Rumor: Troublesome Final Cut Studio Development Pushes New Release to 2011

The English-version of French tech-site MacBidouille is reporting that Apple’s self-imposed plans to release a new version of their Final Cut Studio suite in 2010 have hit a roadblock.

Citing its own sources, HardMac notes that the 2010 target is likely to have been missed, as “The development of this software suite has suffered significant setbacks and it will be necessary to wait until 2011 to see its release; furthermore, the scope of the project has been reduced.”

A breakdown of some of the reasons for the delay is available below:

1. Reportedly, the idea of having a unified interface has been abandoned due to “difficulties in reaching a satisfactory compromise among not only the various applications but above all between different development teams”

2. There were some “fundamental differences of opinion” with respect to the ideal interface, which pushed its implementation to 2013, when a new version of Final Cut Studio may emerge.

3. By reassigning many of its most qualified engineers to work on iOS, the teams working on projects considered less urgent have dried up. Those projects include “all those related to Mac OS X and its associated applications,” the report notes.

Although less credible, another interesting assertion is made in the report. Notably, the situation is said to have “really upset Randy Ubilos”, the head of the Final Cut division at Apple.

Developed by Apple Inc., Final Cut Studio is a professional video and audio production suite for Mac OS X.

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

The major applications it includes are:

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

Additional applications include Cinema Tools (tools specific to film processing) and  Qmaster (a distributed processing tool).