FCP Cafe is a community for professional Final Cut Pro editors and developers.

This website has been thrown together by Chris Hocking at LateNite.

WWDC 2025 has launched! 🥳

However, unlike previous years, I didn't have the interest and excitement to get up at 3am to watch the Keynote or Platforms State of the Union.

In fact, I haven't even finished the Keynote yet. 😬

However, for Final Cut Pro editors there's not a huge amount of exciting news.

Metal 4 is coming to Mac & iPad, so that'll bring some improvements.

The latest version of Metal is built to scale to the needs of modern apps. The streamlined API makes it easy for you to achieve optimal performance on Apple silicon with lower overhead command encoding and scalable resource management. Compilation is more explicit and faster than ever with all new ways to reduce run-time compilation.

Metal 4 introduces first-class support for machine learning, starting with native support for tensors in both the API and shading language. Integrate machine learning directly into your Metal app using the command line to execute large networks, or within your shaders to inline inference operations alongside the rest of your shader code.

Metal 4 also extends the MTLDevice that you already use today. You can incrementally adopt features that will help your app or game the most, in the order you need them.

Background Tasks are coming to iPad, so you'll finally be able to export from Final Cut Pro on iPad in the background, without Final Cut Pro aborting the export if you change app focus. 🥳

Here's some example Swift code:

import BackgroundTasks
import SwiftUI

@main
struct ColorFeed: App {
    var body: some Scene {
        WindowGroup {
            // ...
        }
        .backgroundTask(.appRefresh("com.colorfeed.wwdc25.appRefresh")) {
            await self.handleAppRefreshTask()
        }
    }
}

Image Playground gets an update, with support for ChatGPT - but really, who is ACTUALLY using Image Playground in Final Cut Pro today?

...and so far, that's pretty much it as far as I can tell.

I still need to finish the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union, so I'll post more tomorrow if anything jumps out.

There's normally lots of cool new tech, as the WWDC videos are released each day.

Fun fact... All of the 2024 Apple WWDC videos were graded using Tangent panels in Final Cut Pro controlled by CommandPost. I wonder if they did the same this year? 🤔

Oh, and one interesting side note... Intel Mac's won't be supported in macOS 27 next year.

But I didn't want to end the day on a downer, so...

People often ask me "what makes Jumper so special" and "why would I use Jumper when Premiere has Media Intelligence now built-in"?

Well, if you're a Final Cut Pro editor, you should ABSOLUTELY be using Jumper - it's a no-brainer.

But even for Avid Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, and Adobe Premiere Pro users, Jumper is insanely useful - especially in high-end collaborative workflows.

You can even access Jumper Standalone from your Mac menubar. Remote users will be possible in the not-so-distant-future too! 🤯

It's basically "Spotlight for your NLE" - and it's SUCH a handy tool to have in your toolbox.

It hasn't changed the way I edit - I still organise Events with lots of emoji's, in the Final Cut Pro Browser, and I still do selects in the Browser's collections - for example:

However, I basically use Jumper as my "search engine" for times when a client asks "find me the shot of the old man with the red hat", etc.

When I'm doing fast-turnaround edits, unless I have two machines, I don't really have the computer power to analyse things whilst I'm editing (as Jumper makes use of every bit of CPU, GPU and RAM you throw at it!), so I generally just let Jumper analyse everything overnight once I've finished for the day, so when it comes to revisions, I can find things super quickly.

You can download a free trial and learn more about Jumper on the Jumper website.

You can read about my involvement with Jumper on this FCP Cafe news post from 6th November 2024.

To demonstrate it's power - I've just recorded a very quick and dirty screen recording.

This video is unscripted, real-time, no edits, warts and all, using beta software... so... well... enjoy!

If you have any questions, reach out on the CommandPost Discord or Jumper Discord!

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Gyroflow Toolbox v1.3.1 (Build 23) is out now! 🥳

This includes the following improvements:

• We've updated to the latest Gyroflow Core Renderer. HUGE thank you to the amazing AdrianEddy for all his ongoing help, assistance, genius and support!
• Updated from FxPlug v4.3.2 to v4.3.3.
• 175 lens profiles have been updated from the hero Gyroflow project. Thanks to EVERYONE who has submitted lens profiles and another HUGE thank you to AdrianEddy for all the work that goes into managing them.

There is still an outstanding bug/regression related to vertical videos.

Originally, vertical videos worked great in Gyroflow Toolbox, but at some point changes in Gyroflow broke something, and we haven't been able to work out what.

I think, thanks to the amazing AdrianEddy, we now have a possible solution - we'll try and solve this and get out a new bug fix ASAP.

You can learn more about Gyroflow Toolbox on the Gyroflow Toolbox website.

I'm also busily working away on my next app for the Mac App Store, SplitTake.

SplitTake is a Swift/Swift UI application for capturing your screen, webcam and external microphone to ProRes for editing in Final Cut Pro.

There's a lot of great screen recording apps out there, but a lot of them (like ScreenFlow) expect you to do all the editing WITHIN their app - I just want something that easily records the highest quality possible, then gives me everything in Final Cut Pro.

I'm still trying to get the under-the-hood stuff working well first, before tackling the user interface, but here's a sneak peak:

I'll hopefully get it up on TestFlight next week. Stay tuned!

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FxPlug v4.3.3 is out now! 🥳

FxPlug is the effects engine for Apple's Motion and Final Cut Pro.

It includes the following improvements and bug fixes:

• FxPlug SDK is now supported on machines running macOS 11.0 and above.
• Added ability for plug-ins to close a remote window.
• Added tagged pop-up menus so that plug-ins can rearrange the items or add new items between existing items without having to change their parameter handling code.
• Added compatibility with older versions of Final Cut Pro, Motion and Compressor and support for macOS 11.0 and above.
• OpenGL is deprecated. Please update your plugins to work with Metal.
• Fixed an issue that would cause dynamically registered FxPlugs to not load during a “Send To Compressor” event.
• Fixed an issue where anamorphic footage was improperly cropped during analysis.
• Fixed an issue where the FxCustomParameterAPI’s -currentTime method could return an invalid time.
• Deprecated the -[FxImageTile openGLTextureForContext:] method.

You can download FxPlug on the Apple Developer Downloads website.

We'll look into updating BRAW Toolbox and Gyroflow Toolbox ASAP.

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Transfer Toolbox v1.4.0 is out now on the Mac App Store! 🥳

This release adds support for Final Cut Pro 11.1.1 (for Mac) and Final Cut Pro 2.2.1 (for iPad).

Transfer Toolbox allows you to convert Final Cut Pro (for Mac) Libraries into Final Cut Pro (for iPad) Projects.

You can learn more on the Transfer Toolbox website.

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Wow - it's June already. That went quick.

ATEM Exporter v1.0.2 (Build 4) is out now!

This release has zero improvements or bug fixes - sorry!

However, it does have an INCREDIBLY cool new icon but the insanely AWESOME Matthew Skiles. 🥳

Matthew has made some KILLER icons for me over the years...

...but I think this one may be near the best!

You can buy and learn more about ATEM Exporter on its website.

A few days ago, I posted the following on our CommandPost Discord:

Back in 2016, I introduced FCPX Hacks into the world. It originally started off as a little proof of concept project to make finding the browser playhead easier for Scott Simmons. Once I solved that annoying problem... LOTS of other Final Cut Pro editors had other ideas and suggestions, myself included. FCPX Hacks grew and expanded. Eventually, a random Queenslander called David Peterson emailed me, and said my code was basically rubbish (he since disputes this accusation, haha) and I desperately needed help. He introduced me to GitHub, and my single Lua file, eventually become hundreds. David and I are now great friends, who catch up in person whenever we're in the same state. FCPX Hacks evolved into CommandPost.

In the last 9 years, there's been well over 244 releases of CommandPost/FCPX Hacks. It's been downloaded over 258 thousand times. It's been used for projects at Netflix, Pixar and the BBC. People at companies such as Apple, Avid and Adobe use it daily. All of the 2024 Apple WWDC videos were graded using Tangent panels in Final Cut Pro controlled by CommandPost.

CommandPost has always been free and open-source. We've had some awesome financial contributors via GitHub Sponsors and PayPal. Over the last 9 years, CommandPost has brought in AUD$26,374.12 of revenue - basically AUD$2,930.46 per year. A lot of that money has been spent on buying new control surfaces (such as the DaVinci Resolve Editors Keyboard) so that we can add and maintain support in CommandPost.

As you will have seen... I haven't been able to spend as much time on CommandPost as I used to. I now have kids to feed, mortgage to pay, a Film & Television production company with staff (that also have kids and mortgages) to keep afloat. As many have experienced, in the last couple of years, our bread and butter of corporate/advertising jobs have dramatically decreased, and budgets have shrunk. I'd LOVE to spend more time on CommandPost, but it's super hard when it doesn't bring in a lot of revenue.

So I'm proposing a change... I would like to ATTEMPT to try and bring CommandPost to the Mac App Store. I have zero idea if Apple will ever allow it - but I'd like to give it a shot.

In a perfect world, I'd like to just make it a one-off cost (i.e. lifetime/perpetual only) - but I know that times are tough, and some people actually prefer the smaller monthly/yearly costs than a more expensive one-off cost - so I'm open to your ideas and suggestions.

There's currently 471 things on the CommandPost todo list on GitHub, that I would LOVE to action. If CommandPost actually paid my wage, I could spend my time ticking off all of those items - but to do that, I need decent income from CommandPost.

CommandPost would remain open-source (although to be honest, there's only been a tiny handful of contributors to the code), so you could always build it yourself. Old versions would still work. But if you wanted to use the latest and greatest, you'd need to pay, to basically maintain the support. It's actually a LOT of work to keep up with Apple's Final Cut Pro and macOS changes - we're not on the Final Cut Pro beta program - so each time they do an update it's a mad rush to fix things. I would give free licenses to EVERYONE who was a GitHub/PayPal Sponsor prior to today.

I'm not sure about prices. I'm still not sold on a subscription option. I still have no idea if Apple will even allow it. But if we want CommandPost to keep being updated, SOMETHING needs to happen.

Anyway... here's food for thought. What do YOU think?

After posting this on Discord, and sharing the link to the post on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I've been FLOODED with DM's, messages, emails, voice mails, etc.

The feedback has been INSANELY overwhelmingly positive and excited. People seem to genuinely love CommandPost, and want to see it updated and improved.

Whilst there's lots of differing opinions and views, the GENERAL consensus seems to be that people would prefer perpetual/lifetime licenses (as opposed to subscription), and would be ok with around USD$50.

So... that's what we're going to do. Over the coming days and weeks, we'll attempt to bring CommandPost to the Mac App Store for a single fee of USD$50.

The core CommandPost Lua code will remain open-source with an MIT license. We'll continue to merge any CommandPost-App changes back into the Hammerspoon repository.

Given CommandPost v1.5.2 has over 14,312 downloads (noting that a lot of users are still running very old versions of CommandPost for a variety of reasons - I still get bug reports from users on version CommandPost v1.0.6!) - there's certainly potential that it could generate enough income to keep me fully on CommandPost for a year!

There will also be other changes/improvements/additions...

After building Jumper for Avid Media Composer, I fell in love with the Avid PanelSDK - it's so good. The documentation is great, the API is great, the team behind it are great.

Compared to DaVinci Resolve's Python/Lua API, Premiere's Extensions API, and Final Cut Pro's very basic and lacking Workflow Extensions - the Avid PanelSDK is fricken awesome.

As a result, over the coming weeks/months, I plan to release a CommandPost Panel for Avid Media Composer on the Mac App Store for USD$50. This purchase would just be for the Avid panel - you'll still need CommandPost installed - so it'll be USD$100 for Avid users.

There's almost infinite possibilities of what we can do here - so it's super exciting! Your ideas are certainly welcome!

We will also continue to "spin out" toolboxes from CommandPost and make them standalone apps.

The Sony Timecode Repair Toolbox will eventually become the Timecode Toolbox on the Mac App Store - we already have an epic icon for this:

I started building this not long after BRAW Toolbox was shipped, and I even employed someone to try and build it for me at one point, but it's never been finished. It's on the todo list!

The Titles to Keywords/AutoSequence Toolbox will eventually be "spun out" as a standalone paid called SyncScript Pro (previously referred to as Assistants Toolbox on FCP Cafe).

I'm also currently building another app called SplitTake - a simple Swift/Swift UI application for capturing your screen, webcam and external microphone to ProRes for editing in Final Cut Pro.

So, as always, there's a LOT to do, and not enough hours in the day. But hopefully the more people that eventually buy CommandPost, the more time I can spend on it.

And if enough people buy it, maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to drag David Peterson away from his "real job" so he can work on CommandPost full time!

Onwards & Upwards! xx

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If you've been in the post production community for a minute, you've most certainly come across the name Monica Daniel.

She's been featured on the BorisFX Artist Profile.

She's been on Zack Arnold's various websites and podcasts for years.

She's been Sh*tting Sparkles.

She has an insanely impressive list of IMDB credits.

Whilst I don't believe we've ever met in person, I've probably listened to hundreds of hours of her talking over the years on various podcasts.

She now needs our help.

She writes on GoFundMe:

This is very difficult for me to do. I pride myself on being self-sufficient and independent. I have been a professional editor with a successful career in film and television for 20 years. I am a single mother of two teenagers who do well in school and are loving young humans. My son is special needs, and that provides its own unique challenges as I try to be the best mother I can for them. I have given back to the post-production community through volunteering for non-profit organizations like Los Angeles Creative Pro User Group and Blue Collar Post Collective. I have moderated and been a speaker on panels, taught seminars, mentored many up-and-coming editors, and produced a filmmaking edu-tainment podcast for the filmmaking community.

When the strikes hit a couple of years ago, I had just finished working on the finale of a television show. And I have not worked since then. I needed to continue to provide for my children while I tried to find work. I have drained my savings and have managed to extend it as long as I can by accumulating extremely high credit card debt. I have had to pay thousands for water damage to my home in that time and have delayed repairs in my home because I cannot afford it. There have been medical bills and car repairs. I've gone to food banks and ran out of food stamp benefits.

I need help as I am trying to find sources of income and get back on my feet and figure out my career path. I am too young to retire and too old to be considered for many other types of jobs. Thank you for reading.

When you look at the people who have already donated, you know this is important - for example:

• Marianna Montague
• Michael Kammes
• Philip Hodgetts
• Trevor Horton
• Kes Akalaonu

These are industry heavyweights.

I know it's bloody hard to be a post production professional anywhere in the world today, but if you can spare some money and help out Monica, that would be amazing.

Thanks team! xx

You can learn more on her GoFundMe post.

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ATEM Exporter v1.0.1 is out now on the Mac App Store! 🥳

ATEM Exporter is a native Swift + Swift UI Mac Application that listens to a Blackmagic ATEM switcher, and logs all the camera changes.

Click here to buy on the Mac App Store

You can export the camera changes as a Final Cut Pro FCPXML, to use in Final Cut Pro or Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve.

You can export a Program Cut, which allows you to use your program feed from an external recorder (such as a Blackmagic HyperDeck), and add cut points each time there's a camera change.

You can also export a Multicam, which allows you to use your program feed as well as any ISO (i.e. independent camera) recordings, and export a Multicam clip for Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve.

ATEM Exporter was built in a few hours during a live event, and has only currently been tested in a real-world live production using an Blackmagic ATEM Constellation 8K, Blackmagic HyperDeck's and AJA recorders for ISOs - so we welcome any user feedback for other ATEM's!

We're currently just using a placeholder icon (from Timecode Toolbox) whilst a new one is being designed - stay tuned!

You can learn more on the ATEM Exporter website.

evrExpanse 5.6.3 & 5.6.4 Bring Accurate Camera Capture Time to FCP Workflows

The latest updates to evrExpanse, versions 5.6.3 and 5.6.4, deliver a major improvement for editors who rely on accurate timestamp metadata — especially when working in Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and other NLEs or metadata tools.

