Final Cut Pro to Gain 'Transcribe to Caption' AI Feature

[sevoneone]

Apple’s stance in AI is to not tamper with creativity. But AI features save so much time. If Apple insists, they are just going to lose their customers to 3rd party softwares

Indeed. FCP has kinda fallen into being a show horse for Apple technology. There have been some updates, like the AI frame interpolation, that are very standout and cool, but the in-between and quality of life stuff for editors is not keeping up with the competition.

Choosing the next clip to transition to can take an age when you have hours of footage to look through.

I would quite like an additional spoken interface : "Display all the clips when I am panning vertically down a model on my left screen; create a temporary In Point starting that the hips and an Out Point after 1 second; Only show clips that are not already used in the timeline; Display them in a grid all playing at 1/4 real time speed on a loop so that I can decide which clip I want to cut to"

I would absolutely love a filter/smartbin system based on this. I'd rather use buttons than voice to interact with it, but would still be awesome, along with some sort of detection that marks the parts of the clips I most likely will want to use.

Does it allow for editing spatial video though?

That’s the thing

It can edit 360° Stereoscopic Video, I don't know why they have never bothered to add VR180 Support, which is basically what spatial video is. There are workarounds for editing 180 content in a 360° canvas, but why not native?

 

[sevoneone]

A mid-range PC can do more with video in DaVinci or Premiere than the highest-spec Mac can do with FCP and Motion. It's not the hardware that is the bottleneck, it's the software.

Yeah, but Apple Silicon Macs are no slouches at runnning Davinci Resolve. Trounced by high-end desktops with top-shelf Nvidia GPUs sure, but a $450 used/refurbed M1 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM can edit 4k smoothly in Resolve. Are there any $450 PCs out there that can say the same?

 

[DownUnderDan]

Does anyone use Final Cut aka iMovie Pro anymore?

Yeah it's a thing.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I wish they would use AI for extending music tracks. They would be far more useful.

Does the desktop version not do this with Soundtracks? I was just playing with the iPad version and I can set it to any length and it creates a track that “ends well” instead of just cutting out.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Honestly, those types of powerful tools built directly into FCPX without the need for 3rd parties would justify the purchase of an M4 Mac.

Yeah, but that would also mean no 3rd parties making video editing software for macOS if Apple’s solution can do “everything” for one relatively low lifetime price.

What is the point of paying such a premium for a high-end mac when apple no longer has exclusive software to take advantage of it? A mid-range PC can do more with video in DaVinci or Premiere than the highest-spec Mac can do with FCP and Motion. It's not the hardware that is the bottleneck, it's the software.

I actually think Apple’s been making that case. If a user doesn’t need macOS, they don’t necessarily need a Mac. A lot of folks have taken the hint and left Apple’s solutions behind. Apple’s done a good job at that.

 

[wikiverse]

Yeah, but that would also mean no 3rd parties making video editing software for macOS if Apple’s solution can do “everything” for one relatively low lifetime price.

I actually think Apple’s been making that case. If a user doesn’t need macOS, they don’t necessarily need a Mac. A lot of folks have taken the hint and left Apple’s solutions behind. Apple’s done a good job at that.

3rd parties will always make Apple versions of their software. Avid and Adobe did even when apple had >50% of the market with FCP7. Apple will make the money on the hardware sales. Right now there's no incentive to upgrade from a 2017 MPB. Even though it is obsolete and can no longer get macOS upgrades. It still runs Premiere and DaVinci just fine.

No one 'needs' macOS or a Mac. The point is that Apple were supposed to be revolutionising video editing with FCPX (according to their own launch), and it has really become the slowest horse in the race. But it doesn't need to be. Apple could put a relatively small team onto the project, fully integrate Motion, Roto, Tracking, Effects, etc. and become a professional tool again.

The biggest problem with Apple Silicon computers is the lack of dedicated apps that can use the power and efficiency.

 

[wikiverse]

Yeah, but Apple Silicon Macs are no slouches at runnning Davinci Resolve. Trounced by high-end desktops with top-shelf Nvidia GPUs sure, but a $450 used/refurbed M1 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM can edit 4k smoothly in Resolve. Are there any $450 PCs out there that can say the same?

I can run Davinci Resolve on an obsolete 2017 i7 MPB and edit/grade 4K footage smoothly. Blackmagic have done a great job at optimising the performance of their software. It would be easy to build a better PC that can do the same - especially a desktop.

The complaint though is how far FCP has fallen behind. It doesn't need Apple Silicon, because it can't do anything that would actually use it. Apple have the power to fix that.

 

[flexwithmarius]

Finally I can ditch that ancient X Title Extractor plugin

 

[jonnysods]

Text based editing would save me eons with some of the videos I have to edit for clients. Even just having the transcription generated more easily would be great as I have to often write articles based on their video content and the transcription would save me a lot of time.

 

[mansplains]

I wish they would use AI for extending music tracks. They would be far more useful.

Seriously, this isn’t long enough. Ten hours minimum for me.

