As Apple’s first macOS 10.15 beta is now only months away from its WWDC 2019 debut, the company has continued to warn users that certain old apps won’t work going forward — a compatibility break due to dropping support for 32-bit apps. Now the company is releasing updates to its video editing apps Final Cut Pro and iMovie, as well as helper apps Compressor and Motion, all designed to help Mac users transition previously developed videos into formats that will be readable on future macOS machines.
For Final Cut Pro and iMovie, these updates enable the apps to detect potentially incompatible media files and convert them into compatible formats. By comparison, Compressor and Motion will simply detect and flag incompatible files, but not actually convert them. Users will generally need to open up their important old projects one by one to determine whether they’re in need of conversion.
It’s unclear at this stage whether Apple will transition all of the legacy apps and plug-ins found in macOS 10.14 over to macOS 10.15, or simply leave some of them behind; the company’s history and this move to start converting old video and Motion projects suggests the latter. Some developers expect that significant changes may be made to Apple’s long-running QuickTime plug-in system, which currently supports a number of older video formats but may be culled or killed to improve overall Mac performance.
Beyond the old format identification and conversion features, each of the apps includes a minor tweak to improve reliability when directly sharing videos to YouTube, a process that could hang or otherwise experience hiccups partway through the uploading process. Final Cut Pro also arrives with a variety of smaller bug fixes.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
iMovie is a free app for virtually all Mac users, while Final Cut Pro is $300, and the helper apps are $50 each. All four app updates are available directly from the Mac App Store.
