Review » Final Cut Pro X

Today, Apple announced the latest installment of Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Pro X.  The video editing software is available now from the Mac App Store and won’t be sold in a boxed version.  A personal individual license will cost $399.99 and can be installed on multiple computers, while businesses will need to purchase a license for each machine they plan to use the software on.

So what’s new in this version of Final Cut Pro?

The Magnetic Timeline, which is a trackless approach to editing, allows you to easily move footage, arrange clips wherever you want them, all while the clips slide automatically out of the way.  There is also a Auditions feature that allows you to swap out two different versions of the edited footage to help you quickly review which is the better take.


To expedite the editing process, which is largely made up of logging clips, this version of Final Cut Pro X can automatically analyze the content.  It scans your media to dynamically organize your clips into Smart Collections, allowing you to find clips by close up, medium and wide shots as well as media type and the number of people in the shot.

Lastly, Final Cut Pro X is built for 64-bit compatible computers, taking advantage of the latest Mac hardware.  It uses multi-threaded processing and the GPU on your graphics card fast background rendering and real-time playback performance, even with 4k video.