I’ve been editing in the latest version of Final Cut Pro for iPad for the past two weeks. For many professionals, the original release of this app last year missed the mark. His tools were too limited for everyday use. The new version won’t necessarily change that – but despite many frustrations, I’m finally discovering the joy of using it.
A new version of the app, confusingly named “Final Cut Pro for iPad 2” (it’s for all current iPads, not the iPad 2) was released this week. And perhaps the biggest new feature in this year’s release isn’t exactly the Final Cut Pro feature: it’s the brand new app that integrates with it.
The new Final Cut Camera is a standalone app for your iPhone that offers advanced camera controls. If you’ve seen the Blackmagic app or the recently released Kino app, you’ll know what to expect: spikes, manual focus, and audio metering. You just won’t be able to add custom LUTs like in the other two.
Final Cut Camera can be used with Final Cut Pro on iPad to record Live Multicam sessions with footage streamed from up to four iPhones or iPads. In Final Cut on iPad, you take on the role of director. On the fly, you can watch footage coming from iPhones, zoom in and change white balance, focus mode, and more. I can see this new feature being especially popular for video podcasts.
The previews you see are compressed but still look great. Once you stop the recording session, the full-quality files are transferred to the iPad with Final Cut Pro and rendered. The whole process is much faster than I expected. My 10-minute session with three iPhones was available for editing a few minutes later. A new transfer indicator window at the top of the user interface shows the progress.
There is one upgrade I’d like to see for this feature in the future: live editing. Currently, you still have to stop recording first before syncing all files and jumping into editing.
Multicam support is a great new feature, but it contrasts with how little Apple has done to improve the Final Cut Pro experience for iPad. The most notable feature in this year’s update is support for external hard drives. This is important – this feature was strangely absent last year. But adding it immediately reminded me of how poorly Final Cut Pro for iPad (and iPadOS) handles file management.
All your media files must be stored in FCP library files and the same library file must be stored on an internal or external drive. This means you can’t split your media across multiple drives or cloud storage. One of the side effects of this method is that it means you’re just constantly duplicating files from one place to another.
And there are other issues that haven’t changed since last year. For example, you still can’t import complete folders into Final Cut Pro, only individual files. And once they’re imported, you still can’t organize files into separate folders or bins like “A-roll”, “B-roll”, “Music” or “Graphics”.
Another new feature unique to the iPad version of Final Cut Pro is Live Drawings. With Apple Pencil, you can draw animations directly into your clips. Apple’s latest Pencil Pro tricks are supported here, but other than that, there’s not much you can do with the Pencil Pro itself. I wish there was a way to program a haptic press to do something more on the editing front – maybe select multiple clips on hover or just right click. I feel like this would be useful and speed up the pencil work.
There are still a lot of serious video editing features that I’m waiting for Apple to add: composite clips, folders, adjustment layers, post stabilization, coloring tools like curves, sharing projects between machines, the ability to add new LUTs, 360 video support, object tracking, linear keyframes – the list goes on and on. If you read my review from last year, you will find the exact same list.
All the missing stuff really catches you off guard when you’re in the flow. I ended up finding myself making creative decisions based on poor software limitations.
Meanwhile, the mobile video editing app market is more competitive than ever. CapCut is extremely popular among TikTokers. “Why I’m Switching to DaVinci” videos are all over my YouTube channel. And people are still praising the OG iPad app Lumafusion. In fact, three of the features I desperately need are already in the DaVinci iPad app.
But even after trying all the other apps I just listed, and for all my frustration with the missing features, I keep coming back to Final Cut on the iPad. Because there’s one thing Apple does right here, and that’s the overall experience.
Apple calls it a “touch-first” app, and I finally understand what that means. Once you get past the learning curve and once you get the hang of the controls and realize its limitations, you start to really enjoy it and have fun. Apple isn’t trying to replicate Final Cut’s desktop experience — it’s building toward a new one. And you can see the way you interact with the control wheel and the way the side panel comes in so you can edit with your left hand.
I find that using Final Cut Pro by hand is by far the most impressive way to edit. Everything is literally at your fingertips. There’s something about this more tangible approach that I’m starting to find charming, even if it’s not as efficient as a mouse and keyboard.
If Apple can tick off those easy wins, then its vision of a capable and touchable Final Cut Pro could really thrive.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic/The Verge