Why This Is Just the Start of Post Producing iPhone Video

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“Final Cut Pro has just had the biggest PR/social media push since its less than successful launch.”

Final Cut Pro is being mentioned to encourage the 25% of iPhone users that they will be able to use Apple editing software to work with depth.

Not to promote Final Cut, to get iPhone Pro owners to upgrade a year earlier than usual or to encourage a non-pro user to upgrade this year. To make up for a less than usually exciting hardware feature bump.

Working with depth is exciting, but the iPhone marketing group forcing the Final Cut team to prioritise it over implementing features for editors that have been missing for 20 years (collaboration - the essence of film, TV and video) is like telling them to teaching Final Cut to do backflips instead of showing it how to run.

Depth-mapping is a cool technology feature. But the production curmudgeon in me sees this as another aspect of "fix it in post." That's a phrase that ought to be changed to "pay to fix it in post."

FCPX' little brother supports Cinematic-Mode:

support.apple.com/en-en/guide/imovie-ipad/kna233213ff0/ipados

I'm not too sure if the FCP team got told to implement features. They say that there's always been a roadmap and I would assume that this (and ProRes) has been on it for a while..

Unless you have some inside information you would like to share????  

Good spot - are we going to see a 'Cinematic' button in Final Cut Pro?

 

"They say that there's always been a roadmap..."

At the NAB launch years ago, Apple promised FCPX would have a ten year road map. That ten years is up, and FCPX has become badly stagnant. Being able to play with pseudo-DOF from one proprietary camera is not going to make FCPX relevant again all of the sudden unless: 1-you own an iPhone 13, 2- and you shoot all of your content on an iPhone. That's a very narrow segment of the pro market.

Continuously advancing the state of computational videography is good. I read that Apple has about 1,000 people just working on the iPhone camera. If true, they may be spending more on camera development than Panasonic, Canon and Nikon combined.

But despite that huge investment, I haven't heard whether the iPhone 13 Pro will have constant frame rate, even when shooting ProRes. It also apparently doesn't have 24 fps in ProRes, at least in the initial release.

I believe all previous iPhone versions (even if using Filmic Pro) cannot obtain guaranteed constant frame rate -- the iPhone will insist on variable frame rate in certain lighting conditions. That can make syncing with other sources difficult.

You could argue that most users don't care about 24 fps or CFR or syncing -- but most users also don't care about ProRes. If you pay $1,700 for a 1TB phone where "cinematic" video is THE marquee feature, it seems that 24 fps ProRes and CFR would be a core design requirement to deliver on day 1. If the built-in app doesn't support that they could at least provide an API where Filmic Pro or other specialized developers could get access.