The AppleInsider website has some good new information on the direction of Apple’s Final Cut Pro software, and Steve Jobs himself has been answering emails on the subject.
Jobs says that the team members fired were in customer support roles rather than engineering and that the next release ‘would be awesome’. So full steam ahead on version 8.
Final Cut Pro is now back under the supervision of original creator Randy Ubillos (above), who has been hiring senior user interface experts. V8 is having a much-needed makeover and a better user interface.
According to AppleInsider, Apple are targeting prosumers rather than the demands of professionals. Curious.
EOSHD thinks the main things to address for Final Cut Pro and OSx in general are:
• Direct playback of AVCHD content (.mts files)
• Native H.264 editing
• Native AVCHD editing
• Nvidia CUDA and 64bit support
• Improved UI and more intuitive timeline tools
• Better thumbnailed indexing of video clips in the FCP asset browser window
Let’s hope they get it right because for me personally Adobe Premiere CS5 looks very enticing, especially as high end spec Windows PC can be put together especially for video editing at a much lower cost than a Mac.
Video editing was one of the major reason I switched to a Macbook Pro and became a Mac user. It’s a great platform, but the lack of new features is starting to look a bit glaring, and it’s always frustrated me that Quicktime X turned out to be such a disappointment. For a video player, it’s beaten soundly by VLC which supports a huge range of encoding formats and codecs.
Another thing that’d be great to see in the future is a serious touch-UI based video editing solution, possibly for the iPad although current generations of tablet hardware don’t quite have the horse-power (let alone memory!) required for encoding video and editing in real-time.
