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Review: Final Cut Pro for iPad

Scott Simmons

Final Cut Pro for iPad is here at long last. After much rumor and speculation, we had an announcement that it was coming and it’s ready to download in the App Store. It is subscription-based but you can get a free month to try it out.

Apple’s video announcement was impressive. I left that video thinking that Final Cut Pro for iPad looked a lot less like Final Cut Pro than I expected. After using it for a few days, I came to the conclusion below.

Final Cut Pro for iPad is a different beast than Final Cut Pro on the desktop

In fact, the question can be asked, is it Final Cut Pro at all?

Yes, there is a magnetic timeline. Yes, there is keywording. Yes, there is range-based selections. Yes, it runs on Apple hardware. But the similarities could end there.

Here are some key differences that I see between Final Cut Pro for iPad and Final Cut Pro desktop.

Final Cut Pro for iPad is not “iMovie on steroids.”

After Apple’s Final Cut Pro for iPad announcement, I saw a comment that described it as “iMovie on steroids.” First off, the commenter had not touched FCP for iPad and second, it’s much more than that. 

There are many, many more controls in FCP for iPad than iMovie. Anyone who has spent any time at all in any video editing application will want to use FCP for iPad over iMovie any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Beyond so many more controls and features, it’s easier to use with just a small bit of instruction.

This is iMovie. It’s not really anything like the more advanced editing you can do with Final Cut Pro for iPad. Except for that detached audio thing … more on that later.

This article will focus mainly on the craft editing and storytelling tools of Final Cut Pro for iPad. That’s primarily the world I live in, so in my time with this version of Final Cut Pro for iPad I dug into the editorial tools more than some of the more signature effects and iPad-specific features. 

The editing tools are quite different from the desktop version of Final Cut Pro

The first thing I noticed on FCP for iPad was the editing tools (or selection modes as they are properly called) in the timeline are quite different. There are less of them and a different one altogether. 

That’s FCP for iPad tools on the left and FCP desktop on the right.

While I don’t think anyone will miss the Zoom or the Hand tool the change from the Trim tool to the Edge tool is the most significant IMHO. The Edge tool is like the Trim tool in that you can use it to select both sides of an edit for a rolling trim or one side of an edit for a ripple trim. 

But what you can’t do with it is select a clip or a Slip or Slide Edit. In fact, I can’t find a way to do a slip or slide edit at all. Did Apple think the Trim tool would be too complex for a new user? The Edge tool is certainly named for what it can select but not the functionality of what it does. I’m puzzled by this one.

The revolutionary FCP Skimmer is there but if you’re only using the iPad with your fingers via touch you won’t see it. With a keyboard and mouse or trackpad the Skimmer will be there and you’ll feel right at home. 

The Skimmer will also work with an M2 iPad and an 2nd generation Apple Pencil. I’ve been working on an M1 12.9-inch iPad Pro with that 2nd generation Apple Pencil and I don’t get the skimmer. That’s really a shame and I wonder if there was some technical reason for it or if Apple wanted to keep something exclusive to the latest hardware. The skimmer alone isn’t enough to go buy an M2 iPad Pro if you have an M1 already. You’ll get plenty of good use without it. 

The Jog Wheel

If you’ve ever edited any video on an iPad using the touch screen you know how imprecise it can be. Even lifting a finger off of the screen can adjust a slider or a playhead by a small amount. While a stylus helps with that using a mouse makes it much more exact.

The Jog Wheel can do things besides move the playhead. Nudging, trimming and keyframe moving will be as useful and playhead moving.

How has Apple addressed this shortcoming? By engineering what I think is Final Cut Pro for iPad’s most notable feature: a touch-screen jog wheel. By spinning this thing with your finger or Apple pencil you can do a lot of notable editing things with a lot of precision. Things such as:

What can’t you do with the jog wheel?

The Jog wheel also has inertia.

A fast touch spin of the job wheel and the playhead will quickly fly to one end or the other. The faster you spin it, the faster the playhead moves until it slows to a stop. It feels almost mechanical, is fun to use and instantly makes the actual timeline-based editing experience of Final Cut Pro for iPad a step ahead of the competition when it comes to actually having to use the touch-screen to edit by touch. 

Curiosities

There are a number of curiosities in Final Cut Pro for iPad. Some really cool. Some kind of weird. 

