Apple has today announced a collection of creative apps that feels similar to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. In this offering, there’s Final Cut Pro for video editors, Logic Pro for music makers and Pixelmator Pro for image editors on the Mac and iPad, plus Motion, Compressor and MainStage for the Mac and new features for Pages, Keynote and Numbers across the iPhone, iPad and Mac. You get all of that in one subscription for $12.99 a month, or $129 per year.
There’s a discount available for students and educators, who can get these apps for $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. A one month free trial is also available and if you get a new Mac or qualifying iPad you get three months of the software for free. And don’t panic, individual paid-for apps will still be available to buy via the Mac App Store.
After Apple’s acquisition of Pixelmator Pro last year, Pixelmator Pro is now coming to iPad for the first time. Pixelmator Pro is designed for creatives who want to draw, paint and design, as well as edit images. And with an iPad version too, it could be snapping at the heels of the likes of Photoshop and Procreate.
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Final Cut Pro for Mac and iPad (one of our top video editing tools) has had an upgrade, with new intelligent features designed to make video creation easier. For example, there’s no more trawling through hours of footage, as you can now search for footage easily with Transcript and Visual Search.
There’s also Beat Detection, where you can analyse any music track and find the beats within it, enabling you to more easily edit to the music.
On the iPad version of Final Cut Pro, there’s also a Montage Maker, which uses AI to analyse and edit together a video based on the best moments in the footage. You can also edit horizontal videos to vertical with Auto Crop, which will be a win for many content creators.
Logic Pro has also had an upgrade, with smart new AI features including the AI Session Players, which can accompany you once you lay down a track, and Synth Player, which is like having a skilled synthesist in the room with you. Elsewhere there’s access to MainStage, which turns your Mac into an instrument, voice processor or guitar rig.
Also included is access to Motion, a motion graphics tool for creating 2D and 3D effects, and Compressor, which integrates with Final Cut Pro and Motion to customise output settings.
On top of that, there’s also exciting new features for the likes of Pages, Keynote and Numbers. Now I know you wouldn’t normally think that those apps could have exciting new features, they’re not especially sexy apps, but I’ve seen them in action and let me assure you that these are genuine improvements that will have you more excited than you thought you could be about slides and documents.
You can now import text from Pages or Notes and Keynote will create a draft outline for you, and it can even create draft speaker notes for you too. In Numbers, Creator Studio users will be able to generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition with Magic Fill. It might not sound sexy but it’ll probably save you a lot of effort.
The existing Pages, Keynote and Numbers will remain free, but if you want the new features you’ll have to upgrade to Creator Studio, which will be available from 28 January.
Overall, I think this sounds like an exciting proposition from Apple and I’ll be interested to try out the apps and to see what the creative community makes of them.
Find out more about Creator Studio.