📸 Camera-Embedded CreateDate Support

CreateDate is the actual moment the camera records each clip — embedded directly in the file’s metadata. Until now, many workflows relied on the filesystem creation date, which can become inaccurate after file transfers or cloud uploads/downloads.

With evrExpanse 5.6.3, this camera-authored CreateDate is now embedded in DaVinci Resolve metadata export, joining the existing support for Final Cut Pro and other supported NLEs. The “Content Created” field in metadata now reflects the true capture time, enabling better organization, filtering, and Smart Collection creation — even after transfers or rewraps.

🕞 Accurate Timestamps in Transcoded Files

Version 5.6.4 takes it even further. When the “Include Source Metadata” option is enabled, evrExpanse sets the transcoded file’s creation date to match the original CreateDate from the camera — not the OS-generated date.

The result? When transcoded media is imported into Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or other NLEs, the “Content Created” field shown in the browser reflects the true capture time — not a timestamp corrupted by transfer or OS-level changes.

✅ Key Benefits

• True Content Created timestamps preserved in transcoded files
• Improved accuracy for Smart Collections and media organization workflows
• Full compatibility with FCP, DaVinci Resolve, and metadata tools like FoolCat
• Smart fallback to filesystem creation date when metadata is unavailable

These updates are available now in evrExpanse 5.6.4. 👉 Learn more at evrapp.cloud

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The amazing Joe Marler reports on our Discord:

The v11.1.1 fix involving "MXF media to plays back incorrectly" (only XAVC-L) had been filed as issue 449 in the FCP Cafe bug database

There was also an unannounced fix in Pro Video Formats v2.4.1 the day after the Final Cut Pro v11.1.1 release.

That Pro Video Formats v2.4.1 fix addressed sluggish Quicktime XAVC-L playback on Apple Silicon.

I tested the Final Cut Pro v11.1.1 fix on bug #449 before installing Pro Video Formats v2.4.1, and it none-the-less fixed the specific XAVC-L bug involving black frames when using the Final Cut Pro Import dialog on Apple Silicon.
However the QTP bug was suspicious. It might have been in /Library/Video/Professional Video Workflow\Plug-Ins/AppleAVCLGCodec.bundle or in /Library/Video/Professional Video Workflow Plug-Ins/AppleMXFImport.bundle, but I did binary diffs on those and diffs of the decompiled pseudocode and I don't see where it was.

The Final Cut Pro v11.1.1 fix was possibly in the Flexo private framework, maybe in MXF::FileReader.

This is what I absolutely LOVE about the Final Cut Pro community - we have such insanely smart people just openly sharing very technical information. Awesome.

Thanks Joe for all your on-going help, support and genius in both the wider post production community, and ESPECIALLY here at FCP Cafe in the GitHub Issues!

The Pro Video Formats v2.4.1 update was released on 23rd May 2025, so if you haven't already updated, please do via System Settings or downloading manually on the Apple website.

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Final Cut Pro v11.1.1 is out now with the following bug fixes:

• Addresses an issue that could cause MXF media to play back incorrectly.
• Improves reliability when adding video to drop zones in the inspector.
• Fixes an issue when sharing with the “Allow export segmentation” setting that caused inconsistent frame rates.

Compressor v4.10.1 is out now with the following bug fixes:

• Improves reliability when exporting ProRes 422 clips in MXF format.
• Fixes an issue when sharing with the "Allow export segmentation" setting that caused inconsistent frame rates.

There has been no changes to Motion, FxPlug, or Workflow Extensions... yet.

For those that might have missed it Final Cut Pro for iPad v2.2.1 was realised on 8th May with the following bug fix:

• Fixes an issue that caused user-installed fonts to not appear.

We'll test out, and keep you posted on our findings. Thanks team!

evrExpanse v5.6.3 is out now!

New Features: Expanded Metadata Field Coverage

Metadata is now more consistent across all export types, improving cross-platform workflows and post-production integration.

Newly added fields by export type:

• DaVinci Resolve (.CSV): Date Recorded

• Final Cut Pro (.FCPXML): Focus Distance

• evrExpanse (.CSV): Reel Number, Scene, Take, Camera Number, Focus Distance

• Silverstack (.CSV): Camera Letter, Reel Number, Scene, Clip Number, Take

• ASSIMILATE SCRATCH Integration (.XML): Clip Number, Reel Number, Scene, Take, Camera Number, Focus Distance

• Avid Media Composer (.ALE): Clip Number, Reel Number, Scene, Take, Camera Number, Finder Tags, Finder Flag, Focus Distance

📊 For full field comparison, see the updated metadata coverage chart.

You can download and learn more on the evrExpanse website

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Gyroflow Toolbox v1.3.0 (Build 22) is out now!

This release includes the following improvements:

• We've updated to the latest Gyroflow Core Renderer. HUGE thank you to the amazing AdrianEddy for all his ongoing help, assistance, genius and support!
• We've improved how we render error messages in Gyroflow Toolbox. HUGE thank you to Darrin Cardani at Apple and Gabriele de Simone at FxFactory for all your ongoing help, assistance, genius and support (and for putting up with my crazy questions)!
• Updated from FxPlug v4.3 to v4.3.2.

You can learn more and download Gyroflow Toolbox on the Gyroflow Toolbox website.

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Pro Editor Bundle v3 is out now!

Now you can buy all of our apps directly on the Mac App Store! 🥳

The Pro Editor Bundle v3 is USD$500 and includes:

• BRAW Toolbox
• Capacitor
• Fast Collections
• Gyroflow Toolbox
• LUT Robot
• Marker Toolbox
• Metaburner
• News Import
• Recall Toolbox

The Mac App Store also supports Complete My Bundle - which credits customers for apps they’ve already purchased within a bundle. You only pay the balance for the remaining apps.

You can find the Pro Editor Bundle v3 on the Mac App Store here.

Alternatively, if you don't need LUT Robot or Capacitor, you can buy the original Pro Editor Bundle on the Mac App Store here, or if you don't need Metaburner, you can find Pro Editor Bundle v2 on the Mac App Store here.

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Metaburner is now available on the Mac App Store at a discount rate (for a limited time)! 🥳

Previously it was only available on FxFactory - however, there were a few users (cough, Vigneswaran Rajkumar), that really wanted it on the Mac App Store too, so we've finally put it there too!

The versions should be mostly identical (although the Mac App Store version is sandboxed) - and we'll try keep them in-sync.

You can buy it today for USD$79.99 (previously USD$149 on FxFactory).

Metaburner is an Advanced Metadata Generator for Final Cut Pro.

You can access it via a Title in the Titles sidebar.

Metaburner gives you 25 text layers that you can populate with whatever metadata you want.

You can even stack multiple Metaburner Titles on top of each other for unlimited metadata fields!

To begin, simply drag your Final Cut Pro Project from the Browser into the Metaburner Title Inspector via a drop zone, and then Metaburner has full access to everything that's in the FCPXML.

There's also a Lua scripting environment built-in, so you can even "code" your own text for unlimited possibilities.

You can even share Lua variables between multiple Metaburner titles for some crazy cool workflows!

You can learn more on the Metaburner website and buy on the Mac App Store.

The charming Shamir Allibhai from Eddie AI has released an awesome little blog post.

He explains:

I remember April 2011. It was when Apple launched Final Cut Pro X and ended FCP 7. FCP X’s magnetic timeline looked amazing but too much of radical departure for me back then. It was too hard to use after having learned and depended on FCP 7. I migrated to Adobe Premiere.

The launch didn’t just divide the editing world — it shattered it.
Editors walked out. Forums caught fire. Careers shifted overnight.

But what if we got the story wrong?

What if that launch wasn’t a failure… but a fault line?
One that quietly reshaped the next decade of content creation?

We wrote about this pivotal moment in our latest long form article...

The Final Cut That Wasn’t — A deep dive into the launch that broke the industry before building it again. For editors, creators, and anyone who loves a good comeback story.

You can read it on the Eddie AI blog.

You can also step back in time, and read my ORIGINAL FCPX thoughts from 2014 on the FCP Cafe Blog.

Enjoy!

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Thanks to everyone who visited Max & Ronny at the OWC booth at MPTS to check out Jumper for Final Cut Pro!

There was lots of excitement - especially seeing that Jumper analysis files created in Final Cut Pro, can be used in Avid Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro and Jumper Standalone - on Mac and PC!

You can read more about Jumper on our original FCP Cafe article.

Marker Toolbox v1.5.1 (Build 22) is out now!

It includes the following improvements:

• Add supported for Vimeo's new CSV format. Thanks for reporting Matt!
• Updated TimecodeKit from v2.0.11 to v2.3.3. Thanks Steffan Andrews!

Marker Toolbox allows you to import a Adobe Premiere CSV, Vimeo CSV, Wipster CSV, Dropbox Replay JSON, Frame.io FIOJSON (including from the V4 Beta), Timecode+ TSV & Text Comments into Apple's Final Cut Pro, Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer.

You can even get OpenAI's ChatGPT to help interpret your Text Comments - which is perfect for handling emails from clients!

You can download and learn more on the Marker Toolbox website.

Eddie AI is now available in Final Cut Pro! 🥳

Shamir Allibhai writes:

Imagine if you could just "prompt" your clips in Final Cut Pro to create a great story.
Scratch that. You don’t need to imagine: "ChatGPT" capabilities have arrived for FCP.

And the big week for Eddie AI just got even bigger.
(🎥 Launch video part 3, below...watch to the end 😉)

First Premiere Pro.
Then DaVinci Resolve.
And now... Final Cut Pro. 🍎✂️

Eddie — the AI assistant video editor for pros — is now integrated with all three major video editing applications. That means wherever you cut, whatever your workflow, Eddie and its advanced AI models are there to make you more efficient.

And quite frankly, to liberate you.

📥 Import footage (multicam, sync, compound, and all)
🧠 Find the story
🗂️ Log b-rolls
✂️ Cut roughs
✨ Export projects/timelines, ready to polish

⏳ Hours, if not days → now minutes ⚡

Try Eddie for free — 2 full projects/month, no credit card required

You can learn more on the Eddie AI website.

You can also read about this new integration on RedShark News.

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Introducing Off-topic Rants! 🥳

Over the years, I've written hundreds of blog posts on various personal and LateNite websites, as have some of my friends, collaborators and co-workers at LateNite.

When we re-designed the LateNite website a few years ago, we simplified it, and removed links to the very old blog - the pages were still online, but kinda hidden, only to be found if you Googled them.

However, rather than letting all that content die, I've decided to keep it alive here on FCP Cafe in the *Off-topic Rants section.

Yes, I'm a digital hoarder. We have 267 hard drives in NeoFinder and 353 LTO tapes. 🫠

I also created Unreal Cafe and Resolve Cafe very shortly after setting up FCP Cafe, but they never really took off, so I've moved my Unreal Cafe blog posts here, and have taken down both these sites, so I can just concentrate on Final Cut Pro. 👋

So basically... Off-topic Rants is a random collection of blog posts that contain technical information, creative information, film reviews (apologies if I wrote something bad about your film!), and who knows what else.

Some interesting posts from over the years include:

• Philosophy of Open Source (13th September 2006)
• Post Production Workflow (23rd December 2008)
• Final Cut Studio 3 Predictions (21st February 2009)
• Avid vs FCP – My thoughts… (10th May 2009)
• Mac Hardware Predictions – Death to the Mouse (22nd June 2009)
• Assistant Editor Lecture (30th October 2010)
• Waiting on Sound (16th September 2012)
• The Hard Drive Challenge (12th December 2013)
• FCPX Rant (28th January 2014)
• Directing The Wizards of Aus (20th December 2015)
• Superannuation for Filmmakers (6th June 2018)

Some of the old blogs have formatting issues, broken links, and missing content, so feel free to submit a pull request if you come across anything, or just let me know on the Discord or GitHub.

Also the main Off-topic Rants page currently doesn't list everything, so you can only find a lot of the old blogs by searching, or stepping through the blog posts page-by-page (which will take a while, as there's currently 349 posts!).

If nothing else... all these decades of old blog posts will probably explain why I'm so crazy... 🤷

Enjoy!

Jumper for Final Cut Pro has been on display at MPTS show at Olympia Grand Hall in London today, and will be back again tomorrow! 🥳

The amazing Ronny Courtens from OWC (Head of Enterprise solutions - Jellyfish/Jupiter/LTO) and Max Lund from Witchcraft Software (the lead developer of Jumper) will be on the stand demoing Jumper, running large shared media volumes and on-premises machine learning datasets off a Jellyfish NAS.

Ronny is giving live demos of their latest high-performance Jellyfish NAS systems, their powerful new Jellyfish Manager v3.0, and the very first release of their brand-new Jellyfish Media Management software.

The Jellyfish systems is connected to super-fast OWC Thunderbolt 5 hubs, docks, and drives, to demo high-speed edit-while-ingest collaboration workflows.

If you want to see the fastest and most user-friendly storage solutions for creative teams, and the latest developments in on-premises machine learning, go and visit MPTS on the ccktech booth, Stand B42.

The event runs:

Thursday 15th May - 09:30 - 17:00

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New Case Study!

Dev Benegal has written an awesome new case study covering his film An Arrested Moment.

You can read all about it on FCP Cafe.

Thanks heaps Dev for sharing with the Final Cut Pro Community! 🥳

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Marker Data v1.2.0 is out now!

In includes the following improvement:

• Introducing Pagemaker – a new feature that allows users to create PDFs directly within Marker Data
• Swatch analysis now provides percentage progress, including completion status for each processed image (#122)
• Updated Notion Module CSV2Notion Neo to version 1.3.5
• Increased Notion Module's upload threads

You can learn more and download on the Marker Data website.

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Jumper for Final Cut Pro will be on display at MPTS show at Olympia Grand Hall in London next week thanks to OWC! 🥳

The amazing Ronny Courtens from OWC (Head of Enterprise solutions - Jellyfish/Jupiter/LTO) and Max Lund from Witchcraft Software (the lead developer of Jumper) will be on the stand demoing Jumper, running large shared media volumes and on-premises machine learning datasets off a Jellyfish NAS.

Ronny will give live demos of their latest high-performance Jellyfish NAS systems, their powerful new Jellyfish Manager v3.0, and the very first release of their brand-new Jellyfish Media Management software.

The Jellyfish systems will be connected to super-fast OWC Thunderbolt 5 hubs, docks, and drives, to demo high-speed edit-while-ingest collaboration workflows.

If you want to see the fastest and most user-friendly storage solutions for creative teams, and the latest developments in on-premises machine learning, come and visit MPTS on the ccktech booth, Stand B42.

The event runs:

Wednesday 14th May - 09:30 - 18:30
Thursday 15th May - 09:30 - 17:00

Caption Pop AI v1.1.5 is out now!

It now includes background text boxes, improved color pickers, new languages, and a DTD bug fix.

The auto-update’s broken, so to install:

• Quit FCP & SR app
• Delete the SR app
• Download and install new version
• Restart FCP and then relaunch Caption Pop AI

After updating, both the SR app and Caption Pop AI should have 1.1.5 version numbers.

You can learn more on the Stupid Raisins website.

evrExpanse v5.6.2 is out now!

This update is packed with powerful new features and enhancements for Canon users, making it easier than ever to unlock the full potential of your EOS Cinema camera metadata — especially for those working with legacy equipment.

New Features:

• Canon XF Utility Integration: Seamlessly integrate with Canon XF Utility for a more efficient metadata workflow with Canon XF-AVC MXF media.

Enhancements:

• Expanded Metadata Support: Direct extraction of Camera Index, Reel Number, and Clip Number from Canon EOS Cinema MXF files, providing deeper insights into your footage.

FIXED:

• Improved Color Space Detection: Resolved color space extraction issues for Canon C200 (XF-AVC) files.

Read the Full Release Notes

You can download and learn more on the evrExpanse website

72-Hour Flash Sale – 50% OFF evrExpanse! Claim Your Discount

EDL-X v2.14 is out now!

In includes the following improvement:

• New Choice for Clip Names: Top-Level Clip Names - Forced - grabs the first name found while drilling down in the timeline

You can download on the Mac App Store.

