Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Final Cut Pro for iPad review: still rendering”.
So I’ve been using my iPad for a lot of my photography work and the ability to edit photos with an apple pencil just feels right, but I have not been able to replicate the setup for video editing today. Apple is releasing Final Cut Pro for iPad, and I want to see if I’m ready to make iPad my main editing machine, Let’s get into it. The iPad that I personally own is a 2018 12.9 iPad Pro with a12x bionic chip and Final Cut Pro will not work on that iPad. You will need an iPad with an M1 or an M2 processor Apple sent me this latest iPad right here with two terabytes of storage and 16 gigabytes of RAM. Why am I mentioning storage Well turns out you can’t directly edit videos off of external drive. All your media needs to live on your iPad, which basically means that if you want to be using an iPad for video, editing, you’ll want to spend extra money on buying extra storage. It’S an odd limitation, but there will be a few more as we go on. Okay, let’s start with the simple stuff, let’s import submedia, so I haven’t had any issues with any of my various file types except for 360 videos. Those are not supported. We can just ignore that folder. For now, you also cannot import entire folders.
You have to open each one and select the clips that you need. I don’t love that I like to organize my stuff in folders, but this also means that there are no folders or events inside of Final Cut Pro either. You can add keywords, you can sort files and you can favorite or reject files, but that is about it. It can get messy if you have larger projects. The setup looks fairly similar to what you’d see on a desktop Final Cut Pro the timeline at the bottom.
Over here, source and preview window in top left and the media on the right what’s new here – are all these buttons at the bottom of your user interface. So the first one is the inspect button, so tapping that brings up the sidebar on the left hand, side, and I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you’re holding your iPad with both hands. You can kind of do your editing with your right hand and then do the adjustments with your left hand.
So usually, the first thing that you would see in the inspect window on the desktop is options for stabilization and rolling shutter speed correction, but there’s no stabilizer in the iPad version of Final Cut. So the three other icons next to the inspect are volume, animate and multi-can. Okay, so clicking on the animate button. Here brings up this keyframe editing graph sort of similar to show video animation on desktop, but it’s sort of not as intuitive so here’s the list of all the adjustments you can keyframe and it’s limited to transform and color adjustment. It’S very easy to add keyframes. But what I realized is that you cannot tap on each keyframe to move your playhead there.
You have to tap on these buttons in the corner. I just wish you can do both aside from that. The bigger problem that I see here is that you cannot edit on a graph, meaning you cannot ease in or ease out of your transitions. All your keyframe movements will be linear by default, and you cannot change that.
There are some new features exclusive to the Final Cut Pro on iPad. So if you have an apple pencil, the second gen you can freely draw or write on top of your footage and then animate it. It’S called live drawing and I think it’s fantastic. Okay, so tapping on this icon right here opens up a new window and here’s a clip of Becca in the river during our Apple watch shoot hey back up.
So, let’s add an arrow and write Becca, so we don’t forget who that is, I’m super creative. I promise hit done and that is it live. Drawing just shows up as a new layer. Here it’s fun to use, makes my handwriting look better than it actually is, but I’m also worried that this type of an effect could get repetitive over time.
All of them kind of end up looking similar, you can cut out animation if you want and add effects on top of it, and you know I’m sure that more creative people will find ways to utilize this feature. I think it’s really fun, but let’s say you want to put some of the text behind an object like this Apple watch right here. So there’s this new Effect called scene removal mask in theory. It should separate the main subject from the background.
It’S like rotoscoping in After Effects, but without the need to manually mask it yourself. So I tried it on this clip and just doesn’t look good. I tried it on many other ones, and it’s just not great Apple does recommend using a more stable clip and using it in an area of high contrast, which is why I tried it here, but it’s it’s not great and you can’t even adjust the mask. You sort of have to just plop in the effect see if it works and if it doesn’t well, you just have to move on.
Okay. Next up is volume so tapping on the volume icon here brings up audio metering. On your right hand, side tapping on the inspect opens up more options for your audio edits. There’S an offset there’s a pan. There’S a fade in. There are also these new super good voice, enhancement tools that Apple recently added to the desktop version of Final Cut Pro, so there’s voice, isolation, loudness and noise removal Apple, also added about 40 songs, which you can use here.
