Apple announces Final Cut Pro 10.4 with support for VR, HDR, HEVC, more
Apple at the Final Cut Pro X Creative Summit on Friday debuted Final Cut Pro 10.4, a hotly anticipated update to the flagship professional video editing suite that includes support for VR, HDR footage, direct integration for iOS video and more.
Source: Richard Taylor via Twitter
Video professionals attending the event were invited to go hands-on with the new software at Apple's 1 Infinite Loop campus, some of whom posted what they saw online.
Providing a fairly in depth synopsis was FCPX plugin developer Alex Gollner, who chronicled the update's highlights on Twitter. Of note, while Apple is not releasing a new version of FCPX, the 10.4 update is bristling with new features that the company showed off using unreleased iMac Pro workstations.
First on the list is support for true virtual reality video. Final Cut Pro's timeline has been updated to support VR footage, including clip orientation, with compatibility for two different head-mounted display feeds. VR integration extends to Motion 5, Apple's motion graphics and special effects software.
As expected, version 10.4 will support all the tools offered in noted plugin maker Tim Dashwood's 360VR toolbox. Dashwood was hired by Apple in April.
Additionally, the editing package receives support for HDR Rec. 2020 alongside a new slate of color controls including a color picker and color wheels.
Users who own the latest iPhones, like iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X, will be able to open 4K HEVC footage in FCPX timelines. HEVC, also known as H.265, is a video compression protocol that promises to halve file sizes while maintaining superior image quality. Apple adopted the codec in iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra.
Apple has not announced a firm release date, but says the next version of FCPX will be available some time this year. More information about the software is expected to come from Apple itself in the near future.
Final Cut Pro was last updated in May when version 10.3.4 saw release. The professional editing suite is available for purchase from the App Store for $299.99.
Source: Richard Taylor via Twitter
Video professionals attending the event were invited to go hands-on with the new software at Apple's 1 Infinite Loop campus, some of whom posted what they saw online.
Providing a fairly in depth synopsis was FCPX plugin developer Alex Gollner, who chronicled the update's highlights on Twitter. Of note, while Apple is not releasing a new version of FCPX, the 10.4 update is bristling with new features that the company showed off using unreleased iMac Pro workstations.
First on the list is support for true virtual reality video. Final Cut Pro's timeline has been updated to support VR footage, including clip orientation, with compatibility for two different head-mounted display feeds. VR integration extends to Motion 5, Apple's motion graphics and special effects software.
As expected, version 10.4 will support all the tools offered in noted plugin maker Tim Dashwood's 360VR toolbox. Dashwood was hired by Apple in April.
#vr video in the next version of Final Cut Pro X #fcpx at Apple today pic.twitter.com/mTeXee1CXm
-- Alex Gollner (@Alex4D)
Additionally, the editing package receives support for HDR Rec. 2020 alongside a new slate of color controls including a color picker and color wheels.
Users who own the latest iPhones, like iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X, will be able to open 4K HEVC footage in FCPX timelines. HEVC, also known as H.265, is a video compression protocol that promises to halve file sizes while maintaining superior image quality. Apple adopted the codec in iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra.
Apple has not announced a firm release date, but says the next version of FCPX will be available some time this year. More information about the software is expected to come from Apple itself in the near future.
Final Cut Pro was last updated in May when version 10.3.4 saw release. The professional editing suite is available for purchase from the App Store for $299.99.
Comments
Its a shame, but you've missed the boat on this Apple. Keep going though Adobe has a monopoly everywhere else it's good for them to have some competition.
No word on Compressor and hevc encoding yet?
If that's the meanng intended, it might be helpful to spell it out. For my own reasons, I've been waiting a long time for native 3D support in Final Cut. Maybe it's finally here, coming in through the back door because of VR.
But I agree with what’s posted here: Resolve has caught up in a big way by offering professional coloring tools (and adding editing later on) which they offer by switching between ’tabs’ where the interface becomes coloring focused vs editing focused.
Also, Resolve includes 2D/3D tracking (which you can do with a plug-in in FCPX but really doesn’t feel integrated).