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Audio Design Desk v2.2 is out now!

It contains the following changes:

• +Sounds Marketplace is here. The way that sound packs are browsed and downloaded has been changed to an online model based on the ability to individualize sounds.
• Stem Splitter
• Generate new sounds using the integrated SoundGen tools
• New triggers panel in the Timeline
• Bug fixes and UI refinements

You can learn more and download from the Audio Design Desk website.

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Dylan Bates (The Final Cut Bro) has released a new app called Motion Template Version Tool.

I'm so incredibly proud of Dylan for jumping neck deep into development and programming - that's awesome!

You can watch him explain the application on YouTube:

You can pay what you want - with a minimum of USD$5.

You can download and learn more on The Final Cut Pro store.

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CommandPost is now on Discord!

You can sign up for our new CommandPost Discord community on Discord.

I haven't had Facebook on my phone for years, and at the start of the year I removed Twitter as well.

Sadly, as a result, I was very slow to respond to Twitter DM's and questions on our CommandPost Facebook Community.

I'm an active member of a few Discord Communities, so I figured, I might as well try move the CommandPost community to Discord! We'll see how it goes.

Hope to see you there!

Jumper is coming to Avid Media Composer & DaVinci Resolve!

Whilst this isn't technically Final Cut Pro news, it will bring some benefits, as Jumper's analysis files will be common between Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve (Mac & Windows), Adobe Premiere Pro (Mac & Windows) and Avid Media Composer (Mac & Windows)!

A standalone/desktop version of Jumper is also in active development.

You can learn more on the Jumper website.

MotionVFX has updated a bunch of their products, for example:

• mFlare 2 v3.1.6: Crash fixes, added base template
• mTracker 3D Area v1.1.2: Added base template, updated separator for templates

You can download and learn more on the MotionVFX website.

X2Pro5 v5.0.44 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Support for mov files created on iPhones.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Builder NLE v4.2.12 is out now with the following bug fixes:

• Bug fix for dealing with stale security scoped bookmarks when accessing media files
• Bug fix for audio playback

You can download on the Mac App Store.

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BRAW Toolbox v1.4.4 (74) is out now!

It contains the following improvements:

• Added support for Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K 65.
• Added support for updated Constant Quality record settings on URSA Cine.
• Added support for Panasonic UB-50 Blackmagic RAW clips.
• Updated from Blackmagic RAW SDK v4.4 to v4.5.
• Updated from FxPlug v4.3.1 to v4.3.2.

You can learn more and download on the BRAW Toolbox website.

Arctic v24.3.2 it out now with support for Final Cut Pro 11.1.

You can learn more and download on the Arctic website.

MotionVFX has updated a bunch of their products, for example:

• mFilmLook v3.0: New Motion Blur Al effect available in CineStudio. All effects added as separate handy presets
• mRotoAl v1.1.5: Updated separator for templates
• mFilmLook Elemental Presets v1.0.1: Support for the latest mFilmLook, featuring Motion Blur

You can download and learn more on the MotionVFX website.

Creator's Best Friend v1.3.4 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Bug fix for determining the visibility of a marker on a clip's out point

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Simons Says Translation v3.9.6 is out now with minor bug fixes.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Sync-N-Link X v1.3.5 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Critical bug fix for crashes caused by garbage collection (introduced in version 1.3.3)

You can download on the Mac App Store.

captionAnimator v1.1.4 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Bug fix for a crash caused by creating shortened titles from a caption (in some cases)

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Discuss this news item

Apple has just released updates to Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Pro for iPad, Final Cut Camera, Compressor, Motion and FxPlug.

As always, please make sure you backup your current version of Final Cut Pro, Motion and Compressor before updating.

Iain Anderson has written up a detailed post over at ProVideo Coalition.

As usual Ripple Training is straight out of the gate with a great summary video, which you can watch on YouTube below:

The amazing Jenn Jager has also released a video:

...as has Dylan Bates (aka The Final Cut Bro):

Final Cut Pro for Mac has a database update (1133 in v11.0.1, and now 1150 in v11.1) - which means existing Libraries will need to be updated. We recommend manually making backups of your Final Cut Pro Libraries before updating.

There was no update to FCPXML in this release - it's still on FCPXML v1.13.

Interestingly, new Adjustment Clips in FCPXML are just standard video items with a new special effect applied - so existing FCPXML-based tools should continue to work without any updates:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE fcpxml>

<fcpxml version="1.13">
    <resources>
        <format id="r1" name="FFVideoFormat1080p25" frameDuration="100/2500s" width="1920" height="1080" colorSpace="1-1-1 (Rec. 709)"/>
        <effect id="r2" name="Adjustment Clip" uid="FFAdjustmentEffect"/>
    </resources>
    <library location="file:///Example.fcpbundle/">
        <event name=" 🎬 EDITS" uid="917D28EF-04EA-4A6B-A8B4-FAB14E5AA649">
            <project name="Adjustment Clip" uid="23781BD2-0E2A-4BF9-9ED0-6E1DA0844336" modDate="2025-03-28 12:24:17 +1100">
                <sequence format="r1" duration="86400s" tcStart="0s" tcFormat="NDF" audioLayout="stereo" audioRate="48k">
                    <spine>
                        <video ref="r2" offset="0s" name="Adjustment Clip" start="3600s" duration="86400s" role="adjustments"/>
                    </spine>
                </sequence>
            </project>
        </event>
    </library>
</fcpxml>

Whilst this isn't a major update (compared to what Blackmagic will most likely announce next week before NAB), it does have a lot a very useful additions for professional editors.

Adjustment Clips is something the Final Cut Pro community has been asking for a very long time, so it's awesome to see that Apple's finally built this in.

Whilst we've always been able to build empty Motion Titles to basically act as adjustment layers (I personally always used Alex4D's free adjustment layer) - it became a bit annoying with collaboration, because different people would use different adjustment layer Motion Templates. I have about 10 different Adjustment Layers on my system for example.

As you'll see in the above videos, Adjustments Clips are also an improvement upon the legacy Adjustment Layers, because they can be applied from the Effects Browser, and they also support transitions.

The addition of the Quantec QRS (Quantec Room Simulator) is awesome too - although not really unexpected, given it was featured so heavily at last years FCP Creative Summit when talking about Logic Pro. I would GUESS that they originally wanted this in FCP 11, but ran out of time.

Renaming audio effects in the Inspector is another super useful quality of life improvement, that was basically low-hanging fruit for the FCP team. Interestingly, this just uses the nameOverride parameter in FCPXML, which already was in FCPXML v1.13 for audio effects.

Revealing the source of a multicam angle or synced clip in the Browser is also another great quality of life improvement for professional editors. Previously, editors would have to use CommandPost to achieve similar functionality.

Moveable Markers have also finally been officially enabled! This has been a secret/hidden feature in Final Cut Pro for years - it was first discovered by Alex Goldner back in June 2014, and added to CommandPost.

Image Playground is a bit of unsurprisingly, but "meh" feature, however if you don't enable Apple Intelligence at the macOS level, you won't even see the option anyway (so your Import button will just open the Import window)!

There's also lots of documented (and some undocumented) bug fixes, which is always welcome. The improvements to FxPlug will hopefully mean third party plugins will become more stable and reliable.

We'll continue to explore and test it in more detail over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, here's the full release notes:

Final Cut Pro v11.1 includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:

• Add color corrections and effects to an adjustment clip above the timeline to apply them to a range of clips at once.
• Get inspired with Image Playground and use Apple Intelligence to quickly create stylized images based on a description, suggested concepts, or people from your Photos library.*
• Speed up your Magnetic Mask workflows with important bug fixes, performance improvements, and a new keyboard shortcut to show or hide the Magnetic Mask Editor.
• Use the Quantec QRS (Quantec Room Simulator) effect to create natural and transparent audio reverbs that simulate real acoustic spaces.
• Stay organized by renaming audio effects in the inspector.
• Reveal the source of a multicam angle or synced clip in the browser.
• Move markers in the timeline by dragging them in a clip, or remove markers by dragging them out of a clip.

Additional support and bug fixes:

• The Magnetic Mask Editor now closes automatically when the last Magnetic Mask is removed from a clip.
• Improves reliability when batch exporting compound clips that contain Magnetic Masks.
• Adds support for using Transcribe to Captions with a single audio role component.
• Improves stability when dragging a library item to a text editor to generate an FCPXML.
• Improves reliability when upgrading a library that contains 100 fps clips.
• Improves reliability when sharing a project that includes ARRI ProRes MXF media.
• Fixes an issue that prevented a LUT from being automatically applied when importing ARRIRAW MXF clips.
• Improves performance when applying Smooth Slo-Mo to ProRes 4444 files with an alpha channel on Mac models with M1.
• Fixes an issue that caused audio to go out of sync when adding 25 fps clips to a 23.98 fps timeline.
• Fixes an issue that could cause sound to slip out of sync when detaching audio from a clip with a J-cut and a through edit.
• Fixes an issue that caused an MP3 or AAC audio file to have a truncated audio waveform after export.
• Fixes an issue that caused black frames to be displayed when playing back HEVC clips from a RED camera.
• Fixes an issue that prevented the browser from automatically scrolling to an active cell in list view.
• Fixes an issue that caused the selected browser clip to change when Show Hidden Clips was enabled.

Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.2 includes the following features and enhancements:

• Expand your editing workflows with support for portrait orientation on your iPad.
• Speed up your editing with keyboard shortcuts to nudge a selection, replace with gap, and lift or overwrite to the primary storyline.
• Get inspired with Image Playground and use Apple Intelligence to quickly create stylized images based on a description, suggested concepts, or people from your Photos library.*
• Capture in 50 fps for additional editing flexibility and delivery options.

Improvements and bug fixes:

• Double-tap in the timeline to quickly start and stop playback.
• Automatically scroll the timeline when moving the playhead, moving timeline clips, or editing, including trimming, retiming, and selecting multiple clips.
• Animation keyframes now default to the Transform All property.
• Fixes an issue that caused the inspector to sometimes apply effect changes to the previously selected clip.
• Addresses an issue that caused clips to sometimes appear black in the timeline.
• Improves reliability when editing focus points of Cinematic mode videos in a connected storyline.
• Improves reliability when using onscreen controls to resize clips in the viewer.
• Fixes an issue that interrupted audio playback when changing the audio configuration in the inspector.
• Addresses an issue that caused multicam syncing to fail with the inspector open.
• Improves reliability when using the Continuous Zoom slider with the front-facing camera.
• Fixes an issue that caused incorrect voiceover controls to appear after a Live Multicam session.
• Addresses an issue that caused the app to rotate unexpectedly when using Stage Manager and Live Multicam.
• Fixes an issue in Live Multicam that caused incorrect lens options to appear in the zoom slider for certain frame rate and resolution settings.
• Addresses an issue that caused the Live Multicam Record button to sometimes appear offscreen.
• Improves reliability when using the jog wheel on iPad mini.
• Fixes an issue that caused the Picture in Picture viewer to flash and not resize correctly on iPad mini.
• Addresses an issue that caused the voiceover controls to flash on iPad mini.
• Improves the reliability of the inspector color palette when VoiceOver accessibility mode is turned on.
• Includes stability and performance improvements.

New keyboard shortcuts:

• Replace with Gap: Shift-Delete
• Overwrite to Primary Storyline: Option-Command-Down Arrow
• Lift from Primary Storyline: Option-Command-Up Arrow
• Nudge Left Many: Shift-Comma (,)
• Nudge Right Many: Shift-Period (.)
• Import from Image Playground: Shift-Option-P

Motion v5.10 includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:

• Get inspired with Image Playground and use Apple Intelligence to quickly create stylized images based on a description, suggested concepts, or people from your Photos library.
• Fixes an issue where disabling a soloed object in the Layers list would not clear its solo state.
• Improves stability when using the Timecode generator.
• Improves performance when playing back image sequences.

Compressor v4.10 includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:

• Get higher quality frame rate retiming powered by best-in-class machine learning, converting to higher frame rates, such as 60, 90, and 120 fps.
• Adds support for video pass-through of long GOP to MXF exports.
• Fixes an issue where the app would crash when applying an audio only preset to a video.
• Fixes an issue where custom frame size was constrained to a previously selected aspect ratio.
• Fixes an issue where multichannel audio layout was misinterpreted.
• Fixes an issue where log processing is retained when replacing a log-encoded video source file in an existing job.

FxPlug v4.3.2 includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:

• Improved overall stability.
• Added ability for plug-ins to close a remote window.
• Added tagged pop-up menus so that plug-ins can rearrange the items or add new items between existing items without having to change their parameter handling code.
• OpenGL is deprecated. Please update your plugins to work with Metal.
• Fixed an issue that would cause dynamically registered FxPlugs to not load during a “Send To Compressor” event.
• Fixed an issue where anamorphic footage was improperly cropped during analysis.
• Fixed some memory leaks in the FxPlug.Framework.
• Fixed an issue where the FxCustomParameterAPI’s -currentTime method could return an invalid time.
• Deprecated the -[FxImageTile openGLTextureForContext:] method.

Final Cut Camera v1.2 includes the following features and enhancements:

• Quickly switch to the 48 mm telephoto lens to capture the perfect shot. (Requires iPhone 14 Pro or later.)
• Play back your Log videos in SDR or HDR with the vibrancy of the original scene by applying the Apple Log LUT. (Requires iPhone 15 Pro or later.)
• Record videos in Spatial Audio for even more realistic and immersive sound. (Requires iPhone 16.)
• Capture in 50 fps for additional editing flexibility and delivery options.

Improvements and bug fixes:

• Improves reliability when recording in 4K 120 fps or 4K 100 fps.
• Fixes an issue that caused preview latency when recording in 4K 60 fps.
• Improves the reliability of HDR overexposure indicators.
• Addresses an issue that caused the thumbnail image to sometimes not appear or update when recording with an external drive.
• Fixes an issue that caused the Continuous Zoom slider to be hidden after switching to a different lens.
• Addresses an issue that caused focus peaking indicators to sometimes appear on the edge of the frame.
• Fixes an issue that prevented automatic exposure from resetting to zero after switching from manual exposure.
• Addresses an issue that caused the green dot indicator to sometimes appear incorrectly while in the media browser.
• Improves reliability with media transfers to Final Cut Pro for iPad.
• Improves reliability when changing device orientation.
• Includes stability and performance improvements.

Discuss this news item

MotionVFX mRotoAI v1.1.4 is out now with the following changes:

• Improved stability and optimized memory usage

You can download and learn more on the MotionVFX website.

Picture This... v1.0.7 is out now with the following changes:

• Critical bug fix for image generation failures caused by file names that are too long
• Bug fix to escape image file names for valid XML

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Discuss this news item

Final Cut Pro v11.0.1 is out now!

It includes the following bug fixes:

• Addresses an issue that caused Custom Overlays not to be visible in the viewer.
• Fixes an issue that caused errors when using Send to Compressor from a timeline that included Magnetic Mask effects.
• Improves reliability of the Show Horizon command in the viewer.
• Improves performance when pressing and holding the H key to scroll the timeline manually.

You can update now on the Mac App Store.

Final Cut Pro for iPad v2.1.1 is also out now with the following bug fix:

• Fixes an issue that caused Final Cut Pro for iPad to display a black screen and close unexpectedly.

Sync-N-Link X v1.3.2 is out now.

It includes the following bug fix:

• Critical bug fix for an error message raised by failing to access media files via security-scoped bookmarks (in some cases)

You can download on the Mac App Store.

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BRAW Toolbox v1.4.3 is out now!

It includes the following changes:

🔨 Improvements:

• Added support for Panasonic UB10 Blackmagic RAW clips.
• Updated from Blackmagic RAW SDK v4.3.1 to v4.4.

🐞 Bug Fix:

• Fixed a regression where the Toolbox drop zone failed to work properly in older versions of Final Cut Pro.

You can learn more and download on the BRAW Toolbox website.

