When Apple announced the new Apple Creator Studio, it sent minor ripples through the post-production world and major ripples through the content-creator world. It’s a subscription-based suite of over ten Mac and iPad apps, covering everything from video editing and music creation to image editing, spreadsheets, document page layout, motion graphics, and more.
- Final Cut Pro (Mac and iPad)
- Pixelmator Pro (Mac and iPad)
- Logic Pro (Mac and iPad)
- Motion (Mac)
- Compressor (Mac)
- Keynote (Mac, iPad, iPhone)
- Pages (Mac, iPad, iPhone)
- Numbers (Mac, iPad, iPhone)
- Mainstage (Mac)
If you’ve done any content creation on the Mac, you’ll know most of these applications. Their basic functionality hasn’t changed. What has changed is getting them all in a $129-per-year bundle ($12.99-per-month) with some Creator Studio-specific features.
When the subscription pricing for the Apple Creator Studio was announced, the hand-wringing on the internet reached a frenzied pace because, for years, a one-time purchase of apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, or Motion meant one charge and free updates. That will still be the case, and I’m quoting from the reviewer guide here: “Existing customers of one-time purchase apps continue to receive free updates.”
But more about the subscription tier later. While the subscription option is what many reviews have focused on, I think the real focus is on the value you get for the price. There is a lot of value in this subscription, especially if you work with both an iPad and a desktop Mac. Not every application is available on both platforms. The core creative tools of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro are available for both Mac and the iPad. Add in iCloud integration, and it’s easy to begin a project on the iPad and then move that project and all its media over to the Mac. Yes, you may have to contend with and manage iPad storage. And yes, file management on the iPad to iCloud can be a little bit tricky, but it can be done.
While there’s no Final Cut Pro App library in iCloud Drive. You can still use iCloud Drive, or any cloud service to transfer your Final Cut Pro iPad project over to the desktop. Video can include such large quantities of media that it probably makes sense to not make iCloud an easy destination to send all your video media to. If you are going to dive deep into video editing on the iPad with Final Cut Pro, you’ll most likely want to make use of external storage.
This brings me another question. How do you review something like the Apple Creator Studio that is such a broad suite of tools? A number of individual tools have been reviewed here on ProVideo Coalition before. Some of these applications I use regularly, others I do not. Rather than having this review ready on launch day, it took a little bit more time to play around with some stuff I don’t normally use. And I got a little extra time due to the unprecedented ice storm that happened in the South this winter that brought my city to a complete halt (and left many of us without power for multiple days).
Well, some of the new features of my most used application in the Apple Creator Studio, Final Cut Pro, did get some nice signature new features. The real news of this announcement is less about the features and more about the Apple Creator Studio in totality. There is a lot here for a very affordable price. There is some nice integration between the iPad and the Mac. Integration between the apps in the Creator Studio? That has room for improvement.
Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro is updated to version 12.
The signature new features in Final Cut Pro are the transcript search and the visual search.
These new features will use AI to analyze your clip and perform new types of searches in Final Cut, both on the desktop FCP and on Final Cut Pro for iPad. This will speed up editorial work and cut down on scrubbing and searching. On the desktop, these search results can be saved as a smart collection, making it even faster to find frequently needed items.
It’s worth remembering that with this newfound search power, you may need to set aside some time when importing media to let Final Cut Pro perform its analysis. And this isn’t unique to these new FCP features. Every AI-based post-production tool I’ve encountered requires analyzing the media before it can be used.
Visual Search
In my humble opinion, Visual Search is the biggest addition and most useful feature here. Using AI to analyze video content and make it searchable by image, text, or speech is a major revolution in video editing and post-production. We first saw this come along in Jumper, and then Adobe added Visual Search to Premiere.
In FCP 12, the new searches aren’t segmented off as part of some glossy and flashy new feature, but rather integrated into all the other searches within Final Cut.
You can continue to search as usual, with both visual and transcript searches included.
What you’ll really want to do is use Final Cut’s grouping and sorting feature because you can now sort media by relevance. Both high relevance and low relevance are exactly what you want with an AI-powered search. In the example above, clip AA5726 is a really long clip, but using visual search, Final Cut is returning only pieces of that clip that actually show the truck’s interior mirror. And skimming in Thumbnail View is so incredibly fast. Even a quick check of the low-relevance clips will show how relevant the search results are.
