Professional video editing, simplified
Final Cut Pro, Apple’s premiere video editing software, targets both working professionals and consumers who want more power for their video editing projects than iMovie provides. The Mac-only app bridges these two worlds well and works magnificently once you get to know it. Final Cut Pro offers fantastic organization tools, snappy performance, and plenty of top-notch effects that can elevate your video productions. All that said, our Editors’ Choice winner for pro video editors is still Adobe Premiere, which offers clearer import and export processes and more advanced AI features.How Much Does Final Cut Pro Cost?
You now have two ways to buy Final Cut Pro: You can make a one-time payment of $299.99 on the Mac App Store or sign up for Apple’s new Creator Studio subscription, which costs $12.99 per month or $129 per year. That low subscription price also gets you Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, and more. You can install Final Cut Pro on multiple Macs, and you receive updates via the App Store. Apple offers a 30-day trial, which requires only an Apple Store account.
For comparison, Adobe’s competing Premiere costs a minimum of $22.99 per month, with just a seven-day trial. DaVinci Resolve, similar to Final Cut Pro, carries a one-time price of $295. DaVinci Resolve’s perpetually free version is extremely capable, however. The standalone Ultimate edition of CyberLink PowerDirector goes for $139.99, while a subscription version costs $79.99 per year.
If you want motion graphics and encoding to many output formats, you need to fork over another $49.99 each for Apple’s Motion and Compressor ancillary applications. DaVinci Resolve includes these capabilities. Premiere’s After Effects motion graphics tool requires a separate $22.99-per-month subscription, but its Media Encoder utility is part of the single-app subscription price.
The iPad version of Final Cut Pro requires a $4.99 per month or $49 per year subscription, unless you opt for the Apple Creator Studio suite.What’s New in Final Cut Pro?
Alongside Creator Studio, Apple recently announced new features for its media editing applications, including Final Cut Pro. The macOS edition is now on Version 12, whereas the iPad edition is on Version 3. Here’s what’s new:
Beat Detection. This new capability leverages AI from the video editor’s audio stablemate, Logic Pro, to analyze your video’s music track and display a Beat Grid, letting you align video cuts to the music’s beats for a polished result.
Premium Content. Apple adds 60 dynamic titles and transitions, 14 graphic elements, and countdown animations and timers to set the pace.
Transcript Search. This takes advantage of the program’s ability to generate caption tracks automatically from speech in your video clips. With it, you simply type in words or phrases, and the program takes you to the part of the timeline with the specific dialogue. This feature requires an Apple silicon Mac.
Visual Search. An even more impressive tool than transcript search, this feature uses AI to analyze what’s going on in a video clip. Just type something like «car speeding by» or an activity like «dancing», and Final Cut Pro takes you to the relevant place in the timeline. It could save you a lot of time applying keyword tags to your clips. This tool also requires an Apple silicon Mac.
The iPad version of Final Cut Pro gets several new features, too:
Background Export. This capability lets you work in other apps on your iPad while a long video export is in progress, keeping you apprised of progress via Live Activities notifications.
External Monitor Playback. Even desktop video editing sometimes benefits from viewing a project on a large external monitor. This update brings that option to Final Cut Pro on the iPad.
Montage Maker. One of the major features that arrived with the Creator Studio is available only in the iPad version of Final Cut Pro. It analyzes your media and cuts it down to the most interesting bits, matching the clips to the beats of the soundtrack.
Multiple Clip Selection. Sometimes you want to apply the same effect to multiple clips at once. This is a pretty standard video editing feature in desktop software, and now it’s available on the iPad.
Missing among the new tools in Final Cut Pro are generative AI features, like those in Premiere and even in consumer-level products like PowerDirector. The closest to these are the auto-captioning and Magic Mask features, but those are a far cry from generating video content based on text prompts. You can, however, use Apple Playground-generated images (but not video) in your Final Cut projects.Can Your Mac Run Final Cut Pro?
Final Cut Pro requires a hefty 6.5GB of local storage. The program requires a machine running macOS 15.6 or later, which means no MacBook older than 2018. It also requires a Metal-capable graphics card for Intel-based machines and a minimum of 8GB RAM. (Apple recommends 16GB.) As mentioned, Final Cut Pro runs natively on Apple silicon Macs, and some features require this type of chip. Unlike Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve, which run on macOS and Windows (and Linux in the latter’s case), Final Cut Pro is for Apple devices only.Libraries, Importing, and Organizing: Manage Your Projects
Final Cut Pro Libraries let you keep assets together for use in multiple projects. They combine the previously discrete Events and Projects panels. Libraries are similar to the Catalogs in Adobe Lightroom in that they are databases that you can back up to a separate drive and receive automatic backups. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about projects you created before this Library arrangement: Final Cut gives you a simple update option to get them working with the program.
