Apple announced Final Cut Pro X at NAB 2011.  We are buying it June 1. I’m psyched to get my hands on it and integrate it into Friday’s Films.  There’s plenty of coverage on the web, but I always prefer to watch the keynote and make my own conclusions.  The videos below are the best coverage I found – watch them.

My takeaways:

- 64-bit, Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, – It’s about friggin’ time.  We are no longer limited to 4 GB of RAM use in FCP and hopefully fewer GPU bugs, more CPUs pinned more often.  16 exabytes (that’s 16 billion GB) of RAM should last us a year or so before YuYing or I figure out how to max it out.

- Cooler looking UI – Seems to make nesting worthwhile.  Practicality and confusion level of the UI changes remain to be seen.  I think we’ll love them.

- Magnetic timeline – seems pretty handy.

- Background rendering – hopefully this is adjustable and I can turn it off most of the time.

- Native editing of more formats – H.264 in particular – If we don’t have to ingest and transcode in the same fashion, it’ll save some time, although the offloader/transcoder/Drobo we have going will live long into this new version of FCP.

- Keywords – This includes a nicer way of dealing with subclips, etc and it’ll be handy.  I like the ability to add metadata to everything and have items show in multiple places based on that metadata.

- Automatic audio waveform synchronization – sucks to be PluralEyes.