And, of course, you can save these new search results as a Smart Collection. Including the options to create Smart Collections based on media analysis. You still have to do a lot of the smart collection creation manually, but in an AI world, are we that far away from being able to just prompt Final Cut to “create a smart collection based on visual search of the term mirror?” Perhaps we are not.
The visual search of fast. And you don’t have to be specific with a word. I searched for “dozer” instead of bulldozer and if found bulldozers at the top of the results. Searching for colors also returns clips with those color palettes. It is easy to see above when I search for blue. There were no clips with predominantly green color palettes, so visual search returned no results for green. An interesting thing happened when I searched for “red.” If you see in the GIF above, there’s a couple of clips that have red within the clip, but you’ll also see a bunch of white clips when I searched for the term “red.” You can’t see them in the small image, but the search return was clips of a screen where one of the words in the subject of an email line was in all capitals RED. So Final Cut is seeing the text within the image and is able to read that text, which is different than a transcript search. It is a visual search that is seeing and understanding text.
Visual search is becoming a bit of a default way to operate. Once you become used to it in your editing tool, you miss it when it’s not there. While there’s no excuse for not properly organizing an edit, there are times when the quick access to a clip that Visual Search can provide can’t be matched. The same applies in Final Cut Pro. Final Cut is the king of good organization due to the very powerful organizational tool, keyword collections. Add Visual Search to the list, and you can move through the early phases of an edit at lightning speed. Speed has always been one of the hallmarks of Final Cut, and Visual Search supports that.
Transcript Search
As for the Transcript Search, this is a new feature that is a bit puzzling. Once clips are analyzed, the transcript search is incredibly fast. You can search for words or phrases that Includes or Is Related To, so there’s a lot of flexibility. Search results are populated in the browser as clips that can be played, skimmed, keyworded or edited with, like any other clips in a browser.
You can really see the difference in a search depending on whether you are wanting to be exact or want to find things related to a word or phrase. And thanks to our friends at EditStock and their Donut Dynamite package to help visualize this.
This type of transcript search is quite a useful addition to Final Cut Pro, and since it’s very fast, like most things in Final Cut, it’s really easy to experiment with because you can quickly search, find a result, or not find a result, clear that search, and move on.
But what you can’t do is view the transcript in any useful and readable way. I am assuming the full transcript data is there in Final Cut once an interview is analyzed. If you can quickly find spoken word text after it’s been analyzed, why is that transcript data not made readily available for other tasks? Perhaps this is just phase one of transcript integration and Final Cut Pro, but it’s an odd omission considering how truly useful transcripts are in editorial. And I’m not even talking about text-based editing. I’m talking about having an interview and being able to see and follow along with the transcript as you listen. Or even exporting that transcript as a text file to send to a client. That simple feature would be useful, but it’s not part of this new Final Cut Pro release.
Beat Detection
The other new feature update in this version of Final Cut Pro is beat detection. Drop a piece of music into the timeline, turn on beat detection (you can right-clip a clip in the timeline, or turn it on under the clip menu), enable it in the timeline and you’ve got visual indicators in the timeline for the musical beats. Apple’s engineers have implemented a different version of this feature as most editing tools apply markers to the clip, whereas in Final Cut, these are beat indicators in the timeline.
As someone who does a lot of music editing, I rarely use beat markers in any editing tool. It’s not that I don’t think they’re useful or trust them, I just feel like I do a better job, and I pay more attention to musical edits when I’m looking at waveforms and making the marks myself.
Once a clip has been analyzed, the beat detection is there when editing and trimming, provided it’s turned on in the timeline.
I do like this implementation of timeline markings for the beats, rather than placing editing markers on the clips themselves. I didn’t think I would but after using it a few times, it’s great. One reason I don’t use bead detection in Premiere, for example, is that you often end up with a clip populated with way more markers than you need, and it just gets in the way. By placing these beat-detection markers directly on the timeline and making them easy to toggle on and off, I can see myself using beat detection more in Final Cut Pro than in other editing tools.
Beat detection also puts different types of markers on different types of beats. I don’t know the specific musical terms, but the bold green markers indicate the heaviest beats in the song, while the dotted markers indicate intermediate beats. Turn on snapping, and you can see a specific visual indicator that you’re snapping to a beat.
I do admit this can help make music editing faster. You might lose some of the nuance of doing it manually, but for quick music edits, this beat-detection implementation works well. The more I use it, the more I like it. It’s like a lot of things in Final Cut Pro. These features weren’t there from the beginning, but when they do get introduced, they are well thought out. Which makes the lack of transcript usage even more puzzling.
