There have been a lot of rumors about what is going to happen with Final Cut Studio, some even thought it was going to disappear because Apple just wants to sell iPads. But it looks like Apple is in fact working on a new edition of their popular NLE and Larry Jordan was recently invited to take a peak at an early version of it. For what he has seen, it is a “jaw-dropper” (full article here)

Thanks to Adobe CS5 which has become a real contender, and the new Avid version, it looks like this new Final Cut Studio will have to be impressive. But what is impressive for me:

Blu-Ray support – Sorry folks I do not see any chance there will be better Blu-Ray support, because Apple does not like Blu-Ray, but I hope at least I will be able to make a good H.264 export to backup some things and put them on the web.

Media management – Please please please, Apple this is something I really need to see improved, manual reconnection is killing me.

New media support – Most of my clients are using XDCAM and Canon H.264, I really need to edit natively with them and have faster workflows.

Integration and optimization – Well if they are making a new version, making a better integration between their suite would be fine, also I hope they rewrite part of the code to take advantage of the new processor and graphic boards available.

Looks like a wish list is more than an article on FCP, but as Larry says on his blog, “We won’t know anything Apple does not want us to know”…so pack your bags, I think we will see this new version at NAB 2011.