Previs Pro 3, the iPad-only storyboarding and previs app for filmmakers, has been released. The update introduces animatics, an AI-driven lighting system, and a free edition aimed at students and independent creators. The new animatics system lets users turn their storyboard frames into timed sequences, complete with sound effects and audio tracks. This makes it possible to test pacing and shot rhythm before production begins.

The addition of animatics also strengthens collaboration. Directors and editors can review not just static storyboards but moving sequences with timing and audio cues. That allows quicker iteration before camera equipment or crew are booked. The developer highlights that this feature is designed to export easily into editing suites for further refinement. Another key addition is “AI Light Grade.” The tool uses automated lighting analysis to adjust scene lighting within the app, designed to give quick previews of mood and exposure. The developer has not provided technical details on the underlying AI model.

AI Light Grade is integrated into the existing 3D environment system. It enables users to run quick test passes on scenes without manually adjusting every lighting parameter. While this promises speed gains, the company has not clarified whether the AI lighting is deterministic or adaptive, nor whether its results are intended only for previs visuals or can be matched to real-world set lighting. Not independently verified at press time.

Previs Pro 3 is also available in a new free edition. It includes a limited feature set, capped at 10 projects and 10 shots per project, but otherwise provides access to the main toolset. Paid versions remain available via subscription. The monthly price is $39.99, the yearly price is $179.99, and the lifetime price is $399.99.

The free edition is clearly targeted at students, hobbyists, or independent filmmakers who want to test the app without committing to a subscription. Its hard cap of 10 shots per project limits its usefulness for larger productions, where shot counts quickly run into the hundreds. The Pro tier removes these restrictions and adds unlimited projects, making it the only practical option for professional workflows.

Availability

Previs Pro runs exclusively on iPadOS. The app is distributed via the Apple App Store. No desktop or Android versions have been announced.

The rest of the toolset

Beyond the new features in version 3, Previs Pro’s core workflow remains unchanged. The app lets filmmakers build storyboards and previs sequences by combining 3D characters, props, and environments inside a touch-driven interface. It supports augmented reality (AR) location scouting, enabling users to preview shots on real-world sets using an iPad camera feed.

Previs Pro includes an asset library for characters, props, and vehicles, with pose controls and camera tools to define shot composition. Storyboards can be exported as images, PDFs, or video animatics for use in editing pipelines. For production planning, the app also provides tools to manage shot lists, camera metadata, and location data, making it possible to link previsualisation directly with scheduling and on-set reference.

As always, new tools should be tested carefully before relying on them in active productions.

The post Animatics, AI Lighting, and a Free Tier: Previs Pro 3 Expands Storyboarding on iPad first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The Blender Foundation is now developing a native Blender Ipad app for the iPad Pro—complete with Apple Pencil support and a multitouch interface aimed squarely at professional 3D artists. This will not be a “Blender Lite.” The project aims for the full desktop Blender experience, reworked for pen and touch workflows, while preserving the familiar Blender architecture.

The first iteration will cover sculpting and basic object manipulation, with features such as Grease Pencil, storyboarding, and animation scheduled for later releases. The Blender team made it clear: the goal is to maintain parity with the desktop version, just with a different input philosophy.

Interface Built for Touch, Without Dumbing Down

Designers at the Blender Foundation are rethinking the UI for a single-window workflow. There will be floating panels, context overlays, collapsed menus, and icon-driven sidebars—each tailored for pen and finger rather than mouse. Importantly, the UI is being built directly atop Blender’s core, not a mobile-only fork. This ensures compatibility and consistency, so desktop and tablet artists will share the same underlying toolset and development pipeline.

The project targets existing Blender users—no attempt to reinvent the app as an entry-level tool for hobbyists. The focus remains on enabling experienced artists to use familiar workflows with a different interface.

Roadmap and Timeline

No firm release date yet, but the Blender Foundation is planning a live tech demo for SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver (August 10–14). Following that, Blender HQ in Amsterdam will host a design workshop to gather more community input, and additional sessions are on the agenda for Blender Conference 2025.

Once the Blender iPad Pro app is stable, the team plans to expand to other devices, including Microsoft Surface, Huawei MatePad, Wacom MovinkPad, and Android tablets. The goal is to address professional 3D workflows on the full spectrum of advanced tablets—eventually.