Gap Clips do exist in FCP for iPad so what can’t we insert one at the playhead?

What you don’t see in the browser are the orange indicators for Used Media Ranges. That will really be missed on the iPad since you’re more limited by screen size so anything to help know what you’re working with and have used is good.
A lot tap on a clip will reveal a submenu that is much smaller than that of desktop FCP. Where’s my detach audio? We need that for serious editing.

I want to make one note about all of these Curiosities listed above. They all come from a place of being burdened as a user of Final Cut Pro on the desktop. All the way back to Final Cut Pro X version 1.0. I intimately know all the tools that are in there so I know what FCP for iPad is missing. I realize some will make life easier while others might not be possible on an iPad touch device. Many users coming to FCP on the iPad for the first time will not have this burden. For one example of that, see the very end of this article.

Managing the storage will be important

As great as the iPad is, you’re still not able to manage media on an iPad like you can on the Mac. While FCP for iPad can import media from external storage like an attached SSD drive or camera cards, that media will be copied to the internal iPad storage upon import. 

There is no option with your media to “leave in place.” In the image above FCP is copying my ProRes numbered clips into a project.

I was wondering about how this internal storage would be managed so I imported a bunch of media into a project that was just over 1 GB. ⬇️

Checking my iPad storage I see that Final Cut Pro was taking up just under 5 GBs with all of the other media and renders and edits I had in the app. ⬇️

I then duplicated that project 15 times to see where the storage sat on my iPad. ⬇️

It’s good to know that’s FCP doesn’t duplicate the media if you duplicate the project. ⬇️

And the actual data that FCP is using after those 15 duplicates only went up marginally which is great since, like any good NLE, the data inside the edit project is small and is mainly pointers back to the original media. 

Yes, these are the kinds of things I think about with any new NLE. 🙂

And why did I go to this silly project duplicating extreme?

As I was working, I began to wonder how I could duplicate my timeline if I wanted to make a new version or preserve an old cut if I went to make extensive edits. There is no timeline in the browser so it seemed like duplicating the entire project was the way. 

But I was wrong. 

When you’re out in the project creation and selection screen, there’s a little pop-up menu arrow by the project name and format. There you can duplicate a timeline and create a new version. 

This is important as any serious editing tool must be able to create different versions of an edit easily. If you want to duplicate an edit hit the the dots when looking at the timeline selection and there is an option to duplicate and rename a timeline. I wouldn’t call this method easy but it’s essential and nice to have. 

Where are the Secondary Storylines?

Final Cut Pro for iPad doesn’t have Secondary Storylines in the same way that the desktop version does and this is a big change considering the importance of connected clips in the overall way FCP works. It’s another curious decision to leave them out.

You can sort of trick FCP for iPad into making a Secondary Storyline by applying a transition between connected clips. Like FCP on the desktop Connected Clips need to be in a container and that is a secondary storyline. Have a batch of clips you want in a secondary? Select them all and apply a transition. Want cuts instead of that transition? Just delete the transition and the Secondary Storyline will remain intact. 

Here’s a Secondary Storyline I created by adding a transition to all of these connected clips, then deleting the transitions one at a time. 🤷‍♂️

This makes me feel like secondary storylines will get a more prominent place in a future version of Final Cut Pro for iPad. Or somehow I completely missed how to create secondary storyline without this little hack trick.

Multicam

Multicam editing works well, but it’s limited to 4 angles. Four isn’t many but on a mobile device you might not need more as I think it’s targeted to much smaller productions like interview setups than a concert or music video.

Above is a 2 angle mulitcam, footage courtesy of EditStock.

You can see above that FCP still cuts the audio when doing a Multicam edit. I think it’s just the nature of the magnetic timeline and the clip container paradigm that FCP uses. I wish they had engineered around this because even though you don’t (usually) hear the cut in the audio, it is just unnerving when you are trying to cut mulitcam video angles to a single audio source. It doesn’t feel right to see cuts in your audio.

What does feel right is the angle editor right in FCP for iPad. You can sync by audio waveform of course. 

What about the “progressive disclosure?”

One of Final Cut Pro desktop’s best features is progressive disclosure, where you are presented with a simple interface, but parts of that interface will reveal themselves as you need more complexity and features. FCP for iPad offers something similar, and it’s well done with the iPad’s limited-screen real estate.

