Final Cut

Final Cut Camera is a new Apple app that offers incredible manual control over your iPhone’s camera system. If you use your phone for professional videography — or even for a hobby project — you should use this free app to take videos rather than sticking with the stock Camera app.

Final Cut Camera comes absolutely packed with professional features the Camera app can’t match. The new app gives you finer control over exposure, white balance, color temperature and more. You can enable image overlays to see which parts of the frame are in focus or overexposed. In short, it’s a highly versatile camera. You can even pair it with Final Cut Pro for iPad to capture footage from multiple iPhones simultaneously.

Final Cut Camera is totally free on the App Store. Keep reading to learn how to use it. 

The latest version of Final Cut Pro X is out now with a new Metal engine that promises a big performance boost. It also make optimizations for the all-new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR.

Apple is today bringing the same Metal engine to Motion and Compressor, too.

Apple’s next big venture could be to go head-to-head with Snapchat and similar content-sharing services. The company is expected to integrate new video features into iOS that would be developed by the engineers behind Final Cut and iMovie.

But is this a good idea? Apple failed miserably when it tried to take on social networks before, and some would argue that many of its products already suffer as a result of its expansion into new areas.

Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight as we battle it out over whether Apple is wasting its time trying to fight Snapchat.

The Touch is a cool-looking new way to control Adobe Lightroom, either using your Magic trackpad or your iPad. It’s a small app that runs alongside Lightroom (or Final Cut Pro X) and lets you control it using all manner of gestures, taps, and swipes, letting you focus less on which slider to grab and more on looking at the image itself.

Visual editing software Smoke may now be in the clear for prosumer or indie filmmakers.

Autodesk’s latest version of Smoke will cost $3,495 and you can run it on your MacBook Pro. While that same wad of cash may still be enough to get you a cruddy used car, that’s about one-third the $15,000 price the California-based multinational was asking for the previous version of the software released just last year. The more affordable price may put cool effects like green screens and 3D within reach.

Apple has promised to issue a major update to Final Cut Pro X “sometime during 2012” that will deliver a number of new features, including multichannel audio editing, dual viewers, and more, to its professional video editing software. The Cupertino company provided all the details to producer, editor, and director Larry Jordan.

Avid has been making professional video editing software for decades, and with the introduction of the “pro-sumer” Final Cut Pro X, many industry leaders have turned back to Avid for their editing needs.

Interestingly, Avid has launched an official app called Avid Studio for the iPad. With more features than the iMovie iPad app, Avid Studio is the first semi-professional editing tool to hit Apple’s tablet.

Disgruntled video editors who were unsatisfied with their Final Cut Pro X purchase earlier this year seem to have turned to Adobe’s products instead. The company’s video tools for Mac have seen a 45% growth year-over-year, undoubtedly thanks to the fiasco that surrounded Apple’s latest Final Cut following its release.

Update: Final Cut X will be $299 and will be available in the App Store in June. Still unknown are the future of Final Cut Studio (Including Soundtrack, Motion, Compressor, Color, DVD Studio) or Express.

Apple is, at the very moment I’m writing this, taking the cloak off of Final Cut X live and to much applause in front of the Final Cut Pro User Group Network in Las Vegas. For several weeks there have been rumors and murmurings that Apple would today unveil the next iteration of its venerable Final Cut video editing software, we’re learning now those rumors were true.

Final Cut users know that the last major update the software had was about 10 years ago. Though many users love the program, it was getting so long in the tooth it was starting to look like a vampire.

Details of the new Final Cut X are still coming in since the unveiling isn’t over yet, but one attendee at the event is posting updates via twitter (thanks @fcpsupermeet). Here are some notables from his twitter stream:

• Crowd is unruly!
• Final Cut X is a full rebuild from scratch
• 64 bit – Crowd: “finally!” “thank you!”
• Cocoa, Core Animation, Open CL, Grand Central Dispatch support
• The Focus was on image quality
• Fully color managed
• Resolution independent playback/timeline all the way up to 4K
• Features people detection, single or in groups
• Non-destructive auto color balance
• Automatic audio cleanup (option to auto noise reduce audio, more)
• Features “smart collections”: a lot like the smart folders found in OS X
• Editing can start immediately during importing of AVCHD and other media, switches silently to local media as it ingests
• Uses every available cpu cycle to keep things rendered. Also highly scalable. Will even work on a Macbook
• No interruption for rendering. No transcoding, EVERYTHING native. (incl DSLR footage–assume this means AVC)
• Presentation received a standing ovation!

Via macrumors.com.

As a rule, Apple is secretive about when to expect updates to their product lines, but if you know Cupertino’s history of past releases, it’s usually pretty easy to guess when they are likely to announce a new product.

Most of the time, that’s good enough, except when it isn’t. As film postproduction consultant Dustyn Gobler notes, when Apple is secretive about future plans for its software suites — in this case, Final Cut Pro — people who are running their businesses on that software can get edgy.

Gobler decided to write Steve Jobs and see what was happening with Final Cut. As he put it, “My clients are making multi-year, hundreds of thousands of dollars decisions and we need to know what’s going on with Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Server, and Xsan.   We need to know that Apple won’t abandon Final Cut Pro because selling iPads is more lucrative.”

Steve quickly got back to him with a response, assuring him that “a great release of Final Cut is coming early next year.” It was, of course, sent from his iPad.

Gobler’s full email contains a larger plea to Steve to allow the product managers of their pro apps to begin transparently blogging about what Apple is working on, which of course went unaddressed, but come on: good for customers or no, that’s just not Apple’s style.