Apple has announced the next version of Final Cut Pro, one of the leading film and video editing packages.  Final Cut has gained market share over the years from Avid, which remains the dominant editing platform for motion pictures.  Final Cut has a more rough and tumble ecosystem, but is more nimble and adaptable because of it.  Avid, by contrast, is a bit more of a lumbering beast with regard to adopting new formats and workflows – but gains in stability and bullet-proofness because of it.  Final Cut Pro has been seeming long in the tooth lately.  In particular, the underlying code was still based on the older Carbon API for Mac OS-X.  Among other deficiencies, this precludes Apple’s pro-apps from taking advantage of 64-bit processing (and also limits how much memory an application can take advantage of).  Final Cut Pro X will be Cocoa based, and thus able to use unlimited amounts of memory, to take advantage of multiple processors for rendering, etc.

A variety of pundits and bloggers have described what was seen in the preview at the FCP Supermeet during the NAB expo a few weeks ago.  This article by Scott Simmons on the Pro Video Coalition site is pretty thorough.  And Walter Biscardi’s thoughts on The “Future” of Editing are interesting.  I guess we’ll see in a month.  Or two…

Final Cut Pro X is promising to ship in June, and for the bargain-basement price of $299.  This is assumed to mean that Motion, Color, Sountrack Pro, and DVD Studio Pro will be unbundled, sold separately.