Professional video editing is one of the most resource- and screen-space-demanding tasks computers perform, and with AI features coming to the category, it’s only becoming more so. That’s why it’s remarkable that Apple’s newly released Final Cut Pro app for iPad has managed to produce a highly usable and reasonably full-featured video editing application for a tablet.
The newly designed app requires at least an 11-inch iPad Pro, which makes sense. After all, you need a largish screen just to see what’s going on in the program—the timeline, source panel, preview panel, effects, audio, and so on. I tested the beta of Final Cut Pro for iPad on a 12.9-inch M2 iPad with 2TB storage for a few days. I’m extremely impressed with the app’s usability and power, though some professionals will miss certain features. The app makes video editing comfortable, thanks to an ingenious user interface design that’s more intuitive than most desktop video editing software.
Getting Started With Final Cut on the iPad
When you first launch the Final Cut app on the iPad, you need to pick a subscription. You get a one-month free trial, but you have to choose a $4.99 per month or $49 per year plan. If you bought Final Cut for macOS, you still need to pay this subscription to use the iPad app.
When you first start the app, it offers a sample movie project to help you get going. I’m a big fan of this approach, as opposed to apps that dump you in the deep end without a paddle. The sample (a manageable 400MB download) shows footage from a Lunar New Year celebration.
(Credit: Apple)
Intuitive Interface
At the top level of the project and media hierarchy, your projects show up in a panel on the left-side panel. Another side panel for account and app options is hideable with a button. When you open the sample project, you see a timeline view that looks remarkably similar to Final Cut Pro on the Mac, with some important differences, most of which make the program easier and clearer to use.
(Credit: Apple)
The interface is flexible. You drag up on the top of the timeline to enlarge it or down to push it out of view. You can resize the relative width of the viewer, switch it to full-screen, or change it to a floating (but oddly non-resizeable) picture-in-picture window. You can also turn off the source panel to get a larger preview window.
Touch gestures on the timeline work just as you’d expect them to. You can pinch and unpinch to zoom in and out, or drag a finger to move the timeline. To change the track height, you tap the Options button, switching to the Appearance tab, where you can also turn on and off (very narrow) audio meters. Unlike in iMovie, but more like in most other desktop video editors, you move the playhead to go back and forth through the timeline rather than moving the whole timeline while the playhead remains still.
The source and effect panel in the top right has something I greatly appreciate: a search box. This eases finding the transition, video or audio effect, object, or soundtrack you’re looking to use.
Getting your own clips onto the timeline involves choosing them from iCloud Drive, On My iPad, or another cloud source such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. Shared files, Recents, and Favorites also appear in the media adding dialog box, and you can color code them as well. This process of adding media will still be something of an adjustment for those used to a standard desktop file system, and pros may miss media bins, folders, and other organization tools.
Apple Pencil and Keyboard for Greater Precision
Using a stylus with Final Cut on iPad has some advantages. Being able to scrub through your video by simply gesturing above the timeline with the Apple Pencil is one of the cooler things about the app. Having a stylus also lets you precisely turn the jog wheel and tap on command buttons.
A keyboard has long been the main input device for video editors. With Final Cut Pro on the iPad, you can add a Magic keyboard ($299) or Smart Keyboard Folio ($179) to use all the keyboard shortcuts you already use with desktop video-editing software. For example, the J, K, and L keys let you control playback, and I and O let you set in and out points when pre-trimming.
The Jog Wheel
(Credit: Apple)
One of the cleverer bits of interface design in the app is the Jog Wheel. With it, you can either move through the timeline or set an adjustment value. You enable it with a button at top right, which presents a Minimized version at bottom right that you tap to enlarge to its full size. It scrolls frame by frame for precise edits.
Adding, Joining, and Trimming Clips
(Credit: Apple)
You can import media from the Photos or Files apps, or record it directly in Final Cut using your iPad. Once a clip is in the source panel, double-tapping it opens a pre-trim view so that you can choose in and out points before adding it to the timeline; or you can edit the endpoints after it’s on the timeline. You can both reject or favorite the clip ranges you’ve selected. Or apply keyword tags to clips, a plus for organizing and finding them later.
As with many video-editing apps, Final Cut on the iPad defaults to magnetic clip behavior when you drag one onto the timeline, called Snapping mode. A related choice is Position; when enabled, the project time is maintained when you add a clip, either by overwriting when you drop a clip onto the timeline or by adding empty space. It probably makes sense to turn on Position after you have a bunch of media and effects in the timeline and don’t want to bugger up the whole movie’s synchronization when you add a new clip.
I appreciate that you don’t have to drag the clips onto the timeline. You can also use the Append button to add the clip to the playhead position or storyline. Final Cut Pro on the Mac has buttons for the same options, and the concepts of a main storyline, connected clips, and roles (such as b-roll or dialog) spans both versions of the app.
Getting Funky With Effects
The Properties button opens a left panel from which you can apply transformations such as scaling and rotating, and cropping (with Ken Burns and Auto Crop choices). This opens the world of picture-in-picture effects and more. The transformations can be controlled with keyframe markers, something greatly aided by using an Apple Pencil. The Properties panel (when you have a clip selected) also lets you change the speed of the clip (with the option to maintain pitch), reverse it, or add a freeze frame.
