Apple announced the second update in four months for Final Cut Pro X this Thursday. The company’s professional-level app for video editing on the Mac has received two new features; closed captioning and ProRes RAW file format.
FCPX’s use of ProRes as an intermediate codec allows its users to work with high-quality video images as also ensuring enough performance to minimize hindrances during the editing process, a frequent side-effect of working with unprocessed RA-formatted video. Apple’s new ProRes RAW format file type has combined the visual benefit of RAW with the performance of ProRes, thus ensuring hassle-free editing.
ProRes RAW allows FCPX users to work with RAW data from the camera sensor, which is ideal for making image quality adjustments, and the ProRes RAW files are smaller than uncompressed RAW video, even smaller than ProRes 4444 and ProRes 422HQ, claims Apple. The performance boost provided by the latest update shall allow an iMac Pro to play eight simultaneous streams of ProRes RAW 4K video during picture-in-picture editing; and shall offer drastic improvements in rendering and export times over Redcode RAW and Canon Cinema RAW Light.
Atomos’s Sumo 19 and Shogun Inferno camera monitors will support playback of ProRes RAW upon having a free firmware update applied to it, and DJI’s Zenumse 19 camera for its Inspire 2 drone will be able to capture video in ProRes RAW through the RAW activation package scheduled to be released later this Spring.
So far as closed captioning is concerned, FCPX now has a full suite of closed-captioning tools that shall allow editors to import captions or create new ones. These captions will be tied to the selected video or audio clip, which means that the caption will move along with the clip.
Apple has created the feature in a way so that it overlaps with validation, thus informing editors if captions overlap, contain errors or invalid characters, or are improperly formatted. Captions can be exported in CEA-608 and iTT formats, be embedded into a video file or exported as a sidecar file, and have YouTube and Vimeo support.
FCPX is available for $300 in the Mac App Store, along with Compressor ($50) and Motion ($50).
The updates to Final Cut Pro X, Compressor, and Motion will be made available in the Mac App Store from 9th April 2018.
