Apple today launched Final Cut Pro X, the latest version of its editing software for professional users.

The software, which was unveiled at the the Final Cut Pro User Group ‘Supermeet’ at NAB in Las Vegas in April, is only available to download from the Mac App Store. It is priced at £179.99, while motion graphics tool Motion 5 and encoding software Compressor 4 are both priced at £29.99.

Apple says the 64-bit rewrite of Final Cut Pro has seen the software “rebuilt from the ground up”. Features include:

Magnetic Timeline promises an “exceptionally fluid, flexible way to edit”, allowing users to assemble shots as clips in order to eliminate unwanted black gaps in the timeline and move clips out of the way to avoid collisions and sync problems.

Clip Connections is described by Apple as “an easy way to place clips such as B-roll, sound effects and music in the timeline so that they all move together as you make changes”. Visual connections are designed to make it easy to hand a project over to another editor or to resume editing at a later date.

Compound Clips is designed to get rid of timeline clutter by allowing editors to group elements together and collapse them into a single clip, removing superfluous items from the timeline and creating a simplified version of the segment.

Import files with resolution up to 4K, as well as codecs such as Apple ProRes Sony IMX, XDCAM, XDCAM EX, XDCAM HD, and XDCAM HD422 (with additional Sony software). FCP supports streaming DV capture through FireWire. Or, users can capture video from tape using third-party video cards and software.

Content Auto-Analysis organises media to speed up preparation by scanning footage and creating metadata with range-based tags for media attributes, camera data, shot type, and whether the shot contains one person, two people or a group.

Range-Based Keywords sort and filter by creating keywords and assigning them to clip ranges.

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