During NAB 2015 this week, Apple released updates to Final Cut Pro X, Motion and Compressor.
Final Cut Pro X 10.2’s big new features include:
- 3D titles
- improved masking for color grading and effects
- native support for more camera formats
- GPU-accelerated RED RAW processing
Motion 5.2 extends the power of 3D titles with the ability to create custom materials and environments and instantly publish them to Final Cut Pro X. And, Compressor 4.2 makes it easy to package a movie for sale on the iTunes Store.
The complete list of release notes for Final Cut Pro X 10.2 are listed below.
Introducing 3D titles
- Beautifully animated and easily customizable 3D text
- Simple templates to get started quickly
- Cinematic templates with built-in backgrounds and animations
- Large collection of text styles to create stunning looks with one click
- Customize your titles with hundreds of combinations of materials, lighting, and edges
- Additional controls to adjust environment, shadows, and more
- Instantly convert 2D titles to 3D
- Open any title in Motion to add multiple lights, cameras, and tracking
Advanced effects
- Display up to four video scopes simultaneously
- Apply super ellipse Shape Mask to any clip
- Apply Draw mask to any clip, with options for linear, bezier, or B-spline smoothing
- New shape and color mask controls for every effect
- Instantly display the alpha channel for any effect mask
- Save custom effects as presets for quick access
- Color Board merged into the new Color Correction effect
- Rearrange the processing order of the Color Correction effect
- Improved keyframing with better motion smoothing
- Improved optical flow for beautiful slow motion on a wider range of content
- Better performance of FxPlug plug-ins and built-in effects that use multiple frames like Visual Echo and Trails
Camera formats
- Support for Panasonic AVC-Ultra codec family
- Support for Sony XAVC S format
- Import Sony XAVC and XDCAM formats without separate plug-in
- Support for JVC H.264 Long GOP format
- GPU-accelerated RED RAW processing with support for dual GPUs
- Support for RED RAW anamorphic formats
Additional features
- You can now use Smart Collections at the event and library level
- Import window consolidates all options into a single sidebar
- GPU rendering when using Send To Compressor with support for dual GPUs
- CABAC entropy mode for multi-pass encoding
- XML 1.5 for third-party interchange. For legacy third-party applications, XML 1.4 continues to be supported
Final Cut Pro X 10.2 also includes the following:
- Faster drawing of audio waveforms which improves performance especially when editing over a network
- Transform controls work correctly with photos in a secondary storyline
- Resizable Filter window for searching
- Freeze frames copy media across multiple libraries
- Slo-mo video clips from iPhone appear in the Browser with a badge
- Full-screen playback does not automatically superimpose transport controls
- Improved performance when skimming Long GOP video including AVCHD
- Exporting a Master File using i-Frame codecs like ProRes can play in QuickTime Player before the export completes
- Support for XAVC S video recorded at 120 fps and 240 fps
- MXF-wrapped AVC-Intra and Uncompressed files export faster
Final Cut Pro X remains $299 from the Mac App Store. Version 10.2 is a free upgrade for existing users.
