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Final Cut Pro – Apples high end NLE editing package - has been ‘stalled’ at version 7 for the last 2 years fuelling much speculation about the direction and future of the NLE Pro App, but would Apple really drop this flag ship product? We think not.

Final Cut Pro came from a purchase of Final Cut code from Macromedia (http://tiny.cc/e3z7n) and not surprisingly the man behind Adobe Premiere and Final Cut - Randy Ubillos - was brought on board by Apple to take the product forward to the product we have come to know today.  But as Apple has stormed forward with OSX, a lot of FCP’s core code is not true 64bit but rather old Carbon code and not the desired Cocoa. This is where the system is felt to be weak and is crying out for attention by the massive user base.

In 2007 Randy Ubillos was redirected to develop and streamline iMovie08 and in turn the iLife product line.  This move fuelled the rumours that the ever decreasing MAC OSX Pro Apps team (now massively over shadowed by the iOS project) was being run down in developing the Pro Apps that people were becoming so reliant on (BBC especially investing heavily in the application.) Interestingly its reported on varying sites that FCP holds about 64% of the US market and Avid a mere 22%, but figures for the UK/Europe would appear to be hard to come by.

It is now becoming apparent that Apple is redeveloping the application with Randy Ubillos back at the helm, and recoding for a complete 64bit app, but in this coding process its worth noting that Apple now feels that the application has had a swing in both platform (more and more systems now being used on laptops rather than workstations) and user type (pro-sumer and home users becoming more and more common than out and out professionals, which is bore out by the high sales of Final Cut Express) With the likes of Thunderbolt (http://www.apple.com/thunderbolt) being common place on the latest Mac books this can only fuel speculation for this shift in standard working platform for FCP. What is interesting is that the latest FCP is rumored to have support for 4K playback, improved media management which perhaps are not tools demanded by Apples envisaged user base.

What ever happen I’m sure it’ll be interesting and possibly controversial.
 


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