is final cut pro worth it

Final Cut Pro (Apple recently removed the "X" from the name), Apple's professional and prosumer-level video editing software, targets both consumers who want more power for their video-editing projects than iMovie offers and professionals who create content for the cinema and television. It does a remarkable job of bridging these two worlds, and, though professionals may complain about its nontraditional trackless timeline and amateurs may scratch their heads over its wealth of sophisticated options, it's in fact a magnificent tool for both groups. Final Cut Pro remains a PCMag Editors' Choice for video editing software.

What's New in Final Cut Pro?

The highlight of the latest version, 10.5, is support for Apple's new Apple Silicon M1–based computers. It also adds the ability to transcode media automatically when you copy or consolidate a project, and searchable and downloadable user guides are also welcome new arrivals. Other prominent recent features include Smart Conform, which uses machine learning AI to crop widescreen content to fit mobile device screens and social media formats—similar to Adobe Premiere Pro's Auto Reframe tool.

Recent updates to how you can work with proxy files are especially useful for video pros who are increasingly doing work remotely. You also now get stabilization for 360-degree clips; improved performance with RED RAW and Canon Cinema RAW Light codecs; Inspector panel improvements, and audio crossfades. FCPX's companion Motion app now can edit 3D object animation and has a Stroke filter, and Compressor can apply camera and creative LUTs.

Other recent updates let you use macOS Catalina's Sidecar feature that turns an iPad into a second display; grade HDR video with enhanced color mask and range isolation tools; and use HSL (hue, saturation, and luma) controls in the Color inspector to select a range of color with greater precision.

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Final Cut has long since regained initially missing pro-level features—including multicam editing, XML importing, and external monitor support. Those have been joined by many more capabilities, including powerful 3D titling and an impressive Flow transition to smooth out jump cuts. Rich support for 360-degree VR content, updated color grading tools, and support for HDR and HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec, aka H.265) arrived in version 10.4, along with a slew of smaller tweaks and added capabilities, stability, and fixes.

Final Cut Pro still shuns the traditional timeline-track interface of its predecessors, a change that drove off a lot of video professionals. The company did this to take advantage of the more powerful hardware in newer Macs as well as to reimagine the craft of video editing. The result is a surprisingly powerful and (once you get the hang of it) easy-to-use application.

How Much Does Final Cut Pro Cost?

As with any modern Mac app, you can get Final Cut Pro in the Mac App Store. You can install it on multiple Macs for $299, and you receive updates automatically—no subscription required. There's no upgrade pricing, but, really, compared with the old Final Cut's $999 price, $299 is basically upgrade pricing. By comparison, you can only get Adobe's competing Premiere Pro with a Creative Cloud subscription for $19.99 per month. Once you've bought Final Cut Pro, you're entitled to all updates. Apple offers a very generous 90-day free trial if you just want to kick the software tires; it only requires an Apple Store account.

At over 3GB, Final Cut Pro is a hefty download, so make sure you have enough local storage. The program requires a machine running macOS Catalina 10.15.6 or later, an OpenCL-capable video processor, 3.8GB free disk space, and a minimum of 4GB RAM (8GB is the recommended amount). As mentioned above, it runs natively on the new Apple Silicon M1–based Macs. Apple claims that these can render projects up to six times faster, though they compared with Core i3-based Macs—hardware that few serious video editors would be likely to use.

I tested Final Cut on 2019 iMac with a 3.6GHz Core i9 processor, a Radeon Pro Vega GPU, and 16GB RAM running macOS Catalina and on a 13-inch MacBook Pro with at 3.1 GHz Core i5 CPU and 8GB RAM and Touch Bar. As you might expect with the iMac's specs, performance was responsive whether I was importing, scrubbing, previewing compound picture-in-picture montages, or adding effects, but it's also reasonably performant on the less powerful laptop.

Libraries, Import, Organize

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 Photoshop Lightroom in that they are databases that can be backed up to a separate drive, and they receive automatic backups. Luckily, you don't have to worry about projects you created before this Library arrangement: Final Cut offers a simple update option to get them with the program.

Libraries are a big part of organizing your assets, but before you use them you have to import media. In fact, at import, you can tell Final Cut to copy the media to a specified Library. Within the Library, the import is an Event. You can specify creating proxy and optimized media, analyze video for color balance, and fix audio problems on import.

