As rumored just last week, Apple has officially released Final Cut Pro X to the Mac App Store as promised back in April -- and it’s not alone. The company is also releasing Motion 5 and Compressor 4 at the record-low price of $49.99 each.
On Tuesday, Apple, Inc. announced the release of Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 and Compressor 4 to the Mac App Store. As promised at the NAB Supermeet back in April where the software received its first public preview, Final Cut Pro X is a download-only affair for the low price of $299.99 and marks the first time the pro editing package is available as a 64-bit application for better memory management and speed.
“Final Cut Pro X is the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We have shown it to many of the world’s best Pro editors, and their jaws have dropped.”
That includes Academy Award winning film editors like Angus Wall, who gushed, “I’m blown away by what Apple has done with Final Cut Pro X… [it] is incredibly modern and fast, but most importantly it lets you focus on telling your story in the most creative way, while it actively manages all of the technical details.”
Among the many new features in the completely rewritten Final Cut Pro X are the Magnetic Timeline, which Apple touts as “a trackless approach to editing your footage that lets you add and arrange clips wherever you want them, while other clips instantly slide out of the way.” Content Auto-Analysis also scans your media on import and tags your content with useful information to speed up the editing process.
Final Cut Pro X isn’t the entire story, either -- Apple has also released new versions of Motion and Compressor, each for $49.99 on the Mac App Store. Motion 5 is designed for video editors to get the most out of custom titles, transitions and effects as well as dazzling animations in 2D or 3D space, while Compressor 4 makes short work of encoding videos for most any need.
The unbundling of these apps ends the days of Final Cut Studio and potentially DVD Studio Pro as well, which appears to be shown no love with the latest generation of pro video software. All three apps have just hit the Mac App Store, so warm up those credit cards and get your purchasing on today!
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jrbookwalter
June 21, 2011 at 9:46am
Installing FCPX and Compressor 4 on my iMac this morning moved all of the previous Final Cut Studio 3 applications into their own folder -- they all seem to run alongside the new stuff just fine, although FCP 7 still uses it own version of Compressor rather than the new one.
JRB
Roger Workman
June 21, 2011 at 9:08am
Is this the end of Apple's education discounts? These prices are more reasonable than Final Cut Studio's $1000 price tag, but it would still be nice to see a discount for students and teachers. As far as I can tell, there is none, unless there's a special Mac App Store for Education that I haven't found yet.
Also, is there any word on how well the new FCP components will interact with the Final Cut Studio components?
