In yesterday’s Fall iPad announcement, which saw a new iPad Pro and iPad being released, Apple also announced that Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve video editor and color grading suite is coming to the iPad.
Calling it the ultimate combination of performance and portability for professionals, Apple says that the new M2 processor running iPadOS 16 is powerful enough to transcode 4K60p ProRes footage on the fly.
“The breakthrough performance of M2 enhances an incredible selection of pro apps available on iPad,” stated the press release, “including DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Publisher 2 iPad, Octane X, uMake, and more.”
For the first time in two years, Apple released a simple video and press release announcing the next-generation iPad and Pad Pro and dropped the news of DaVinci coming to the mobile platform about eight minutes in.
There wasn’t much in the way of details, but Apple did say that the version of Resolve was good for editing, color grading, and visual effects.
Image Credit – Apple
Visual effects on a tablet really haven’t caught on until now, since the processor-heavy application usually relies on GPU acceleration to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
But the eight-core M2 chip provides desktop-level performance along with a 10-core GPU and 100GB/s of united memory can shoulder the rendering. This means content creators can capture, edit, and publish cinema-grade video from a single device out in the field.
Apple tested the ProRes Raw transcoding in LumaFusion and found that the M2 processor could fly through processing the 55-second clip up to three times faster than the M1.
With WiFi 6e and 5G connectivity, the iPad Pro will also be able to work in a Camera-to-Cloud workflow for transferring high-resolution proxies while shooting Raw natively.
Of course, if creators plan to use the new iPad Pro for all up content creation from capturing video in ProRes Raw and editing their projects using DaVinci Resolve in 4K, they’re going to want to opt for the larger 1TB or 2TB models maxed out with 16 GB of RAM.
The base 128GB model would likely be problematic space-wise, along with the 256GB and 512GB models since they are limited to 8GB of RAM.
Users can expect to drop upwards of $2000 or more for the upper-range models as a result, however, they could save a small amount by opting for the smaller 11-inch model.
Still, the fact that Apple is dropping this news is fantastic news for content creators working out in the field. From documentarians to wedding shoots and citizen journalism, the iPad Pro has the potential to be just what Apple claims … a mobile movie production studio.
[source: Apple]
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