I’ve been doing video editing since I was a teenager, I went to school for TV production and one of my first jobs was video editing for college sports highlights. Final Cut Pro has been present in all of this. Today I still use Final Cut Pro almost daily for my YouTube channel and I really love the app.
Needless to say, the appearance of Final Cut Pro for iPad was a big announcement for me and I was super excited to see what Apple would do here. After our initial first impressions, I delved into this iPad release, seeing how it can best work with what I need, and how it can serve the video editing community at large.
Available at $4.99 a month or $49.99 for a one-year subscription, would this be a “real Final Cut” or would it be some sort of Final Cut Mobile that would leave people like me disappointed? Let’s find out.
Final Cut Pro: What is it?
Who can use Final Cut Pro on iPad?
Final Cut Pro is a real high-end app and sadly it can’t run on every iPad available today. An iPad with an M1 or M2 processor is required. For this review, I was using a 2021 11″ iPad Pro, which has an M1 processor. So expect a performance boost if you’re using an M2 device.
Final Cut Pro is a non-linear video editing app that has been around for decades on the Mac and has just been released for the iPad as well. If you haven’t heard of “non-linear video editors” before, that’s okay. They’re what most professional video editors use to create everything from YouTube videos, music videos, TV shows, and even feature films. Your favorite video essay was made with a non-linear editor, just like the latest Marvel blockbuster, so they really allow for a lot of different jobs.
The basic idea is that you have a collection of video clips and you want to create a sequence with those clips to tell a story. In a nonlinear video editor, you’ll import your clips (and other media, such as images, music, or titles) into the app’s library, then you can drag those clips into a timeline. That timeline is your final video, and you can trim clips, move them, and overlay them on top of each other in the timeline. Once you’ve created a sequence of clips you like, you can export the timeline as a new video file. If you’re a YouTuber, that exported file is what gets uploaded to YouTube, for example.
This is a very broad summary, but it should give you an idea of which category Final Cut Pro falls into.
The video editor landscape on iPad
Even if you’ve never heard the term “non-linear video editor” before, you may have used one in the past and not be familiar with it. iMovie also falls into this category, but it’s a much simpler version of what Final Cut does. If all you need is to edit a few clips together from your iPhone, then iMovie is a great place to start.
But once you start feeling bound by iMovie, it might be time to look for something more robust. Maybe you want more freedom in your edits, or you want more advanced titles or color corrections. Maybe you need more layers of video, or you just need more control over the finer details of editing.
For years, iPad users would probably be drawn to LumaFusion, which has done a lot to innovate iPad video editing over the years. Or maybe you like Adobe and use Premiere Rush, which is a stripped-down version of Adobe’s desktop editor. DaVinci Resolve was a big update to the pro app that hit the iPad in late 2022, which was also a severely downsized version of their desktop app.
I’m happy to say that even though Final Cut Pro for iPad is stripped down compared to the Mac app, it manages to feel more complete than those other apps.
Final Cut Pro: editing on iPadOS
After using the app for a couple of days to edit a video, I can confidently say that despite some paper cutting and limitations, Final Cut Pro is the best video editing app I’ve ever used for the iPad. Other apps have done a good job, namely LumaFusion for leading the way with video editing for iPad, but credit to Apple for coming out of the gate with a powerful and easier to use interface than the Mac app somehow.
For example, resizing and moving videos can be a pain on the Mac. You’re switching between modes and using a mouse to resize things can be clunky, so you find yourself just typing in numbers that feel less natural. By comparison, I was immediately able to naturally use my fingers to grab a clip, resize it, and move it around the frame in a way that just felt better than anything I’d ever experienced on the Mac. As a bonus, there were all those Mac controls too, so I could go back to my old ways if I wanted. The software gave me choice, which is always a good thing in pro-level apps.
I also really liked how my media library, transitions, effects, and music all feel better to browse than the Mac version of the app. On the Mac these are all separated into different views and parts of the screen, but due to the limited screen real estate on the iPad, they’ve had to condense things and I think this change is just great in terms of getting what I need at any given moment in the middle of an edit.
In truth, I always expected it to be slower when I first used this version of the app, just as I would be with any other new editor. Muscle memory is a heck of a thing and I just had to adjust. Once I did that, I really started seeing flashes of brilliance in this interface.