Feedback and Development Community Participation

The new “Beyond Mouse and Keyboard” branch on Blender’s developer forums is open for input, with the Foundation especially interested in designers experienced with multitouch and pen-based UIs. Add-ons are not on the priority list for initial builds, so plugin authors may have to wait until the core UI and workflows are stable.

What Tab-Specific Workflows Mean for Desktop Blender

UI improvements being developed for tablets—including a Quick Favorites editor, icon-driven sidebar, helper overlays, and wheel menus—are also planned for the desktop version of Blender 5.0. Touch-first R&D could soon benefit every Blender artist, regardless of platform.

The post Blender on iPad Pro at Last—Without Losing Its Blender-ness first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Maxon has now nailed the Forger coffin shut, confirming that the iPad sculpting app will enter “limited maintenance mode” and vanish from the App Store on September 10, 2025. The company’s newly published FAQ leaves little room for ambiguity: after the cutoff, no new updates, no fresh bug fixes, and definitely no new subscriptions.

Forger, acquired by Maxon in 2021 after a long solo run since 2011, brought polygon modeling, non-destructive layers, and a surprisingly ambitious toolset to the iPad. But since 2023, it’s seen nothing more than bug fix bandages. Now, even those are running out.

What “Limited Maintenance Mode” Means—No Surprises Here

From September 10, 2025, Forger is gone from the App Store. You can’t buy, download, or subscribe. Current users can keep the app as long as their subscription is active and can re-download, but there will be no new updates or bug fixes. Technical support remains, but only until your subscription runs out or Forger vanishes entirely.

Migration: GoZ

If you want your work to survive, use GoZ to transfer projects to ZBrush (desktop or iPad). Forger’s native file format is not supported anywhere else—not even in Cinema 4D. Plan accordingly. Layers, mesh data, and certain effects may not transfer cleanly, especially for complex projects. The official advice: test your asset pipeline now, not after September.

Forger Out, ZBrush for iPad In

Maxon’s recommended replacement is ZBrush for iPad, which debuted in September 2024. It supports 200+ brushes, DynaMesh, Sculptris Pro, and other ZBrush staples. It’s free to try, but full functionality costs $9.99/month or $89.99/year—substantially more than Forger’s old $1.99/month or $14.99/year. There is no migration discount. The Forger and ZBrush for iPad teams are being merged, so features should converge (in theory, and with enough patience).

Reality Check: Test Before You Migrate

Every workflow, export, and pipeline step should be validated with actual production assets before committing to ZBrush for iPad or any replacement. Maxon’s FAQ and support documentation make no secret of Forger’s quirks—neither should your team.

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Maxon official FAQ: End of Support // Forger End of Service FAQ

The post Maxon Sunsets Forger: iPad Sculptors Get the (Maintenance) Axe first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Ultimately, the Mac mini is recommended for serious video production, whereas the iPad suits H.264, H.265 and ProRes users. The first part of our review has shown some disadvantages of the iPad Pro over using the Mac mini Pro for DaVinci Resolve 19, in particular when it comes to memory management of the limited 16 GB of RAM. Well, Apple should know their hardware better than anybody else (even if they tend to demo new hardware with Blackmagic software too).

So, we have a closer look at FCP-X on either device this time and then, a second look at the fresh version 20 of DaVinci Resolve (DR for short). Finally, we’ll try to reach a final verdict regarding the usefulness of the iPad Pro and the Mac mini Pro for video professionals.

Video sources

This time, we run the software under Sequoia 15.5 on the Mac mini and iPadOS 18.5 on the tablet. Not much has changed regarding compatibility of the tablet software with raw video formats. Neither DR 20 nor FCP-X (2.2.1) accept any professional sources, like Canon, Sony, or Red. With one notable exception: either one is reading their own family’s RAW.

DR for iPad can handle BRAW, and FCP-X does Apple’s ProRes RAW. The latter is even supported by specialised hardware in the M4 Pro. Under MacOS, DR is reading clips from just about every camera in general use, while FCP-X is quite limited. Canon RAW at least is accepted by Apple’s Compressor for conversion, but neither Sony’s OCN nor Nikon’s R3D is read. So, you may need to run DR too, just for conversions (the free version should suffice).

