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Apple Updates iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor With New Backgrounds, Enhanced Search, Notifications, and More

anakin44011 said:
Would you prefer they had called it iPad Express?


Sorry...that's a really arcane Final Cut Express reference, but I'm hoping at least 3 people will get a chuckle.
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Heh, maybe they could revive the names of Final Cut Express and Logic Express for the iPadOS versions of those apps! I mean, it's been ten years now since Final Cut Pro X came out in its' original version and thus Final Cut Express and the old FCP/Studio were discontinued, and the current FCP has really evolved into a very full-featured, professional video editing application, to the point where it can do pretty much (if not entirely) everything Adobe Premiere Pro and Magix Vegas Pro can do!
 
amartinez1660 said:
At least there seems to be many few updates every some few months lately, many sad updates may equal an OK one 😛

But agreed, some key things just not there or sometimes broken. I still don’t get why for example motion doesn’t have “compound clips”, FCP has them, every other compositing app has them… still love working in them though.
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That's what Clone layers are for in Motion. Personally I'd prefer not to have Compound Clips in FCPX, but some sort of collapsed mode saveable secondary story line that you can apply effects to. Jumping in and out of CC's is a pain. Sometimes.
 
R.T.J. said:
That is why no professionals use it. There used to be television networks using Final Cut 7 until Apple decided to ditch it, since then everybody went mack to avid or premiere. FCPX is good but the problem is Apple and their way of thinking of "we can do whatever we want whenever we want and people will still want us".
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Love Macs. FCP was my platform. Will never trust Apple again with pro software.
 
R.T.J. said:
That is why no professionals use it. There used to be television networks using Final Cut 7 until Apple decided to ditch it, since then everybody went mack to avid or premiere. FCPX is good but the problem is Apple and their way of thinking of "we can do whatever we want whenever we want and people will still want us".
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More folks use FCPX now than EVER used Final Cut 7 at it’s height. I’d say swapping one group for a much larger group is a win :)
 
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They released a 16g ram device. We wait for the update news? We are expecting pro apps on said pro device. They showed us that they put that all that ram to good use, and dropped custom app placement on the home screen. 🤯 Mind blown. Android tablets did that first try, in 2009. Apple isn't for professionals.
 
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Does any one uses iMovie, Motion or Compressor? I feel like they are the same as Pages and Numbers, they exist just because. iMovie was powerful yet easy to use editor until they upgraded it to its current form. I imagine PROs use something else than Motion and Compressor.

All that I understood is that some youtubers use FCP because its faster than AVID/Premier on their Apple Laptops. Hardly an app to compete against big names in the industry?!
 
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MacBH928 said:
Does any one uses iMovie, Motion or Compressor? I feel like they are the same as Pages and Numbers, they exist just because. iMovie was powerful yet easy to use editor until they upgraded it to its current form. I imagine PROs use something else than Motion and Compressor.

All that I understood is that some youtubers use FCP because its faster than AVID/Premier on their Apple Laptops. Hardly an app to compete against big names in the industry?!
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My experience:
I started using iMovie on an older 2013 iMac that I had lying around because I wanted to easily and quickly cut/edit/sync footage from Track/Lapping Days, so completely in a non-professional hobby level use case…

The goal was to not feel at work where I already do similar related to the games industry, it was great overall, getting used to it was quick and actually finished some vids which I would have never done if I were to do it in the professional way I’m used to: After Effects for concise shots, can spend weeks on a 20seconds piece.

Soon enough though, the limitations do kick in quick, limited set of presets/color-correction/titles/etc tools, etc made me take a pause from it. Aided by the fact that I did not have a full grasp of the library/events/keywords workflow (which is also in FCP).

Enter a fancy new 2020 iMac and FCP, none of those limitations, tons of plugins and overall more thorough. This now feels like a real program (except keyframes, forget about anything composition-like keyframing on the timeline) but still with the accessibility of a ‘hobby like’ approach that I was looking for before.

Now enter Motion: it is the front end engine for users that powers anything rendering in FCP.
It does compositing work alright but what it does best is creating generators/titles/plugins for FCP without the need to throw a single line of code… suppose that in FCP it’s not possible to create glass-like blurred backgrounds with a title on top, and that could be done in Motion/AE/etc by putting the footage there treated and re-exporting, but instead of going to motion to create ‘a specific title with a glass like blurred background’ it is better to create it in a way that when used in FCP (that same Motion project), it allows to ‘create any amount of blurred backgrounds with any title and colors whenever it’s dropped on the FCP timeline’: example, with some footage on the timeline, drop that tool done in Motion, it will blur your footage and give you the option to put a title in front at any size/text/color/etc/etc (these options depend on which parameters were exposed from motion for the user to see in FCP).
The $50 price tag is seriously misleading.

Enter compressor: by far the most user friendly but professionally capable transcoding tool also tightly integrated in anything FCP.

It is hard to try to cram up a lot of this in a single post but for me at least I can see myself doing stuff that I wouldn’t have before just because the iteration times are so much quicker not to mention accessible.