Marker Toolbox v1.5.0 is out now!

It includes the following new feature:

• Added support for MP4 Chapter Markers (such as Hybrid MP4 recordings from OBS). Thanks for suggesting Adam Olivero!

You can learn more and download on the Marker Toolbox website.

Producer's Best Friend v1.4.73 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Bug fix for detecting disabled audio clips in a project

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Captionator for Final Cut v2.1.4 is out now with the following bug fixes:

• Bugfix: Re-adds the Build In/Build Out option for Custom Titles (now found under the custom title panel)

• Bugfix from 2.1.3: Model panel would sometimes show "Loading...", and should now be fixed.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

captionAnimator v1.1.2 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Bug fix for captions containing multiple fonts

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Discuss this news item

Automatic Duck's latest app, Multicam Flattener is now available for purchase! 🥳

Finally it is possible to flatten Multicam clips in Final Cut Pro timelines!

You can read more about it and watch a tutorial video on the Automatic Duck website.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Sync-N-Link v1.3.1 is out now with the following new feature:

• Support for disabling camera audio when a synced clip is opened into a Timeline

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Captionator for Final Cut v2.1.3 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Fixes a bug that could cause the model selector to stick on "Loading..." forever.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Builder NLE v4.2.11 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Critical bug fix for cases where mixed DTD version numbers can create FCPXML that cannot be imported into Final Cut Pro.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

fontAudition-X v1.0.7 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Minor bug fixes address formatting of the font window.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

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Marker Toolbox v1.4.2 is out now with the following bug fix:

• The Apply Markers to Existing Final Cut Pro Clip drop zone now works correctly with FCPXML v1.13 and Final Cut Pro 11. Thanks for reporting Jeff Roy!

You can learn more and download on the Marker Toolbox website.

captionAnimator v1.1 is out now with the following changes:

• New feature: option to split captions into shorter titles
• Bug fix for titles being connected to the wrong primary storyline clip (in some cases)
• Cleaned-up app icon

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Creator's Best Friend v1.3.2 is out now with the following bug fix:

• Critical bug fix to prevent a timestamp containing 60 seconds

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Discuss this news item

Sync-N-Link X v1.3 is out now!

It contains the following new feature:

• Ignores event clips hidden in Final Cut Pro 11

You can download on the Mac App Store.

X2Pro5 v5.0.43 is out now!

It contains support for Final Cut Pro 11 and FCPXML v1.13.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

evrExpanse v5.3.0 is out now!

In contains the following new feature:

• ARRI Camera Support for Smart LUT Finder

Smart LUT Finder now supports ARRI camera files in .mov and .mxf formats (ProRes). For cameras using LogC3, the appropriate LUT can be extracted directly from the file's metadata, streamlining the color grading process.

Supported ARRI Cameras:

• ALEXA Mini LF
• ALEXA LF
• AMIRA
• ALEXA Mini
• ALEXA SXT W

You can download and learn more on the evrExpanse website.

Audio Design Desk v2.1.12 is out now!

It contains the following changes:

• Fixes add sound pack folder command
• Adds new drag target in the timeline to allow you to drag multiple sound pack folders and install them at once.
• Fixes various sound pack management issues in previous build

You can learn more and download from the Audio Design Desk website.

Discuss this news item

Sync-N-Link X v1.2.1 is out now!

It contains the following change:

• Bug fix for DTD validation

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Audio Design Desk v2.1.9 is out now!

• *New: Global Auto Transpose in timeline. This allows regions which contain key metadata to be transposed to the selected key of choice. By default full mix music isn't included in this control, but the option for that can be adjusted in effects preferences. This feature is most useful with shorter pitched regions such as loops.
• Moved sound pack manage panel to dedicated window. There is a new key command to show it in the main Library menu. Tab is removed but there is a button at the bottom of the sound pack manager for the window. The manage panel also has a number of fixes.
• • Button in home screen sound pack panels wasn't working correctly
• Audio Editor's edit range controls weren't behaving correctly on render new file dialog
• More robust and performant rendering queue for pitch or time shifts in the Timeline
• Regions when dragged to the top of the timeline would often snap back to their source track
• Drag copy of regions, snap, pitch shift after copy, etc

You can learn more and download from the Audio Design Desk website.

Discuss this news item

BRAW Toolbox v1.4.2 (72) is out now!

It contains the following bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug where the Toolbox drop zone failed to work properly in Final Cut Pro 11 due to depreciated FCPXML versions. Thanks for reporting Alex Sofonea!
• Fixed a bug where the Check All/Uncheck All button in the Workflow Extension didn't work correctly. Thanks for reporting Mathew Welsh!

You can download and learn more on the BRAW Toolbox website.

Dylan Bates (The Final Cut Bro) has released a new product called Ultimate Glitch Transitions for Final Cut Pro | Vol. 1

You can use the discount code Glitch20 to get 20% off at checkout.

Dylan writes:

Hey fam, if you've been editing in Final Cut Pro for any length of time, there's a good chance you've run into an issue with transitions. When you apply a transition onto an overlying layer like a title or logo graphic, it almost always takes over the entire timeline, regardless of what you are applying it to.

THIS DRIVES ME CRAZY.

This week, I released a brand new glitch transition pack. But whenever I release a new plugin, I want it to solve problems that we have as everyday editors in Final Cut Pro.

So my goal with this pack was to solve that exact problem. And I am happy to report, that it was a success!

My new Glitch Transition pack allows you to enable / disable whether or not you want to apply it to the rest of the timeline.

PLUS it comes with 20 variations of glitches, as well as an enormous amount of customization. So the possibilities truly are endless!

You can learn more and purchase on Dylan's Gumroad Store.

SendToX v1.2.7 is out now!

It has the following change:

• Bug fix for falsely reporting that files are offline

You can download on the Mac App Store.

Discuss this news item

CommandPost v1.5.1 is out now!

It includes the following bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug in the Modify Project action for Final Cut Pro. Thanks for reporting Adam Schoales!
• Fixed how CommandPost reads and writes Final Cut Pro 11's sandboxed preferences. This fixes features such as Enable Rendering During Playback.
• Fixed how CommandPost reads Final Cut Pro 11's sandboxed User Destinations.
• Fixed a bug which prevented CommandPost from sending FCPXMLs back to Final Cut Pro. Thanks for reporting Martin Turner!

You can learn more and download for free on the CommandPost website.

Jumper 2024.12.05 (1453) for Apple Silicon Mac's is out now!

It includes the following updates:

🆕 Important Changes

• We now finally support visual processing of R3D files! To enable this feature, you need to go to www.red.com/downloads and download and install REDCINE-X PRO.
• We now save the transcriptions as plain text files in the audio analysis folder. The transcription can be found in the two .txt files if you right-click on a file in Jumper's media table and click Reveal Audio analysis.

🔨 Improvements

• Improve frame capture quality when making reverse image searches via Final Cut Pro

🐞 Bug Fixes

• Prevent automatic shutdown of Jumper Engine if the Final Cut Pro Trial version is running.
• Make sure the settings for target audio and video track in Premiere Pro doesn't reset on restart, thanks for reporting @citizensam!
• Make sure we are frame-accurate when doing reverse image searches from a Premiere Pro timeline, thanks for reporting @citizensam!

You can learn more and download a free trial on the Jumper website.

captionTranslation v1.0.1 is out now!

It includes the following new feature:

• Manage languages button to directly access the Translation Languages feature in System Settings

You can download now on the Mac App Store.

Audio Design Desk v2.1.8 is out now!

It includes the following changes:

• Fix: Replace and Metronome panels in timeline weren't appearing
• Fix: Exit full screen video will return video to previous docked size
• Fix: Slip editing in audio editor
• Improved metadata analysis/guessing for very short files. Added minimum confidence slider to UI.
• Improved loudness analysis for very short files
• Fixed Region Effects popup
• Fixed some region mouse responsiveness issues.
• Improved metadata windows

You can learn more and download from the Audio Design Desk website.

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Jumper is having a Black Friday sale!

Get 50% off yearly and lifetime licenses with the discount code: BLACKFRIDAY50.

You can learn more on the Jumper website.

CoreMelt is also having a massive Black Friday sale!

Get 50% off everything with the discount code: CM2024BF.

Offer ends 4th December.

You can learn more on the CoreMelt website.

Hedge is also doing a Black Friday sale!

Until 7th December, all new licenses and upgrades to Pro are 20% off. Yes, that includes bundles 🥳

Use the discount code: BLACKFRIDAY.

You can learn more on the Hedge website.

Isaac T. has started selling awesome clothing for filmmakers and post production professionals!

You can learn more on his blog.

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Strada & Michael Cioni have just released the full video of Michael's presentation from the 2024 Final Cut Pro Creative Summit!

I was there in the room - and it was an absolutely awesome and inspiring talk.

It's called Why Early Adopters Win: CEO Michael Cioni’s Strategies for Creators and you can watch below on YouTube:

Julie Eckersley and Dr Austin Hayden have written a manifesto for creating high-quality, low cost television for the Digital Age, titled FREESTYLE TV.

I had the honour of writing a couple of pages about my personal thoughts/opinions on what Producers should know about Post Production.

You can download the PDF and have a read via the FREESTYLE TV website.

Metaburner v1.1.2 (52) is out now!

This release fixes a bug where Metaburner could crash when handling unsupported fonts. Thanks for reporting Joseph Nilo!

You can download and learn more on the Metaburner website.

Media Sync Tool v1.2 is out now.

It includes the following changes:

• Added support for Final Cut Pro 11
• Implemented major bug fixes

You can download Media Sync Tool on the Mac App Store.

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Backups for Final Cut Pro v2.1.4 is out now!

This update includes the following changes:

• Verified to run under MacOS Sequoia and work with Final Cut Pro v11.0.
• Update the terminology used in various dialogs and help files.

You can download Backups for Final Cut Pro on the Mac App Store.

Hazy by FilmConvert for Final Cut Pro is out now!

Filters are an important part of any filmmaker's toolkit, and now, you can get all the benefits of shooting with diffusion filters in post using Hazy. Soften any bright areas of your image, smooth any uneven skin tones, and add a nice bloom effect to strong light sources using our filter presets.

You can learn more on the Hazy website.

Halation by FilmConvert for Final Cut Pro is out now!

Take your project to the next level by adding Halation to your footage. As a by-product of shooting film, Halation adds a red glow around the bright part of your image, adding to the romantic feeling of celluloid film.

You can learn more on the Halation website.

Robin S. Kurz has released a new video on his YouTube channel titled, Final Cut Pro 11: New Transcribe to Captions Feature + Must-Have Tools for Faster Workflow!

You can watch it on YouTube below:

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Seed Creative has posted an awesome video covering the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit.

You can watch it on YouTube:

Audio Design Desk v2.1.7 is out now!

• Hot Fix: v2.1.6 had an experimental library indexing feature accidentially enabled. Removed.
• Fix: The timeline area oriented the Arrow cursor to its center point rather than its tip. This made dragging sometimes confusing and unintuitive
• Improve audio track's automation point UI
• Allow drag and drop of videos into the video player
• Show more extension status' in the window title bar

You can learn more and download on the Audio Design Desk website.

Color Finale is having their Black Friday Sale offering up to 65% off post-production tools.

You can learn more on the Color Finale website.

Looking for other Black Friday deals?

Jonny Elwyn's site is probably the best place to find them!

You can check out his detailed list of deals on his website.

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CommandPost v1.5.0 is out now!

It includes the following changes:

Improvements:

• Updated to Lua v5.4.7.
• Added support for FCPXML v1.13 used by Final Cut Pro 11.
• Increased the number of banks from 30 to 50. Thanks for suggesting Todd Hallam!
• We now force the Sony Timecode Repair Toolbox to use FCPXML v1.11, so that it can be more easily imported into older versions of DaVinci Resolve.

Bug Fixes:

• Added support for Clear Key in Final Cut Pro Command Sets. Thanks for reporting Iain Anderson!
• Fixed an error on macOS Sequoia, where macOS would return no frontmost windows (which shouldn't technically be possible). Thanks for reporting Iain Anderson!
• Fixed a bug where Insert Action in the Scripting panel would fail to import some actions. Thanks for reporting Ermal Rexhepi!
• Fixed a bug in Final Cut Pro 11 and macOS Sequoia where CommandPost could fail to apply Effects, Transitions, Titles and Generators. Thanks for reporting Kurt Farr!
• We now correctly trigger Final Cut Pro Trial menubar items when running the trial version of Final Cut Pro.

You can download for free via the CommandPost website.

Producer's Best Friend v1.4.72 is out now.

It contains:

• Support for version 1.13 XML from Final Cut Pro 11
• Bug fix for creating thumbnail images

You can download on the Mac App Store.

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In very sad news, the post production community recently found out via Rohan’s brother in-law that Motion guru Rohan Marks has unexpectedly past away.

Whilst I knew of Rohan and his amazing work in the Motion and Final Cut Pro community, I didn't know him personally, however Bret Williams of BretFX has shared these thoughts:

😢 It is with great sadness that I share with the group that our resident Motion guru Rohan Marks passed away last week. According to his sister he was "lost suddenly and too soon." Rohan was an amazing soul and a mentor to us all here. Rohan was one of the nicest guys I've ever known. We had become good friends over the last few years, chatting frequently about Motion and life in general.
Spreading the word about Motion, and helping people learn Motion was one of his passions. He even recently went so far as to say to me that "Motion literally changed my life. For the best." He was proud of the work he did as one of Stupid Raisins creatives and more recently you could find his own solutions on FxFactory as "ROWIE" and his tutorials on his YouTube channel.
Please keep Rohan's family and friends in your thoughts and prayers. Rest in peace Rohan. You will be sorely missed. 💔

From all reports, he was a very loving, helpful, and talented person - and will be very much missed by everyone in the Motion and Final Cut Pro community.

<!-- Insert giant virtual hug to everyone who knew and loved Rohan. xx -->

BRAW Toolbox v1.4.1 (71) is out now.

It includes the following improvements:

• Updated from Blackmagic RAW SDK v4.3 to v4.3.1.
• Updated from FxPlug v4.3 to v4.3.1.
• Improved Blackmagic RAW SDK stability with simultaneous decodes.

Whilst Apple did announce at the 2024 Final Cut Pro Creative Summit that Final Cut Pro 11 now supports the new macOS system-wide MediaExtension Framework, and that Blackmagic will at some point release a Blackmagic RAW Media Extension - there is currently no time frame, so we have no idea if this is coming in days, weeks, or months.

In 2023 Apple announced a new framework called MediaExtension, that provides a means for developers to create format readers and video decoders for media that the system doesn’t natively support - such as Blackmagic RAW and Nikon NRAW.

This was supposed to come in macOS Sonoma, but they silently killed it - only for it to reappear in this years WWDC for macOS Sequoia.

Whilst it's been out for a while, the documentation is insanely complicated and limited and the only person I know who's done ANYTHING with it so far is the incredible Anton Marini, who's been building an ffmpeg Media Extension over on GitHub here.

I originally started playing with and testing MediaExtension's both back in 2023, and during the macOS Sequoia beta's, but never made much progress, as Final Cut Pro 10.8.1 didn't support Media Extensions anyway.

However, given there's no certainty as to when Blackmagic will release a Blackmagic RAW Media Extension, we're going to go back and see if we can bring a Blackmagic RAW Media Extension to market sooner rather than later.

Apple announced 3rd party Motion Templates were "coming soon" to iPad at launch, and that functionality is still not out - so we don't really want to waste time waiting for something that could be a year away.

We'll continue to keep you posted on our progress on FCP Cafe.

You can learn more and download BRAW Toolbox on the BRAW Toolbox website.

Capacitor v1.1.0 (5) is out now.

It includes added support for Final Cut Pro 11 and FCPXML v1.13.

You can learn more and download Capacitor on the Capacitor website.

Builder NLE v4.2.10 is out now.

It includes the following changes:

• Critical bug fix to read and process "Final Cut Pro Document" binary files exported from Final Cut Pro
• Bug fix for keyboard commands invoked from the People or Keywords field
• New feature: ignore hidden clips when importing an event from Final Cut Pro 11

You can download on the Mac App Store.

