14 DAY TRIAL // An email reply signed Apple CEO, Steve Jobs suggests that the company behind the Mac operating system is preparing to ship an enhanced, 64-bit version of the Final Cut Studio video and audio production suite.
Concerned that Apple did not feature an announcement on Final Cut Studio at the October 20 Back to the Mac event, Evan Agee (website developer, film maker and musician) decided to email Steve Jobs himself to get some answers.
Unfortunately, Evan’s web site was down at the time of this writing, therefore we could not quote him directly.
However, going by 9to5mac, Evan asked whether Apple was working on ways to improve the suite, and “threw in his hopes for a 64-bit update”.
Steve Jobs’ reply reportedly was:
Stay tuned and buckle up. Sent from my iPhone
The typically terse answer has Steve Jobs written all over it. While Softpedia cannot confirm its accuracy, there is no solid reason to believe this conversation did not occur.
Moreover, Apple last updated Final Cut Studio in mid-2009, which means a major update was already on the table.
For those who are not familiar with the software, 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 version 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.