 

[amartinez1660]

Captions are nice, but they need some form of text based editing if they want to remain competitive with Resolve, Premiere and AI specific tools like DeScript. Text based editing is a game changer for making video editing more accessible and speeds things up even for experienced editors. I have hardly touched Final Cut in the past year because the transcription based editing in Resolve is such a time saver.

“Text based editing”… that’s a new one to me. Gotta brush up as of right now to understand what some of you are even referring to 😮

Choosing the next clip to transition to can take an age when you have hours of footage to look through.

I would quite like an additional spoken interface : "Display all the clips when I am panning vertically down a model on my left screen; create a temporary In Point starting that the hips and an Out Point after 1 second; Only show clips that are not already used in the timeline; Display them in a grid all playing at 1/4 real time speed on a loop so that I can decide which clip I want to cut to"

Is that an example of text based editing that Resolve can do? Because that’s insane… they have been doing crazy stuff non stop.

 

[funwithstuff]

Choosing the next clip to transition to can take an age when you have hours of footage to look through.

I would quite like an additional spoken interface : "Display all the clips when I am panning vertically down a model on my left screen; create a temporary In Point starting that the hips and an Out Point after 1 second; Only show clips that are not already used in the timeline; Display them in a grid all playing at 1/4 real time speed on a loop so that I can decide which clip I want to cut to"

I would expect this kind of interface to be coming to many kinds of apps sometime over the next couple of years, and it will be pretty transformational — the first versions of this came out with Claude recently. As a trainer/author, I'm a little mixed, because it's probably the point at which people stop actually learning how to use their software.

 

[funwithstuff]

Does it allow for editing spatial video though?

That’s the thing

Apple have announced that Spatial video editing support would be coming to FCP this year, so fingers crossed it'll be announced at the FCP Creative Summit in a couple of weeks from now!

Hit up fcpcreativesummits.com if you want to visit Apple Park and see that live — see you there?

(It's not free, but use the code JOINME for 15% off.)

 

[sos47]

its all about plugins
adobe premiere and davinci having tons.

 

[svish]

Good to see this change. Will definitely be useful for some.

 

[funwithstuff]

its all about plugins
adobe premiere and davinci having tons.

FCP has many, many plug-ins, templates and effects available, because of the Motion integration that's existed for years. Try fxfactory.com, motionVFX.com, lenoFX.com, bretfx.com.

 

[JamesMay82]

Subtitling was my least favourite thing to do so this will be a game changer! Save lots of money as well if you don’t have to outsource

 

[Frantisekj]

Captions are nice, but they need some form of text based editing if they want to remain competitive with Resolve, Premiere and AI specific tools like DeScript. Text based editing is a game changer for making video editing more accessible and speeds things up even for experienced editors. I have hardly touched Final Cut in the past year because the transcription based editing in Resolve is such a time saver.

Adding captions to videos you can do with every other iPhone. And if they do not add good editor they it’s not very useful.

With power of M chips they could already do live overdub with natural AI voices. That’s feature worth app like Final Cut.

 

[ethanmd]

If you have a script, making accurate subtitles with Premiere Pro is a doodle, because you can auto-generate captions and then import the original text to make corrections. Then you have captions that are accurate in content and timing.

Auto generated subtitles are very useful to documentaries in particular, they can help you with editing as well (searching for when somebody talked about x subject), but it's still quite laborious to make corrections, so I expect this will be useful, but still behind Adobe's implementation.

 

[JungleNYC]

Praise be! This is a loooong time coming. Anyone who does caption work knows how many hours it eats in a day.

 

[Rank Sarpac]

How about giving FCPX a proper 'roles based' audio mixer, as folks have been asking Apple for at least 8 years now 🙈

This is the only thing having me drift to Resolve so much lately. Plus I have some familiarity with node-based effects back from the Apple Shake days.

 

[BradMacPro]

If this is an AI, thing, I'm thinking this may be Apple Silicon only.

 

[spicynujac]

Does anyone use Final Cut aka iMovie Pro anymore?

Absolutely. Best editing program out there. The outdated one is imovie.
Not that there's really anything better than imovie in its class. But it just hasn't been updated or refined in years.

I'm a professional photographer and I tried ALL the video editing software except Adobe's because I refuse to rent software. I mean a BUNCH of them. Like 20 programs or so. FCPX is the easiest to use and has all the features I need. It may lack a feature here and there (like this auto-captioning) but more efficient workflow with a logical and friendly user interface wins every single time.

 

[GlassFingers]

I just want an assistant that can do things like “hey make my copies of this transition all this length or change this colour on all of them”.

Edited something the other day then changed a colour and had to go along to each time I’d pasted it and make the same change.

Get into the habit of putting your source footage into a Multicam clip or Compound clip and work with that on the timeline. Then later if you need to go back and change the color, you can do it once at the master level.

 

[GlassFingers]

I wish they would use AI for extending music tracks. They would be far more useful.

Agreed. This would be amazing.