Final Cut Server is Apple's discontinued server-based backend for managing

Final Cut Studio Final Cut Studio is a discontinued suite of professional video production and post-production made by Apple for the Mac. The suite competed with Avid Media Composer for the high-end movie production market. It first went on sale in 2005. In ...

files (particularly

Final Cut Pro Final Cut Pro (often abbreviated FCP or FCPX) is a professional non-linear video-editing application initially developed by Macromedia, and, since 1998, by Apple as part of its pro apps collection. Final Cut Pro allows users to import, edit, a ...

) and for

workflow automation Workflow is a generic term for orchestrated and repeatable patterns of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequen ...

. Based on Proximity's artbox package, Final Cut Server includes media asset management tools with access controls and was designed to catalog any media file type and allow addition of custom

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

to make those files searchable. Final Cut Server runs on macOS, and is accessed through a

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client and

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

framework running on Windows and macOS. Apple announced the discontinuation of the software in June 2011, replacing it with

Final Cut Pro X Final Cut Pro (often abbreviated FCP or FCPX) is a professional non-linear video-editing application initially developed by Macromedia, and, since 1998, by Apple as part of its pro apps collection. Final Cut Pro allows users to import, edit, a ...

Release

Arising from Apple's acquisition of the Proximity Group in 2006, the development of Final Cut Server was announced in April 2007 at NAB 2007. It was released in early April 2008, with pricing at $999 for the 10-client license and $1,999 for the unlimited client license. On July 23, 2009, v1.5 was released, coinciding with an update to Final Cut Studio. The upgrade changed the pricing structure by eliminating the original 10-client license and reducing the cost of the unlimited client license to $999. Upgrades from Final Cut Studio v1.1.1 to v1.5 for both the unlimited license and the older 10-client license were $299. With the purchase of the upgrade, the 10-client license was converted into an unlimited client license. Feature updates in version 1.5 included the addition of global searches accessible to a workgroup, integration of

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. Windows Server operating systems include it as a set of processes and services. Originally, only centralized domain management used Active Direct ...

permission sets, updated search engine performance and further proxy settings. Version 1.5.2, which includes some fixes, was released in May 2010. In June 2011, Apple announced the discontinuation of Final Cut Server, as

was discontinued in favor of

Reception

In 2008, ''

Macworld ''Macworld'' is a digital magazine and website dedicated to products and software of Apple Inc., published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG. History ''Macworld'' was founded by David Bunnell and Cheryl Woodard (publishers) and Andrew Fl ...

'' said of version 1.1, "Final Cut Server has powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use catalog and searching capabilities", has heavy integration with Final Cut Studio, and is better than other asset management systems by dynamically updating even from many small distributed volumes not directly connected to the server. However, there were some usability concerns. In 2010, ''Definition'' magazine's extensive review praised it as transformative to even a single editor's workflow, from end to end, especially in synchronizing multiple workstations.

References

External links

* {{Final Cut Studio Apple Inc. software