CUPERTINO, California—March 14, 2001—Apple today introduced Final Cut Pro 2, the next generation of its award-winning video editing, compositing and special effects software. Final Cut Pro 2 is a powerful, all-in-one editing solution, featuring real-time editing, breakthrough Power Mac™ G4 performance and a scalable architecture that allows users to output content into any video format. “Final Cut Pro 2, running on our blazingly fast Power Mac G4 or PowerBook G4, offers the specialized features and robust editing workflow sought after by video professionals, without the expensive price tags,” said David Moody, Apple’s senior director of Applications Marketing. “Final Cut Pro’s innovative, extensible real-time architecture gives editors what they need most—time to be more creative and productive.” With Final Cut Pro 2, real-time editing and compositing functions are seamlessly integrated into the video production workflow. By simply adding an optional, supported real-time processing card, video editors can instantly perform wipes, dissolves, and 2D motion graphics effects, dramatically increasing their creative freedom and efficiency. Final Cut Pro’s real-time architecture allows third-party manufacturers to create hardware that supports a variety of professional editing features and formats. The first card to support Final Cut Pro’s real-time architecture is the RTMac card from Matrox, which provides real-time broadcast-quality transitions and effects, and uncompressed, 32-bit, animated graphics in a dual-stream, native-DV editing environment. Final Cut Pro 2 takes advantage of the supercomputing performance of Apple’s new Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 lines, and the new QuickTime™ 5 architecture, to deliver dramatic gains in video editing productivity. On compute-intensive operations, Final Cut Pro 2 is up to 30% faster on G4 systems and 70% faster on dual-processor G4 systems, when compared to the previous generation’s performance on similarly configured systems.