While rumored for months, Final Cut Pro X was announced at the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro Users Group "Supermeet" held at Bally's Las Vegas, separate but time coordinated along with the NAB Show held in the Las Vegas Convention Center across town on April 12, 2011. The announcement and its future ramifications were the talk of the show. Within minutes of the announcement, professional users realized the new product was a radical difference from the previous line of Final Cut Pro products suggesting it was a dumbing down of the previous product they had invested into. What was realized later was the new "advancement" also, necessarily meant the termination of any future development of the previous versions of Final Cut Pro.

On June 20, 2011, Apple released a rewritten version of Final Cut Pro named to "Final Cut Pro X". A new application written from scratch, FCP X is a trackless 64-bit application with Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL support, allowing it to scale and use all available cores for processing such as rendering and transcoding. FCP X supports up to 4K resolutions and during import, can analyze footage and audio for automatic sorting into groups such as close-ups, medium shots, shots with two people or group shots as well as prepare the footage for quick, automatic fixes for defects such as, camera shake, rolling shutter and color balance. Audio can also be analyzed in an attempt to automatically remove hums, pops or other noticeable defects and assign channel configurations. It also features a 'Magnetic Timeline' which edits footage in a Storyline without knocking any other clips or audio out of place at other points of the Timeline. It has been available on the Mac App Store since June 21, 2011 for $299.99, along with Motion 5 & Compressor 4, both selling at $49.99.

Final Cut Pro is a non-linear video editing software developed by Macromedia Inc. and then Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro X, runs on Mac personal computers powered by OS X version 10.6.7 or later and using Intel processors. The software allows users to log and transfer video onto a hard drive (internal or external), where it can be edited, processed, and output to a wide variety of formats.

Since the early 2000s, Final Cut Pro has developed a large and expanding user base, mainly video hobbyists and independent filmmakers. It had also made inroads with film and television editors who have traditionally used Avid Technology's Media Composer. According to a 2007 SCRI study, Final Cut Pro made up 49% of the US professional editing market, with Avid at 22%. A published survey in 2008 by the American Cinema Editors Guild placed their users at 21% FCP (and growing from previous surveys of this group), while all others were still on an Avid system of some kind.

Final Cut Pro provides non-linear, non-destructive editing of any QuickTime compatible video format including DV, HDV, P2 MXF (DVCProHD), XDCAM (via plug-in), and 2K film formats. It supports a number of simultaneously composited video tracks (limited mainly by video format and hardware capability); up to 99 audio tracks; multi-camera editing for combining video from multiple camera sources; as well as standard ripple, roll, slip, slide, scrub, razor blade and time remapping edit functions. It comes with a range of video transitions and a range of video and audio filters such as keying tools, mattes and vocal de-poppers and de-essers. It also has a manual 3-way color correction filter, videoscopes and a selection of generators, such as slugs, test cards and noise.