Apple updates Final Cut Pro X, Compressor and Motion with new features

Posted:
in Mac Software edited February 2016
Apple on Thursday rolled out a trio of updates for its pro-level video editing suite, bumping versions of Final Cut Pro X, Compressor and Motion with feature additions and numerous bug fixes.




Flagship non-linear editor Final Cut Pro X reached version 10.2.3 with today's update, bringing both user-facing interface changes and extended backend processing support for newly released file types and equipment. For example, a 4K export preset has been introduced to create video files for Apple's own devices.

Sharing options have also been expanded to support multiple YouTube accounts and Share window assets for iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPad Pro and the fourth-generation Apple TV. Users can now import Canon XF-AVC data from that company's C300 Mark II camera.

Other enhancements and bug fixes include:

  • Customizable Default Effect lets you choose both a video and audio effect that is assigned to a keyboard shortcut
  • Improves speed when opening libraries on a SAN
  • Resolves an issue that could affect the timecode display in the Dashboard on OS X El Capitan
  • Resolves an issue in which a disabled video effect could appear as Missing Effect when opening the project or when sharing to Compressor
  • Addresses an issue in which black frames could appear in imported iPhone video clips that were trimmed on iPhone
  • Fixes an issue that could cause the playhead to jump ahead when editing short titles
  • Fixes an issue that could cause the timeline to stop playback when switching views in the Browser
  • Fixes an issue in which points on a Bezier shape could incorrectly switch from Linear to Smooth
  • Fixes an issue in which some objects within Motion templates render with soft edges

The last major Final Cut Pro X update came almost a year ago in April 2015, when Apple introduced easy-to-use 3D titles, support for contemporary and various UI upgrades.

Final Cut Pro X version 10.2.3 is a free 2.83GB update for current users, while new customers can purchase the software for $299.99 from the Mac App Store.




Motion, Apple's Final Cut Pro X graphics and animation companion app, also added support for the latest in Apple hardware. Version 5.2.3 mostly contains bug fixes, however, including stability improvements for Photoshop file handling and iTunes and photo library searches.

Other fixes include:

  • Improves stability when using the Undo command after ungrouping a parent group
  • Correctly saves percentage-based parameters in the Checkerboard generator after closing and reopening a project
  • Correctly saves the preview movie for Motion templates created in German, Japanese, and Chinese
  • Fixes an issue in which points on a Bezier shape could incorrectly switch from Linear to Smooth
  • Fixes an issue in which some objects within Motion templates render with soft edges

Motion version 5.2.3 comes in as a free 2.21GB download for existing users. The app is priced at $49.99.




Finally, file export and management software Compressor also added Apple device-centric 4K export preset capabilities in its Thursday update. The latest iPhone, iPad and Apple TV models were likewise added to the compatibility list.

Version 4.2.2 fixes a closed caption file issue that would pop up when creating iTunes Store Packages, while squashing graphical bugs relating to the navigation window and OS X El Capitan.

Priced at $49.99 from the Mac App Store, existing users can download the 431MB Compressor version 4.2.2 update for free.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 24
    I like Motion. From what I understand it's far less capable than Adobe's motion graphics product (After Effects), but you can get results far faster with Motion.
    tallest skil
  • Reply 2 of 24
    This is it?  This is a maintenance update with a new feature as far as FCPX is concerned.  Apple continues to disappoint when it comes to supporting its' own products.
    woodbinekermit4krazy
  • Reply 3 of 24
    rfrmac said:
    This is it?  This is a maintenance update with a new feature as far as FCPX is concerned.  Apple continues to disappoint when it comes to supporting its' own products.
    Exactly, they should be updating FCP every 24 hours with new features daily......./s
    Rayz2016williamlondoncornchipSpamSandwichbdkennedy1002tallest skilnolamacguy
  • Reply 4 of 24
    Yep, @gadetcanav2, what was @rfmac thinking? FCP X is AWESOME! In four short years Apple has taken FCP from an NLE Hollywood trusted in its post workflows, to a YouTube/Vimeo editing tool, to its new razor-sharp focus on what really matters in media - Apple's own devices. Forget 4K cinema - it's the iPad Pro, man.

    So the "Pro" application that still can't make a decent audio AAF (don't bore me with that tech stuff, my clients just want AWESOME) and hides important things like timecode like they're just there to look at, not cue to or copy/paste, is getting very much better at working with media that really matters - "movies" from your iPhone. So what's iMovie again? Oh that ends at K12. After that, we're all Pros, here at high school. Yeah right.

