Apple just announced Final Cut Pro X will be available in June. It comes with a new look and features that will make editing a lot faster. I personally will upgrade because of two things: It will be able to render in the background while I edit and it supports native editing. What does that mean? Lots of time saved.

Rendering can take forever because you have to wait for Final Cut to process the changes that you have made to a video project. To preview the changes you have made, you have to render, but with the new version of Final Cut the you will be able to see your changes instantaneously. This will make me more efficient and allow me to pass the savings on to my clients.

What is native editing? This means you don’t have to transcode (convert) video files to an editing format like Apple’s Prores 422 anymore. My workhorse camera body, the Canon 5D mark II, shoots in H.264, which takes forever to edit in Final Cut and so I edit in Prores 422. Rendering that H.264 footage is such a time waster that no one does it and Prores is a kind of an industry standard. But again, this takes time and now we won’t have to wait the sometimes hours it takes for transcoding. Adobe Premiere allowed native editing of H.264 last year, and Apple finally caught up with this new version of Final Cut Pro X. I know some people (Philip Bloom is one) who switched to Premiere solely because of the native H.264 editing option, so you can see that this is a valuable feature.

The new look of Final Cut Pro X seems a bit lame to me personally, but I don’t care what it looks like as long as it performs well. I am definitely looking forward to the new $300 price tag, which was nice to hear since Final Cut only came in the Studio package in the past, bundled with several other programs with a depressingly high price tag.