EDL-X v2.13 is out now.

It adds support for FCPXML version v1.12 and v1.13.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

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Transfer Toolbox v1.3.0 is out now for free!

Transfer your Final Cut Pro 11.0 (for Mac) Libraries to Final Cut Pro 2.1 (for iPad) Projects!

You can learn more on the Transfer Toolbox website.

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We've just added an absolutely epic new case study to FCP Cafe!

Our friends at Orange Studios recently collaborated with Nike to do an incredible large format installation for the Olympic Games - all cut in Final Cut Pro.

You can read all about it on our Nike Case Study page.

Unfortunately in Final Cut Pro 11, Magnetic Masks don't work with Send to Compressor.

This has been reported to Apple.

You can follow along via our FCP Cafe bug report.

In more positive news, German keys incorrectly shown in Command Editor is now fixed in Final Cut Pro 11! 🥳

Thanks Apple and the Final Cut Pro team!

This was heavily documented in our FCP Cafe Bug Tracker.

Dylan John has posted a video on YouTube titled, FCP 11! What's HOT and What’s NOT in the New Update.

You can watch it on YouTube:

He also has another video title, 3 Creative Ways to Use the New Magnetic Mask in Final Cut Pro.

You can watch it on YouTube:

Captionator for Final Cut v2.1.2 is out now!

It has a new more accurate Whisper Engine and fixes for Final Cut Pro 11 export.

You can download on the Mac App Store.

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Today marks the third and final day of the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit - and what an incredible week it's been!

One of the questions I've been asked a lot over the last few days is... "is Final Cut Pro 11 actually a big release"?

And from my perspective, looking under the hood, I think it absolutely is.

Whilst, as predicted, the headline features were already pre-announced (i.e. Spatial Video, Magnetic Mask and Transcribe to Captions), and compared to DaVinci Resolve, the list of improvements and bug fixes was somewhat small, under the hood there's some big changes to Final Cut Pro 11.

For the first time ever, Final Cut Pro is actually sandboxed... well, kinda.

Sandboxing on a Mac is a security mechanism designed to restrict what software can access and do on the system.

Essentially, it creates a controlled environment — a "sandbox" — where applications can run without affecting the broader system or accessing sensitive user data.

This approach minimises the risk of malware, data leaks, and other security breaches by isolating applications and tightly controlling their permissions.

Apple began enforcing sandboxing for all new apps and updates on the Mac App Store on 1st June 2012 - from this date forward any app submitted to the Mac App Store had to use sandboxing to comply with Apple’s security requirements.

Apple sent an email to developers explaining...

If you have an existing app on the Mac App Store that is not sandboxed, you may still submit bug fix updates after June 1.

But for whatever reason, Final Cut Pro never got sandboxing... until now:

However, I say "kinda", because they're kinda cheating as there's a special temporary exception (com.apple.security.temporary-exception.files.absolute-path.read-write) that allows them read/write access to the system drive - effectively breaking the sandbox.

So, even though TECHNICALLY Final Cut Pro is now sandboxed, it can still read and write any files on your drive, so nothing really changes.

But despite this, this marks a big change to the inner workings of Final Cut Pro.

Another thing that seems to have changed is that more and more of the Final Cut Pro code now looks like it's written in Swift, compared to the older Objective-C.

It seems to me that Apple is slowly modernising the code for the iPad, and then bringing across these shared Frameworks to the Mac.

Despite looking very similar on the surface, I actually think there's a lot more differences under the hood between Final Cut Pro 10.8.1 and Final Cut Pro 11.

Before I get into today's Summit news, I will also mention that the amazing Alex "4D" Gollner has released a new free plugin called Alex4D Transform.

It's an effect that can move in 3D space, rotate in 3 dimensions and scale a clip with on-screen controls.

You can download it on Alex's website.

The first session today was called Making Media Accessible for All, featuring Accessibility Lead at Apple Studios Tatiana Lee and director Ashley Eakin.

It was a great session, and they talked about Ashley's work on Best Foot Forward on Apple+ - you can watch a trailer below:

I've previously produced a short film (for ABC TV) called The Legend of Burnout Barry with our director and two lead actors in wheelchairs, so I found this session extremely interesting and useful.

Next up, I headed into the Cinema Therapy Case Study session.

Now, I've know Bradley Olsen & Alan Seawright for years - they once "kidnapped" me in their car in Las Vegas, many moons ago.

Our company, LateNite, bought a Lumaforge Jellyfish when Alan was still working at Lumaforge.

We've caught up at NAB, LumaForge's Faster Together Event, and last years Final Cut Pro Creative Summit - they're great guys, that I communicate with online.

But I had absolutely no idea that their web show, Cinema Therapy was so... well, massive!

Cinema Therapy currently has 1.72M subscribers and 305 videos on YouTube.

This was an incredible session, also featuring editor Trevor Horton and producer Corinne Demyanovich.

The slide show was incredible slick and professional, and the content was so great - it was probably one of my favourite session at the Summit.

You can watch a trailer for their show below:

Here's a look at some of their slides:

I really loved this session, and I can't wait to catch up on all 305 episodes of their show!

Next up, in typical Sam Mestman style, we had an absolutely epic presentation.

Previously Sam founded FCPWORKS and Lumaforge (who were acquired by OWC), runs We Make Movies and also works for Hedge on PostLab.

He is now the Present of Amove, and in this demonstration, he explained how Amove's offerings create an entire post production ecosystem, along with Hedge's Tools, Jumper and Freque.

Sam demonstrated Amove's functionality, Justin La Vallee demonstrated Freque, Jeff Greenberg demonstrated Jumper.

There was also a demonstration of how this all ties together in a real world production environment.

You can check out some of the slides here (apologies for the quality, I was quite far back in the room):

If you haven't yet checked out Amove, Freque or Jumper - you absolutely should.

Next up, it was lunch time - and again, lunch was super yummy!

After lunch, Wes Plate was up.

Whilst this is the first time I've actually met Wes in person, I've communicated with him online for years, so I feel like I know him really well - he's such a fantastic guy.

I've been using Automatic Duck products (a company Wes and his father Harry runs) for decades - they've solved so many workflow problems across to many applications.

Wes did a great demonstration of all his existing apps:

Then he dropped a bombshell...

You can learn more about Multicam Flattener on the Automatic Duck website.

I've been very fortunate to be a very early beta tester of Multicam Flattener, and it does exactly what it says on the label - it works great.

However, as discussed in yesterday's post, there are now limitations with the new Magnetic Mask, as this information isn't contained within FCPXML, so that's just something to be aware of.

Multicam Flattener will be released soon after some further/wider beta testing, so join the Automatic Duck mailing list to stay updated.

And then... it was my turn. I was a very last minute addition to the running list - basically filling in for someone else, but I jumped at the opportunity.

My session was a Q&A session hosted by the incredible Nick Harauz from Boris FX.

I talked about my production company, LateNite, my software, Jumper and all kinds of other tangents.

I had a lot of fun, and thanks to everyone for their questions and engagement! Feel free to leave comments below if you want to ask my anything else!

Unfortunately I missed the next two sessions, Create Magic in Motion with Mark Spencer and 3D, Spatial and Immersive Video with Iain Anderson - as I was chatting with people in the foyer after my talk.

Again, it's those discussions you have in the hallways that make in-person events so valuable.

Next up we had the amazing Tyler Stalman do a session discussing Shot on iPhone, Edited in Final Cut Pro.

Tyler's YouTube channel has 483K subscribers and 276 videos.

Tyler is such a lovely guy, but also a true professional and an exceptional public speaker.

If you're not already following Tyler on YouTube, you absolutely should be.

Then finally, the big session of the day... Dialogue with Apple: Q&A.

There was a great energy in the room, and lots of excitement. It was fun, it was open, there were laughs. Nothing was under NDA.

There was a lot of questions that were pre-submitted that the Apple team tried to best to answer, and there were also questions from the audience.

I asked a question, that went something along the lines of...

Thank you so much for allowing the Fitness+ team to come and showcase everything - it was seriously awesome to hear all the technical details of what they're doing - it was mind blowing of the scale and frequency that they're making things. One of the most interesting and curious things I noticed is that, despite the fact you showed us all their insanely cool camera robots, one of the key features the Fitness+ team highlighted in their presentation was the fact that they use Final Cut Pro's stabalisation. But they also told us that they do everything as a Multicam? So if they're constantly using stabalisation in Multicam clips, and they told us they're running the stock-standard version of Final Cut Pro, this means they're constantly going inside the Multicam clip, making cuts and stabalising inside the Multicam. If I was making that much content every day, it would drive me crazy! Given this, how much collaboration is there between the Fitness+ team and the FCP team.

And the answer was basically that the Final Cut Pro team work insanely closely with the Fitness+ team across all manner of things - including many months of prep work to get the presentation prepared that we saw yesterday. There was no specific mention on synchronisation in their answers.

Over all though, the general mode and vibe was a happy one. Apple is listening. The team behind the tools we love are human. Apparently one of the crew that helped setup the demo room at Apple Park is an insanely good music video creator. The Final Cut Pro team literally "share a wall" with the Logic Pro team.

With the end of that session, we had a wrap on the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit 2024!

Thanks to EVERYONE who reached out to me over the last week, chatted in the hallways, bought me a coffee or a beer and sent me DMs and messages!

HUGE THANKS to EVERYONE who's downloaded a free trial or bought Jumper, or has purchased my applications - this is what has allowed me to fly all the way from Melbourne, Australia to hang out with you all!

I really hope these FCP Cafe articles have been interesting and helpful! If you liked this coverage, please let Apple and FMC know, so they might help me come back in future years!

Onwards & Upwards!

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Today was the second day of the 2024 Final Cut Pro Creative Summit, and it was super fun and informative.

But before we get into the news from today, just to touch on some things from yesterday...

First up, Matthew O'Brien has released a new video on YouTube talking about Final Cut Pro 11:

Yesterday, I mentioned that I saw something I wasn't allowed to talk about, but today it's out and I can finally talk about it!

As part of my Apple Vision Pro Demo at Apple Park I was very lucky to watch a sneak peak of The Weeknd: Open Hearts on Apple Vision Pro.

It's a new immersive music experience that features Canadian singer-songwriter The Weeknd, filmed in ultra-high resolution 180-degree Apple Immersive Video with Spatial Audio.

You can watch a trailer here:

It's insane. It was such an amazing experience on Apple Vision Pro.

The most amazing part is that there's a section in the music video, where there's a lot of smoke from smoke machines.

As someone who worked in live productions and concert lighting for many years, I've worked with smoke machines a LOT.

When watching this music video in Apple Vision Pro, I could literally TASTE the smoke machines.

My brain was apparently so convinced that what I was seeing was real, that it somehow triggered some prior memories and made me taste and feel something, that wasn't actually real.

This is super interesting, and it's really something you need to watch on Apple Vision Pro to experience.

The music video is amazing - it has some incredible visual effects, and the fact you can look around the frame is pretty amazing - the 2D trailer above really doesn't do it justice.

If you get a chance to experience this epic music video in Apple Vision Pro, please do. You can watch it for free through the Apple TV app on Apple Vision Pro.

In other news, Metaburner v1.1.1 is out now with support for Final Cut Pro 11. You can download it now on FxFactory.

If you don't know what Metaburner is, you can read about it on a previous FCP Cafe news post.

One interesting thing about the new Magnetic Mask in Final Cut Pro is that it saves all the analyse data in a folder called VideoSegmentationFiles within the Final Cut Pro Library bundle.

You can't move it outside the bundle - it needs to live inside the Library bundle (unlike other cache files). This is super interesting, and may present some challenges with collaborative workflows (i.e. with Postlab).

Magnetic Mask data is also not transferred with FCPXML - so if you export a project/timeline containing a clip with a Magnetic Mask, then re-import the FCPXML, the mask won't correctly come across - in fact, you'll just get an empty effect:

This could also prove to be a pain if you use FCPXML round-tripping in your workflow.

Ok, back to the Summit... here was the day two schedule:

First up, we all had the incredible Michael Cioni from Strada perform his presentation, Bet on the Future, bet on Yourself.

I've talked about Michael a lot on FCP Cafe over the years - I'm a MASSIVE fan. He's insanely smart, and such an incredible public speaker. I would, and have literally flown across the world to hear him speak.

I've seen him give presentations at Light Iron in LA for the feature film Focus back in 2015.

I've seen him talk at the Lumaforge Faster Together Stage at NAB back in 2019. I've seen him talk at the Frame.io NAB booth.

Michael is so eloquent, passionate and prepared. He knows everything he's talking about back to front. He's a true filmmaker, who walks the talk.

The Strada crew had some serious cameras recording the presentation so hopefully we'll see it on the Strada YouTube channel soon!

In the meantime, here's some photos from the epic presentation:

Michael's presentation was really awesome, I think everyone walked out of the room, excited, energised, and ready for action.

After Michael's session, unfortunately I missed the other sessions before lunch, as I was busy in the corridors and hotel foyer chatting with Final Cut Professionals.

This is the real power and benefit of the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit - the sessions are great, but some of the best moments are the random conversations you have with people in-between sessions.

Lunch was supplied by the conference and it was really great - a proper hot meal, that was delicious! Thanks FMC!

After lunch everyone went back into the main conference room for Shamir Allibhai (of Simon Says fame), talking about his new startup, Eddie AI.

You can watch the video he opened with below on YouTube:

Eddie AI is basically ChatGPT for your footage. You can literally upload media from multiple cameras, and seperate audio, and automagically in the cloud, it will sync the cameras and audio and prepare it from a large language model (LLM, like ChatGPT).

You can then "chat" to your footage, and get Eddie AI to create edits and selects for you.

You can watch these edits in your browser, but also export these edits as videos and exchange formats, such as FCPXML for Final Cut Pro.

You can sign up to test it out on their website.

Next up, I attended Jeff Greenberg's session on AI Tools to Enhance Your Workflow.

Jeff is an industry legend, and was one of the original founders of the FCP Creative Summit with Sam Mestman.

He opened with a AI-generated song about the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit - it took some people in the audience a few minutes to realise what they were actually listening to!

Jeff will eventually post his presentation on his website, however in the mean time, here's a look at some of his slides:

If you haven't already heard about Jumper, this is a project I've personally helped out with, and you can read more about it on a previous FCP Cafe news post.

It's pretty awesome, and I'll be talking about it more in my session tomorrow.

After Jeff, I went into the amazing Jenn Jager's presentation talking about Masking and Tracking Secrets in Final Cut Pro - mainly focussing on the Magnetic Mask.

This was a fantastic session, with lots of audience interaction and questions.

One cool tip that came from the session is you can hold down SHIFT and move your mouse to adjust the brush size when working with the Magnetic Mask in Final Cut Pro.

You can watch one of Jenn's awesome YouTube videos explaining the Magnetic Mask below:

After Jenn, I attended Daniel Cohn's epic presentation on Movie Magic in Motion.

Daniel is a true indie filmmaker, and absolute Apple Motion guru - and can do some absolutely incredible things with that tool.

He showed off some insanely complex Motion projects. You can check out some of his amazing work on his website.

Finally, we had a very special presentation from Apple's Fitness+ team.

This was incredibly special, as it wasn't under NDA, and whilst there was no Q&A session, they shared a lot of stats and information.

Here's some of the slides:

The below photo only contains ten percent of the team that work on Apple Fitness+:

This was an INSANELY interesting session, and it's so nice to see Apple using, and promoting their own software at such an epic scale!

It's also super interesting what they're doing with FCPXML and custom Motion Templates to get on-set metadata into Final Cut Pro and back out again.

They didn't get into the technical details, but they did mention they use the stock-standard Mac App Store version of Final Cut Pro, so we can only assume they use custom Share Destinations to export their ProRes masters ALONG with FCPXML containing all the additional metadata.