    FCP X is positioning itself as the perfect tool for people who think an unaffordably high end camera is made by GoPro. Arri's best Alexa is 3.2K? Puh! My GoPro's 4K man! Eats it for breakfast! FCP X for 45 second news snippets cut by journalists in the back of the car? Sure. Bentley commercials shot on iPhone? I suspect they went through Flame in a real facility, somewhere in Soho. FCP X has its place, but adding features like phone support before fixing the fundamentals is flawed.
    h2pbrian greenwoodbinekermit4krazycornchipsingularityrazorpitDeeeds
  • Reply 5 of 24
    @fearless ;

    YES, YES and YES.
    Billions if not squillions in the bank and the way they treat their pro customers is like shite. I still feel anger that Aperture was DROPPED for what?? a pissy poor featured app called Photos. Gosh, I cannot count the number of pro photographers Apple managed to piss off in one fell swoop.  I mean, surely with all that hard earned dosh they couldn't have employed a few extra software engineers, if only to support it into the future. 
    cornchipSpamSandwichrazorpitkermit4krazy
  • Reply 6 of 24

    rfrmac said:
    This is it?  This is a maintenance update with a new feature as far as FCPX is concerned.  Apple continues to disappoint when it comes to supporting its' own products.
    Oh come on disappoint? More like treat with utter disdain. I've watched politicians treat their voters with more respect...
    kermit4krazycornchipDeeeds
  • Reply 7 of 24
    Not to jump on the dogpile, but I agree. WTF, Apple? As a formerly proud, happy Apple user for the better part of a decade under Jobs tenure, I feel like I've been sh*t on for committing my business to the Apple ecosystem. 1.5TB of edited images with keywords in Aperture and you drop it like a bad habit while sitting on $217 billion? Screw you too. And then you trash FC Pro, and then you... The list goes on and on... Get your sh*t together before it's too late. 
    cornchipSpamSandwichpalomine
  • Reply 8 of 24
    cornchipcornchip Posts: 1,945member
    I was getting rather tired of Photoshop a couple years ago, and was considering switching to Aperture for photo retouching since I liked doing minor tweaks in iPhoto and was starting to do most of my sketches in other apps. I was really close when they announced they were dropping it and I was like WTF? But at least my procrastinating ways saved me a giant headache that time. iMovie is good enough for my video editing needs at this point in my career, but I do feel sorry for the video pros Apple seems rather distanced from at this point. 
    palomine
  • Reply 9 of 24
    Apple has dumped on its pro-media users. Dropping Aperture given the state of Apple's bank account and general love by pro-media users really sucks! Hugely cost many photographers major angst. This update for FCP, although welcome, is mildly inspiring to pro-users. Again given the design and media productions admiration to Apple and its products, Apple certainly doesn't reciprocate with great ever ground breaking software. Capture One Pro, built by a tiny company in Denmark blows Aperture out of the water and is a good example of "it can be done well" even by a small company. Apple just won't because I assume??? its profit margin isn't high enough?
    cornchip
  • Reply 10 of 24
    Perhaps Apple needs a Pro Apps czar in place who does nothing but ensure software development stays on track and that the pro buyers are happy? Abandoning the high-end pro market for high-end prosumers and amateurs has been one of Apple's biggest strategic mistakes in their history. Without the pros creating using Apple hardware and software, the amateurs have nothing to look forward to once they become proficient.
    palominecornchip
  • Reply 11 of 24
    Does Compressor even have h.265 support yet? In fact, as far as I know, Apple has no support for h.265 on El Capitan and very little on iOS, other than Facetime. This is "pro-level?"
  • Reply 12 of 24
    As much as I hate to say it, it's too late for Apple to get back to where it was with FCP. They screwed the pooch and the pooch's friend.
    I absolutely HATE Adobe and their "pay me for the rest of your life" subscription, but I have converted to Premiere for my main editing needs now. (I do get a very killer deal on my subscription though)
    Come on Apple, don't screw the pooch's friend's pooch!
    /pooch
  • Reply 13 of 24
    As much as I hate to say it, it's too late for Apple to get back to where it was with FCP. They screwed the pooch and the pooch's friend.
    I absolutely HATE Adobe and their "pay me for the rest of your life" subscription, but I have converted to Premiere for my main editing needs now. (I do get a very killer deal on my subscription though)
    Come on Apple, don't screw the pooch's friend's pooch!
    /pooch
    I know that even hardcore Final Cut Pro advocate director David Fincher gave up and changed to Adobe Premiere as of "Gone Girl". One reason was that Premiere could edit 6K RED camera footage.
    edited February 2016
  • Reply 14 of 24
    So did Walter Murch.
  • Reply 15 of 24
    So did Walter Murch.
    Man. That's bad. Murch is a living legend among editors.
  • Reply 16 of 24
    I know that even hardcore Final Cut Pro advocate director David Fincher gave up and changed to Adobe Premiere as of "Gone Girl". One reason was that Premiere could edit 6K RED camera footage.
    @ SpamSandwich

