On April 12th, 2011, Apple announced a new version of Final Cut Pro, dubbed Final Cut Pro X (pronounced “ten”, not “ex”). With Final Cut Pro X’s release also comes a price cut — instead of costing $999.00, Final Cut Pro X will cost $299.00. While that may still seem expensive to the layperson, it is a bargain for such a full-featured application.

Final Cut Pro 7 is known in the video community as the gold standard in video editing and production. Just look inside any video production company, and you’ll find several Mac Pros, each with Final Cut Pro installed. Final Cut Pro was rebuilt from the ground up with Final Cut Pro X, and users are already excited about it.

Faster Than its Predecessors

Most of the excitement about Final Cut Pro X comes due to its new infrastructure. Currently, the primary limiting factor with editing videos is the sheer processing power that it takes to produce and compile them. In other words, long and complex video often takes hours or even days to finish compiling.

This is valuable time wasted for many videographers, who cannot afford to wait days for videos to finish compiling. Final Cut Pro X, however, increases the speed with which a computer can compile the videos.

How?

It does so by shipping with 64-bit support, so it will finally be able to make use of 8 GB of RAM as well as 8-core processor rigs. Therefore, editors can finally make use of their 8-core processors, 8GB of RAM, and other beefy hardware.

Criticism

Not all of the updates to Final Cut Pro X have been greeted with warmth, though. Many users are fearing that Apple is heading in the direction of “casual computing” with the easier-to-use interface. However, Adam Lisagor, popular videographer from Los Angeles, recently said on The Talk Show with Dan Benjamin and John Gruber that he doesn’t believe that the software is catering to casual users.

New Features

In addition, Final Cut Pro X allows users to edit on the fly, since it will render videos in the background. So, you don’t have to set everything aside while your video renders — instead, you can just render your video while you move things around, add text or voiceovers, or continue being productive in other ways.

Other important features include color matching of clips, a smart collection of clips in your Final Cut Pro X library, and people detection — the software can actually detect who is in certain video clips, so you can keep your clips organized.

Right for Everyone?

Final Cut Pro X isn’t right for everyone. But, for those who will take advantage of its advanced features, such as multithreading across CPUs and 64-bits, it is totally worth the investment. This is especially true now that the price has been cut dramatically.

For simple video editing, however, Final Cut Pro X is probably too much. Those users will be better-served by sticking with iMovie or another casual video editing application. For example, if you are simply editing videos of your family vacation, Final Cut Pro X’s computing power is probably more overwhelming than your needs require it to be.