Apple makes updates to Final Cut Pro X & iMovie for Mac

Apple on Thursday released updates to its main Mac video editing tools, Final Cut Pro X and iMovie, focusing the brunt of improvements on the former.

Final Cut users can now see more color options in the Role Editor, change the width of the Inspector when adjusting effect parameters, and run Canon Log 3 and Sony S-Log3/S-Gamut3 log processing, Apple said in release notes. DVD creation is another focus area, for instance offering improved font quality in menus and chapters, as well as better overall image quality.

The update also makes bug fixes, solving glitches with older libraries, Reveal in Browser, and the viewer disappearing when leaving fullscreen mode. Audio waveforms should redraw faster when using clips being imported while recorded to disk.

The iMovie update is purely a maintenance release, dealing with problems such as red tint being added to camcorder imports, and iPhone videos not appearing in the import window.

Final Cut is $299.99 new. iMovie comes bundled with modern Macs, but is otherwise $14.99. For existing users, Thursday's updates are free downloads via the Mac App Store.

10 Comments

ibgarrett 21 comments · 15 Years

About 7 years ago

Apple has flat-out given up on their software on the Macintosh platform. It used to be the iWorks and iLife packages were a "must have", now it's just given away as an afterthought... It's so frustrating.

StrangeDays 12959 comments · 8 Years

ibgarrett said:

Apple has flat-out given up on their software on the Macintosh platform. It used to be the iWorks and iLife packages were a "must have", now it's just given away as an afterthought... It's so frustrating.

Huh? You're responding to an article about updates, so your statement is flat-out incorrect.

Also there have been several updates to iworks lately, and i wouldn't want to be without it. No desire to pay for Office, and no need to do column-flows or whatever it is people complain about Pages not having.

bells 140 comments · 8 Years

ibgarrett said:

Apple has flat-out given up on their software on the Macintosh platform. It used to be the iWorks and iLife packages were a "must have", now it's just given away as an afterthought... It's so frustrating.

You read the article right? Apple charges for Final Cut Pro. Like always iMovie is free with a new Mac purchase.

Rayz2016 6957 comments · 8 Years

ibgarrett said:

Apple has flat-out given up on their software on the Macintosh platform. It used to be the iWorks and iLife packages were a "must have", now it's just given away as an afterthought... It's so frustrating.

I've seen folk who haven't bothered to read the article, but this the first time I've come across someone who didn't make it to the end of the title.

fearless 138 comments · 21 Years

I wonder if the same good souls who confessed that the 2013 Mac Pro was a fail for high end users, could be induced to apply the same thought to FCP X. I can't use a product where I can't lock tracks or timeline content to stop it sliding like jello. And I still can't send a presentable embedded AAF to a ProTools session that is anything like what a sound mixer might recognise. Sorry to harp on about this for 5 years, but yesterday I had to get content from DaVinci to Motion for a VFX job (am I the only person still using it for motion tracking fixes?) and the path was an XML to FCP7, "Send to Motion..." via Motion 4, then open that project in Motion 5 - won't even look at a raw XML, and even if I'd started in FCP X (which I wouldn't have, because this is on the back of a grade) I couldn't have done this because there's no way to Motion from FCP X.
Both Motion and FCP are now start-to-finish tools - minus decent audio mixing. Little wonder our facility does more business from Avid, Adobe and FCP 7 sources than FCP X.

Having said that, getting a project into Resolve is a very well developed path - if anyone used FCP X for projects they didn't completely finish in some fashion on their laptop.