Broadcast Engineering by Michael Grotticelli

Apple has unveiled a new 64-bit upgrade to its Final Cut Pro editing system — the final step in a sequence of events that’s set to revolutionize professional video editing from ease and speed of workflow to remarkable cost reductions. In line with the full-on emergence of IT technology convergence within the professional video production space, users now have “workstation class” performance on their laptop computers.

Version X of Final Cut Pro will be available in June for a price $299, putting it in the cost range of consumer applications and extending the application to a far wider range of video editors. Apple previewed the new software during the FCP User Group SuperMeet at NAB.

Combined with Intel’s Thunderbolt, a new high-speed interface technology now included on all of Apple’s Macbook Pro laptops, the new Final Cut Pro application will be dramatically faster than previous mobile editing technology.

And the professional industry is ready to embrace it and the faster file transfers made possible by the Thunderbolt technology. At the NAB convention in Vegas, companies that support video editing, such as AJA Video, Blackmagic, Matrox, Sonnet, G-Tech, Promise Technologies and La Cie all unveiled new products that will work with it. Executives at these companies said they think it will improve sales of their respective products as well.

“We’re always willing to add improvements when they make sense and for our customers, and having Thunderbolt support on our new products clearly helps get signals in and out of the box faster,” said AJA president Nick Rashby. At NAB the company showed a prototype I/O product code named “Phaser.” It supports HDMI input and output, 10-bit hardware-based up/down/cross-conversions, RS422 deck control, and linear time code support. read more...