A normal everyday example that I wouldn’t ever do while on a windows world when doing some dev with Unity at work:
  • I can video-capture a section of the screen (Mac’s built-in screen capture)
  • drag and drop the thumbnail that appears on the bottom right of the screen (the one after capture stops) on an FCP event
  • This by default will copy that video file to the project’s library
  • Start chopping and editing it in realtime, add some arrows/zooms/highlights(motion-templates-powered) to key points.
  • Optionally could even add some captions (FCP built in ones, nothing fancy) or add some audio recordings overlay via the built-in voice recording tool.
  • Export and share with settings (from Compressor presets visible in FCP) that I know will work on any device.
  • The file size is too big for, say, Discord?… drag and drop the master file on compressor with a preset that it’s considerably lower size.
The key thing here is that it is blazingly fast, doing that loop depending on the length takes minutes, maybe 10 max on average.
Yes it has it quirks, I wish Motion was more like After Effects (mostly because that’s what I used for well over a decade), etc… but I don’t regret a single bit having opened iMovie a few years ago for random personal stuff.

On the movies front:
Not that many movies edited and cut on FCP, there are a few Hollywood movies though. But the reason why things like Avid and others are used is mostly because of legacy, there’s a whole pipeline, rulebooks, workflows that target specifically what has worked all along. Even the recent enough movie Parasite was edited in FCP 7 just because that’s what they were used to.
Quite a few of professional editors I have seen interviews with or videos online might bring up that on their everyday personal world, experimentations or doodling around they would use FCPX. But when it’s time to work for the big machine, if it is an Avid one, then there’s no work around that.

My .0002 cents.
 
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MacBH928 said:
Does any one uses iMovie, Motion or Compressor? I feel like they are the same as Pages and Numbers, they exist just because. iMovie was powerful yet easy to use editor until they upgraded it to its current form. I imagine PROs use something else than Motion and Compressor.

All that I understood is that some youtubers use FCP because its faster than AVID/Premier on their Apple Laptops. Hardly an app to compete against big names in the industry?!
Click to expand...
I still use the recent versions of iMovie for many of my fursuit vlogs and other fairly basic videos. A limitation it has I'm not too fond of is how you can only export in 16:9. While most of my vlogs and some other videos I shoot are in high-definition or at least in 16:9, I still make YouTube Poops of material made in the 4:3 aspect ratio, or other similar mashups or excerpts, so for YTPs or anything else elaborate I use FCP.
And I have used Motion at least a few times, usually to create effects to use in FCP, but have also used it for a few effects in YTPs I largely edit in FCP. If I ever work on some kind of short film that requires such fancy effects, I may do the effect shots in Motion.
And I have used Compressor for exporting some home movies into certain formats. I heard it's also decent for making DVDs and Blu-Rays, but I haven't tried that yet.

I've also talked about how FCP and Motion seem to have reinstated many of the flashy video effects the old iMovie (pre-2007) had, such as Earthquake, Flashing, Fog (Motion), Gaussian Blur, Ghost Trails (now simply called Trails), Lens Flare (Motion), Mirror, N-Square (now called Tile), Rain, Sharpen and Soft Focus (now called Glow). It especially helps they now have keyframe control, so you have far better control over those effects than you did in the old iMovie. But why haven't they brought back the Electricity and Fairy Dust effects into FCP or Motion yet?
 
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I use iMovie, but they seem to have removed some functionality with this latest version. It could never export 4k60, but now it won’t even do 1080p60. It also exports as mp4 rather than mov, for what difference that makes.
 
I am not sure where MacRumours sees an Updated Version of "iMovie for iOS" -
the iOS App Store currently shows version 2.3.2 as being 6 months old...

The macOS Version is a few Days old...
 
mjrw85 said:
I use iMovie, but they seem to have removed some functionality with this latest version. It could never export 4k60, but now it won’t even do 1080p60. It also exports as mp4 rather than mov, for what difference that makes.
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Hmm, on my MacBook Air I was able to export a video on the most recent iMovie in 1080p60.
 
amartinez1660 said:
Even the recent enough movie Parasite was edited in FCP 7 just because that’s what they were used to.
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can FCP7 even edit HD/4K quality movies?
I don't understand why they doodle with FCPX then go to use AVID for the real thing, doodle with AVID if that is what you know how to use.

I don't think Apple is serious about FCP any more, they just keep it to not anger whoever is using it I guess
 
MacBH928 said:
can FCP7 even edit HD/4K quality movies?
I don't understand why they doodle with FCPX then go to use AVID for the real thing, doodle with AVID if that is what you know how to use.

I don't think Apple is serious about FCP any more, they just keep it to not anger whoever is using it I guess
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You'd have to downscale your 4K footage to 1080p in order to bring it into Final Cut Pro 7. It's far easier to just load the 4K video into the newest versions of Final Cut Pro. I hope Apple still keeps FCP in mind, especially since over the past few years it's gotten a lot more professional again. Even the user interface since version 10.3 looks a lot more pro-like and less iMovie-like than the earlier versions did.
 
MacBH928 said:
can FCP7 even edit HD/4K quality movies?
I don't understand why they doodle with FCPX then go to use AVID for the real thing, doodle with AVID if that is what you know how to use.

I don't think Apple is serious about FCP any more, they just keep it to not anger whoever is using it I guess
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My understanding: they do things in FCP because it’s faster and modern. They do it in AVID because they are forced to by legacy rulebooks or the people in charge, understandably, not fixing what’s not broken.

I saw some making of videos of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, there are some on Vimeo/YouTube about the use of FCP in it.

By the way, there’s also this Hollywood:FCP channel that has a lot of comparison of doing a task in one software vs in FCP. Sometimes the task is done in a ridiculously simpler form in FCP compared the others, sometimes is not even doable:

I don’t really know what to think of it but learning it has been quite an enjoyable (sprinkled with frustrations) ride.
 
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