Final Cut Pro X will celebrate its first anniversary in June, and the app has grown considerably in nearly 10 months. Apple has announced more big features to come later this year, but the real question is: Will professional users stick around long enough to use them?

The annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show wrapped up this week in Las Vegas, which Apple used as an opportunity to tease some forthcoming features planned for Final Cut Pro X this year. Pro editor Larry Jordan scored the scoop on these new features in an “on-the-record meeting” the day before NAB launched, and the roadmap looks quite promising.

Thus far, Apple has released four updates to Final Cut Pro X since it debuted on the Mac App Store last June. Versions 10.0.1 and 10.0.3 were primarily releases aimed at bringing new features to the pro video editing app, while the alternating 10.0.2 and 10.0.4 (the latter released earlier this month) have largely contained bug fixes and “stability, performance and compatibility” enhancements.

Jordan notes on his blog that we shouldn’t “read too much into this alternating pattern of features and bug fixes,” but the fact that the app has had such frequent updates should be considered a good sign that Apple is fully committed to improving the app and restoring as much of the utility from the former Final Cut Pro 7 as possible.

The updates so far have indeed covered a lot of ground, particularly for users who require multicam editing, broadcast monitoring and the ability to export different audio mixes, a common task for feature films and television shows which require a music and effects only (M&E) mix for foreign language dubbing. This last dilemma lead to the creation of the new Roles feature, which goes a long way toward fulfilling this need, but Apple could do even more for its FCPX audio features.

As it turns out, they’re already in the process of doing so. One of the four “bullet points” that Apple shared with Larry Jordan are new “multichannel audio editing tools.” While the FCPX team didn’t demonstrate or elaborate on this feature, it sounds a lot like they plan to incorporate some of the functionality from the former Soundtrack Pro into the FCPX interface, and that would be welcome for those of us who now use the editing app almost exclusively.

One of the big disadvantages of FCPX’s revolutionary “Magnetic Timeline” is the loss of dedicated tracks while editing. Traditionally, video editors have been able to depend on a finite number of tracks being available to them, with the ability to route certain tracks to various outputs -- for example, creating a final video master where the first two audio channels output a complete stereo mix (frequently referred to as a “composite” or comp mix), while channels three and four are routed to the aforementioned M&E mix which removes English-language dialogue from the equation, but keeps all other sound effects, ambience and music.

With the Magnetic Timeline in Final Cut Pro X, audio tracks reside wherever the application chooses to place them -- new audio clips can push existing ones up or down in the timeline since there are no dedicated tracks to contain them. Each clip can be assigned to a different Role -- for example, dialogue, effects or music -- and the editor can determine what kind of mix he wants to include when the file is exported.

It’s difficult to know exactly what Apple has in mind with “multichannel audio editing tools,” but we’re hoping for the ability to better manage audio clips in the Magnetic Timeline, as well as more precision when selecting which part of the audio will be heard. In the present version, placing sound effects or editing existing audio isn’t quite as fluid as with Final Cut Pro 7, where an individual clip can be double-clicked and opened as a waveform to adjust in and out points or volume/pan levels.

Dual viewers are the second forthcoming feature on Apple’s target list, which is a throwback to previous versions of Final Cut Pro where editors had both Source and Record monitors -- Source for tweaking clips in a sequence, while the Record viewer keeps an eye on the overall program. This concept comes from the old tape-based editing methods used in the past, where one monitor was tied to incoming video and a second was tied to the machine being fed that source video.

Final Cut Pro X currently does a decent job with only one viewer, which is also used for editing titles, transitions or effects. The problem comes when an editor wants to compare two clips at once, which is technically not possible with a single viewer window. We’re looking forward to seeing what Apple does here, particularly since they’re stressing the importance of adding such features in a better way than they’ve been implemented in the past.

The last two big features are definitely aimed at professional users and may not have much impact for prosumers, unless their workflow is entirely digital. Final Cut Pro X can already read MXF files (used by high-end formats such as XDCAM EX), but only if they are first converted to QuickTime. Apple’s promised MXF plug-in support will do away with this step, adding native MXF wrapper files with the ability to mix them into editing sessions with other formats.

To be fair, FCPX is already a master at doing this kind of thing -- we’ve edited a number of projects mixing SD and HD source material from a variety of sources (including ProRes 422, DV and other codecs), something that prior versions of Final Cut Pro claimed to do but frequently required exasperating amounts of render time and questionable results in the end.

Finally, Apple has promised to bring RED camera support to Final Cut Pro X. Like MXF, footage from the popular RED digital cameras can be edited in FCPX today, but requires a lengthy conversion process to do so. Cupertino now promises to make this process as easy as dropping RED camera footage into a project without hampering creativity in the process.

While Apple may be teasing these four new features, they haven’t yet announced when we might expect them, beyond “later this year.” Of course, these certainly won’t the only features added to Final Cut Pro X in the future -- we’ve got a few small wishlists of our own, but for now it’s comforting to know that Apple is addressing the needs of pro users at a time when competitors such as Adobe are actively courting them with seductive new offerings like the upcoming Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.

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