Final Cut 4 to Support More Features on Mac OS X Lion - Report

Apple is planning the introduction of Final Cut Studio 4, sources are telling Hardmac, with separate versions for OS X Snow Leopard and OS X Lion necessary due to changes in QuickTime layers.

Final Cut Studio is a professional video and audio production suite for Mac OS X.

Developed by Apple themselves, it is regarded as a direct competitor to Avid Media Composer in the high-end movie production industry.

Final Cut Studio 3 contains six main applications and several smaller applications used in editing video.

The major applications are: Final Cut Pro 7 – real-time editing for DV, SD and HD; Motion 4 – real-time motion graphics design; Soundtrack Pro 3 – advanced audio editing and sound design; DVD Studio Pro 4 – encoding, authoring and burning; Color 1.5 – a new color grading application adapted from Silicon Color's FinalTouch; Compressor 3.5 – a video encoding tool for outputting projects in different formats.

Additional applications included are: Cinema Tools 4.5 – tools specific to film processing and Qmaster 3 – a distributed processing tool.

Now, the source mentioned a few paragraphs above claims to have heard that an all new version of Final Cut “should be unveiled in March or early April.”

According to the people familiar with Apple’s plans, the update should be a substantial one compared to the current version.

The site claims to have learned that “Two versions are already running at beta level, one for Snow Leopard, and one for Lion.”

The reason is that “some new features will only be available on Lion’s version, due to the changes made on QuickTime layer,” the report claims.

Softpedia reported in November 2010 that Evan Agee (website developer, film maker and musician) emailed Steve Jobs himself to ask why Apple did not feature an announcement on Final Cut Studio at the October 20 Back to the Mac event.

Evan had asked whether Apple was working on ways to improve the suite, and “threw in his hopes for a 64-bit update”.

Steve Jobs’ reply was: “Stay tuned and buckle up.”