A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced their new software bundle, wrapping their video, animation, design and music apps together with a selection of premium assets and AI tools for other free apps like Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.
Today, all that software was released, and we’ll take a quick look at the key video apps with a focus on Final Cut Pro 12, Motion 6 and Compressor 5. Worth noting: the standalone versions of the apps still have their old icons, while the Apple Creator Studio versions have newer, simplified icons. If you’re mixing a subscription trial with existing purchased apps, use the icons to tell the two apart.
FCP 12: Transcript Search
In a hugely welcome addition, Final Cut Pro 12 now allows you to search through dialogue spoken out loud in your source clips. Timeline transcription has been present for some time, and that remains, but transcribing the source clips is what enables really interesting workflows for dialogue-heavy projects.
Clips can be transcribed during import (or afterwards) and then, the Browser’s search field lets you type in phrases you’re searching for, returning a short part of any clip where that word or phrase is found. This search can be fuzzy if you want it to be, and if you search for word fragment, like “hug”, it’ll also find words like “huge”. To avoid this, just add a space after “hug“. For more explicit control, click the magnifying glass icon to the left of the Search bar, where you can choose “Include” to find exact phrases, or “Is Related To” to return related phrases. It’s also possible to click the icon to the right of the search bar to perform more advanced searches with the same options.
FCP 12 only supports US English, though it’s done a decent job of detecting Australian and UK English in my tests. All transcription is locally performed on device, so there’s no privacy issue, and it’s quick: about 9.5 hours of content was transcribed in around 5 minutes on my MacBook Pro with M3 Max.
Unfortunately, while this approach does allow you find a specific phrase, you have to know (or guess) that a phrase (or related text) exists, and it also has to be detected accurately. If we could see the detected transcript and simply read it for ourselves, we might be able to find some moments more quickly than listening to them. A visible transcript might also help our fuzzy pattern-matching brains to spot phrases that hadn’t been detected correctly.
Most problematic, because we also can’t export the transcripts, we can’t send them to our clients so that they (often the subject matter experts) can both find the moments that matter to them, and check the spoken text for accuracy. While it’s of course still possible to use a third-party app to transcribe, it’s a real shame that we can’t export transcribed source clips with the ease we can export captions on a timeline.
Both Premiere and Resolve allow you to see, export and then edit directly with a transcript, and I’m confused as to why FCP didn’t get one in this update. If you agree, please send the team a polite feature request. Transcript search does work well, and the fuzziness of the search helps, but with a visible transcript it doesn’t reinvent my editing workflows. Fingers crossed for v13.
FCP 12: Visual Search
Finally, Final Cut Pro can now recognize the contents of your clips and let you find them with natural language: shots with clouds, or water, or a car, or someone running. This analysis happens after the automatic transcription by default, and though it can take a while to complete, it saves a lot of effort creating keywords manually. This analysis does take (much) longer than transcription, and as analysis pauses when you play video, you may wish to take a break to allow it to complete. On my system, the same 9.5 hours of clips took a little less than 2 hours to analyze, all on-device.
Apple’s Photos app (on iOS and Mac) has long offered something similar, also processed on-device. If you’ve never used it and you have an iPhone nearby, open Photos, tap the magnifying glass, then type “chair”. Bingo, all the shots of people sitting down or of empty chairs.
Useful, right? Essentially, Visual Search is the same thing, and works about as well as search in Photos does. Anyone who’s struggled with finding the right B-roll clip now has another way to find that clip lost in the stack. While FCP’s skimmer and filmstrip view have always made glancing through clips pretty easy, this is a big step up.
I’ve wanted this for a very long time, even publicly wishing for it on a podcast and seeing Ulti.media create the FCP Video Tag app in response. Today, the third-party app Jumper probably leads this space, but we’ve seen similar features in the library management app Peakto, in previous versions of Strada (though not in the current release) and in Premiere’s Media Intelligence feature.
These apps essentially take one of two approaches: creating explicit keywords, or recognizing the footage and letting you search with natural language. Like Jumper, FCP’s Visual Search doesn’t create explicit keywords, but lets you search for anything you like. Visual Search won’t always find something, but it’s done a pretty good job in most of my tests.