Libraries are a major part of organizing your assets, but you must first import media before you can use them. Each import session places media into an Event in the source area. At import, you can tell Final Cut to copy the event media to a specific Library. You can also have the program analyze video for color balance, excessive noise, stabilization, and the presence of one or more people. The app auto-tags content based on this analysis.
Final Cut Pro can automatically tone-match SDR and HDR files so that you can work with both types in the same project. It can also fix audio issues. However, Premiere makes the import (and export) process clearer for novices.
Final Cut Pro supports expanded color spaces like those that approach Rec. 2020, including the DCI-P3, which current iPhones and iMacs use. It also accepts the H.265 codec (aka HEVC), which minimizes the file size of 4K and 360-degree footage while maintaining resolution. That’s in addition to standard video formats such as AVCHD, HDV, MPEG-4 H.264, and XAVC. However, Final Cut Pro doesn’t work with the open-source MKV and OGG formats.
Of course, the app supports Apple’s ProRes Raw format, which is analogous to Adobe’s DNG raw still camera file format. It gives you access to all sensor data and allows for more leeway in adjusting lighting and colors compared with compressed formats. Atomos recorders support the format, as does the DJI Mavic 3 Pro drone. Controls in the Inspector panel let you adjust the color temperature, exposure offset, and ISO of ProRes Raw content.
If you’ve chosen to analyze the clips, the program can create Smart Collections based on the type of shot (long, close, or medium) or whether the shot is stable or unstable. In my quick test, it created a People folder, with Group, Medium Shot, and Wide Shot Smart Collections below it, and a Stabilization folder with Excessive Shake and Steady Shot groups.
Final Cut Pro can import and export both projects and events in XML format. This means professional video editors can round-trip their work between video editing software and other apps, such as DaVinci Resolve, a standard in pro video color correction. The same holds for organizing projects in Square Box System’s CatDV, which lets teams of professionals organize clips. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the ability to import iMovie projects you started on a mobile device.Easy Keyword Tagging
In addition to its automatic clip organization options, Final Cut Pro includes manual keyword tagging. Much like a good photo workflow app, the video editor makes entering frequently used tags simple—you can even use keyboard shortcuts. Tagging in Final Cut Pro still isn’t as sophisticated as in Adobe Lightroom, but Premiere can use tags only through the separate Adobe Bridge manager (though it does offer lots of metadata fields along with face detection). One very cool keyword tagging option in Final Cut is the ability to apply a tag to just part of a clip. You can also rate, reject, or star a clip from icons below the source tray. Transcript and Visual Search
New drop-down options from the search box let you choose these two AI-powered tools. For the transcript search, you don’t even need to create a transcript first; it just finds the spoken words in the footage. You can select between Includes (for an exact term) or Is Related To (for a broader search) options. I searched for the word «school» in a demo video I shot about Copilot Pages, in which the demonstrator was using the feature to organize and enhance class notes. The tool found the relevant clip section and let me shunt it into the timeline, keeping just a bit of space around the word for context. However, it didn’t find instances of the demonstrator saying «Copilot», since he spoke that word with an accent.
The visual search tool was also somewhat hit or miss. It correctly found moments in my source video files that included images of a soccer match and of a PC. But it couldn’t find a waterfall or a woman speaking, even though I had footage of a female friend talking at Niagara Falls.Collaboration
For collaborative editing, Final Cut Pro supports XML files and locking. You can export Final Cut Pro ProRes or H.264 content as proxy files at 50%, 25%, or 12.5% of the original size, allowing remote editors to access huge projects more efficiently. Adobe Premiere , however, offers more collaboration options with its Team Projects and Productions, which enable simultaneous editing with conflict resolution features. It also sports a Share for Review feature to give non-editing stakeholders a sign-off capability. Premiere also has deep Frame.io integrations for collaboration, though Frame.io also works with Final Cut Pro as a plug-in.Editing Interface: Approachable, But Deep
Final Cut Pro’s interface sports a consistent dark gray that makes the content you’re editing the most prominent thing on the screen. Four preset window layouts in Final Cut include Default, Organize, Color & Effects, and Dual Displays (this isn’t available if you don’t have dual displays). You can also create custom workspace layouts. You can’t, however, undock panels to make them float-free, as you can in Premiere.
Although the Final Cut Pro timeline looks something like that of iMovie, with its free-form, trackless Magnetic Timeline view, the pro program packs vastly more editing power. As with pretty much every video editing app, Final Cut Pro presents the standard three-pane view, with source clips at the top left, a preview window at the top right, and a timeline across the bottom. A timecode indicator appears below the preview window, along with an indicator of the rendering completion percentage. You can expand the preview to full-screen, and there’s now an option to scroll the timeline as your movie plays. You get Undo and Redo tools, but Premiere’s history window offers more in the way of versioning.
You won’t find track numbers along the left edge of the timeline. Final Cut Pro calls tracks lanes, and you can add as many as you like, unlike with PowerDirector and Pinnacle Studio.
