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USER REVIEW APPLE FCP X V10.4
YOU CAN PUBLISH ANY OF THE MOTION GRAPHICS CONTROLS TO FCP X
of Apple’s Metal 2 GPU processing, for even faster rendering. You can publish any of the motion graphics controls to FCP X, so it will integrate with that VR workflow very well. VR for live action is still very much at the Lumière Brothers stage. Astonishing though L ’ arrivée d ’ un train en gare de La Ciotat was, it wasn’t until the invention of the close-up and the cut-away and all the techniques and paraphernalia of narrative editing, that films as we know them came to be. The VR toolset in FCP X v10.4 is pretty capable, given the current limitations of the medium. Apple seems to be demonstrating a commitment to VR – I’m sure as the techniques of VR improve, this toolset will expand. Apple’s commitment to the ‘professional’ (whatever that means) has been called into question since the demise of FCP 7 (and, to some
‘Look Around’ windows – very similar to the new viewers implemented in FCP X. A full description of Motion is beyond the scope of this review, but Motion has always been a super-fast, kind of simplified After Effects. It’s very capable and easy to use, and this new version makes even more use
extent, Aperture), and limited high- end hardware. The arrival of the iMac Pro this month goes a long way to address that (and we’re still promised an updated Mac Pro at some point). FCP X 10.4 has been highly optimised on all Mac hardware, and it really flies on the iMac Pro. The combination is capable of easily decoding native 4.6k REDCODE RAW at full resolution – so easily, in fact, that you can add colour correction, vignettes and even blurs (which are what’s known as ‘computationally intensive’) and still get full resolution, full frame rate (29.97fps) playback. The same is true of 8k ProRes – no problem with full resolution, full frame rate playback even with a bunch of effects piled on the clips. Nice. FCP X will be a free update to existing FCP X users, and is £299.99 from the App Store. Motion and Compressor are £48.99 each.
ABOVE The colour wheel and colour curves. BELOW Main colour grading window.
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