HD For Indies

Think Secret - Final Cut Pro 6 set for NAB release, again

Was trying to not blog anymore today, but every once in a while I see something so off base I just have to write about it.

In short, this article thinks FCP 6 will be seen at NAB 2007: that part I agree with.

They think it'll be shipping at NAB: I'd love for that to be true, but I doubt it.

They think it was going to debut last year but got delayed - so phenomenally wrong. Last year, they'd barely gotten a Universal Binary (runs on PPC and Intel Macs) out the door, they weren't going to be shipping a new version scant months later. They've been busy. Hopefully doing cool stuff like freeing FCP's deep code from the "one codec, one framerate, one resolution) limitation of the timeline, but we'll have to wait and see.

Will it REQUIRE Leopard and an Intel Mac? I doubt it - they'd be leaving soooo many machines behind if they did that. Might they have features that only work on Leopard and/or Intel Macs? That I think is much more likely, perhaps even some things are realtime on Mac Pros, for instance (maybe requiring Leopard, maybe not), but they'll still render non-realtime on PPC hardware.

As for Final Cut Extreme - they say it is rumored to be $10K for hardware/software combo to do 4K and that puts them in Avid pricing territory. This is so laughably wrong in so many ways;

1.) Avid hardware costs either a lot less (Mojo, Mojo SDI) or a lot more (Adrenaline)

2.) Avid's editorial lineup doesn't do 4K

3.) Apple can't even properly do 2K yet (you can get 4:4:4 or 10 bit, not both at same time, and no realtime FX for either, just playback) - let'em get that right first

4.) New RAIDs are likely - 4 GBit cards shipped recently from Apple

4K is SUCH a small niche market at the moment - only highest end feature films are getting mastered to 4K - that Apple has no business getting into it yet. YEARS away from there being enough users that Apple's current business strategy would make that make sense.

More misinformation or off-base data continues through the rest of the article....but suffice it to say, I'm betting we'll see something new at NAB, but I'll betcha it won't be close to shipping. They may SAY it will ship "soon" or "in a few months" but historically, anything shown at NAB as Not Done Yet doesn't ship until July to September (witness Motion, witness FCP 5.1.x update to get 24p HDV)