Today at IBC 2004 — Europe’s key trade show for media, video and broadcasting professionals — Apple announced some of the new features in the next version of Final Cut Pro. The future version will support MPEG-2 IMX, and Panasonic’s P2. “MPEG-2 IMX is a form of the MPEG codec used in camcorders such as Sony’s MSW900 and PDW530, which produces higher quality footage than conventional MPEG-2,” reports Digit magazine. “Currently, only high-end systems such Sony’s XPRI and Pinnacle’s Liquid Blue support the format. P2 is a camcorder media format designed to be more hard-wearing than tape. It’s based around 2GB and 4GB PCMCIA media cards, which can record between 8/16 minutes of DVCPRO footage or 4/8 minutes of DVCPRO 50 footage respectively.”