Final Cut won't ship till '98
Macromedia's entry into high-end video editing will have to wait as it moves ship dates for Final Cut, once code-named "KeyGrip," to 1998.
KeyGrip was announced last year as part of an effort to bring the features and performance of professional video editing workstations to the Macintosh and Windows NT platforms using Apple Computer's QuickTime multimedia development software layer. Macromedia said last September that it would ship product in the first half of 1997. Instead, video editors will have to settle for a demonstration at next week's National Organization of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas.
The delay is due to a need to add more features for the high-end market, according to Tim Myers, Macromedia's director of audio and video product management.
"We could have produced another Corel Lumiere or Adobe Premiere, but that's not our goal," said Myers.
FinalCut will run on any Macintosh or Windows NT machine that has a peripheral connect interface, or PCI slot, said Myers. The partnership announcements last year centered on a video capture, compression and playback card called "Vincent" from Media 100. But FinalCut will work with any PCI video card that supports QuickTime, including cards from TrueVision and Radius, Myers said.
The product will eventually ship in the $1,000-$3,000 price range, the company said. It will include a scripting language similar in syntax to the Lingo language in Macromedia's Director multimedia authoring software.
Slipping ship dates have recently hurt the company's financial outlook, as officials announced last month they expect to post first-quarter losses due to delays in the introduction of Director 6.
(Bud Colligan, chairman of Macromedia, is a board member of CNET: The Computer Network.)