For the past two weeks, I’ve been working with the latest version of Final Cut Pro for the iPad. For many professionals, the original version of this app last year wasn’t the desired outcome. The tools were simply too limited to use on a daily basis. The new version doesn’t necessarily change that – but despite my many frustrations, I’m finally discovering the joy of using it.
The 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 version isn’t just a Final Cut Pro feature: It’s a brand new app built into Final Cut Pro.
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 know what to expect: peaking, manual focus, and audio metering. You just can’t add custom LUTs like you can with the other two.
The Final Cut Camera app can be used alongside 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. You can monitor footage from iPhones, zoom in, and change white balance, focus mode, and more on the fly. I imagine this new feature will be especially popular with video podcasts.
The previews you see are compressed, but still look great. Once you end the recording session, the files are transferred to the iPad running Final Cut Pro at full quality and rendered. The whole process is much faster than I expected. My 10-minute session using three iPhones was available for editing minutes later. A new transfer indicator window at the top of the interface shows you the progress.
There is one upgrade I would like to see for this feature in the future: live editing. Currently, you still have to stop recording first before you can sync all the files and start editing.
Multicam support is a great new feature, but it goes against what else Apple has done to improve the Final Cut Pro for iPad experience. The standout feature of this year’s update is external hard drive support. That’s important—this feature was oddly absent last year. But its addition immediately reminded me of how poorly Final Cut Pro for iPad (and iPadOS) handles file management.
All of your media files must be stored in the FCP library files and the same library file must be stored on either the internal or external drive. This means you cannot split your media across multiple drives or cloud storage. A side effect of this method is that you are constantly duplicating files from one location to another.
And there are other issues that haven’t changed since last year. For example, you still can’t import entire folders into Final Cut Pro, only individual files. And once they’re imported, you still can’t organize the files into separate folders or containers like “A-roll,” “B-roll,” “Music,” or “Graphics.”
Another new feature unique to the iPad version of Final Cut Pro is Live Drawings. Using an Apple Pencil, you can draw animations directly onto your clips. Apple’s latest Pencil Pro tricks are supported here, but other than that, there’s not much to do with the Pencil Pro itself. I wish there was a way to program the haptic press to do more when editing – perhaps select multiple clips on hover, or just make it a right-click. I think that would be useful and would speed up working with a Pencil.
There are still a lot of serious video editing features that I think Apple will add: compound clips, folders, adjustment layers, post stabilization, coloring tools like curves, sharing projects between machines, the ability to add new LUTs, 360-degree video support, object tracking, linear keyframes – the list is endless. If you read my review from last year, you’ll find the exact same list there.
All of these missing things really surprise you when you’re in the middle of it. Ultimately, I was making creative decisions based on bad software limitations.
Now, the mobile video editing app market is more competitive than ever. CapCut is extremely popular with TikTokers. “Why I’m switching to DaVinci” videos are all over my YouTube feed. And people are still fans of the OG iPad app, Lumafusion. In fact, three of the features I desperately need are already included in DaVinci’s iPad app.
But even after trying all the other apps I just listed, and despite all my frustration with the missing features, I keep coming back to Final Cut on the iPad. Because there’s one thing Apple is doing right here, and that’s the overall experience.
Apple calls this a “touch-first” app, and I finally understand what that means. Once you get past the learning curve, get a handle on the controls, and are aware of the limitations, you start to have fun and enjoy it. Apple isn’t trying to copy the Final Cut desktop experience—it’s building a new one. And you can see that in the way you interact with the jog wheel and the way the sidebar pops up so you can edit with your left hand.
I’ve found that using Final Cut Pro with my hands is by far the most intensive way of editing. Everything is literally right 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 achieve these simple wins, its vision of a powerful, touch-enabled Final Cut Pro could really flourish.
Photography by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge