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2024
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May
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8th May 2024
Apple has announced Final Cut Pro for Mac 10.8 and Final Cut Pro for iPad 2!
There's also a new Final Cut Camera app coming to iPhone & iPad.
- You can read the official press release here.
- You can watch the Apple Event on YouTube here.
- You can read Iain Anderson's thoughts on ProVideo Coalition here.
- You can watch Matthew O'Brien's reaction on YouTube here.
- You can watch Richard Taylor's Final Cut TV & Coffee Live Stream here.
The big ticket items for Mac are...
A new Enhance Light and Color effect for the Color Inspector, offering the ability to improve color, color balance, contrast, and brightness in one simple step, and is optimized for SDR, HDR, RAW, and Log-encoded media.
Whilst Final Cut Pro has had a Balance Color tool for a long time, and did a pretty good job at balancing things - it doesn't give you any controls (aside from a White Balance picker), so it's really just a one-click solution where it either works or it doesn't.
It also never really worked well with Log-encoded media.
For me personally, I'm NOT a colourist, I don't enjoy colour grading, and I generally do everything in the Color Board - so this new tool will be HUGELY helpful, and something I've been wanting for many years.
I do a lot of fast-turnaround corporate/advertising edits where there's no time to send to a professional colourist - so this will be a very handy tool to have in the toolbox!
It'll be very interesting to compare to Colourlab AI 3.
Smooth Slo-Mo adds Machine Learning speed effects, which will be very interesting to try out, and see how it compares with Topaz Video AI.
You can now Rename Effects in the Video & Color Inspector! This has something that the Final Cut Pro community have wanted for years - so it's awesome that it's finally coming!
You can also now drag & drop effects from the Inspector to clips on the timeline and the browser! Hopefully this means you'll also be able to drag them into Recall Toolbox or save them using CommandPost's Pasteboard Buffer!
The Timeline Index also got some love and attention, with added columns for Metadata Fields such as Reel, Scene, Camera Angle, etc.
This could be incredibly handy when combined with CommandPost's Timeline Index CSV Export feature!
It also looks like they've finally added a button to toggle the Scrolling Timeline on and off!
Personally, I think this is a really solid update, with some great professional features that I'll be using every day. I'm excited to give it a test run!
The big ticket items for iPad are...
Things are faster on M4:
With M4 on the new iPad Pro, final rendering is up to 2x faster, and editors can take advantage of support for up to 4x more streams of ProRes RAW than with M1.
Live Multicam on Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 allows users to direct and control up to four cameras, providing a director’s view of each live video feed in real time.
Final Cut Pro for iPad now officially supports External Storage - so you can save your Projects & Media on external drives.
There's no information on whether or not you can go from Mac to iPad yet though, so Transfer Toolbox may still be necessary.
There's lots more content:
Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 brings more options to customize projects. Users can dial in their edits with 12 new color-grading presets, choose from eight basic text titles, score with 20 new soundtracks, and add additional dynamic backgrounds to create effect overlays and title sequences.
Interestingly, despite 3rd Party Content being listed as "coming soon" when Final Cut Pro for iPad first launched, there was still no mention of 3rd Party Content coming in this release.
It'll also be interesting to see if any "quality of life" improvements are made in this new version - such as the ability to copy and paste things between Projects.
We're excited to check it out, when it ships later this year:
Pricing and Availability
- Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 will be available later this spring as a free update for existing users, and available on the App Store for $4.99 (U.S.) per month or $49 (U.S.) per year, with a one-month free trial for new users.
- Final Cut Camera will be available for free later this spring as a standalone app.
- Final Cut Pro for Mac 10.8 will be available as a free update for existing users and for $299.99 (U.S.) for new users on the Mac App Store. All new users can download a free 90-day trial of Final Cut Pro.