Final Cut Pro, Compressor, Motion updated with better Mac Studio performance

AppleInsider

Apple has issued new updates to its Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor apps to boost performance on the Mac Studio, and to support a pair of new iMovie features.

Final Cut Pro

The minor updates to Apple's professional video apps were released on April 12, and also include a number of other minor updates.

In Final Cut Pro, for example, users will be able to quickly locate media that appears more than once. The update also has a new feature that improves the clarity of speech by adjusting background noise using machine learning.

Apple has also updated Motion to include a new Sliced Scale filter that can divide an image into slices to prevent distortion when scaling.

Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor have also all been updated to optimize playback and graphical performance on M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips in the Mac Studio. The three apps now also support the Korean language.

Additionally, Apple has also updated all three apps with support for the new iMovie Storyboards and Magic Movie features. Both features, which are available only on iPhone and iPad, allow aspiring video creators and others to easily make good-looking video content with templates and automatic editing, as well as other features.

The new updates to Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor should be available to download from the App Store as of Tuesday.

Read on AppleInsider

atonaldenim

Here comes a whole new round of Mac Studio review YouTube videos I have to watch! 🤓

hucom2000

What confuses me about this is that Apple‘s marketing for the M1 Ultra seems to indicate that all the performance benefits of the chip come straight from the hardware (and possibly the operating system). 

So how does optimizing software lead to better performance on these chips?

Is it possible that compressor didn’t take full advantage of the M1 architecture prior to this update? If that’s true it should result in performance gains not only on the ultra, but also lower tier M1 chips.

edited April 2022

netrox

hucom2000 said:

What confuses me about this is that Apple‘s marketing for the M1 Ultra seems to indicate that all the performance benefits of the chip come straight from the hardware (and possibly the operating system). 

So how does optimizing software lead to better performance on these chips?

Is it possible that compressor didn’t take full advantage of the M1 architecture prior to this update? If that’s true it should result in performance gains not only on the ultra, but also lower tier M1 chips.

I thought the same. Even Pixelmator update and Capture One claims a boost on M1 Ultra so maybe there are a few that can be optimized. Unless they really have old legacy code.  

tht

hucom2000 said:

What confuses me about this is that Apple‘s marketing for the M1 Ultra seems to indicate that all the performance benefits of the chip come straight from the hardware (and possibly the operating system). 

So how does optimizing software lead to better performance on these chips?

Is it possible that compressor didn’t take full advantage of the M1 architecture prior to this update? If that’s true it should result in performance gains not only on the ultra, but also lower tier M1 chips.

Yes, of course it is possible, most especially with 20 year old software. You can pretty much assume that every single piece of nontrivial software has been not been coded for the specific hardware features that it runs on, even though they have been running on the same type of hardware for decades. Look no further than Adobe apps, or MS apps, or web browsers. Every single nontrivial piece of software can be further optimized. Then, in comes down to specific hardware details that software developers won't pay attention to unless it makes their software unstable.

It basically has to be trivial for developers to implement. There have been about 4 to 5 generations of SIMD units on Intel CPUs spanning 20 years. Only the most obvious and easy workflows have been design for AVX256 or AVX2. AVX-512? It's basically only done only on a case by case basis. Then, Apple's SIMD units don't work in exactly the same way, and developers have to rearchitect their software to really get great performance gains. Developers just aren't going to spend the resources to do it. They do what they always do, rely on continuing hardware performance to make their software run faster. Getting a piece of nontrivial software to run stably and have competitive features is already a gargantuan job.