Apple has announced Final Cut Pro 10.8 for Mac. 10.8 leverages the Neural Engine in Apple silicon, and adds new AI features and organizational tools.
Apple claims that the new version allows users to improve color, color balance, contrast, and brightness in one simple step. It has also been optimized for SDR, HDR, RAW, and Log-encoded media.
There is also a new feature called Smooth Slo-Mo, where frames of video are intelligently generated and blended together. It will be interesting to see how well this actually works.
Color corrections and video effects can also now be given custom names in the inspector to easily identify changes applied to a clip, and effects can be dragged from the inspector to other clips in the timeline or viewer. The timeline index also offers the ability to search for and navigate to clips with missing media or effects. And text-based timeline search now includes important information like reel, scene, camera angle, and more.
This is perhaps not the big update that Final Cut Users have been wanting, but any update is better than no update! With Apple previously stating that they will be investing a lot of capital into AI, it will be interesting to see what future updates come to Final Cut Pro.
Final Cut Pro for Mac 10.8 will be available as a free update for existing users and for $299.99 USD for new users on the Mac App Store. All new users can download a free 90-day trial of Final Cut Pro.