While BRAW Toolbox by Chris Hocking makes FCP-X compatible with BRAW under MacOS, no such solution is available for the iPad. Blackmagic (BM for short) still refuses to support ProRes RAW in DR version 20. Consequently, we can’t directly compare speed and reliability of these in the two video apps. For a detailed comparison, there’s an excellent article by Adam Wilt.

There’s also no widely established benchmark for either app on the tablet, like Puget Systems’ one for DR (now on MacOS too) or the one by Team2Films (T2F for short) we used last time. Instead, we have layered several clips in ProRes RAW and also tried some very high resolution sources from BM’s new cinema cameras after conversion to ProRes 422 HQ.

Stability and speed

Of course, we were most curious about the stability with the limited RAM of 16 GB, the maximum you can get in the iPadPro. In DR, with the converted T2F benchmark on the iPad (see here), version 20 crashed just like 19, so no news here. But we didn’t get any such crash in FCP-X, even if trying with insane source resolutions. The worst was a 12K ProRes clip stacked in a small, rotated picture over a 17K (!) clip in an UHD timeline.

This gave us an out-of-memory error even with the integrated RAM technology of Apple silicon when trying to play it back. Nevertheless, we could render this timeline into H.265 without stalls or artefacts. Even 17K alone worked in UHD, but playback was not 100% smooth. Obviously, Apple knows very well how to handle such challenges.

Three clips of ProRes RAW stacked for picture-in-picture played without any hiccups, of course, and rendered just as fast as non-RAW clips. For comparison, we moved the projects to the Mac mini too. As you may expect, the poor thing with just 24 GB of RAM went into massive swapping to SSD with 17K in a 17K timeline (!) under DR, but didn’t crash.

Trying 17K, cut into an 8K timeline in DR 20 with 5 simple color correction nodes (two of them with a Power Window) played at 17 to 18 fps. 8K output is getting rendered with massive swapping, but no stall. FCP-X is also showing swapping with a 17K source, but a bit less than DR on the Mac mini Pro. Rendering to UHD in H.265 was nearly twice as fast than on the iPad with FCP-X.

Finally, they don’t force you to have the sources on internal storage any more (which was a limitation we critisized in our first review). Any good SSD with a known good cable will do now, so you don’t need to pay their massive premium for 2 TB. Unfortunately, you’ll still need to go for 1 TB to get 16 GB of RAM in the tablet. The Mac mini Pro is available with up to 64 GB and you can still choose any size for the internal SSD.

Multicam

While both DR and FCP-X offer multicam editing of recorded footage, only FCP-X on the iPad can do it with up to four wireless live streams as highly compressed proxies. This function is limited to sources running Final Cut Camera (free), so you’ll have to stay in the Apple ecosphere with iPhones or other iPads. But with the remarkable quality of recent iPhones (see here), you’ll have the smallest live studio one can imagine today.

To avoid misunderstandings: switching does not send a live stream out into the world. But, of course, FCP-X can be used to correct edits or add effects after live recording. For full quality, you’ll need to transfer the clips from the phones to the iPad after recording. But you can start editing immediately, based on the proxies, while the transfer happens in the background.

The whole experience with Live Multicam in FCP-X is really smooth, with step-by-step instructions and the ease of use you’d expect from Apple (there’s a free tutorial by Ripple Training). Live Multicam supports the full potential of these cameras, including log or HDR recording and the ProRes codec with recent models. You can even control camera settings remotely.

BM is offering live switching possibilities too with their ATEM line of products, and recording an editable version for DR while going out live. This is not limited to their own cameras, but you’ll need more gear to lug around. Wiring up a studio with ATEM or anything comparable is considerably more complex and expensive than the iPad’s Live Multicam, but needed for professional broadcasting.

Screens

All of this is supported by the excellent screen of the iPad Pro with impressive contrast by a tandem OLED. You can get very quite close to the established standards with its reference modes. And we shouldn’t blame Apple for issues with shifts of color and contrast on other devices and software – it’s a general lack of standards in the industry. The iPad will recognise the tags for different modes and switch accordingly (read here for further details and adjustments).