One interesting thing to ponder though is... does the Fitness app on iPhone, iPhone and Apple TV actually run the Motion Engine under the hood for doing the personalised animation, or are they generating something similar using Swift/SwiftUI?

After the Apple presentation it was then the Networking Expo Night - which again, had absolutely awesome food and a free drink.

Overall, day two of the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit has proven to be just as fun and exciting as day one. I can't wait to see what's in-store for the third and final day tomorrow!

I'll be personally presenting at 2pm.

Onwards & Upwards!

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Today was the first day of the 2024 Final Cut Pro Creative Summit, and what a fun and exciting day it was!

But before we get into that... Some backstory...

I jumped on a plane from Melbourne, Australia on Monday afternoon, and arrived in San Francisco on Monday morning - yes, I travelled back in time.

The flight was great. Watching Civil War may not have been the smartest move, but it's a great movie (I also LOVED Devs), and I quickly followed it up with Ghostbusters: Afterlife for good measure.

I took an Uber from the airport to the Juniper Hotel, and once it eventually stopped raining, I spent the entire day just walking around Cupertino, adventuring around the outskirts of Apple's Infinite Loop Campus and Apple Park.

I had no idea just how many Apple buildings are in Cupertino (in addition to the Infinite Loop Campus & Apple Park) - there's literally hundreds of them! I now have many, many photos of me with signs of Apple buildings.

I ended up having lunch at the Apple Park Visitors Centre, and dinner at BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse, right next to Infinite Loop.

Before dinner, I made the foolish mistake of buying milk, orange juice and cereal from Whole Foods - which was insanely expensive, not realising that Target over here also sells food!

On the positive side, everything I bought from Whole Foods is apparently, healthy, ethical and organic - so that's a win.

By the end of Monday, I had done a lot of kilometres around Cupertino, and I was totally exhausted, and thankfully got a really good night's sleep - so I was in the timezone.

On Tuesday, people started to arrive for the conference, so I got to hang out with a bunch of old friends from the Final Cut Pro Community.

I had lunch with the amazing Bradley Olsen (who created the Off The Tracks documentary) and the insanely intelligent Gabriel Spaulding, and then we all went out for coffee with a much bigger group of Final Cut Pro gurus, as more people started to arrive at the Juniper.

Literally the best part of the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit is catching up with old friends, and meeting new people. There's so many incredible smart people in attendance, from all over the world.

I had dinner at the Juniper with a large group of awesome Final Cut Pro gurus, including Philip Hodgetts & Dr Gregory Clarke (from Intelligent Assistance), Iain Anderson (who literally wrote the book on Final Cut Pro), Bret Williams of BretFX and many others.

And then it was Wednesday...

The day started in the Juniper foyer, where we all got to catch up around the coffee stations.

I don't believe FMC has yet released any official numbers yet, but based on the amount of badges on the table, I think it probably slightly bigger attendance than last year.

The first and only session of the day at the Juniper was the always awesome and always charming Nick Harauz from Boris FX welcoming everyone to the conference, explaining what laid in-store for the next three days, and introducing everyone that's speaking at the conference (myself included).

One super interesting and exciting fact is that when Nick asked the audience how many first timers were attending, a huge portion of the room raised their hands. So whilst I saw a lot of people I met last year at the conference, it's awesome to see heaps of new faces!

It's always super cool to see FCP Cafe featured on the presentations - with our awesome icon designed by the incredible Matthew Skiles.

After the session wrapped, Iain Anderson and Mitchell Harris were already doing impromptu demo's of their own personal Vision Pro's for those that were keen!

Then it was time for lunch, and I got to hang out with my panelist buddy from last year, the awesome Jenn Jager (and her lovely husband), Bret Williams, a new friend, Stanislaw Luberda (who's done some absolutely awesome Motion tutorials!) and some others for some really great food!

But before we knew it, it was time to jump on the bus to Apple Park...

Unlike last year, this year, the main presentation took place at Apple Developer Center (Tantau 14) - right next to Apple Park and the Apple Park Visitors Centre.

The Developer Center has a very slick and high-tech theatre, which we all eventually entered into to watch Apple announce what they've been working on.

Like last year, we weren't allowed to take any photos or videos of the actual presentation - but I can tell you it was insanely slick and well produced.

For those that have watched lots of Apple Keynote and WWDC presentations, this was absolutely on par - high production quality, well rehearsed, no technical issues.

First up we got some insanely cool demonstrations of Logic Pro for Mac 11.1 and Logic Pro for iPad 2.1.

Apple explains in their press release:

Logic Pro for Mac and iPad supercharge songwriting, beat-making, producing, and mixing, and are an excellent companion for Final Cut Pro editors. Today, that experience gets even better with the new Quantec Room Simulator plug-in, which allows users to tap into the legendary sound of the most acoustically accurate reverb ever created, built using the original schematics, algorithms, and code from Quantec founder and inventor Wolfgang Buchleitner. Users can select the vintage Quantec QRS to add natural acoustic space to music while preserving sonic character, or the modern Quantec Yardstick for improved clarity and detail. The Quantec QRS technology is a great tool for video editors who want to add natural-sounding spaces to dialog, foley, and music.

“The Quantec Room Simulator has been a key element to my sound for many years, appearing on records like Passion and Us. I also used it to build harmonic drones to start my live set, which then evolved into songs like ‘Across the River,’” said musician Peter Gabriel. “It’s wonderful that Apple is bringing the Quantec QRS back to life as a plug-in for Logic users around the world.”

The Logic Pro demo's were awesome. As someone who actually knows what an Quantec QRS and Yardstick are (Wolfgang Buchleitner used to hand-build them himself with his wife in the last decade before he sadly passed away!) - I was pretty blown away by what Apple have done, acquiring the technology and turning it into a digital product with the same "heart" as the original analogue (in the case of the QRS) and digital (in the case of the Yardstick) products.

Logic Pro is an amazing piece of software, and it was great to see Apple promoting it, not just for music creation, but also in video production!

Next up we had a demonstration of Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.1 and Final Cut Camera.

Ever since the release of Final Cut Pro for iPad, they've been promoting "Third-party content" as "Coming Soon" - it even still says that on the website:

Alas, it still seems third party Motion Templates are still in the works.

I was kinda hoping that we might see Motion for iPad released this year, so that Motion designers could build Motion Templates for iPad on the iPad, but it wasn't meant to be.

We did however get some big feature updates. To quote the release notes...

Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.1 includes the following features and enhancements:

• Automatically improve the color, color balance, contrast, and brightness of video or still images using the new Enhance Light and Color effect, powered by machine learning.
• Add personalized Live Drawing animations to your video with new watercolor, crayon, fountain pen, and monoline inks.
• Highlight visuals with new Reframe effects, add video overlays with Modular transitions, and polish your content with even more color grading presets and soundtracks.
• Edit high-frame-rate media with timeline support for 90, 100, and 120 fps settings.
• Experience instant haptic feedback as you edit and navigate your projects using Apple Pencil Pro.
• Increase efficiency with new keyboard shortcuts for common tasks in the browser and timeline.
• Dynamically adjust the size and position of the viewer in Picture in Picture mode.

Improvements and bug fixes:

• Expand or minimize clip height in the timeline with a vertical pinch to zoom gesture.
• Double-tap to reset white balance, manual focus, and exposure settings to default values in pro camera mode.
• Fixes an issue that caused the front-facing camera to sometimes display the incorrect lens selection in pro camera mode.
• Fixes an issue that could cause a browser clip to temporarily disappear when tapped.
• Improves reliability when opening and closing the Keywords list with Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard.
• Fixes an issue that prevented nudging audio clips at subframe levels with the jog wheel.
• Improves reliability when nudging primary storyline clips with the jog wheel in Position mode.
• Improves reliability when nudging and trimming timeline clips with keyboard shortcuts.
• Fixes an issue that sometimes prevented selecting timeline clips after deleting a connected clip.
• Fixes an issue where replacing one soundtrack with another in the timeline did not match the original’s duration.
• Fixes an issue that caused a soundtrack trimmed during playback to not update to the correct duration.
• Fixes an issue that caused certain log clips to not fully display their color profile information in the inspector.
• Fixes an issue that caused the transition name to not appear or update in the inspector.
• Improves reliability when enabling and disabling onscreen controls for shape masks.
• Includes stability and performance improvements.

Live Multicam improvements and bug fixes:

• Improves Live Multicam device discovery, connection, media transfer, and stability.
• Improves Live Multicam clip syncing.
• Fixes an issue that caused Live Multicam device previews to sometimes shift color after the first recording.
• Fixes an issue that caused low storage alerts to sometimes appear incorrectly during recording.
• Fixes an issue that caused an incorrect ISO value to sometimes appear in a connected device’s exposure settings.
• Fixes an issue that could cause Live Multicam settings to not update Final Cut Camera settings correctly.

New keyboard shortcuts:

• Render Timeline: Control-Shift-R
• Select All (Browser): Command-A
• Deselect All (Browser): Shift-Command-A
• Zoom In (Browser): Command-Plus Sign (+)
• Zoom Out (Browser): Command-Minus Sign (-)

Then on the Final Cut Camera 1.1 side we get (again, quoting from the release notes):

• Preview your Log video in SDR or HDR with the vibrancy of the original scene by enabling the Apple Log LUT while recording. (Requires iPhone 15 Pro or later.)
• Record in Log and HEVC for increased flexibility and dynamic range combined with smaller file sizes. (Requires iPhone 15 Pro or later.)
• Precisely compose your video using the level with tilt and roll indicators or crosshairs for overhead shots.
• Capture high-quality 4K footage at up to 120 fps with iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Improvements and bug fixes:

• Double-tap to reset white balance, manual focus, and exposure settings to default values.
• Expands ISO ranges to include additional values.
• Fixes an issue that caused the 4:3 aspect ratio guide to be displayed incorrectly in portrait orientation.
• Fixes an issue that could cause the camera preview to lag.
• Fixes an issue that caused the camera preview to briefly blur when switching between automatic and manual settings.
• Fixes an issue that interrupted recording when quickly opening the media browser after tapping the Record button.
• Fixes an issue that prevented the media browser from closing when quickly tapping to return to the camera view.
• Fixes an issue that prevented using Forget This Device if a device was not in discoverable range for Live Multicam.
• Improves reliability with media transfers to Final Cut Pro for iPad.
• Improves reliability when changing device orientation.
• Includes stability and performance improvements.

I was actually pleasantly surprised how big an applause we got from the room when they announced recording Log in HEVC - this seems to be something that a lot of people were desperate for, which is awesome!

Before we get into Final Cut Pro, let's have quick look at Apple Motion.

Motion 5.9 includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:

• Install third-party Media Extensions to support playback and compositing of more video formats (requires macOS Sequoia or later).
• Adds a tooltip that describes rasterization for parameters in the Inspector.
• Improves results when resetting the Stroke filter.
• Improves the appearance of behavior curve animations in the Keyframe Editor.
• Fixes an issue that caused ripple delete to not work properly.
• Fixes an issue that caused particles or replicators to erroneously be created from audio files.
• Fixes an issue that caused the Analyze button to not work properly when using a point tracker.
• Improves stability for third-party plug-ins that perform analysis.
• Improves stability when previewing multiple 3D text styles.
• Improves stability when importing an invalid EXR file.

Given there's really only bug fixes and improvements in this release, it may still be true that the Motion team is very busy working on how to bring Motion Templates to iPad - maybe that's a next year thing?

For those developers following along, along with Motion 5.9 we also got FxPlug 4.3.1.

The FxPlug 4.3.1 SDK includes the following:

• Improved overall stability.
• Added support for Metal API validation.
• Fixed an issue that caused multiple parameters to be created with the same ID (which I think is something I ran into with Metaburner!)
• Updated the descriptions that the example plugins display in the inspector in Motion.
• Metal API validation can be used when debugging plugins.

You can download the latest FxPlug update on the Apple Developers site.

Whilst there was also a Workflow Extensions SDK 1.0.3 update, it doesn't seem to have any actual release notes apart from the point:

• A Workflow Extension built with this version of SDK is compatible with Final Cut Pro 10.4.9 or later running on macOS 11 or later on Intel hardware. It will be compatible with Final Cut Pro 10.5 or later running on macOS 11 or later on Apple Silicon systems.

...and with that, we move into Final Cut Pro.

The presentation opened with this epic video, edited by the incredible Thomas Grove Carter (you can read about Thomas on FCP Cafe here):

It was funny, as soon as I saw this video, I instantly thought it might have been Thomas who cut it, and soon discovered after that he did - it's fricken awesome.

Tyler Stalman has also just released a video where he talks with Thomas about Final Cut Pro 11:

I'm a MASSIVE fan of Tyler, and an even bigger fan of Thomas - so this is definitely a video worth watching!

And whilst we're sharing links...

You can read Iain Anderson's thoughts about Final Cut Pro 11 on ProVideo Coalition.

You can also read Scott Simmons thoughts about Final Cut Pro 11 on ProVideo Coalition.

Of course, Mark & Steve at Ripple Training have already covered the update - check out their Final Cut Pro 11 - NEW FEATURES IN-DEPTH video on YouTube:

As has the incredible Jenn Jager in her Final Cut Pro Update | THIS IS THE BIG ONE! video on YouTube:

Dylan Bates (The Final Cut Bro) has also released a video on YouTube:

Again, quoting the release notes...

Final Cut Pro 11.0 includes the following enhancements:

• Expand your creative freedom with the revolutionary AI-powered Magnetic Mask, and isolate people, objects, and shapes in any footage without a green screen or time-consuming manual rotoscoping (a Mac with Apple silicon recommended).
• Use Transcribe to Captions to automatically create captions from spoken audio in the timeline with a powerful AI language model built for speed and accuracy (Mac with Apple silicon and macOS Sequoia or later required).
• Import and edit spatial video clips from Apple Vision Pro or iPhone 15 Pro or later; add titles, color correction, and effects; and share captivating spatial projects that can be viewed on Apple Vision Pro (Mac with Apple silicon required).
• Edit in the timeline at 90, 100, and 120 fps.
• Reduce clutter in the browser by automatically hiding original clips when creating synced clips or multicam clips.
• Speed up your creative flow with new Picture in Picture and Callout effects.
• Create interesting visual reveals with new Modular transitions.
• Use Vertical Zoom to Fit to scale clip heights to fit in the timeline.
• Change the order of vertically stacked clips with a new keyboard shortcut.
• Quickly navigate clips in list view and edit clip text with a new keyboard shortcut.
• Increase efficiency with additional new keyboard shortcuts including Rename Clip, Show/Hide Audio Lanes, Expand/Collapse Subroles, Play Half Speed Forward/Reverse, Consolidate Motion Content, Paste Timecode, and Show Horizon.
• Install third-party Media Extensions to support playback and editing of more video formats (macOS Sequoia or later required).

Additional support and bug fixes:

• Improves performance in timelines that contain a high number of markers.
• Fixes an issue that caused the alert badge on an event to not disappear after all missing media was relinked.
• Fixes an issue that caused the Clouds generator to be partially transparent.
• Fixes an issue that caused the Collapse to Connected Storyline command to trim audio if the audio was leading video.
• Adds support for exporting uncompressed or ProRes MXF video with 32 kHz audio.
• Adds support for exporting directly to the Photos library.
• Updates FCPXML to version 1.13.

Obviously the big feature is the AI-powered Magnetic Mask and the first question everyone seems to ask is... "does this replace mRotoAI"?

And the answer is... it really depends? What Apple has put into Final Cut Pro is insanely fast and powerful - in a lot of cases, one click will get you something awesome:

Whereas with this same shot, mRotoAI struggles with the hair, however you get a LOT more controls and fine tuning:

I think for most users, people will be happy to avoid the MotionVFX subscription and just go with the build-in tool, however for power users, having mRotoAI in your toolbox will continue to be very handy.

It's also worth noting that mRotoAI comes with a heap of Expansions - so it's more than just a one-click tool.

Then we have Transcribe to Captions which is awesome - but I don't think it's actually what most people want?

