Final Cut Pro for the iPad: incredibly fun but lacking features

One of my favorite photo editing methods is the iPad. Pinch-to-zoom is natural, Apple Pencil is great for adjustments, and apps have improved over time. However, I have not been able to reproduce that setup for video editing. LumaFusion has never worked for me and I haven’t made that switch yet after seeing a YouTube recommendation “I switched to DaVinci Resolve. This is why” video.

here of Verge, we’re mostly Adobe users, but for personal work we like to tinker with Final Cut Pro, so the news that it’s coming to the iPad was exciting for me. However, I own the 2018 iPad Pro, i.e. he model with the A12X Bionic chip. Final Cut Pro will not work with them. Requires an iPad with M1 or M2. So Apple sent me a loaner car to test the new Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro for iPad is a carefully designed app that gets many of the basics right. It’s a nice adaptation of the desktop app, and FCP users will feel at home. We take advantage of the iPad’s touch-first interface and make good use of accessories such as the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil. It’s also reasonably priced, and Apple sells it as a $5/month or $50/year subscription, so it’s easy to use for a month or two and see if it’s something you want to stick with.

But if you were expecting this to be a complete drop-in replacement for the Mac version of Final Cut Pro, you’ll probably be disappointed. There are still many features in this version that we missed during testing. Also, if you’re the type of editor who likes to work on both iPad and Mac, you need to be careful how you organize your project and which device you start with.

The 12.9-inch iPad that Apple lent me for this work had a 2TB drive and 16GB RAM, and came with a Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil. The total cost of this setup is $2,877. ($2,399 if you ditch the accessories.) And one of the first limitations of Final Cut Pro on the iPad is that you can’t edit from an external drive, so you’ll need an iPad with more storage. increase. All media files must reside within the iPad’s Files app. I think we’re getting to a point where SSDs are fast enough to handle this workload. So this is a strange limitation. There will be more of them as we continue.

Another minor limitation occurs when importing files. You cannot export entire folders. You will have to open each folder and manually select the clips you want to import. So if you’re serious about file management and you’re used to a particular folder hierarchy, you won’t be able to reproduce it here.

This also means that there are no events or smart collections (“bins” for Premiere users) in the library. It’s all in the media window in the top right corner of your screen. You can add keywords and add “favorite” or “reject” labels. You can also sort the media by label or media type.

You will feel at home as soon as you launch the app. The setup is pretty similar to Final Cut Pro on the desktop, just a little smaller and a little cramped, but not claustrophobic. You can resize each window or hide some to keep your setup clutter-free. There’s also a picture-in-picture view in case you need to take a closer look at your media. The preview window that plays the clip is still in the upper left corner, and you can choose between playback quality and performance. The Editing Timeline appears along the bottom edge, and just below it are some new buttons like Inspect, Volume, Animation, and Multicam. Start adjusting the clip here.

Pressing the Inspect button brings up the inspector sidebar from the left. I really like the way it looks. This also makes a lot of sense when editing while holding the iPad with both hands. With your right hand you can select a clip and your left hand is already in that sidebar where you can start making adjustments.

In this window you can also find options for Stabilization and Rolling Shutter Compensation, but neither option is available. As someone who shoots mostly with sliders, the loss of stabilization is frustrating.

Tap the Animate button to see this keyframe editing graph. Add keyframes here to animate clip movement and color adjustments. I think the user experience could be better (e.g. tapping the keyframe itself doesn’t select it), but the bigger problem I have is the keyframe transitions I do with FCP on the iPad are all linear by default and cannot be changed. There is no way to “make it easier” or “make it easier” to move.

Tapping the volume button reveals audio metering and a gain slider on either side of the timeline. There are also some handy audio effects you can use, including basic fade-ins, fade-outs, pans, and even more ambitious effects like his EQ and compressors. The iPad version of Final Cut Pro also has some recent additions to his FCP on desktop audio effects. Audio separation, loudness and denoising features are all here and work similarly.

But there are some new features exclusive to FCP on the iPad, including some that make my life a lot easier. If you have an Apple Pencil, you can freely draw or write on the video to animate it. It’s called live drawing and it’s amazing. I’m sure there are more creative people than me who can really take advantage of this, but I was able to animate some great text and sketches on the clip. But it’s also one of those things that can quickly become too repetitive. I hope Apple adds some brush options in the future.

There is also a new masking effect called Auto Scene Removal, called Rotoscoping in After Effects terminology. This is what I do to separate the subject, such as a person or pet, from the background and place the text behind it. Unfortunately it didn’t work for me at all. Apple’s demos show that the two only work with clearly separated static shots, but even when I try to recreate that, the title flickers between subject and background, and generally I lost sight of it and had little success. I expected more there.