    I agree with your sentiment and although I'm sure it's true that Fincher may have had a play in Premiere with some native RED footage if he said so, it's highly unlikely the entire film was cut graded and mixed without involving the industry's standard tools. Hollywood films with high budgets just aren't Made on a Mac by one guy cutting raw camera footage - there a team and an industry built around DIT, LTO backups, relentless arguments over LUTs that differ by a hair's breadth and absolutely nothing is shot linear, without a curve. So while, yes, you probably could pull Dragon 6K RAW into Premiere, apply a curve to it and carry on, no one does - the machine would bog down on day 2. The most common flow involves a DIT transcoding in YoYotta or Resolve to DNxHD 36 or 115 for an editor to cut in Avid, or to ProRes to cut in something else.Avid's latest version is the first to go above HD resolutions, and for offline that's been fine for years, and will be for a long time. For the same reason editors avoid AMA in Avid (direct access to source clips, in the FCP/Premiere style) most prefer a single source codec and a reconform occurs at the end, or at stages along the way, in Mistika, Baselight or Resolve to get back to raw footage. It won't be graded in FCP anything, Adobe anything or Avid anything, unless there's a Dolby PRM in the suite at the very least, or a Barco/Christie at the back. Fed from a consumer NLE? Possible, but highly unlikely, although I've done it for test screenings on early cuts, usually from Avid.
  • Reply 17 of 24
    And at the end, someone will output an AAF of every single piece of audio synched up to pictures and traced back to multitrack polyphonic sources by the assistant editor(s), with generous handles ready for import into ProTools. Sure there may be indie outliers who use Logic or Nuendo when they're not recording songs, but Avid's ProTools dominates. FCP X's stems as an alternative? For an early bash mix, maybe - for a final, if you turn up with those you'll be laughed out of town.
  • Reply 18 of 24
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    So did Walter Murch.
    Man. That's bad. Murch is a living legend among editors.
    He talks about it in the following video and mentions what other editors are using:



    He hasn't used FCPX but has a lack of trust and is comfortable with the alternatives. With Apple ditching Aperture, there is that uncertainty about whether they could do the same with FCPX. Also he was talking about having meetings with Adobe where they added small custom features to Premiere based on their feedback and they really appreciated that. That's not something Apple would be likely to do.

    Although people complain about Adobe's payment method, it's sustainable and it allows them to issue updates whenever they want without accounting the costs. When you look at Avid, the company is on the ropes and I'm not sure that the film industry is taking it seriously. Their latest filings show that their liabilities exceed their assets by over $300m. They are making a small profit so perhaps they can turn it around eventually but it could take a while.

    Adobe would be better off buying Avid out when it makes sense. They have a few billion in assets to do that easily, although $300m might be a bit much for it vs the gains. It wouldn't be for Avid's products but they'd be buying their place in the high-end film and audio industry.

    Randy Ubillos, the main FCP developer has retired from Apple:

    http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/04/23/final-cut-creator-randy-ubillos-leaves-apple-after-20-years

    I remember reading that one of the main Aperture developers left Apple a few years before it was EOL'd. They obviously have a team still maintaining FCPX so perhaps they will keep it going but they advertised an internal job role late last year that suggested at least parts of their own team didn't use it:



    This kind of software at the high-end almost needs to be like a development environment that you can build into what you need and multiple different workflows. Plugins help but being able to script the interface too. Swift's scriptability would be useful there where people could modify startup scripts. This is like the Atom text editor where the whole UI can be adjusted. If someone wanted a custom control or feature, Apple wouldn't necessarily need to have any part of it. A 3rd party developer team could script a UI element and attach it to a Swift script for an action. It takes a lot of work to make and maintain something like that but it's a way to crowd-source feature development. If it was flexible enough, it would allow people to make the software behave just like any other.

    It's not Apple's focus though and it doesn't really do anything for their business the way it does for software-dependent companies like Avid and Adobe and I don't think Apple has a desire to compete with them. Some of the Apple team were originally at Adobe. Mac sales are higher than ever, people aren't abandoning the platform in large numbers, there's no impending doom from doing this. People can and do use Premiere and Avid on the Mac and people will use FCPX where they feel it's suitable.

    I think the whole idea of safety and assurance with software support goes against Apple's dynamism. You can see how that baggage weighs on companies like Microsoft. This gives them appeal in different markets where consumers like new and businesses like stability and dependability.