I saw one Creator Studio review that lamented that beat markers aren’t exported with a Final Cut Pro XML. It’s a silly criticism, as you really would never need beat markers in an XML output and conform in another tool.
I’ve only scratched the surface here, so watch this great video that goes into a lot of good detail about these new features.
Final Cut Pro for iPad
There’s truly a real ease of editing on Final Cut Pro for iPad, and I think it’s an ease that really surpasses any of the other iPad editing tools out there. If you’re within the Apple ecosystem, then it’s worth a try. You shoot videos on your iPhone. They end up in iCloud, and then it’s a simple import into Final Cut Pro on iPad. Or maybe you’ve got a multi-cam shoot where you’ll use an iPhone or two, along with the camera on the iPad. Then you can edit that multi-cam right on the iPad itself.
While you’re not editing a Netflix documentary on your iPad, Final Cut Pro iPad does something important when it comes to making sense out of all that media you shot with your phone. It makes editing fun. The touch-friendly interface is simple to use, tools are easily discoverable, and while an Apple Pencil certainly makes things go a little faster, simply placing the iPad on your lap and using your fingers lets you get a lot of work done.
Final Cut Pro for iPad includes the new Montage Maker. It’s a tool that can analyze a batch of clips and create a quick edit out of them. It will first analyze the clips and then present an edit that can be previewed or further refined by things like adding music, rearranging clips, or changing the speed. iMovie on iPad has a similar function called “Magic Movie” which I’ve used a number of times over the years, as it’s helpful for quickly throwing together a bunch of clips for something watchable. And if memory serves me correctly, iMovie on the Mac many years ago had a similar automatic movie-making function that really wasn’t all that good and was perhaps discontinued. But here we are in the AI era, when AI can do a much better job of making an automatic edit than has been possible in the past.
I tried Montage Maker on several projects for media that have long been sitting in the cloud and I found it very handy to have around. It’s not Eddie AI or Quickture, but it’s not supposed to be. It is fast from drive/cloud to the timeline which gets you to tweaking and refining faster.
You get the option for Montage Maker when you select clips in the browser.
At first, I thought that Montage Maker was a project-based tool that had to be used when you first imported media. But then I realized that you can use Montage Maker anytime on a selection of clips in the project media panel. Just selected a batch of clips and run it.
Final Cut Pro for iPad will have to analyze the clips when you’re making a montage. The more clips you select, the longer it might take, but it’s pretty fast. I go back to an earlier comment that when using AI on media, that media has to be processed and analyzed for the AI to work. Build that little bit of time into your workflow.
Once the analysis is complete, the editor can adjust and tweak the montage. Happy with the montage? Add it to the existing timeline. Once on the timeline, the montage can be further tweaked, as refinement in the Montage Maker itself is limited. This can lead to a lot of experimentation. If you don’t like what the Montage Maker did, delete it and do it yourself. But I love this as a way to just get a batch of clips on the timeline.
Montage Maker isn’t a one-and-done on the existing timeline, as you can continue to use the Montage Maker to experiment or as you add new clips to the project. This makes it way more useful than if it had to be used the first time media is brought into a project to create the first timeline.
And all those new search features in Final Cut Pro on the desktop, Visual Search and Transcript Search, they’re also available on Final Cut Pro for iPad.
I wish Final Cut Pro for iPad would adopt one great feature from the desktop: the ability to show Used Media Ranges.
This feature will place an orange mark on source clips in the Final Cut browser to indicate the range of a clip used in a loaded timeline. It’s a fantastic way to get a quick glimpse of what has been used and what hasn’t. And marks on the source clips is better than a column that just shows a checkbox indicating something has been used. Because let’s be honest, no matter what anyone says, video editing on the iPad is not as easy as video editing on a desktop computer, so any media review and usage tools are helpful. Now, don’t confuse “easy” and “fun.” Something can not be incredibly easy but still be fun, and I think that’s where video editing on the iPad currently falls. It’s not as easy to edit video on Final Cut for the iPad as it is on Final Cut Pro on the desktop, but the unique interface in the iPad Pro itself can actually make it a little bit more fun, and there’s something to be said for that.
I think Final Cut Pro for iPad nails it as the easiest and most pleasant editing application on the iPad, but it’s still more tedious and more difficult than Final Cut Pro on the desktop. Even something as simple as adding used media ranges as an option could speed up the process.
