Now don’t get me wrong, since Adobe stepped up to the plate with Premiere CS5 to fill the gap that Apple left when they decided to focus on making billions of dollars in iPad and iPhone sales (What a horrible company eh? Not.) for the last couple of years, I haven’t exactly been freaking out over the lack of updates for FCP. In the same breath though, Final Cut has been my core video app for more than six years, and despite the file format support issues, frequent crashes, sub-par integration with Soundtrack Pro and Motion, and other things I know pros can relate to, Final Cut still was and generally is my “go to” editing app.

More on this after the jump but for now, watch one of two videos from the announcement of Final Cut Pro X last night in Vegas for NAB, These leaked out online but have not yet been taken down so I am assuming that Apple is ready to lift the veil of secrecy. Thank God. It gets really interesting around minute 18.

These videos are from the Supermeet held in Las Vegas for Nab 2011. We weren’t able to make it this year but we’ve been a number of times, and I am psyched to know I will be going for sure next year.

Almost as important as new features is the price, a mere $299, which I am assuming is the upgrade fee. Exciting new features are the native editing of H.264 clips, background rendering and automatic image stabilization. I am personally not that thrilled about the implementation of the face and scene detection, but for others I can see it being a potentially big deal. There are also a lot of improvement on the timeline to remove some of its most frustrating behaviors.

The UI looks a bit iMovie’ish, which personally scares the crap out of me, but I uderstand the working metaphor Apple is going towards, and new things always take a little getting used to.

Firing a shot across Premiere’s capable bow is the new Compound clips. We’ll reserve judgment on issues like multiple audio clip sync and other features that make this type of feature so cool in Premier CS5, but from the looks of it (around the 20 minute mark) it’s pretty killer. You can deal with a Compound Clip as a single file but also be able to tunnel back through the media, and it both increases complexity and reduces it from a usability standpoint at the same time.

Inline Precision Editor. Oh yea.

Auditioning is a great new tool for those of us who just can’t decide on certain edits, effects, etc. and need to show what we’ve done to as many people as possible for critique. Auditioning allows you to create “rough cuts” by throwing a version into an Auditioning bin, and previewing things in real-time (Maybe on a dual MacPro with dual nVidia cards and Thunderbolt drives?)

Lot more to come on this including some great plugins from Noise Industries, Boris, and many others. This is the news we have been looking forward to in order to get our pro game on some more. iPads and iPhones are awesome, but we are creative pros, and by the looks of our demo’s, most likely o are you.

Great things to come! Stay Tuned….