Sometimes you’ll need to experiment to get the results you want; if you try a search term and it doesn’t return anything, try a similar word. Searching for “sea” didn’t find a clip that “ocean” did, for example. I was able to find the sun, clouds, people wearing jackets, people in wheelchairs, and clapperboards quite easily, while searching for books produced some false positives with book-like objects. A section of a clip with a painting of a bird was found when searching for “bird” (great) while a blue logo was found when searching for “water” (not great).
Interestingly, in a collection of clips I shot at the last Final Cut Pro Creative Summit in 2024, it could find shots of “Apple Park” but couldn’t find a “vision pro”. Visual search will always, by its nature, remain a little fuzzy, but the larger and more diverse your footage, the more useful it will be. UPDATE: Note that search results are classified by relevance, but you’ll only see a clip’s rating in the Relevance column of List view, or if you activate grouping by relevance in Filmstrip view.
In comparative tests with Jumper and Premiere’s Media Intelligence, I think Jumper does the best job overall. Media Intelligence’s analysis is quickest, but it doesn’t always locate the part of a clip your search terms have matched, and a search for “apple” didn’t find all the Apple logos that FCP could. It’s a mixed bag, though — Final Cut Pro’s visual search didn’t find all the instances of “wheelchair” that the other two did.
While I think I’ll need to curate a collection of test clips and run some more exhaustive tests to find exactly where each of these services excel and falter, FCP’s Visual Search is the most integrated into the core editing app, making it easier to engage with.
After a Visual Search In FCP, if you find some clips you like and want to return to them later, you can create a smart collection (to repeat the search later) or use more traditional strategies like adding a keyword or rating these clips as Favorites. While I might have reservations about the implementation details of Transcript Search, Visual Search is well integrated and a very useful addition to the app.
FCP 12: Beat Detection
This is something else I’ve wanted for a long time, and FCP’s implementation here is top-tier. Bring in an audio clip, tap ⌥B to enable beat detection on that clip, and after a quick analysis pass, you’ll visually see where all the beats land. The Beat Grid can then be shown or hidden by tapping 0 (zero). While adding markers manually has worked for me in the past, this is far superior; you can zoom in and out to see more potential beats to snap on to.
At a high level, when zoomed out, the major points at which the audio features a strong change will be highlighted. Zoom in on part of the timeline and you’ll see additional markers for each measure, with beats showing notes inside each one. It’s excellent.
This really helps with one of the key problems that cutting to the beat brings — the edit gets boring quickly. If you can zoom in and find something else in the song to lock on to, that brings variety. Of course, you don’t have to always cut on a beat; it can really help to find a key moment in a clip, like a door slam or other impact, then drop a marker and sync that moment up to a beat instead.
Premiere and Resolve still have a leg up with music here; if a clip isn’t the right length, those NLEs can extend or shorten a clip on their own, and FCP can’t do that yet. However, the Beat Grid does make it much, much easier to find where a song repeats so you can do this yourself.
FCP 12: Visible help for new users
When you first start out with FCP, it’s not always obvious what to do. Happily, in the new version, you’ll see helpful on-screen guidance to help you get started properly.
These notes tell you what the Browser is, what goes in a Timeline, and while they’re not going to be of much help to existing editors, new editors will love them. The terminology in FCP is a little different to other NLEs, and the number of people who put everything in a giant Library called “Untitled” is probably more than Apple would like.
Because names aren’t always obvious, if you’re jumping into FCP to take a look, here are a few basics:
- A Library holds or points to the all media for a job and contains Events. It’s usually wisest to make a new Library for each job you do for a client, but some people prefer to make new Events and keep all work for a client in a single Library.
- Events contain clips, containers like compound clips and multicam clips, and Projects, which are your timelines (aka sequences).
- Organization is usually done with Keywords, and if you pre-organize your clips into folders, every containing folder will become a Keyword by default. Keywords let clips appear to be in multiple places at the same time.
- Subclips can be made with Keywords, or by selecting part of a clip and pressing F to mark it as a Favorite. If you then view Favorites Only in the Browser, you’ll just see all the best bits.
Final Cut Pro’s strength has always been that it approaches things differently, but that has meant that users of other NLEs have always struggled more than novices. Built-in context-ready help was overdue, but is very welcome.
Along with the headline features there are a few minor updates and bug fixes. I’ll just highlight one, which is that using Paste Attributes on a single clip wouldn’t reliably paste the Spatial Conform property. This was a pain for anyone using Open Gate media (see my recent articles here and here) and I’m very glad to see this one fixed. (As an aside, I reported this bug! Thanks to the team for fixing it.)
