Apple released Final Cut Pro 11 last week, and the company clearly thinks the new features it's offering are a big deal. The last time Apple completely changed the version number was when it launched Final Cut Pro X (aka FCP 10) back in 2011.
Final Cut Pro 11 includes eight new features, and the AI-powered automatic subtitling feature was one of the big ones …
Final Cut Pro 11 Auto-Captions
Apple teased the feature during the Mac mini keynote before officially announcing it. The company said it was one of two AI-powered features, along with Magnetic Masking (which makes it easier to select specific elements in a video clip).
Apple said that automatic captioning was a long-requested feature.
Transcription to subtitles is a long-requested feature that enables fast and accurate closed captioning […] Closed captions can be automatically generated on the timeline using Apple's trained large language model that transcribes spoken language.
A Big Deal for Videographers
The last time I created captions for a video, it was a very labor-intensive task. You need to create a caption box for every few seconds of video, usually containing only some part of a sentence. They need to be manually aligned with the video clips.
There are AI tools out there to handle the actual transcription, and I’ve since found MacWhisper to be a great tool for doing just that. But they still only do part of the work for you: you still need to create the subtitle boxes and paste in the section of text you want, and it’s still slow and fairly labor-intensive.
With the new tool, it’s 100% automatic — and takes literally seconds!
Here’s all you need to do. Select the video in the timeline, right-click, and select “Transcribe to Subtitles”:
Then just wait. In this example, it’s a 16-minute video, and the total time spent on a 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max was under 11 seconds.
Once finished, the subtitle line appears as normal and can be edited as needed.
Of course, no AI transcription tool is perfect, and Apple’s subtitles feature is no exception. You’ll need to do some tweaking, but I was completely blown away by how well it worked on a video with multiple nationalities and accents. My top tip here is to edit the .ITT file (see below) in a text editor rather than editing the text in Final Cut — it’s much easier.
To judge the quality for yourself, here’s a video of the fully unedited transcripts. You can use the chapter markers to jump to different interviewees and see how well it handles different accents (make sure you click the card icon to turn on subtitles).
Once you have the transcripts in Final Cut, go to File > Export Subtitles to export an .ITT file.
When uploading to YouTube, simply click the “Add Captions” button in the workflow, then select the upload option and point to the file, selecting the “With Timecode” option.
A Big Deal for Accessibility
By conservative estimates, tens of millions of people rely entirely on captions for their videos. Add in those who are partially deaf, have trouble hearing dialogue, or simply prefer to watch with captions, and you're likely looking at over a billion people.
Yes, YouTube offers its own auto-captioning feature, but as anyone who's ever tried it knows, it's very unpredictable.
With adding high-quality captions so quick and easy, it's a no-brainer for creators to use. With just a few seconds of automation and a few minutes of manual editing, it's hard to see why anyone wouldn't do this.
Of course, this is just the beginning. The feature is currently limited to English (US), but other languages will be coming soon, just with Apple Intelligence implementing them more generally.
If you're a video creator and use Final Cut Pro, I highly recommend you give this feature a try — I think you'll be impressed!
Image: 9to5Mac
