New Final Cut Pro!

There's a really good chance you already know this, but just in case you're that guy who's living under a rock in the GEICO commercial, a new version of Final Cut is apparently going to drop this Spring. NAB might just be all the more exciting this year if Apple has something to show (though early consensus seems to think that Apple won't show it on the floor, but perhaps at an event before NAB kicks off).

Larry Jordan, a Final Cut instructor and host of the Digital Production Buzz, was invited out to a "secret meeting" of "industry professionals" and shown the new software.  Larry doesn't reveal much, but what he does say gets you excited (if you're an editor, that is).

Combine this news with Apple's unveiling of Thunderbolt (an odd name for Intel's Light Peak connection) and you have some really exciting possibilities with the new Macbook Pros unveiled today. Basically think of Thunderbolt as this extremely fast connection capable of connecting monitors, drives and other devices together. A number of manufacturers are announcing support for Thunderbolt, so you'll see I/O devices from Blackmagic and AJA in the near future.  Also with the new Macbook Pros, for the first time, you have an Apple laptop with 1 gig of dedicated video RAM.  Some are upset that Apple chose only ATI cards for this release, locking out those wanting Nvidia's CUDA technology for CS5 and Resolve, but for those who are firmly rooted in Final Cut and Avid the video card news is exciting.  I also wonder if there'll be some sort of external PCI Express chasis that you can connect via Thunderbolt.  If so you could load it up with Nvidia CUDA-based cards and your laptop will fly with Premiere CS5.  Of course this is conjecture on my part, but there's a chance this can happen.

I assume Apple will add Thunderbolt to the Mac Pro, and the iMac as well.  If so, you can then see Macbook Pros and iMacs being serious editing machines with the ability to connect to drives fast enough to support multi-streams of HD video.  Granted you can do this now with FW800 drives, but we're talking significantly faster drives here (think beyond e-SATA speeds).

Suddenly there's something to be really excited about with Final Cut.  Of course I could just be setting myself up for disappointment, but that's nothing new.