It’s easy to transfer a Final Cut Pro edit from the iPad to the desktop. That’s what makes this combination of both Final Cut Pros quite powerful. Begin your edit out in the field or from the comfort of your couch. And when you get it to a place you like, send it to the desktop. You can then even use your iPad as a full screen playback monitor, and you’ve got some good hardware to view your image on.
Logic Pro
I don’t use Logic Pro, and I’ve only opened it a couple of times in my life. I’m much more familiar with GarageBand, but Logic Pro takes audio production to the next level. In the context of this review, I’ve been thinking about a suite of software tools for film and video post-production. The first question of an audio application like Logic Pro in a creative suite for video post-production might be: can you mix your video edit within the included audio application?
I was curious about Logic Pro’s ability to do a mix to picture. I exported an AAF from a small corporate project, and Logic Pro imported the AAF just fine. It also imported the reference file in perfect sync with the AAF. Someone used to mixing for picture in a track-based digital audio workstation might feel right at home as they open up the mixer, create buses, mix with automation, and do a lot of the things they do in any other digital audio workstation. I was surprised at how quickly I can get a usable mix, but then I’m also surprised at how deep an application Logic Pro really is.
Now, the irony of bringing this picture mix into Logic Pro via an AAF was that Final Cut Pro itself could not export that AAF to load into Logic Pro. I had to use Resolve as an intermediary step to get the edit from Final Cut into Logic. If a Creative Studio user wants to implement this workflow of editing in Final Cut and mixing in Logic, they’d be best off to invest in something like X2Pro, which has been the go-to solution for exporting an AAF from Final Cut Pro for years. But this isn’t new information. If you’ve been using Final Cut Pro for any number of years and have thought about integrating it into a larger post-production workflow, you know that there are a number of affordable third-party tools that help Final Cut Pro integrate with most all aspects of post-production.
Logic Pro is not really known as a mix for picture tool, even though it is entirely possible. It’s not going to supplant Pro Tools in the high-end mixing department. But since Adobe seems very slow to develop Adobe Audition, perhaps users of the Apple Creative Suite will find themselves using Logic Pro to mix for picture.
What I’ve been most surprised by while playing around with Logic Pro (and letting my guitar-playing son have some fun with it as well) is how deep this program is for music creation. This program can do a lot, and the learning curve can be very steep, which is true of most high-end professional applications. It almost feels like an outlier in the Creative Suite, given the many years-old redesign of Final Cut Pro and the seemingly simple Pixelmator Pro. Both Final Cut and Pixelmator were very powerful and can do more than their relatively simple interface might suggest. The Logic Pro looks and feels very deep from the start, and it’s great to see Apple continuing to develop it.
Pixelmator Pro
The inclusion of Pixelmator Pro in the Apple Creative Suite could be the application that moves the needle for some creators, making it their suite of choice. It’s a powerful image editing application akin to Adobe Photoshop.
I haven’t used Pixelmator Pro much, and honestly, I try to stay out of Photoshop until I absolutely have to go there. Pixelmator’s bullet-point list is pretty impressive, as it includes all the basic color correction and effects you might want for still-image work. There’s full layers, masking, and support for raw photos. You can even bring a video in to do some retouching as well.
This video below was long, and it was a live stream, I think. But you can skim through it and get a good idea of what all you can do in Pixelmator Pro if you’re not familiar with the application.
Since there’s both an iPad version and a Mac version of Pixelmator Pro, I was wondering about the interoperability between the iPad and the desktop. In Final Cut Pro, you have to share a project from the iPad back to the desktop. But that’s not the case with Pixelmator.
Pixelmator Pro’s .pxm files can be saved to iCloud Drive and opened on either platform from iCloud Drive. Same with Logic Pro and a number of the other apps in the Apple Creator Studio. And I’m guessing this isn’t an option in Final Cut Pro because Final Cut Pro projects that include media can be enormous in size, whereas things like Pixelmator Pro and Logic Pro file sizes are usually much smaller.
What about Pages, Numbers and Keynote in a suite of “creative apps”?
Being in the Apple ecosystem, I use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote a lot. They are integral to much of the work I do. Most feature changes in Creator Studio are related to premium content and AI. The most interesting thing is the “Intelligent Content Creation” in Keynote, where it can use OpenAI to generate a presentation based on your data input.
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This will definitely be a feature I experiment with as I prep for NAB Post|Production World.
But all the old iWork apps get some new AI integration. Depending on what you’re working on, you may see new purple Creator Studio specific features like the new Content Hub, image generation, Magic Fill for spreadsheets or slide cleapup.
