The shift to working from home during COVID-19 has affected just about every industry, including professional video editors. An update to Apple's pro video editing suite looks to address the challenges of that remote work, including improvements to Final Cut Pro X (which goes to version 10.4.9), Motion, and Compressor.
Highlights include Smart Conform for Social Media, which uses AI to crop widescreen content to fit mobile device screens and social media formats; new proxy capabilities that allow pro video and motion editors to share smaller files (video content is a notorious storage hog); and 3D object animation in Apple Motion. Performance improvements and new format support also arrive today.
Final Cut Pro: Proxy Improvements and Smart Conform
Since video files tend to be enormous, editors like to use proxy files—or compressed, lower-resolution versions—to speed up working with the content, especially for remote work on laptops. Updates to Final Cut make using proxies even more efficient.
You can now specify that a proxy should reduce the media size of ProRes or H.264 content by 50, 25, or 12.5 percent. You can also share a library in proxy format either on a portable drive or on network storage for easy sharing. Content that can't be proxied stays in the library at full resolution. Libraries can now include proxies created by third-party services like Frame.io.
Since so much video is now shared to social media, editors need to create versions in multiple formats, such as vertical and square, for the likes of Instagram and Facebook Stories. The new Smart Conform resembles the Auto Reframe tool Adobe added to Premiere Pro a year ago. Both use visual AI to determine the interesting areas of a video frame to crop to for these non-widescreen social outlets. Apple's Smart Conform includes a nice tool called Transform Overscan that lets you see the crop inside the full frame and lets you customize the result.
Motion Updates: 3D and Stroke Filter
Apple's After Effects competitor, Motion, now adds the ability to edit and animate 3D objects. It supports Apple's USDZ augmented reality format, rather than a traditional 3D format (though this is a messy world of proprietary formats, and doesn’t really matter if your pushing the animation to Final Cut). It comes with 60 prefab objects, and you can get more from third parties such as Sketchfab and TurboSquid.
Compressor News
Compressor is Apple's video-encoding app, sort of like Adobe Media Encoder. New with today's update, Compressor gets support for LUTs for Panasonic, Sony, Canon, Blackmagic, Nikon, and ARRI Log, as well as custom LUTs both for accurate camera imports and effects. It accepts standard LUT formats such as .cube, .mga, and .m3d file formats, and both HDR and SDR.
Final Cut Pro X 10.4.9 is a free update for existing users, and Apple is offering a generous 90-day free trial—even if you've already expired a free trial. New purchasers pay $299 for Final Cut, and $49.99 each for Motion and Compressor.
Further Reading
- Adobe Premiere Automatically Reformats Videos
- AI Tools Can Detect Deepfakes, But for How Long?
- Elgato Adds HDR to 4K60 Pro Capture Card
- Adobe Teases Project Rush for Simplified Video Production
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- More in Video Editing