Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/watchlist/final-cut-pro-x-11-compressor-4-9-and-motion-5-9/
Apple has released Final Cut Pro 11, a major update for the professional video app with new AI-enhanced features and workflow improvements. Additionally, Apple has updated its Compressor encoding utility and Motion graphics tool with improvements and bug fixes.
New features in Final Cut Pro include the AI-powered Magnetic Mask for isolating people, objects, and shapes from the background without a green screen, Transcribe to Captions for automatically creating captions from spoken audio using an AI language model, and support for importing and editing spatial video clips from devices such as an Apple Vision Pro or iPhone 15 Pro or later. All three require a Mac with Apple silicon, and the Transcribe feature requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later.
Final Cut Pro 11 also now reduces clutter in the browser by automatically hiding original clips when creating synced clips or multicam clips, enables you to create interesting visual reveals with new Modular transitions, lets you change the order of vertically stacked clips with a new keyboard shortcut, improves performance in timelines that contain a high number of markers, adds support for exporting uncompressed or ProRes MXF video with 32 kHz audio, resolves an issue that caused the alert badge on an event to remain even after all missing media was relinked, and now allows for exporting directly to the Photos library.
Motion 5.9 improves results when resetting the Stroke filter, enhances the appearance of behavior curve animations in the Keyframe Editor, fixes a bug that prevented ripple delete from working properly, improves stability for third-party plug-ins that perform analysis, and resolves an issue that caused the Analyze button to work improperly when using a point tracker.
Compressor 4.9 adds support for transcoding stereoscopic video files to spatial video for editing in Final Cut Pro and playback on the Apple Vision Pro, and it resolves an issue where exporting a high frame rate clip would produce a file that plays in slow motion.
All three apps enable you to install third-party Media Extensions to support decoding and playback of more video formats (requires Sequoia or later) and require macOS 14.6 Sonoma or later. (Free updates. Final Cut Pro, $299.99 new, 5.6 GB, release notes, macOS 13.5+; Compressor, $49.99 new, 80.2 MB, release notes, macOS 13.5+; Motion, $49.99 new, 2.7 GB, release notes, macOS 14.6+)