The reason why I don’t use Resolve that much for editing is that FCPX’s magnetic timeline is a joy to use, and overall speed is really impressive.
I guess the FCPX development team is very small. Maybe adding engineers to focus on coloring and/or buying up Mocha Pro or something would be a good step for them?
Also, Motion has become a really weird set of features and limitations. Again, Blackmagic and Adobd seem to have their bases covered there. Motion is useless and Apple doesn’t seem to put the R&D in to offer amazing things like Adobe announced recently. By now I think it’s even better to drop Motion entirely and integrate whatever was useful into FCPX. At least FCPX has earned its position - as long as they up the pace on innovation.
http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1710-final-cut-pro-x-v-adobe-premiere-pro-render-and-export-speed-tests
Apple didn't have much choice but to rebuild FCP from the ground up and the performance they gained from doing that is a huge benefit. There are people who have changed hardware and can't easily go back and don't have a desire to go back but there are new customers that will use it.
The more features they add and the more that people figure out how to get it to work for them, the more that people will use it. Apple has more freedom now to add features. Potential features might include adjustment layers where you add an effects clip to span over multiple clips and fade their effect in/out (and link them to the affected clips):
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/help-tutorials-adjustment-layers.html
Being able to lock individual clips so they are stuck in the timeline and other clips get cropped around them. Being able to choose more export settings inside FCP X instead of relying on Compressor.
One thing that could be useful for online authoring is being able to sync the edit and the authoring where if there's a mistake seen in an upload, they don't have to encode and upload the entire clip. Maybe they messed up a name somewhere in the timeline, they could adjust it and it would flag that it's out of sync with authored version and then sync the portion that was changed. That would need support from Youtube/Vimeo (or an intermediate cloud service e.g chunk to Apple, full video sent out with faster upload) but Apple could also provide HTML5 streaming tools for people who host their own videos and do chunk authoring, which offers some video protection but they just upload the chunks that were changed. Auto-subtitles with Siri, auto-tagging with CoreML.
Apple removed some things in order to protect editors from common mistakes and sometimes they are needed:
https://layersmagazine.com/premiere-pro-cs4-sync-lock.html
One important example is the connections override:
Apple put it behind the tilde/grav key, I don't know how anybody is supposed to figure that out on their own. Command-alt-click for the connection position too. Their list of shortcuts is pretty long:
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12724?locale=en_US
The clip connections helps keep clips together but they could do more complex connections manually like you might want to keep two video clips the same distance apart so they could allow linking anything just by selecting them and command-L or something. Then they all get moved together. Audio locked to multiple video tracks. Attribute locking like volume, scale, color. Swift scripting support so you could do things like resync/brighten all clips with a certain tag or name in code.
Eventually, the feature set will be enough that it suffices for most editing tasks and it will just need people to adapt to the shortcuts and workflow. The editors who migrated to Premiere will have gone through a long migration process and would have to do the same back again so it won't happen suddenly and there will always be some bad feelings about it. But it's not as if it's a utopia anywhere, all software has its own quirks and bugs. Windows PCs are not something everyone wants to spend their days using so a lot of Premiere users will still be on the Mac and FCP X will always be improving and sitting in their Applications folder whenever they need to use it. People can use different editors for different jobs.
Apple uses the software themselves for their own marketing videos so it's not as if they are just throwing something out there, they just tend to design more around their own needs first, which doesn't cover everybody and then they have to build it out based on the feedback they get.
I am no fan of Adobe. I think they still don’t understand the needs of a web designer/developer or have a clue in which direction the web is heading, but they’re reliable, and that is super important for a pro to invest his experience in their tools.
Adobe is on the wrong track and they update their software often!
Paraphrased: It gets you where you don’t want to go quicker!
Premiere's got all the disadvantages of Photoshop, with almost none of the advantages.
And I don’t agree with your iMac Pro comment. They didn’t create these machines for their own software at all, but to avoid pro brand ambassadors switching to Windows to get some seriour computing done. They made it for VR developers, scientist and artists. Only a very small percentage will use iMac Pro for Final Cut Pro.