What’S cool about. Those is that Final Cut Pro will automatically re-time the song, So it fits your timeline, meaning that any of these songs can be 10 seconds long or 10 minutes long, but it only works for these 40 songs. This is something I used to do in audition, but Adobe also added this specific feature to Premiere not too long ago, and it works with any song that you want in Final Cut, you’re kind of stuck with these 40 songs, they’re good songs. So, let’s see how that song ends, that’s pretty good. All right! Moving on color Final Cut Pro comes with some common Luts built in like the re, Blackmagic Canon and Sony Lut. So if you film, with one of those cameras, then you’re in luck, if not well, bad news is that you can’t add any of your own Luts. For me, that means no DJI Luts or Fuji Luts similar to Luts. You also cannot add third-party plugins, but Apple says those are coming.
So maybe Luts will be part of that in the future, but there’s no timeline on one that’ll happen. The other coloring adjustments are also limited Apple decided to go with sliders. Here. Here’S where you can adjust exposure and saturation, including your highs, mids lows and pluck point and as far as color manipulation goes, you get warmth or white balance and tint levels for highs, mids and lows, and that is about it. There are no curves, no color board. No color wheels like the ones you’d find on a Mac version of Final Cut Pro.
The one thing that I use a lot are Hue and saturation curves, but those are also saying you can still get a lot done with these, but I wish the interface was a little bit more consistent there and if you want to send this project to DaVinci, Resolve because you prefer coloring there, I know a lot of you do tough luck. You won’t be able to do so. Final Cut cannot transfer projects onto that. It also cannot export or import XML files, which you usually use to copy your timelines into those other apps. In fact, you can only transfer Final Cut Pro libraries from iPad to the mac and not the other way around, which means you sort of have to make a decision before you start editing which machine you’re going to start editing on and hopefully finish on as well Sure that you can use Final Cut probe with just your hands and to make things even easier, there’s a new little feature called the jog wheel, which you can tap over here. You can use it in your timeline to move your playhead back and forth, or you can also nudge the clip. You can also place it anywhere on the screen, which is super helpful if you’re left-handed and I think it’s even more helpful, maybe even mandatory, if you’re using your hands to edit. I love it.
I think it’s great. It’S really nice, but I still prefer editing with a keyboard and a mouse or a trackpad in this case, and that’s one big reason which is shortcut which also means speed, ino for in and out Forks e or Q, to insert into the timeline works jkl for Playback all work zoom in zoom out work pretty much all the basic ones work here, but there are a few obvious ones that are missing too V for enabling and disabling a clip gone. Turning snapping on and off doesn’t work, which is n, adding gaps or blank spaces. It’S command W, but it’s gone here.
Compounding Clips doesn’t work, you can’t get markers so M for markers is gone command, plus e for exporting is also gone, and the last one that I’m missing is the tiller key. That one is also gone all right. Lastly, let’s talk about battery life and performance, so when it comes to Performance, I have almost no complaints, but one thing that I did notice is that the battery life is depleting pretty quickly. First time, editing.
I was down to like 43 after about two hours, which is sort of like steam deck territory. Here, editing on an iPad was genuinely fun and exciting. The digital jog wheel is a nice little addition to the software and the live drawings is a clever use of an apple pencil, the experience of it all. I have zero issues with, but I’m still surprised at how many features are missing and that’s just not gon na work.
For me, it seems like this version of Final Cut. Pro is a good place to start a project. Maybe you just want to take a first pass or assemble the timeline check the clips check, audio or whatever. For me, I eventually have to turn over to my desktop or my laptop for any finishing touches like coloring and animation, but if you’re starting out and you’re looking for a video editing software I’d give this a try. It’S five dollars a month, which is really not that bad of a deal, and you can still get a lot of stuff done here. Yeah apple nailed the experience but left some crucial features on The Cutting floor, which is exactly what I’d expect Apple to do.
Hey. Thank you so much for watching. I haven’t been on video in a while, so hope everyone is well uh. This was almost an hour long video that I had to cut down to like 10 minutes.
So if I missed anything, please let me know in the comments and I can try to answer any questions down below all right. .