Transitions and Effects
Adding transitions is a simple matter of dragging them between clips on the timeline. You get an option of duplicating content where there’s not enough overlap on your clips. There are only 34 transition choices compared with more than 100 on the macOS version of Final Cut. But there are some not found in the desktop version, stylized ones with colorful rectangles, that are suitable for social media videos.
The Mac version of Final Cut Pro includes over 150 effects, and you can add more thanks to plug-in support. The iPad version includes 55, though the documentation says third-party content (that is, plug-ins) is coming soon. For each effect that you apply, you can adjust the Lighting and color aspects, and you can create a mask to restrict the area affected by the effect. A Mix slider lets you adjust the strength of the effect. It all happens in the inspector panel which you opened from a button on the bottom of the screen.
Some of the more extreme effects like artistic style overlays are not to be found here. Nor do you get seamless transition choices.
Titles, Backgrounds, and Objects
The iPad version of Final Cut doesn’t give you as large a selection of titles as you get in the desktop version, but what you get is high quality and highly configurable. There aren’t any 3D titles, but there are matched choices for opening, closing, lower thirds, and bumpers.
You get 26 snazzy background choices, but only eight objects, such as heart and thumb up. It’s a far cry from the selections found in consumer video software like Pinnacle Studio or CyberLink PowerDirector, which offer large sets of animated, customizable objects.
Scene Removal Mask
(Credit: Apple)
Scene Removal Mask is like a green screen shot that doesn’t require a green screen. In my quick testing on a couple of different shots, however, its results were not great. I hadn’t read the fine print, which says you need footage of the background without the subject first or at the end and that the background should be still. Also recommended are evenly lit, noncomplex backgrounds without shadows.
After trying to follow the suggestions, I still ended up with a pretty imperfect mask. Hair caused the background to leak in. I occasionally lost the mask on parts of the face, and glasses throwing the tool off. I’d like to see Apple add a sensitivity slider for folks to fine-tune the mask.
Recommended by Our Editors
Live Drawing
(Credit: Apple)
Live Drawing is a fun effect, though probably not one that professionals will warm up to. It lets you fingerpaint or draw on the preview windows with the Apple Pencil to create an animated markup. It worked just as advertised in my testing. Perhaps sports videographers could use it as a telestrator effect in post.
Multicam Editing
For multicam editing, you start by, you guessed it, tapping the Multicam button at the bottom of the interface. I tried dragging clips down into the multicam clip slots, but it doesn’t work. You first have to tap Add new multicam Clip. A box pops up showing your source clips, and you select up to four of them. You give the muticam clip a name, a format, and whether to sync using audio. The last is on by default, and probably the best choice unless you’re a super professional outfit using timecodes. The Automatic format choice is also a good bet, as it determines the resolution, orientation, color space, and frame rate based on commonalities among your selected clips. Again, Automatic is likely the best option, but you can use custom settings if you prefer.
(Credit: Apple)
In my quick test, the feature worked to perfection. The clips were synced exactly correctly, and as with all these tools, you tap the angle you want as the video plays to get the angles you want at the times you want. I appreciate that separate clips for the selected angles appear on the timeline, rather than an uneditable merged clip, as some less-pro-oriented programs do.
Color
A decent selection of color effects are available in the Effects panel, but there’s no LUT support—yet. You get scopes and plenty of sliders for color adjustments but no HSL (hue, saturation, and lightness) wheels like those in the desktop app. These color wheels would be a good fit for controlling with the Apple Pencil. I also missed the presence of a color match tool to get two angles shot with different camera models matching in color.
Sound Options
The standard planner and fader as well as volume offset are available from the Inspect panel, where you also find fade in and out, voice isolation, and noise removal. The latter two worked well in my testing, though they occasioned the only crash during my testing of the preview version.
There are 23 acoustic effects (Cathedral, Robot, Delay, and so on) to choose from, and 45 background music tracks. One thing missing is short samples like crashing, dog barking, or explosions, which are fun and useful for video makers.
Exporting and Sharing
You can export a project as video or audio or both, and there are preset output options for social platforms as well as high quality and small file size. Impressively, you can export to six flavors of Apple’s ProRes format, to H.264, or to HEVC. You can also simply share the project in Final Cut for iPad’s own format. There’s no option to export Roles or Media Stems, as you can on the desktop app. In quick informal tests, exporting was quick, though I have nothing to compare it with as yet.
(Credit: Apple)
Apple’s press materials claim that you can send projects edited on Final Cut for iPad to the desktop version of the software, but I was unable to get it to work.
What You Don’t Get in the iPad Version
It’s impressive how much Apple has included in an app that belongs to one of the most complex categories of software. But of course, it’s only the first version and the company made some reasonable choices about what to leave out. You don’t get motion tracking, color wheels, or color match. The app doesn’t yet have third-party plug-in support, but Apple’s documentation states that that’s coming. Some tools of interest to studio editors are missing as well, such as Auditions and Media Stems.
The Final Word on Final Cut for iPad
Apple has done a remarkable job of bringing an extremely usable version of its pro video editing software into the touch world of the iPad. It can get pros most of the way when they’re working on professional video projects, and many a YouTuber or TikToker will find that it gets them all the way. The iPad version of Final Cut Pro is actually clearer to use and more delightful than most desktop video editing software. The nominal $4.99-a-month subscription is a worthwhile spend, especially if Apple continues to add features and content. If you prefer working on a couch instead of at a desk, Final Cut running on the iPad is a great option.