Apple also added about 40 songs at your disposal. The great thing about these is that FCP will automatically retime your song timings to fit your timeline. Any of these songs can be 10 seconds or 10 minutes long. However, this only works for his 40 songs. This is what I used to do in Audition, but Adobe added this particular feature to Premiere so it works with any song.

Let’s talk about colors. I have bad news for those of you who shoot with LOG profiles. There is no way to add custom LUTs, but all hope is not lost. FCP provides widely used embedded LUTs from Canon, Arri, Blackmagic, Sony, and more. In my case that means I can’t use Fuji footage or DJI LUTs. You can’t add third-party plugins either, but Apple says they will be coming, so in the future he could include LUTs in that too. However, it is undecided when that will be.

However, there are some things you can do without using LUTs. When you open the Adjust Color effect, all you see is a slider. There are no traditional curves, color boards, color wheels or HSL curves like the desktop version. I was never a fan of these, but still prefer them over basic sliders like the one you see here. There’s still a lot of tweaking to be made here, but I wish this interface was more consistent. And finally, there are scopes, vectorscopes and histograms where you can monitor the coloring.

Some editors prefer to color in DaVinci and would like to submit this project to DaVinci. But that is not possible. FCP also cannot export or import XML files that you normally use to copy timelines to other apps. In fact, FCP libraries can only be transferred from iPad to Mac, not vice versa. This also means you have to decide which machine you want to start and finish editing on and hope you made the right choice.

In general, I like the user interface of the app as a whole. It has some nice changes from the desktop version and fits the iPad very well. Apple made his FCP usable with just your hands and added a new little feature called the Jog Wheel to make things easier.

If you’ve seen or used a Loupedeck or DaVinci Resolve physics wheel, it’s basically digital, but the wheel is digital. You can use this on the timeline to move the playhead and nudge clips forward or backward. It cannot be used to tweak the sliders when adjusting color, only to control clips and playheads in the timeline.

It can be placed anywhere along the sides of the screen. This is useful if you are left-handed, and is especially useful, and sometimes necessary, when editing with your hands. I love it.

But I still prefer to edit using keyboard and trackpad or mouse. Mainly because I’m used to using keyboard shortcuts and editing them is much faster.

Almost all of the usual keyboard shortcuts work: I and O for in and out points, JKL for playback, fast forward, rewind, zoom in, zoom out, jump in timeline, add cross dissolve, etc. I was surprised to see which were omitted. Here’s a short list of things I normally use on my desktop that aren’t available on my iPad.

• V enables or disables clipping.
• N toggles snapping on and off.
• M is for markers. They are completely gone. I can live without them.
• Option W to add white space is gone.
• Cmd-E — no export shortcut
• Option-G for compositing clips is no longer both a shortcut and a function.
• The tilde (~) is like a magic pro-level keyboard shortcut that helps you override connection points on the timeline. If you haven’t already, you should totally use it…but not here. because it is gone.

Unsurprisingly, there’s little to complain about when it comes to Final Cut Pro’s performance on the iPad. Everything runs smoothly and quickly. Adding super long files didn’t cause any problems. There are options to set the playback preview to favor performance or quality, but I chose performance. However, I noticed that the battery drained quickly. After about two hours of editing on a screen with comfortable brightness, it dropped to 43 percent. My conspiratorial brain thinks the main reason I can’t edit from an external drive is because I need to keep my iPad connected instead.

Overall, there are many things I love about editing with Final Cut Pro on my iPad. However, I’m surprised that many features are missing. Lacking options for coloring, missing very common features like the blade tool and the ability to enable or disable clips, no importing LUTs, no stabilization… could go on. These are not necessarily “professional” level tools. We have already covered the whole aspect of file management. It baffles me!

Meanwhile, I’m editing 4K ProRes video in Final Cut Pro on a tablet with one of the best HDR capable screens ever. I use Apple Pencil to draw animations directly on the footage. The experience itself is pretty good, at $5/month it’s a very accessible and powerful tool. But finally, when it came time to edit the video I made to test Final Cut, I went back to my Mac. I’m sure it could have been done on the iPad as well. However, some of my slider B-rolls were more erratic and I would have been frustrated with the end result.

If you’re just starting out, this is a very intuitive and easy app to get started with. But for someone like me with an established workflow, some key features are still missing.

Photo: Vjeran Pavic/The Verge