Apple this week announced what it described as “a new chapter for video editing on Mac” with the release of Final Cut Pro 11 for macOS. The update, coincident with this week’s Final Cut Pro Summit, includes what Apple boasted are “intelligent new features, timesaving tools, and new creative options come to Final Cut Pro across Mac, iPad, and iPhone.”
The new Final Cut Pro is joined by updates to Final Cut Pro for iPadOS, as well as Final Cut Camera for iPhone and spatial video for Vision Pro.
From an accessibility perspective, the most newsworthy piece of Apple’s announcement is the all-new Transcribe to Captions features in the macOS version of Final Cut. I wrote about it earlier this month, saying in part the feature’s inclusion is a big deal for disabled videographers who need such functionality but can’t necessarily afford to pay a third party for it. Moreover, I also noted how Transcribe to Captions makes elements like voiceovers more accessible to audiences when they perhaps wouldn’t be otherwise. Apple notes in its press release Transcribe to Captions is a feature powered by artificial intelligence that enables “captions [be] automatically generated in the timeline using an Apple-trained large language model that transcribes spoken audio.”
While I’m no video editor—not even at a hobbyist level—the inclusion of Transcribe to Captions strikes me as more meaningful than for sheer productivity. While not an accessibility feature in the classical sense, Transcribe to Captions is a symbolic one insofar as it’s tacit acknowledgment that captions matter. In a world where YouTube’s captions historically have generated crap, along with the increase in captions in short-form video like Instagram Reels and TikTok, it’s notable Final Cut users have a built-in tool—again, it isn’t trivial people get this “for free”—that presumably will generate accurate captions.
I staunchly believe the notion “accessibility is for everyone” oftentimes feels like a platitude and patronizing—the reality is, accessibility exists first and foremost so that disabled people can participate in a society unbuilt for us—the existence of Transcribe to Captions in Final Cut Pro is a prime example of accessibility being for everyone. Captions obviously help the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, but they truly do, for example, help someone with bimodal sensory input. As a CODA, I grew up with closed-captions on our television—for a long time delivered via a bespoke box—and naturally grew accustomed to reading dialogue with my eyes as my ears received it aurally. To this day, I can’t comfortably watch video without captions; I sorely wish the YouTube and YouTube TV apps on tvOS had a global setting for captions. They genuinely help.
Final Cut Pro is in the Mac App Store for $300. It’s free for existing users, with a “Pro Apps Bundle for Education” available for $200.
Finally, I’ll end this piece by pointing to my prior PSA wherein I share that captions and subtitles, however similar, are in actuality not interchangeable. They both exist for entirely different reasons.