Motion 6: Magnetic Mask and more
FCP’s Magnetic Mask is faster than Resolve’s Magic Mask and After Effects’s Roto Brush, and clearly inspired Premiere’s Object Selection tool, so it’s great to see it flow across into Motion, which has more matte-focused tools to perform finer cleanup than FCP does. If you’re doing any compositing in Motion, you’ll be very pleased to see this one here.
To access it, choose the dedicated new tool at the right of the toolbar, click on the parts of the image you want to select, then finesse the selection and analyze with the tools in the Inspector.
After analysis, toggle the Edit Mode from Select Objects to Show Result, and you can then invert or feather the mask before using it for further compositing.
3D Text has also seen a big speed boost due to under-the-hood changes. To test this out, I created a new 4K 50 fps project, added a line of 3D text, then made 60 copies using a replicator and used the Sequence Replicator behavior to spin many of them around at the same time. On Motion 5, playback hovered around 26fps, but on Motion 6, the same project played a 41fps. A 50% speed bost on 3D text? Yes please.
While Motion’s never been expensive, it’s still often been overlooked. While it doesn’t have the compositing features of After Effects, for motion graphics it can actually do an excellent job, and often way faster than AE. If you’re testing out the Apple Creator Studio, don’t sleep on Motion.
Compressor 5: Immersive bundles
It’s now far easier than before to prepare footage the Apple Vision Pro, including not just footage from the monster Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive but Spatial Audio in the ASAF format. Most footage like this will be prepared first through Resolve (and check out this video from Hugh Huo for a full workflow) but Compressor is a great choice for more control over the final export.
UPDATE: although BRAW support was promised in FCP at the last FCP Creative Summit in 2024, it’s still to arrive. For now at least, you can use BRAW Toolbox to access BRAW footage in FCP, and the recent update to v1.5 allows previewing of Immersive footage from the URSA Cine Immersive — even letting you choose which lens to view. Without at least 3D 180° support in FCP it’ll be hard to deliver the footage in a proper immersive format, but for previewing and potential spatial (non-immersive) uses, it could be very handy.
However you edit your footage, you’ll now be able to use presets like this one to prep your media:
While this is great, I wish I could push even more pixels to the Apple Vision Pro. Unfortunately, the maximum delivery resolution is limited, at the codec level, to 4320 pixels high, so there’s no way to share footage at the original captured media size of 7200 pixels high. Obviously, there are limits to what devices can play and what networks can deliver — we’re shooting for the moon here — but I’m really hoping for some kind of workaround to push past this hard limit. Immersive needs all the pixels it can get, and I want to see everything these fantastic cameras can shoot.
Conclusion
There’s more to this bundle than I can share right now, and it’ll take time to unpack the new changes. Still, it’s easy to say that at US $12.99/month or US$129/year, Apple Creator Studio is a great deal for many video- and audio-focused creatives. As well as the three video apps here, there are iPad versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro on Mac and iPad, Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad, MainStage on Mac, plus additional AI powers and assets for Keynote, Pages, Numbers and eventually Freeform too. Some new assets (like Titles and Transitions) for Final Cut Pro are also exclusively available in the subscription.
The first month is free, but new users looking for a more extended trial of any of these apps now have an easy way to see how well they fit into their workflows. Anyone who previously subscribed to Final Cut Pro for iPad or Logic Pro for iPad and wants to keep using them will now get access to many more apps for about the cost of these two older subs combined. Yes, the base cost has gone up, but there’s a lot more included now.
The easiest decision? Any students who ever want to create any music or videos should definitely spend US$3/month to massively expand their creative potential. While the student plan is for one person only, the full-price subscription can be shared across a family group for no extra charge — ideal for parents of budding filmmakers.
Lastly, pro video users who already own Final Cut Pro and/or Motion get free updates as usual. While they have less incentive to embrace the subscription life, it could still be worthwhile. If you’ve always wanted to get into Logic Pro, or if you make heavy use of Keynote — long a powerhouse app for animated charts and diagrams — you can dip in to a subscription as you need the extra apps, then fall back on your existing apps when you don’t.
Look for future articles exploring the wider suite, but for now — back up your existing apps, update away, and dive into the welcome new features.