A short headline, but one that will have an immense impact on the broadcast and post production industry across the world. The BBC has chosen Final Cut Pro X as its NLE for news editing, but this is the tip of the iceberg as the move to FCPX is spreading fast across other departments.

We first got an inkling of the Beeb’s move to FCPX a few months ago, but today we have official BBC confirmation courtesy of FCP.co friend Richard Atherton:

After a successful trial period BBC news cameramen/editors will be upgrading to Final Cut Pro X from FCP 7 for their news gathering field operations. A full roll-out throughout all the English regions is expected next year. The initial ER training was devised and carried out by Richard Atherton (www.fcp.training) one of the first Apple Certified Trainers way back in 2003.

Further trials are ensuing within other divisions of the BBC and, aside from it’s widespread use on The Culture Show, FCP X is about to be deployed for several other productions within the BBC including several popular daytime shows. Richard Atherton says: “I’ve had a tremendous response from the BBC editors I’ve trained, all of whom have expressed surprise at how fast and versatile editing with the system is. Converts within the BBC are growing rapidly”. 

News editing back at base will also use FCPX as Quantel now supports ProRes encoding. (Another piece in the jigsaw!) No exact figure on the number of licences for News, but we understand it to be in four figures. Growing rapidly is a very modest way of saying that the FCPX uptake in the BBC is large, we expect it to be adopted by most departments with the possible exception of the editing that happens in the recently equipped Media City facilities.

The breadcrumbs were there, it just needed somebody to follow them. We got very curious a month ago when we we saw an interview on BBC News that was filmed in an edit suite that had FCPX running on a monitor in the background!

Eagle eyed Twitter readers might also have picked up on a few tweets indicating the move:

 

 

So some amazing news which will no doubt be a talking point at the upcoming IBC show. We have heard rumours of other broadcasting and media companies adopting FCPX too, but we have nothing concrete that we can publish at the moment. 

Now about AS-11 delivery to Auntie?

 

http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1487-the-bbc-adopts-final-cut-pro-x-for-news-gathering

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