The iPhone has become a major source of video for all sorts of productions, not just cat videos. Assembling your 4K HEVC clips in iMovie for iOS is a really useful tool. It’s very straight forward to take these iOS iMovies directly into FCP. You can use the Share function in iMovie and then upload to iCloud or transfer via AirDrop to your computer. I like using Share to iTunes in iMovie. When you connect your phone to your computer to sync with iTunes, inside your phone under File Sharing/iMovie you’ll see the project which you can pick up and drag and drop anywhere you want, onto whatever drive you want on your system. Once the project is on a local drive it can be imported from FCP’s File>Import menu.
The iMovie project imports as a new event with the edited project and its clips.
Timeline Selections
If you have a clip selected in the Timeline you can now use Command-Left or Right Arrow to move to and select the next or previous clip, similar to the select clip above or below with Command-Up or Down Arrow introduced in 10.3. If you have a title selected in the Timeline Command-Left or Right Arrow will select, not the next or previous clip, but the next or previous title, a quick and handy way to move between titles in the Timeline. These commands are role based, following roles like Titles or Dialogue rather than simply linearly. Also, they will skip any clips hidden by Connected Clips. There also shortcuts to extend the selection to the Next Clip Control-Command-Right Arrow and to extend it to include the Previous Clip Control-Command-Left Arrow.
Preferences
There are a few new preferences. In Editing preferences you can set which color correction tool to be your default. The application default is the Color Board, but you can set Color Wheels, which might be many people’s choice, or Color Curves, or Hue/Saturation Curves.
Info Inspector
There are new metadata presets in the Info inspector.
HDR shows you various luminance, white point, and other information.
Export
There are no changes in Sharing. Surprisingly there is no HEVC output option. However, HEVC output is available in the updated Compressor 4.4, in its Apple Devices presets up to 4K in either 8-bit or 10-bit, which produce .m4v files.
You can also use it as the codec for a QuickTime .mov file, or even in MPEG-4.
When converting ProRes 422 video to HEVC you’d be hard pressed to see the difference. The HEVC file will be about an eighth of the file size. I wouldn’t use this for mastering or archiving, but for someone who has the capacity to play it back, it’s huge advantage. Be warned however, compressing to QuickTime H.265 can be quite slow, especially to 10-bit. On the other hand the Apple Devices presets compress really well.
A new Sharing dialogue in FCP is very welcome. It warns when you’re exporting proxy media.
Open Clip
In 10.3.x you could Open Clip from inside the Timeline, by right-clicking on it, or on the clip in the Browser, or by using the Clip menu. Despite the FCP team’s best efforts this continued to cause problems for new users who would sometimes begin editing by using the Open Clip function and then proceeding to edit their program into a single clip. In 10.4 Open Clip has finally disappeared from the shortcut menu in both the Timeline and the Browser. You can still open a clip that’s in a project in the Timeline or open a clip in the Browser from the Clip menu. In place of Open Clip in the shortcut menu in the Browser there is now New Project. If you select this option on a clip in the Browser, it will bring up the New Project dialogue and then drop the clip into it. You can also select multiple clips and use this option to add all the selected items. or the ranges marked in the clips, into a new project, a really quick way to get started.
And More
In the Color Board, if you drag a puck of either of the side and keep going, the puck will pop over to the corresponding point on the other side of the board.
Many of the Logic audio effects have been redesigned using the new Logic Pro X interface.
In Modify>Adjust Volumes you can toggle fade in and fade out on and off separately.
Control-tab will now cycle through the tabs in the Inspector when it’s the active pane.
If Looped Playback (Command-L) is activated an indicator around the Play button in the Viewer will appear.
If you don’t see it Looped Playback is off.
Activating the Transform functions in the Viewer no longer closes the Video Scopes, which is a nice.
The application now has support for the Canon Cinema RAW Light format with a plugin that can be downloaded here. There is also a new RED workflow installer that downloads here.
10.4 also supports the new YouTube authentication protocol, which hopefully will end a lot of YT log in problems.
The speed of Optical Flow analysis will be improved using the capabilities of Metal 2 in High Sierra.
The bug that caused FCP to crash on launching on a laptop when connected to external monitors is reported to have been fixed.
Last but not least: Square pixel stills in the standard anamorphic video formats 960x720 and 1440x1080 are no longer stretched. Previously, the user had to make a one pixel adjustment to the resolution to prevent this from happening.
