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Cupertino, California — Apple today announced a major update to its professional video editing app, Final Cut Pro X, with new features including 360-degree VR video editing, advanced color grading tools and support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) video. Optimized to take full advantage of the incredible performance capabilities of the all-new iMac Pro, Final Cut Pro users can now edit full-resolution 8K video for the first time on a Mac. Apple is also extending 360-degree VR video support to Final Cut Pro companion apps, Motion and Compressor. Today, with more than 2 million seats, Final Cut Pro X is the most popular version of the software ever and is used by professional video editors to create incredible works of art, from award-winning Hollywood feature films and commercials, to international broadcasts and the world’s most popular YouTube videos.

“With new features like 360-degree VR editing and motion graphics, advanced color grading and HDR support, Final Cut Pro gives video editors the tools to create stunning, next-generation content,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Apps Product Marketing. “When combined with the performance of Mac hardware, including the all-new iMac Pro, Final Cut Pro provides an incredibly powerful post-production studio to millions of video editors around the world.”

Final Cut Pro lets professional editors create VR content with the ability to import, edit and deliver 360-degree video and view the project in real time through a connected HTC VIVE headset with SteamVR. Users can easily add 360-degree titles in 2D or 3D; apply blurs, glows and other immersive effects; and use visual controls to straighten horizons or remove camera rigs from equirectangular videos. Standard photos and videos can also be added to VR projects and 360-degree video can be shared directly to popular websites including YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo.

The update also includes powerful tools for professional color grading. Unique color wheels feature built-in controls to adjust hue, saturation and brightness. Color curves allow for ultra-fine color adjustments with multiple control points to target specific color ranges, and eye droppers let users sample specific colors and apply manual white balance. Users can also apply custom lookup tables (LUTs) from popular color grading apps like DaVinci Resolve and websites including PremiumBeat, Color Grading Central and more.

With support for the most popular HDR formats, Final Cut Pro gains access to an expanded range of brightness levels to deliver incredibly realistic images. Editors can output video to HDR monitors using I/O devices from AJA and Blackmagic with brightness levels up to 10,000 nits. The new color grading tools support both HDR and Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) video, and with tone mapping, users can easily change HDR to SDR output for broadcast.

Motion 5.4 enables users to create immersive 360-degree VR titles and effects that can be instantly accessed in Final Cut Pro. The update also makes it easy to convert between any type of Motion project at any time, create realistic spring-loaded animations with the new Overshoot behavior and apply photographic-inspired looks with new filters. Compressor 4.4 lets users deliver 360-degree video with industry-standard spherical metadata. Compressor also lets users export HEVC and HDR video, while adding a range of new options for delivering MXF files.

Final Cut Pro 10.4 is available as a free update today for existing users, and for $299.99 (US) for new users on the Mac App Store. Motion 5.4 and Compressor 4.4 are also available as a free update today for existing users, and for $49.99 (US) each for new users on the Mac App Store. Education customers can purchase the Pro Apps Bundle for Education for $199.99 (US). For more information, please visit: apple.com/final-cut-pro.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple’s more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Adobe has announced major updates to Premiere Pro CC and its other video apps, with VR workflows spearheading a new focus on immersive VR and 360 video experiences.
Set for an 'early summer' release, the CC platform updates bring new VR capabilities to Adobe's flagship video editor, in the form of a 'field of view' mode that allows editors to work with imported spherical stitched video and see what a viewer would see when looking in a given direction.
The new mode will allow users to dynamically switch between monoscopic, stereoscopic and anaglyph frame layouts, freely reposition the viewing angle across 360 degrees while editing, and export video with VR tags so that video players like YouTube automatically recognize it.
Adobe also announced a new workflow that enables editors to begin editing during 'ingest' while importing video and audio in the background, as well as new proxy workflows for working with high resolution formats including 8K, HDR and HFR media.
Additionally, Adobe is expanding Premier Pro's Lumetri color correction toolkit, which should give editors finer control when isolating and adjusting specific colors using HSL secondaries. New navigational keyboard shortcuts, an added Twitter export option, and extra captioning and titling features are also part of the forthcoming update.
Many other apps in Adobe's Creative Cloud suite are also set to benefit from the new release. Other feature highlights coming to Adobe CC include:
Media Encoder: A clearer media browser panel is coming to Adobe's standalone encoding app, as well as support for Audition and Character Animator apps.
After Effects CC: The motion graphics and special effects editor is being given a new audio and video preview engine for smoother playback for cached frames, new GPU-accelerated Gaussian Blur and Lumetri Color effects for faster rendering, and new 3D media export options.
Audition CC: A new Essential Sound panel boasts simpler sound mixing and preset saving, while a quick export option lets editors send video projects with finished audio directly to Adobe Media Encoder.
Character Animator CC: A new puppet tag panel enables users to apply multiple motion trigger behaviors to video, track puppets in the field of view and quickly switch between facial profiles.
Adobe Stock CC: Tighter integration with Adobe's suite of apps and a new filtered and tagged search system for quick access to over 50 million images and video clips from within Premiere Pro and After Effects.
The new features were announced by Adobe ahead of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show next week, where it will be previewing the updates to Creative Cloud, which are expected to be made available to subscribers in the coming months.
Adobe offers subscriptions to Creative Cloud for $49.99 a month, while non-subscribers have the option of a free 30-day trial. More information about Adobe video apps and Creative Cloud is available on Adobe's website.