Apple releases Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor on Mac App Store

Not strictly iPhone or iPad news, but Apple today released a huge upgrade to their pro video editing tools with Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor, which will be available for $299, $49, and $49 respectively on the Mac App Store.

“Final Cut Pro X is the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We have shown it to many of the world’s best Pro editors, and their jaws have dropped.”

“I’m blown away by what Apple has done with Final Cut Pro,” said Angus Wall, Academy Award-winning film editor. “Final Cut Pro X is incredibly modern and fast, but most importantly it lets you focus on telling your story in the most creative way, while it actively manages all of the technical details.”

While they'll no doubt be used to make a ton of content for our iOS devices, the interesting thing to me is how closely Final Cut Pro has come to resemble iMovie for both Mac and iOS, showing once again how Apple uses innovation on OS X to drive iOS, and iOS to drive OS X.

We saw this with the leaner, meaner QuickTime X on iOS that got ported back to the Mac, along with tons of interface and experience conventions for OS X Lion, and we're seeing it with iMovie, GarageBand, and things like CoreImage being moved to iPhone and iPad.

We probably won't see Final Cut Pro X touch for iOS any time soon, but we'll absolutely see better versions of iMovie for iOS because of it. And vice versa.

Anyone picking up Final Cut Pro X?

[Apple PR, Final Cut Pro]