Other uses

We’ve already had a close look at the iPad for monitoring with CineMon (see here). It’s out of beta now, working very well on the iPad Pro and getting faster and more efficient with every update. The author is even planning a record function. We made one weird observation, though: the capture interface for HDMI input with the best balance of image quality, price and size is the Acasis VC-003 (see here).

But it doesn’t work the same way under iPadOS as it did in our review under MacOS. While we could choose 4:2:2 for color subsampling on the Mac, there are only two versions of 4:2:0 on the tablet. OTOH, we couldn’t get 24 or 25 fps on the Mac, while the iPad offers a broader range of all usual frame rates, even including the ones for NTSC.

This is not a bug in CineMon, since other software like CamX shows the same limitations and options. The drivers for the UVC standard used for such devices are part of the OS, so these differences seem to point to Apple’s responsibility.

The Fairlight page is still not officially supported by DR 20 on the iPad. While you can activate that page by your own key settings via the usual hack by option-command-k, you can’t yet rely on its stability. But Apple offers their very capable audio app called Logic Pro for the iPad as well. And then, there are all the possibilities of the touch screen, which are not only used for intuitive operation of FCP-X, but even more so for artwork with Apple’s Pencil Pro.

Conclusion

Both the iPad M4 and the Mac mini M4 Pro are very capable devices, and have been very reliable in our tests if not overwhelmed by insane resolutions. But which one is the right choice?

I’d recommend the Mac mini (or any of its bigger brothers) for DaVinci Resolve if you have to work with sources like the high-end cameras from Arri, Blackmagic, Canon, Red/Nikon or Sony. Needing conversion of your footage before editing on the iPad is just too tedious. This would also be an argument against Final Cut Pro. Another feature you’ll be missing is the new keyframe editor in DR 20. Even worse, the old one is gone on the iPad.

Of course, if you want an integrated keyboard and screen, one of the MacBooks M4 will do just as well. But don’t get any Mac with only the basic RAM if you have source resolutions beyond 4K/UHD, rather get as much as you can afford. You can rather save on internal storage, which will never suffice for professional video production anyway.

But if your camera is recording one of the flavours of H.264 or H.265 or ProRes RAW, the iPad is a serious alternative. Today, a log recording in 10 bit 4:2:2 with a good data rate can give you nearly as much flexibility and quality as the raw recordings. You can cover full post-production for these formats on the tablet, and get the additional possibilities of drawing on the screen with the Pencil Pro if you are an artist.

The post Final Cut Pro:Mac mini or iPad M4? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Uli Plank.

Serious video work has been possible on an iPad for quite a while now, with apps like DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, or even Luma Fusion (see here). But until now, most professionals would consider the tablet for preparation while being off-base and not for finishing in a complete workflow. With the arrival of the M4 processors, which blow away most of the competition in the Mac mini or MacBook Pro, we’d like to have another look at the iPad Pro with such a processor.

Reviewed hardware and its OS

Apple kindly lent us a well-equipped iPad Pro M4 with 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB of solid state storage. We have been running it under iOS 18.4.1. For comparison, we use a Mac mini M4 Pro with 24 GB, 12‑Core CPU, and 16‑Core GPU. While we still like macOS Sonoma better, this one can only be operated under MacOS Sequoia, (currently in version 15.4.1). Our first part will be focused on their use for DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve

Blackmagic Design (BM for short) already has a public beta for version 20 of DaVinci Resolve (DR), but not on the tablet. While beta testing under iOS is possible with Apple’s TestFlight, they obviously didn’t care to go through the hassle of registration. So, version 20 will probably only show up on the tablet once it’s final. Accordingly, our comparison will take place primarily on version 19, 19.1.4 Studio to be precise. BM mentions that projects (.drp files) or archives (.dra) are fully compatible, but now there’s one caveat: those out of version 20 are not backward compatible.

There are other limitations when trying to get serious: no RAW formats other than BM’s own BRAW are read by DR on the iPad. Since we wanted to try a widely available benchmark on either hardware, we used the one by Team 2 Films, which you can download here. To seriously challenge the hardware (and DR), it’s using several other RAW formats in resolutions up to 8K. Puget Systems now has a version of their popular PugetBench for Creators under MacOS too, but not for the tablet. A basic score of 8811 for the Mac mini Pro in that test is remarkable, in particular in relation to its low power consumption.

