Rumor: Final Cut Pro X on sale, third-party Thunderbolt products unveiled next week

Apple may appeal to its high-end video production customers next week with the release of Final Cut Pro X on the Mac App Store, as well as the announcement of new third-party products that will take advantage of the high-speed Thunderbolt port found on new Macs, according to a new rumor.

The details came on Tuesday from Macotakara, which was told by sources that Apple will begin to sell Final Cut Pro X on the Mac App Store next week. That would come as no surprise, as Apple said earlier this year that the $299, 64-bit software will arrive in June.

What would be new, though, are products that take advantage of the high-speed Thunderbolt port. Sources also reportedly said that new Thunderbolt products from third-party partners will be announced when Final Cut Pro X goes on sale.

Last week, AppleInsider was first to report on images that claim to show off Final Cut Pro X, as well as the unannounced Motion 5 software from Apple, and rumors of a new version of Color. The last update to Final Cut Studio was released in July of 2009.

More images claimed to be of Final Cut Pro X appeared online on Sunday. The abundance of new material related to the upcoming software update suggests it is being openly tested before its impending release.

Apple offered a sneak peak of Final Cut Pro X in April to the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas. There, the company touted the new release as being "as revolutionary as the first version of Final Cut Pro."

Final Cut Pro X is set to include support for all processing cores, as well as the high-definition 4K resolution. It will also allow editing during import, scalable rendering, a resolution-independent playback system, fully color-managed Final Cut based on colorsync, people and shot detection, and audio clean-up.

But since the official unveiling of Final Cut Pro X at the FCP User Group Supermeet at the NAB conference, Apple has not offered any new details. It also made no mention of any other Final Cut Studio applications other than Final Cut Pro.

Apple unveiled the high-speed Thunderbolt port, co-developed with Intel, on its new MacBook Pros in February. Since then, Thunderbolt has also been added to updated iMacs, and is expected to arrive on the rest of the company's Mac lineup this year.

Thunderbolt pairs Intel's PCI Express interconnect with DisplayPort on the same connector, offering transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps. That's twice as fast as the 5Gbps offered by USB 3.0, and 20 times faster than the 480Mbps with USB 2.0.