Whilst having Final Cut Pro do automatic captions is awesome and amazing, I think most people were expecting automated titles, like CapCut, Caption Pop AI (discussed on FCP Cafe here) and mCaptions (discussed on FCP Cafe here).

Thankfully we now have captionTranslator (discussed on FCP Cafe here) and captionAnimator (discussed on FCP Cafe here).

Editing spatial video clips in Final Cut Pro is kinda cool... but the fact we can't plug in a Vision Pro into our MacBook Pro, like we could previously do with a Vive headset, seems like a step back, especially given there's still a Output to VR Headset option in the Final Cut Pro Window menubar?

Really though my favourite features are:

• Reduce clutter in the browser by automatically hiding original clips when creating synced clips or multicam clips.
• Use Vertical Zoom to Fit to scale clip heights to fit in the timeline.
• Change the order of vertically stacked clips with a new keyboard shortcut.
• Quickly navigate clips in list view and edit clip text with a new keyboard shortcut.
• Increase efficiency with additional new keyboard shortcuts including Rename Clip, Show/Hide Audio Lanes, Expand/Collapse Subroles, Play Half Speed Forward/Reverse, Consolidate Motion Content, Paste Timecode, and Show Horizon.

Whilst it seems like such a minor thing, the addition of a default shortcut key for Paste Timecode is absolutely MASSIVE for CommandPost and Jumper users! THANK YOU FINAL CUT PRO TEAM!

This is something I've personally requested, and I'm so excited and happy to see it's been actioned!

Why? Because we use the Paste Timecode shortcut key to programatically move the playhead in CommandPost and Jumper, as there's no other API or method to do it. This is great!

We've had the ability to trigger Show Horizon and Rename Clip in CommandPost for a few years now, so it's nice to see Apple has been listening to CommandPost users and have added this natively!

Of course, the main thing that MANY people came up to me about after the presentation was the fact that Blackmagic RAW is FINALLY coming natively to Final Cut Pro via Media Extensions.

In 2023 Apple announced a new framework called MediaExtension, that provides a means for developers to create format readers and video decoders for media that the system doesn’t natively support - such as Blackmagic RAW and Nikon NRAW.

This was supposed to come in macOS Sonoma, but they silently killed it - only for it to reappear in this years WWDC for macOS Sequoia.

Whilst it's been out for a while, the documentation is insanely complicated and limited and the only person I know who's done ANYTHING with it so far is the incredible Anton Marini, who's been building an ffmpeg Media Extension over on GitHub here.

However today Apple confirmed that Blackmagic RAW will come to Final Cut Pro via Media Extensions... at some point in the future. We're currently not sure if this is days, weeks or months.

Now of course... this means that the shelf life of my own BRAW Toolbox is very limited, haha. However, I always knew this was coming.

I originally only created BRAW Toolbox, because I had clients that would hand over 2-4TB of BRAW footage, and I didn't want to waste time/hard drive space converting them to ProRes, or even worse, have to jump into DaVinci Resolve or Premiere - so I built BRAW Toolbox.

Over three thousand people have used BRAW Toolbox on all kinds of jobs - it's been used successfully on feature films, television shows and high-end television commercials!

This was my first ever paid Mac application, so I'm insanely proud of it. It was also the first ever FxPlug4 extension to ever make it to the Mac App Store - pretty crazy for someone who considers themselves a filmmaker, not a developer!

I've always wanted to port BRAW Toolbox over to Media Extensions, but sadly the Media Extensions API is really hard to work with - and my attempts to contact Apple Developer Support were unsuccessful.

I think really, Apple always intended for camera manufacturers to make Media Extensions - not filmmakers from Melbourne, Australia.

We currently don't know when Blackmagic will release their Media Extension, and we don't really know how it'll work exactly.

Apple have released some documentation:

...and it does look like you will be able to edit RAW properties - but probably not be able to key-frame parameters like you can currently do in BRAW Toolbox.

BRAW Toolbox does use the official Blackmagic RAW SDK, so all the colour science and image pipeline is exactly the same as what you see in DaVinci Resolve.

However, now that Blackmagic have access to Media Extensions, they'll be able to do things far better than what I could do with BRAW Toolbox in terms of performance, due to the fact that I was basically "tricking" Final Cut Pro into using an "effect" to draw BRAW frames.

In theory, assuming Blackmagic want to allow it - we should see a big speed improvement between BRAW Toolbox and Blackmagic's Media Extension when it comes to exporting and rendering.

Hopefully now that Apple has basically opens the doors to ANYONE being able to build a Media Extension, this will open the doors to lots of other codecs - such as native Nikon NRAW, and maybe even the re-emergence of the good olde Perian tools!

One of the most exciting things for me though, was Bill Davis mentioning FCP Cafe in the keynote! Woohoo!

He showcased Knut Hake & Sam Pluemacher's amazing Notion Database of Final Cut Pro Projects from around the world. If you haven't checked it out, you definitely should!

I really wish I was able to take a photo of this moment, as it was super special - thank you Knut & Sam for all the incredible work you put into the Final Cut Pro community!

With this update, we also see a jump from FCPXML v1.12 to v1.13.

For those developers following along, the additions are:

<!ATTLIST format heroEye CDATA #IMPLIED>			<!-- ("left" | "right") -->

<!ATTLIST asset heroEyeOverride CDATA #IMPLIED>		<!-- ("left" | "right") -->

<!ELEMENT adjust-stereo-3D (param*)>
<!ATTLIST adjust-stereo-3D enabled (0 | 1) "1">
<!ATTLIST adjust-stereo-3D convergence CDATA "0">
<!ATTLIST adjust-stereo-3D autoScale (0 | 1) "1">
<!ATTLIST adjust-stereo-3D swapEyes (0 | 1) "0">
<!ATTLIST adjust-stereo-3D depth CDATA "0">

<!-- The 'intrinsic-params' entities declare intrinsic video and audio adjustments. -->
<!ENTITY % intrinsic-params-video "(object-tracker?, adjust-crop?, adjust-corners?, adjust-conform?, adjust-transform?, adjust-blend?, adjust-stabilization?, adjust-rollingShutter?, adjust-360-transform?, adjust-reorient?, adjust-orientation?, adjust-cinematic?, adjust-colorConform?, adjust-stereo-3D?)">

<!-- The live drawing intrinsic params are a subset of intrinsic-params-video. -->
<!ENTITY % intrinsic-params-live-drawing "adjust-crop?, adjust-corners?, adjust-conform?, adjust-transform?, adjust-blend?, adjust-360-transform?, adjust-colorConform?, adjust-stereo-3D?">

<!ENTITY % marker_item "(marker | chapter-marker | rating | keyword | analysis-marker | hidden-clip-marker)">

<!-- A 'conform-rate' defines how the clip's frame rate should be conformed to the sequence frame rate -->
<!ATTLIST conform-rate srcFrameRate (23.98 | 24 | 25 | 29.97 | 30 | 60 | 47.95 | 48 | 50 | 59.94 | 90 | 100 | 119.88 | 120) #IMPLIED>

<!ELEMENT hidden-clip-marker EMPTY>

The awesome Steffan Andrews has already added 90fps support to TimecodeKit!

Good news for Jumper users - Final Cut Pro 11 already works great with Jumper!

If you're not already aware of Jumper, please read our previous news post.

CommandPost however will most likely need some tweaks to support FCPXML v1.13, which I'll try and get to ASAP.

After the Apple presentations, it was time to leave the Apple Developer Center and head over to Apple Park.

This time, unlike last year, we were actually allowed to take photos on the outside of Apple Park (just not inside)!

We all walked around to the same room that we went to last year for the demo, to have some snacks, then check out the latest Apple Hardware and Final Cut Pro 11 demonstrations.

There was definitely a massive positive and happy buzz in the room!

Unlike last year, Apple also ran some private/invite only demo's of the latest improvements to Apple Vision Pro - and I was lucky enough to be selected to attend the very last session.

I've had the pleasure of previously testing out Iain Anderson's Vision Pro at Sydney airport a few months ago, when we were randomly passing at the same time - however for this session I had two dedicated Apple staff making sure that the Vision Pro was set up perfectly for my head and eyes, and explaining how everything works.

We got to watch a whole bunch of immersive content in the Photos app and via the Vimeo app and work with immersive content with Final Cut Pro through the Vision Pro and a MacBook Pro.

I also got to see some stuff I'm not allowed to yet talk about - but I will say the demo was absolutely amazing, and just so much fun.

HUGE shout out to our "minder" John on the Keynote team, who had to stick around for a few hours to look after a small group of us as the rest of the conference jumped on buses.

We even got to have dinner at Apple Park - which was pretty special in itself.

Overall, it was a pretty magical day - and I'm HUGELY thankful and appreciative to the entire Apple team who allowed us to come back to Apple Park again this year. It was so much fun!

And this is only day one of the conference. Tomorrow we get to hear the keynote talk from the one and only Michael Cioni from Strada, which will be SUPER exciting!

Onwards & Upwards!

Arctic 24.3 is out now!

It includes support for Final Cut Pro 11, and has a spiffy new UI!

You can download and learn more here.

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Metaburner v1.1.0 is out now on FxFactory!

For those that have been following along, Metaburner has proven to be one of the most challenging and complicated things I've ever built.

The idea is simple - we just want to be able to "burn in" metadata from a Final Cut Pro project, simple, right?

Whilst it didn't take me very long to throw together a proof-of-concept, getting it to work well proved to be incredibly complicated.

Metaburner v1.0.0 (Build 1) hit Apple's TestFlight on 16th December 2023.

Thanks to the feedback and support of some of the best minds in the Final Cut Pro community, we iterated fast and pushed out quite a few updates improving things.

By 8th January 2024, Metaburner v1.0.0 (25) hit FxFactory, our first product to be sold outside the Mac App Store.

All our initial paid apps, such as BRAW Toolbox, Gyroflow Toolbox, Marker Toolbox, Recall Toolbox and Fast Collections were all released on the Apple Mac Store.

So, why FxFactory? FxFactory has a number of benefits for us:

• FxFactory is a highly curated store focussed on editing professionals with a huge catalog of amazing products
• FxFactory offers free trials and watermarked versions
• FxFactory doesn't require Apps to be sandboxed
• FxFactory offers developers advice and code-level technical support/guidance
• FxFactory helps with user technical support
• FxFactory helps with marketing and promotion
• FxFactory has a number of technologies built into their software platform to make sure Motion Templates are updated correctly
• The FxFactory team are super smart and super lovely - you have direct contact with their developers/engineers

On 24th January 2024 we released Metaburner v1.0.7 (35) on FxFactory - but then there was radio silence... except if you're in the Final Cut Pro Discord group.

After pushing out v1.0.7 we decided to go back to the drawing board on a lot of things.

Whilst Metaburner was working fine in a lot of cases - for example, if you just have standard clips on a timeline - it wasn't working in more complex cases, such as re-timed Multicam Clips containing Sync Clips.

I enlisted the help of my long-time friend and collaborator David Peterson to do some paid full-time work on FCPXMLKit - our own Swift-based FCPXML engine that's doing a lot of the magic behind-the-scenes.

David also wrote Capacitor (which allows you to easily convert between FCPXML versions) as a test case for FCPXMLKit.

Things that we thought would be simple, turned out to be days and weeks of work.

I knew that Metaburner was never going to make any money, and investing so much time and money into the project was kinda insane - but I also knew that this kind of tool was so important to editors working in long-form - it's just something that NEEDED to exist.

FCPXML is insanely complex - and even though I work with it all the time, even I have trouble explaining it in some cases.

After months of work, lots of maths (I'm terrible at maths), lots of experimentation, we FINALLY got FCPXMLKit to a point where it was working great in most cases.

But we also hit some performance issues - Metaburner was working, but it was slow.

Again, after months or work, emailing every Swift/FCPXML genius I know, and lots of swearing... EVENTUALLY I was able to get performance to a good state too.

It's not the most zippy of applications - but at the same time, it actually performs pretty fast compared to Final Cut Pro's own exporting of FCPXML on large libraries!

So whilst things have been fairly quiet publicly, we did 14 private beta builds of Metaburner v1.1.0 - and there was a lot of Discord discussion happening!

I'm am HUGELY thankful to everyone who's been testing and putting Metaburner through it's paces.

HUGE THANK YOU to Matthieu Laclau, Sam Pluemacher, Knut Hake, Robin Moran, Florian Duffe, Tyler Nelson, Marcos Castiel, Geoffrey Orthwein, Josh Beal, Alex '4D' Gollner and Vigneswaran Rajkumar!

Also, an absolutely MASSIVE THANK YOU to the incredible Steffan Andrews - who is probably on-par with Intelligent Assistance's Dr Gregory Clarke, as the worlds best FCPXML expert.

We've using Steffan's TimecodeKit under the hood, and have also had some fantastic video calls with him regarding his DAWFileKit, which is absolutely amazing if you're a Swift Developer working with FCPXML.

So whilst I originally hoped to have Metaburner done and dusted by January 2024, it's taken until November to finally get it to a point where I'm mostly happy.

Sadly, I'll never make back the money I invested in Metaburner and FCPXMLKit - however hopefully this tool will make it heaps easier for editors to cut long-form projects in Final Cut Pro.

I learnt a HUGE amount for taking on this insane project, and we'll also be able to use FCPXMLKit for lots of other things in the future.

You can download a free trial of Metaburner on FxFactory.

Jumper v2024.11.12 is out now!

It includes the following improvements:

🆕 Important Changes:

• We've removed silence checks from the speech processing pipeline (for now, since it causes issues in some cases).
• If you have very long silent audio/video files, simply don't check the speech processing in the Media panel for these clips.

🐞 Bug Fixes:

• Fixed issues with .mxf files having malformed timecode values.
• Error-safe parsing of .caf audio file metadata.
• We no longer ignore an audio file if there is some issue parsing the audio channel count.

You can download and learn more here.

evrExpanse v5.1.0 is out now!

It has the following improvements:

• Significant performance boost when exporting metadata, up to 4x faster on Apple Silicon and 8x faster on Intel Macs, plus optimized Finder Tags extraction.
• Improved precision in extracting gamma curve metadata from Sony Alpha cameras.
• Fix Gamma Notes and Color Space metadata acquisition when Sony Alpha cameras get GPS coordinates from mobile device.

You can learn more here.

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Greetings from Cupertino!

After a very nice long plane flight from Melbourne, Australia I'm now in the USA ready to cover the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit this week!

I'll be post daily wrap-ups from the three day conference, and covering any Apple and third party announcements.

I'm fairly confident we'll see updates to Final Cut Pro for Mac, Compressor and Motion.

I'm very confident we'll see some cool stuff from third parties, based on the speaker list.

I have absolutely no idea what's coming for Final Cut Pro on iPad or if the Apple Vision Pro will make an appearance.

Apple has been promising third party Motion Templates for Final Cut Pro on the iPad since launch - the website still says "coming soon".

We know that with Transfer Toolbox you can bring Mac Motion Templates to iPad in MOST cases.

I wonder if we'll see Motion for iPad released, along with a whole heap of Motion Templates from MotionVFX?

I do know there's quite a few people from MotionVFX coming to the conference this year.

We also know that Spatial Video is coming to Final Cut Pro - does this mean we'll be able to hook up a Vision Pro to Final Cut Pro?

Only a few days to go, and all will be revealed!

Marker Data v1.1.0 (2) is out now!

Marker Data is now exclusively build and optimised for Apple Silicon only.

🔨 Improvements:

• Application bundle size has been reduced
• User can now Assign Shortcut to Configurations
• Codebase updates for better compatibility with Xcode 16
• Updated Notion Module CSV2Notion Neo to v1.3.3
• Updated Airtable Module Airlift to v1.1.4

🐞 Bug Fix:

• Fixed a critical bug in the Notion module that prevented Marker Data's Data Set uploads when Notion Database URL is not provided

You can download and learn more here.

Xsend Motion v1.2.2 is out now!

It now supports Custom LUT effects!

You can download and learn more on FxFactory.

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Jumper v2024.11.09 is out now!