Benchmarking M4 against M1 Pro

Nevertheless, we also wanted to know how much faster a Mac mini M4 Pro would be compared to a trusty old MacBook Pro M1. The Puget benchmark yielded a score of 4962 in a tad under 16 minutes on the M1 Pro, but the new Mac mini gave us a score of 8811 in less than 4 minutes. This is better than a Windows laptop with the mobile version of the RTX 4090, but less than an Apple M3 Max or a desktop PC with a 4090 (according to Puget Systems’ ranking). Not bad for such a tiny computer! Under full load the fan became audible, but it was not an aggressive sound and could be held well under control with TG Pro.

PugetBench is running DR under external control, while the one by Team 2 Films is just a DR project with demanding source files and complex operations. Rendering it in its original format on the MBP M1 Pro took just short of 12 minutes, and the 32 GB RAM in that machine were enough to avoid swapping to the SSD. We also took the times under Sequoia and for DR 20 beta 2, but they were identical within a reasonable margin of error. The Mac mini M4 Pro needed 10:35, but was faster at 9:46 with DR 20b2, which seems to have some optimisations for M4.

Our machine has only 24 GB, the standard for this model, and it went into occasional swapping with R3D in 8K, but not with 6K. The decoder is grabbing quite a chunk of RAM too. So, if you regularly need to work in 8K and are eying this little machine, you may want to go higher. It’s not offered in 32, though, you’ll need to go for 48 GB to be on the safe side. OTOH, a bit of swapping won’t kill your SSD right away, just make rendering a bit slower. And then, there are even ways to replace the SSD in the Mac mini now.

Benchmarking the iPad Pro

Our first step to make it run on the iPad was converting and relinking all incompatible clips to ProRes 422HQ in their original resolution. CineForm would be accepted too, but now that DR can export ProRes under Windows as well, this point doesn’t really matter. For reference, we tested this version of the project on the Mac mini M4 too. It got rendered just a tad faster than the original version at 9 minutes and 26 seconds. After all, those Macs have hardware for ProRes too, while most RAW formats are quite CPU-heavy and needed a little bit longer.

Trying to run that version on the iPad was a disappointment. Rendering stalled in various places, after which we got false offline messages for some clips. This is a typical problem in DR 19, where you can’t always take such messages literally, if the sources are still connected and should be compatible. Even if complex processes at high resolution with that benchmark occasionally provoked some swapping to SSD, MacOS never showed any such errors. Trying to render in shorter chunks, after opening up the hidden Deliver page to see where it failed, didn’t really solve the issue on the tablet.

The iPad is not available with more than 16 GB of RAM, and even that only in the expensive 1 TB or 2 TB version. So we downscaled all the 8K clips to half their resolution, but 6K and below were kept at their size. Now, finally, the iPad got through with the rendering and needed 10:19. Not bad for a machine with passive cooling only, but even a MacBook M1 Pro finished the downscaled and converted project in 8:02, the Mac mini M4 needed 6:34. The iPad consumed 8% of a full charge during that render, so it should run up to two hours without needing external power. SSD speed is more balanced than in older models, with over 2.8 gbps read speed and close to 2.8 write according to Jazz Disk Pro.

Preliminary conclusion

All of this points to a memory issue with higher resolutions, even if the iPad Pro supports playing 8K over HDMI. There is no app for iOS directly comparable to the Activity Monitor under MacOS, but using Device Monitor² we could see that the iPad was getting close to 99% of memory in use when rendering stalled. Obviously, we have a memory management issue here for production in DR, even if the iPad Pro supports playing 8K over HDMI.

Our MacBook M1 Pro with 32 GB RAM didn’t even start swapping, the Mac mini with only 24 GB got into occasional swapping to the SSD, for example with 8K REDcode footage. But it was still perfectly stable when doing this, there were no stalls or any other render issues. So, either the memory management of iOS for the iPad Pro is not as good, or the issue is on Blackmagic’s side. Next we’ll test the tablet with Apple’s Final Cut Pro X.

The post Mac mini or iPad Pro M4 for Post? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Uli Plank.