The Subscription Thing
Much of the discussion around the Apple Creator Studio has centered on the new subscription model for this deep suite of tools. At $12.99 per month or $129 per year, it’s almost a non-issue as the cost-to-tool ratio is an incredible bargain. Even though there are still stand-alone, single-purchase versions of the Creator Studio apps that can be had, if you’re new to Final Cut Pro or Logic and have any intention of creating much content at all, the Creator Studio bundle is the way to go. One yearly purchase, one initial install of the apps, and you don’t have to think about anything until the subscription comes up for renewal the next year.
The differences in the Creator Studio apps and the standalone apps are kind of negligible at this point in time. There are a number of AI features included in some of the apps as well as some royalty free content that’s all part of the subscription. The basic functionality in most apps is the same. There’s just a real convenience factor with the Creator Studio that might make the affordable price worth it, especially if this is your first time with the app family. Since you can have both versions of some of the apps installed on a Mac, it’ll just be cleaner and less confusing to jump headfirst into the Creator Studio.
The other question I’ve seen asked by many is how the Apple Creator Studio compares to the Adobe Creative Cloud? Since both are subscription-based and both offer similar media creation apps, it’s a fair question. But I think they are very different in their offerings and target market. The Adobe Creative Cloud is a significant investment in both time and money to learn how to use most of its tools well. Spend any time around Reddit, and you’ll soon learn that there are creators who jump into Adobe Premiere with zero training and zero thought into how to use a high-end video editing application and they are quickly frustrated, often blaming Premiere. And many of them aren’t willing to learn.
The Apple Creator Studio is more approachable in both price and learning curve so it will be a much better choice for many content creators and/or those new to media creation. Most everything you might need is in the Creator Studio. And while there’s discussion of Apple’s Photomator acquisition not being in the suite, until that happens, there’s always the native Photos app or something like Peakto for photo organization. That photo organizing tool is really the only missing element in the Apple Creator Studio bundle.
The next step would be integration
I’m not sure what the future of the Apple Creator Studio holds, but I would say that the killer feature of this entire suite could be tight integration amongst all the applications. I doubt this will ever happen, as my guess is that it would require some extensive retooling of file formats and how those applications talk to each other.
But here are a few scenarios where tight integration and interoperability between all the Apple Creator Studio apps could make it that killer feature:
- Imagine a world where you could drop a Final Cut Pro project right into Logic and have that audio populate ready for a mix.
- Or this is something we’ve always dreamed about: Being able to send clips from a Final Cut timeline right into Motion for some motion graphics work.
- A command that would send a still image from Final Cut Pro into Pixelmator Pro for cleanup or editing and then have that result updated wherever you’ve used that still image in a Final Cut Pro project.
- Or a command that lets you send a frame from your FCP video to Pixelmator, which can then be edited into a YouTube thumbnail and shared directly to YouTube or another social media platform.
- Here’s a real pipe dream: sending a transcript from a Final Cut Pro interview into Pages, where you could use more advanced word-processor tools to be able to copy, paste, and cut into something coherent. Then have that conformed into a timeline for that interview in Final Cut Pro.
- Say you have a video project with a lot of lower thirds or text boxes you have to reuse. But each of those text boxes needs to be populated with different data sets. Imagine being able to build those datasets in a Numbers spreadsheet and then connect them to a graphic element in Motion or Final Cut Pro, so all that data didn’t have to be re-entered outside the Numbers spreadsheet.
Aside from extensive retooling of the applications to enable deep interoperability, I think this is what many users might expect from applications sold as a suite or studio of tools. Now, many of the bullet points above are higher-end workflows that probably aren’t for Apple Creator Studio‘s target market. But then again, as users spend time with tools and become more advanced editors, more advanced mixers, more advanced creators, they can learn to use more advanced workflows because those can save time and save money.
Pros
- A great bang for the buck
- Almost every app in the suite is easy to learn and easy to use but powerful enough to do serious, professional work
- Begin work on an iPad, finish work on the Mac (for several of the applications in the suite)
Cons
- It isn’t explicitly clear what you get in the subscription versions of these apps over the standalone, single-purchase versions of these apps
- Interoperability and exchange between the applications could be stronger, considering they are all part of a “studio” of tools
Cautions
- While you can install the single-purchase versions alongside the Creator Studio versions, you can’t run them at the same time (though why would you?)
- If you want to go from Final Cut Pro on the desktop to Final Cut Pro on the iPad you’ll need Transfer Toolbox
- If you’re a video person with any musical bone in your body, you might want to give yourself time with Logic Pro