It has the following bug fixes:

• Fixed slow search responses when working with footage on shared storage, such as a NAS or SAN. Thanks for reporting Siim!
• Jumper now ignores non-media files from FCPXML.
• Reduced verbose error logging output for offline files.

You can download and learn more here.

MotionVFX has released a bunch of updates to their products:

• mCallouts Simple v3.0.2: Tracking engine update
• mMessage v3.0.2: Tracking engine update
• mCallouts Simple 2 v3.0.2: Tracking engine update
• mPointer v3.0.2: Tracking engine update
• mFreezeFrame Movie v2.0.5: Stability update
• mMessage 2 v3.0.2: Tracking engine update
• mHUD 3 v3.0.2: Tracking engine

You can download the latest updates using mInstaller.

They are also offering 30% off on their site using the promo code: BW30

You can learn more here.

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The incredible Knut Hake and Sam Pluemacher have put together a database of projects cut on Final Cut Pro!

It's on Notion and it's easily searchable by:

• Type of show
• Region
• Distributor
• Country
• Editor

You can also submit your own projects to be included.

You can check it out here.

captionTranslator by Intelligent Assistance is out now on the Mac App Store!

The price is USD$29.99 until 31st December where it'll increase to USD$34.99.

Free translation on your Mac. No Internet required.

It uses Apple's Translation Framework.

Translate Captions to additional language captions in Final Cut Pro.

It supports:

• Arabic
• Chinese (Mandarin - China mainland)
• Chinese (Mandarin - Taiwan)
• Dutch
• English (UK)
• English (US)
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

The interface is very basic:

Simply drag and drop your project/timeline into the Workflow Extension window above and press Go.

The first time you run it, you'll most likely need to download language files from Apple

Our initial tests show that it's not always perfect in every language:

It seems to default to English if it has trouble translating, which seems like a good workaround.

However, I tried the exact timeline again a few minutes later and got better results:

I think maybe the models hadn't completely downloaded in the background yet, so this is something to keep in mind.

You can read the manual here.

You can buy now on the Mac App Store here.

captionAnimator v1.0.3 is out now!

It now supports Compound Clips with Captions.

You can download on the Mac App Store here.

Frame.io v2.7.2 is out now!

It contains bug fixes and performance improvements.

You can download on the Mac App Store here.

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Introducing Jumper by Witchcraft Software in Sweden. 🇸🇪

A powerful AI search engine for your footage.

No clouds. No uploads. All on device.

Please watch this launch video on YouTube:

You can also watch a detailed tutorial video here.

I’m very biased, but it’s amazing. I basically describe it as Spotlight for your NLE.

You should stop reading this and go download it now from here.

Let me explain...

Now, firstly, this isn’t a LateNite project - this isn’t my (Chris Hocking’s) baby.

Jumper is the brainchild of YouTube and BadAss FX creator Arthur Moore.

But before I get into that, let’s jump back to 1st February 2023.

On Richard Taylor’s FCPRadio Episode 134 podcast, Iain Anderson explained:

I'm really excited by what's happening with the AI stuff, with stuff like Whisper...
But the problem with captions in Final Cut is they only go on a project...
I want them on clips as well, to make them searchable to a time so that you could search for a phrase you know somebody said and instantly find it in your rushes.
You could do that today, I'm sure with Lumberjack... but I think there's room for Apple to add a whole lot more AI smarts...
So the auto-tagging, you know, Apple should do that. Apple should be able to find where there's water in a shot, where there's a cat in a shot, where the shot is mostly red.
It should be able to detect all of that and just do it for you on the fly.

I was on that podcast, and what Iain asked for isn’t something new or groundbreaking - every video editor I know wants to be able to just search for "guy wearing green t-shirt" in their NLE and it gets found.

Over the years I’ve reached out to countless companies and developers to try and convince them to build something exactly like this - but never really got any bites. Machine Learning and AI is really hard - and I was already personally juggling so many things, I didn’t want to start learning machine learning myself, so I never even attempted to add any ML or AI features to CommandPost or standalone apps - I left that for people like the amazing Alex Raccuglia.

Avid’s had ScriptSync and script-based editing for decades. Resolve’s got face recognition. Final Cut Pro’s had the ability to "analyse video" for a decade - with options to automatically balance colour and find people. Ulti.Media has Transcriber and FCP Video Tag. Kino AI got people very excited for a few months (and I offered many times to help them get Kino AI working with Final Cut Pro!), until they decided to concentrate on Enterprise customers rather than freelance video editors. Strada is working on some incredible stuff - but it’s all cloud based - which is not an option for a lot of people due to privacy, but also slow internet (like we do in parts of Australia). There’s all this tech around, with so many options and possibilities - but there’s still no easy way to just search for "guy wearing green t-shirt" locally on your Mac... well, until now.

I first discovered Arthur Moore back in June 2019 when he posted an incredible video about using the Loupedeck+ with CommandPost in Final Cut Pro:

This wasn’t sponsored, he never contacted me in advance, and I had no idea he was doing it until I saw it shared online. I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the video, and how exciting it was. I was so humbled and amazed that someone was willing to do such an incredible video showcasing my silly little free and open source application - especially as I consider myself a filmmaker, not a programmer or developer.

Then a few months later in September 2019, Arthur did another video about CommandPost:

Again, I was simply blown away by the quality of his videos, and basically just really happy that people were getting something out of CommandPost - because it originally just started out as a way to make the playhead more visible for Scott Simmons!

Jump forward to December 2019, and Arthur sent me an audio message asking for help building an installer for his BadAss Fx apps.

Whilst this was something I was super interested in helping with (and eventually years later, I ended up helping BretFX bring their apps to the Mac App Store), alas, this never happened, as I went down the giant rabbit hole of adding Loupedeck CT support to CommandPost, with Arthur beta testing it.

This was a pretty massive job, as the Loupedeck CT hardware is insanely powerful - with knobs, touch screen buttons, physical buttons, LED buttons, vibration, an internal hard drive, etc. By February 2020 though we had a pretty reliable beta, thanks to Arthur’s feedback and testing.

Finally in January 2021, a massive CommandPost v1.1.0 update was released to the world with Loupedeck (original), Loupedeck CT, Loupedeck Live, TourBox, Stream Deck XL and Stream Deck Mini support. It was such a popular release that Loupedeck actually reached out to me to start building an official Loupedeck plugin for CommandPost (i.e. within their official Loupedeck app).

For the next few years, I didn’t really hear much from Arthur - but as a video editor, I continued to use BadAss FX on hundreds of projects. Then in March 2024, he reached out again:

Hey Chris! I'm developing something really cool with my friend. It's a local running AI that helps users search for footage. We got pretty far with Premiere and we are starting to move to Final Cut soon. I wonder if you would be interested in looking at what we have done and maybe joining us?

The timing couldn’t have been worse - at the start of this year I was totally burnt out, exhausted and overwhelmed. I declined the offer, but said I’m happy to offer help and advice as needed, as I do for lots of people and companies in the Final Cut Pro space (hence this website).

A few months later in June 2024, Arthur sent me a tutorial video for what they’d built in Adobe Premiere - it was super cool, but to build something like that in Final Cut Pro would be a big challenge, as unlike Premiere, Final Cut Pro has no official API for doing the stuff they needed to do... without CommandPost at least.

I was already juggling all my own apps on the Mac App Store, Arctic for Hedge, this website, two kids and a film and television production company, so I didn’t really want to take on yet another crazy project - however, I agreed to help offer advice, we set up a Slack for Jumper... and before long, I got fully roped in.

Jump forward to November 2024 - and after 4 months or so of some crazy hours in-between other jobs and commitments, as well as lots of long and sometimes loud discussions, we have something that’s pretty incredible.

There’s basically four core team members in Team Sweden, and then I’m helping out from Melbourne, Australia - so timezones have been fun. Arthur and I are the crazy Final Cut Pro editors, and then Max and two of his best mates are the coding geniuses behind the scenes - who don’t actually have any background in film & television, or post production. It’s been super interesting and collaborative, getting feedback from people who have never even opened Final Cut Pro before, and don’t have decades of background (and baggage) when talking about fun things like Drop Frame Timecode, FCPXML DTDs, etc.

But at it's heart, Jumper really is a tool by video editors, for video editors. Arthur, myself and a giant team of amazing early beta testers have pushed hard to make the tool the most useful it can be in real-world scenarios for video editors. We’ve battle tested it on real jobs, with real deadlines and real pressure - sometimes it failed miserably, so we went back to the drawing board, iterated and improved.

Going back to March 2024, my original advice was to do everything with FCPXML, however for various reasons, the first betas of Jumper for Final Cut Pro were reading the Library files at the file system level - which worked great... until you have to support Multicam & Synchronised Clips. Jump forward to today, and Jumper now have exceptional support for Multicam & Synchronised Clips thanks to the feedback of beta testers and the Jumper community. It really has been a team effort by some incredible supporters, including some amazing business mentors and advisors in Sweden, and Australia.

Whilst this site, and my interests, mainly lie in the Final Cut Pro universe - Jumper is not just for Final Cut Pro editors - it originally all started in Adobe Premiere, and Witchcraft plan to release for DaVinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer soon. They are also working on Jumper Enterprise, which allows you to analyse all your footage on a local server, and then have unlimited clients all access that data over your existing shared storage and network - it’s super exciting.

The thing I love most about Jumper really is that it’s just like Spotlight for your NLE. I was editing a fast turnaround corporate job earlier in the year, and I had a client over my shoulder saying things like "find the footage of the guy with a purple shirt and a funny hat" - Jumper could just find that shot instantly, and the client was pretty blown away. You don't even have to get the spelling correct.

Whilst there’ll be some video editors that use Jumper all the time (i.e. documentary, nature, sports, etc), for others in the scripted world (i.e. scripted film & television), it may be less frequently used, because assistant editors will have already logged and organised the footage by scene, for example. However, just being able to open the Jumper Workflow Extension and instantly find ANYTHING in your Library is pretty insane. It’s a very handy tool to have in your toolbox - and I say this as someone who has built a lot of toolboxes over the years!

Whilst I have no ownership in Witchcraft (the newly formed company behind Jumper), and it’s not my baby - I’m super proud of Jumper, and all the work that myself and Team Sweden has put into it. It’s entirely possible that Apple, Blackmagic or Adobe will Sherlock it at some point in the future - but for now, it’s the only tool on the market that can do what it does... all locally, all on device.

I’m very glad Arthur took me along for the ride!

You can buy and learn more here.

Onwards & Upwards!

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Well, I didn't have this on my 2024 Bingo Card!

The Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple.

They write on their blog:

We’ve been inspired by Apple since day one, crafting our products with the same razor-sharp focus on design, ease of use, and performance. And looking back, it’s crazy what a small group of dedicated people have been able to achieve over the years from all the way in Vilnius, Lithuania. Now, we’ll have the ability to reach an even wider audience and make an even bigger impact on the lives of creative people around the world.

What to expect Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

Thank you We want to give a big thanks to our amazing users for your support over the past 17 years. Your feedback has played a huge role in shaping our apps into what they are today. As we step into this exciting new chapter, we can’t wait to share what’s next.

Well, this is big.

My GUESS is they want the engineering talent to help improve Photos on Mac and more importantly iPhone & iPad.

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Dylan Bates (aka The Final Cut Bro) is having a 24 hour sale!

Get 31% off for the next 24 hours only!

Use the discount code: Boo31

You can learn more here.

captionAnimator v1.0.2 is out now with the following improvements:

• New feature: for projects with captions in multiple languages, use the Language popup menu to choose which caption language is used to make titles
• Bug fix for detecting titles with custom roles applied

You can download on the Mac App Store here.

Pinch and a punch for the first day of the month! Woohoo!

EasyEase on FxFactory brings easing of keyframes directly into your editing workflow, allowing you to apply custom easing functions to the position, scale, and rotation of your clips and elements.

Unlike other plugins, which animate simply from point A to B without keyframes and offer limited easing options, EasyEase supports full keyframing of its parameters. This means you can create complex animations with multiple keyframes, adjusting the speed by changing the distance between them.

EasyEase provides a wide range of easing functions, including unique options like Back Ease In & Out, Back Ease Out, Ease In, Ease Out, Quadratic Ease Out and more.

By exposing and mimicking the Position, Scale, and Rotation parameters and applying these cool animation easing effects, it brings functionality to Final Cut Pro that hasn't been there before.

You can learn more and download here.

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Waltzing With Brando will premiere at the Torino Film Festival!

Cut in Final Cut Pro X by the incredible and magical Michael Yanovich, ACE.

You can read more here.

finalcutgod has released a new YouTube video talking about captions in Final Cut Pro:

Caption Pop AI by StupidRaisins is out now for USD$34 for a limited time!

The website says:

Introducing Caption Pop AI – the fastest way to make captions right inside Final Cut Pro! Forget about exporting to CapCut or waiting on other slow, clunky software. With Caption Pop AI, you can automatically create captions in just 3 easy steps: analyze your video’s audio, customize your captions, and drop them onto your video. Done!

Whether you're editing YouTube content, social media clips, or Caption Pop AI demos, Caption Pop AI delivers professional results in record time. Customize the look, enjoy accurate AI transcriptions, and work in 17 languages – all without leaving Final Cut Pro.

Get Caption Pop AI today and keep your workflow smooth and speedy!

You can watch an intro video on YouTube here:

You can download and learn more here.

What I didn't realise until now is that StupidRaisins has basically built their own versions of FxFactory - their own app, with their own marketplace - very impressive!

I've already downloaded Caption Pop AI and taken it for a quick test drive...

My first comment is I fricken LOVE the Stupid Raisins DMG!

My second comment, is their developers clearly haven't read my FCP Cafe documentation about why you should use greyscale icons for Workflow Extensions!

They also haven't set the minimum sizes correctly for their Workflow Extension:

Unlike MotionVFX's mCaptionsAI it seems like Caption Pop AI only support importing audio files:

After dragging in a WAV or AIFF you can select local or cloud processing and the model you want to use:

If you selected local, it then downloads the model:

It then processes the audio content:

Once complete, you have a lot of controls to play with:

To send back to Final Cut Pro, it's a bit more clunky than MotionVFX's mCaptionsAI - if you press Open in FCP, it will basically send a FCPXML across - prompting you to select a Library in which you want to import the FCPXML.

It then brings in a new Project with just the titles, so you need to copy and paste back into your original project/timeline:

Overall it does a pretty good job, using the recent Mac mini Announcement video as a test:

There is some maths errors/funkiness with timings, for example:

Overall though, it seems like a very useful tool to have in your toolbox, especially if you don't want to pay MotionVFX a subscription.

It'll be super interesting to see how well Apple's new caption tool compares to OpenAI's Whisper, which is what all these tools use.

It seems like Caption Pop AI is using whisper.cpp under the hood.

It stores all the models, temporary audio files, and FCPXML exports in '~/Library/Containers/com.urlaunched.StupidRaisins.StupidRaisins/Data/Library/Application Support/com.urlaunched.StupidRaisins.StupidRaisins:

If the Apple speech-to-text model is better than Whisper (which is unlikely), then I'd imagine a lot of these developers will start offering a FCPXML import option.

I think though, really the main benefit Apple has is that they can do the timing and handle timecode much better than Whisper can currently do - this might be the biggest selling point for Apple's tool.

Overall, it's great to see another non-subscription tool on the market!

Audio Design Desk v2.1.3 is out now!

It includes the following changes:

• Track automation wasn't blocking mouse events on regions beneath, so it made it impossible to drag automation points
• More region mouse event improvements and fixes
• Improvements and fixes to Audio Unit manager UI for enabling and disabling Audio Units
• Epidemic login button would be disabled if you canceled out of the web login forcing an ADD restart to reenable it
• Audio tables wasn't updating with correct count after searching
• Dragging multiple files from the library tables would result in overlapped regions in the timeline. Now, they will stack by default on new tracks, but you can hold the shift key to have them placed sequentially in a row
• Misc UI fixes

You can download and learn more here.

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