    They could redo parts of FCPX in Swift and build it to be customized and make each main component (timeline, viewer etc) a scriptable object that was instantiated. You could have multiple video timelines and projects open at once if that's what you wanted connected to their own viewers. You could even make it look exactly like FCP 7. They can make iMovie out of the exact same code but with different scripts and without the ability to use custom scripts. This also allows for more integration into varied workflows. Being able to natively open old projects would at least get people to look at it. In the video above they said Premiere was more like FCP 8 and you can see why - https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/migrate-from-final-cut-pro.html, Apple left that up to 3rd parties to figure out. Scripting support could integrate this migration.

    They could also do a dozen other things though with other products. If it's not what they want to do then people just have to accept that and use the right tools for whatever they need done. It doesn't make sense for Apple to provide the best tools in every industry because some tools work best being cross-platform.
    Deeeds
  • Reply 19 of 24
    They could also do a dozen other things though with other products. If it's not what they want to do then people just have to accept that and use the right tools for whatever they need done. It doesn't make sense for Apple to provide the best tools in every industry because some tools work best being cross-platform.
    @Marvin ;

    While of course Apple can't compete in everything, it'll never gain any traction in enterprise, with or without IBM, if it has a reputation of luring people away into platforms they're half-hearted about, and abandoning them when a solo in-house product champion moves on. I've heard many arguments that Apple needed to move to 64-bit from 32-bit FCP 7, and that a new code base gave them the OPPORTUNITY to re-invent editing! No tracks! Magnetism! Nothing you can lock when you're done! Think again klutzes - you really want iMovie but BIGGER don't you? No thanks.

    No one, repeat, no one who used FCP 7 for a living wanted this. They wanted FCP 8, and don't tell me Henry Ford said we all wanted a faster horse. Where exactly has been FCP X's Great Leap Forward that we're all really glad we stayed for, now we've done as Larry Jordan proposed and given them time to make it not only AMAZING, but better than what we had? We'd be working faster even with slower renders because we could throw out a reference movie and chuck it at Compressor, not have to render out the whole sequence, and carry on cutting. We'd be at FCP 9 by now, 64-bit and all, and would still be happily buying Mac Pro towers, not toys, and doing with hardware what you propose we should do with software - making it suit our world.

    But the great crime was not the coronation of the prince, FCP X. It was the execution of his uncle, the king, Final Cut Studio, with all the clemency of Kim Jong Un. Suddenly we couldn't buy it, it wasn't supported and our business was scrambling for alternatives. We've all found different, worthy combinations, but only companies that go under generally leave their customers in that lurch. Apple was just insensitive to the consequences for its users, and that casts a long shadow over enterprise aspirations - one I see every day as my iPad 2 crumbles under the cancer of involuntary iOS updates.
    Deeeds
  • Reply 20 of 24
    fearless said:
    They could also do a dozen other things though with other products. If it's not what they want to do then people just have to accept that and use the right tools for whatever they need done. It doesn't make sense for Apple to provide the best tools in every industry because some tools work best being cross-platform.
    @Marvin ;

    While of course Apple can't compete in everything, it'll never gain any traction in enterprise, with or without IBM, if it has a reputation of luring people away into platforms they're half-hearted about, and abandoning them when a solo in-house product champion moves on. I've heard many arguments that Apple needed to move to 64-bit from 32-bit FCP 7, and that a new code base gave them the OPPORTUNITY to re-invent editing! No tracks! Magnetism! Nothing you can lock when you're done! Think again klutzes - you really want iMovie but BIGGER don't you? No thanks.

    No one, repeat, no one who used FCP 7 for a living wanted this. They wanted FCP 8, and don't tell me Henry Ford said we all wanted a faster horse. Where exactly has been FCP X's Great Leap Forward that we're all really glad we stayed for, now we've done as Larry Jordan proposed and given them time to make it not only AMAZING, but better than what we had? We'd be working faster even with slower renders because we could throw out a reference movie and chuck it at Compressor, not have to render out the whole sequence, and carry on cutting. We'd be at FCP 9 by now, 64-bit and all, and would still be happily buying Mac Pro towers, not toys, and doing with hardware what you propose we should do with software - making it suit our world.

    But the great crime was not the coronation of the prince, FCP X. It was the execution of his uncle, the king, Final Cut Studio, with all the clemency of Kim Jong Un. Suddenly we couldn't buy it, it wasn't supported and our business was scrambling for alternatives. We've all found different, worthy combinations, but only companies that go under generally leave their customers in that lurch. Apple was just insensitive to the consequences for its users, and that casts a long shadow over enterprise aspirations - one I see every day as my iPad 2 crumbles under the cancer of involuntary iOS updates.
    Word!
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