While Final Cut Pro for Mac is optimized for using a mouse and keyboard to do everything, the iPad version was built with mouse, keyboard, touch, and Apple Pencil in mind. The brilliant thing about this is that you can freely switch between input methods and use whatever is best for the task at hand.
I found myself using the Magic Keyboard when trimming my timeline, setting in and out points on individual clips, and playing my project, but I leaned on touch to move clips around and tweak things in the inspector. Apple has also added a cool feature that lets you draw on your video and play that drawing as an animation. This was obviously done best with the Apple Pencil.
Final Cut Pro: What I liked
Final Cut Pro has long been known for its speed of work. It’s not only render times you always see in benchmarks, but the act of editing itself (you know, 90% of the work) is faster, especially on silicon Apple devices. I’m happy to report that Final Cut Pro for iPad continues this legacy and is incredibly well optimized on my iPad, an 11-inch M1 iPad Pro.
In truth, I was working with 4K footage shot on a Canon EOS R6, which is pretty video heavy, but my iPad didn’t sweat it, even when I was layering up to three clips on top of each other and applying color corrections to them at the same time. This is running an M1 processor, which we all know is pretty great, but there’s something special about having this power in a device that’s just 6mm thick.
I noticed that editing was making the back of my iPad a little warm and decreasing battery life. It seems like I’d be able to go from 100% to dead in 2-3 hours of constant editing, which isn’t the end of the world, but it’s faster than any other app I can think of.
For years we’ve complained that iPads (especially the Pro ones) have more horsepower than any software can actually use, but Final Cut is absolutely pushing the iPad to its limits and I’m super happy it’s stepped into that role.
Final Cut Pro: some paper cuts
Now there are some pain points with the app that go beyond just not being used to the app yet. The first is file management, which Apple has chosen to err on the side of simple. All files must be imported into Final Cut, even if they are already on your device in Photos or Files. This can be a big problem if you work with large video files, as they now have to exist twice on your iPad. I was able to largely avoid this by importing directly from the SD card my camera uses, thankfully.
On a related note, I was having trouble exporting my project when I was done. The app kept throwing errors telling me I didn’t have enough space on my device, even though the Settings app told me I was only using 100 of the 256GB of internal storage I had on this iPad. I tried deleting apps to free up more space, but it kept complaining.
In the end, I had to export the whole project to my Mac and render the video there. It was only a 1.2GB file after export, so my iPad should have had a lot of space left, so maybe this is just a 1.0 quirk that will be fixed. One thing that would help here is (as in the Mac version) being able to choose the export destination before rendering, so that you can plug in an external drive and save the video there if you’re low on space.
On the plus side, this proved to me that moving a project from iPad to Mac is completely seamless and everything transfers seamlessly.
Finally, there’s no way to customize keyboard shortcuts in the app, which is a shame since I have a couple of things I constantly do that I set to specific keys that I use to work super efficiently on my Mac. Basically, there there’s a lot less stuff with keyboard shortcuts, and those shortcuts can’t be changed.
Final Cut Pro: the verdict
Despite the limitations and quirks inherent in any 1.0 product release (even from Apple), I find myself extremely excited about this app and fully expect it to be the foundation for the Mac app down the road. The things that are here and work as you would expect are so delicious and sometimes even better than what we have in the Mac version.
And while it’s less feature-rich than the Mac app, it doesn’t make me feel like it’s a second-rate app. It looks more like they had enough to ship and will continue to build on that. Eventually, I expect this to come to the Mac and this unified app to become Final Cut Pro moving forward, with the current Mac app reverting to a legacy state.
I think Apple will wait a while to do this since they probably don’t want to create as much friction as they did a decade ago when they switched from Final Cut Pro 7 to X, but I can’t see the point in keeping two separate apps like this forever. Hopefully this unification will also come with the ability to sync projects to iCloud and be able to work on your Mac, pick up your iPad and work there, with all your editing and media syncing seamlessly between the two.
Oh, and Macs would really benefit from having multi-touch if this app were to arrive, but that’s a can of worms for another day. Right now, I’m very impressed with what Apple has been able to deliver in this version of the app and can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
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