With everything closed up, you’ve got a tidy and fast way to do some editing.
Start opening up and revealing everything, and the screen can become cramped. But you have a lot of tools in there to get work done.

I was editing on a 12.9-inch iPad Prp and at times, things got cramped. I can’t image what working on a smaller iPad will be like. And no iPhones here as this is iPad only.

How is the performance?

Very good. In my testing on a 12-inch M1 iPad Pro, both media playback and interface manipulation were excellent. It really is fun to use. Even with 4 streams of ProRes doing mulitcam, it never skipped a beat. Admittedly I wasn’t pushing it too hard (and you can render if needed), but it never stuttered or hesitated on any kind of playback. 

You can render, if need be, in a desktop-familiar way.

A long touch on a clip will reveal a render option. If you look really close you can see the dotted line about the timeline that shows clips that could be rendered. Once rendered those dotted lines go away, just like on the desktop FCP.
And in a very important storage management feature, you can purge the render cache on a per-project basis.

 

Loving that HDR iPad Pro liquid retina display

I have to say one of the biggest and most amazing surprises was working with iPhone HDR media on the iPad Pro display. It is incredibly bright and gorgeous when working and then hitting a full-screen preview. And this is just amateur-shot phone footage, so I can imagine what a unique and cool experience it will be with professionally shot and exposed media.

Yea, that’s way too bright. I am willing to be that most HDR media will be left to Color Conversion > Automatic. At least for me.

FCP for iPad will have a full complement of features to support HDR creation, SDR conversion and LUTs, so some pro workflows are built-in. Prepare for the insane iPad camera rigs as people shoot, edit and finish all on the iPad Pro because they can. And we can enjoy!

What are some of those other signature Final Cut Pro for iPad features?

Live Drawing with a second-generation Apple Pencil is really cool and quite fun. It makes you feel like an animation whiz. I don’t know the exact limitation on exactly how big of a live drawing you can record but you can adjust their animation speed with a Draw On control in the Inspector. Once you are done you can move it around like any clip. I predict some fun videos being made with this tool. 

Fast Cut features include an automatic Scene Removal Mask tool, Auto Crop and Voice Isolation. While those aren’t brand new, this “fast cut” description is, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more tools given this “fast cut” designation in the future. 

You can share a Final Cut Pro for the iPad project and open it on another iPad or in FCP on the desktop. This ability to open it on the desktop is possible in Final Cut Pro version 10.6.6.

Soundtracks are audio tracks that edit themselves when you change the duration. So if you’re thinking SonicFire Pro then you have the idea. Or Adobe Remix, or you remember Soundtrack Pro. But Remix works with any track, and Soundtrack Pro was just based around loops.

And yes, Final Cut Pro for iPad is subscription based

I’ll leave this for others to touch on but this is a new FCP model that’s for sure. But it’s in line with what Apple (and every company that sells software) wants to do.

Wrap-up

Okay, so it really is Final Cut Pro, but the engineers and designers have given it a healthy rethink for the iPad. I purposely didn’t mention any other iPad NLEs as this isn’t the place to compare and contrast. (There will be countless YouTube videos doing just that with most missing the point entirely.) This review is about our beloved FCP, where it is in time and what it’s like to actually edit with it when you’re familiar with the desktop version of FCP. We know FCP for desktop has been slow on the upgrades and features for the last few years. Was all that effort put into FCP for iPad so as to neglect the desktop version? Probably not, but Final Cut Pro for iPad is different enough that some extensive engineering went into its creation.

Will you be cutting the next indie feature or unscripted series on Final Cut Pro for iPad? Probably not, but it could be used to do some preliminary work. It’s closer to an NLE companion app than another A company got with their iPad NLE. Final Cut Pro for iPad is geared more toward the “creator” than the dedicated editor. You can shoot video on the iPad right from the NLE! But that creator thing is ok.

In my short time with Final Cut Pro for iPad, this was the best thing that I saw come from it.⬇️

That’s a kid making a video about his dog that he has always wanted to make but never tried before Final Cut Pro for iPad. I gave him minimal instruction, and he was ecstatic when it was done. That’s what you want out of some cool, new and accessible technology. Keep it up creators. You have tools like never before.

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