Final Cut Pro adds impressive new features

Alongside the new iPads announced yesterday, Apple also introduced a new version of Final Cut Pro for iPad as well as Final Cut Pro for Mac 10.8.

If you’re going to stick an M4 chip in a new iPad, you’re going to need some new software to show off its capabilities, and Apple obliged with the announcement of 

Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 that draws on all that power and does some rather impressive things with it.

Apple says that using 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

Possibly its headline grabbing feature though is Live Multicam, which allows users to capture up to four different angles of a single scene, whether working with their own devices or collaborating with others. Live Multicam connects wirelessly via Final Cut Camera, a new video capture app, which enables users to view up to four iPhone or iPad devices and provides a director’s view of each camera in real time. It allows users to adjust a range of settings including white balance and manual focus, while monitoring recordings with zebras and audio meters. Users can now also adjust ISO and shutter speed, and enable focus peaking, bringing even more power to the camera system on iPad Air and iPad Pro (it will run on any Apple silicon).

The all-new Final Cut Camera app on iPhone and iPad can be used connected to Final Cut Pro, or as a standalone professional recording app, and enables precise manual controls of video settings

Editable preview clips are immediately passed through to Final Cut Pro for iPad and replaced with full-resolution files in the background, so users can seamlessly move from production to editing.

Effectively, it’s a live production ecosystem and it will be interesting to see how people start to use it when it’s released later this spring.

External project support and more

There’s more too.  

Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 now supports external projects, letting users create or open projects on an external storage device and import media without taking up space on their iPad. Editors can quickly hand off external projects to another editor or take them into Final Cut Pro for Mac; create new projects on external storage; and seamlessly import high-resolution files and professional codecs like ProRes and Log.

The new software also 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.

Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 comes with 12 new color-grading presets, eight basic text titles, 20 new soundtracks, and additional dynamic backgrounds

And anyone who’s also bought a new Apple Pencil Pro now gets to use Live Drawing with support for barrel roll, giving users more precise control of their chosen tool. And with squeeze, users can quickly pull up an array of brushes and settings.

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  per month or $49 per year, with a one-month free trial for new users.

Final Cut Pro for Mac 10.8

The Final Cut Pro for Mac 10.8 announcement was somewhat buried amidst everything else happening yesterday, but leans into some new AI features and workflow tweaks.

On Mac, Final Cut Pro 10.8 introduces new AI features like Enhance Light and Color, which allows users to improve color, color balance, contrast, and brightness in a single step

Available as a free update to existing users, Final Cut Pro 10.8 introduces Enhance Light and Color, 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. A new  Smooth Slo-Mo feature takes frames of video and intelligently generates and blends them together, providing high-quality movement.

Color corrections and video effects can now be given custom names in the inspector to easily identify changes applied to a clip, and effects can be dragged from the inspector to other clips in the timeline or viewer. The timeline index also offers the ability to search for and navigate to clips with missing media or effects. And text-based timeline search now includes rather useful information such as reel, scene, camera angle, and more.