Final Cut Pro 5 to debut in April at NAB

The new version of Final Cut Pro will be announced at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in mid-April, according to
Think Secret. The software will require OS 10.4 Tiger to run, so may not be released until a couple of months after its announcement, unless Christmas comes reaaaaaaaally early this year and we get a coinciding Tiger release announcement. Don't hold your breath.

FCP5 will – obviously – include HD support, as well as adding multicamera support and the ability to work with more than two tracks of audio. It is being built completely around the QuickTime 7 architecture, and will take advantage of the new Core Video technology to provide hardware-accelerated video processing.

Another tentatively scheduled feature is the ability to do distributed rendering, i.e. allow multiple systems to contribute processor cycles to a rendering operation. It may not show up in the initial release, but regardless, it's only a matter of time. I've said elsewhere that I
think we're going to see a proliferation of distributed computing applications in the not-too-distant future...