Helpfully, clicking on a filename shows a large preview of its contents in the import dialog. One quibble with the Import dialog is that there's no search—in case you have a large folder of clips and you need to find a particular one. Premiere Pro has a simpler Import dialog, but it does include a search box.

The program supports expanded color spaces like those approaching Rec. 2020, such as the DCI-P3 color space supported by current iPhones and iMacs. It also supports the H.265 codec (aka HEVC), designed to reduce files size of 4K and 360-degree footage.

Apple recently developed a format called ProRes Raw, which is analogous to Adobe's DNG raw still camera file format. It gives you access to all sensor data, meaning far more leeway in adjusting lighting and colors. Atomos recorders support the format, as does the pro-level DJI Inspire 2 drone. New for the 10.4.9 update are controls in the Inspector panel for adjusting ISO, color temperature, and exposure offset of ProRes Raw content.

At import, you can have Final Cut Pro create optimized media (in Apple ProRes format) and analyze it for stabilization issues, as well as color balance and the presence of people. If you've chosen to analyze the clips, the program can create Smart Collections based on 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 tools like Blackmagic Design's 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 on iOS projects, so you can start editing on an iPhone or iPad and continue in the more powerful desktop app.

For collaborative editing, Final Cut support Apple Xsan storage, with file locking so team members don't trip on each other's work. A new option is the ability to export a ProRes or H.264 content as proxy files at 50, 25, or 12.5 percent of the original size, allowing remote editors to access huge projects more efficiently. Premiere Pro, on the other hand, offers a bit more in the way of collaboration options with its Team Projects and Adobe Anywhere which leverages Adobe Creative Cloud to enable simultaneous editing with conflict resolution features.

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 the keywording feature in Adobe Lightroom, but Premiere can only use tags through the separate Adobe Bridge manager (though it does offer lots of metadata and face detection). One very cool keyword tagging option in Final Cut is that you can apply a tag to just part of a clip. You can also star, rate, or reject a clip from icons below the source tray. I'm always surprised at how many video editing apps lack this basic metadata capability.

Apple Final Cut Pro X 360-degree editing

Interface

The 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 (which is grayed out if you don't have dual displays). You can also create your own custom workspace layouts. You can't, however, undock panels to make them float free, as you can in Premiere Pro.

While 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 on the top left, preview on the top right, and timeline across the bottom. A timecode indicator appears below the preview window, along with an indicator of rendering percent complete. You can expand the preview to full-screen and resize any panel, but you can't pull panels off into separate windows (Corel VideoStudio Pro and Premiere Pro let you do this). You get Undo and Redo in Final Cut, but Premiere Pro's history window offers more in the way of letting you get back to any point in your editing process.

There are no track numbers along the left edge; Final Cut Pro calls tracks lanes, and you can add as many of these as you like. There's no track limit like you find in other video editors such as Pinnacle Studio and CyberLink PowerDirector. I should note that Final Cut still makes excellent use of keyboard shortcuts, such as for changing back and forth among the trim, select, blade, and range selection functions. Good old J, K, L, I, and O still work as you'd expect. You can display an on-screen keyboard showing them all and edit key functions to taste.

Adding clips to the Magnetic Timeline is a simple dragging operation, and your dropped clip snaps to neighbor clips or the start (you can use a Position cursor tool). If you're attentive, you'll notice a small hairline connects the clip you enter with the first clip you added. This Clip Connection means that whenever you move the main clip, the one added after will stay in the same relative position on the timeline. But if you drag a clip so that it overlaps another, that second clip scoots out of its way, dropping down to create a new overlapping lane beneath it.

Another concept unique to Final Cut Pro is that clips are categorized intoRoles. Roles define what clips are for—it could be video, titles, dialog, music, and effects. But the power of this comes when you create your own custom sub-roles, such as effects, dialogue, background, or B-roll. Clear color-coding of these roles means you can use the default colors or choose from a tasteful palette of a dozen colors to assign your own. Not only do these colors show up on the on-screen timeline, but also on the Touch Bar's mini timeline view, helping you see what kind of tracks are playing. It's great organizational tool.

Editing 360-Degree Video in Final Cut Pro

Apple's support for 360-degree VR video isn't just a gesture. It's deep, well-though-out support with the tools editors in this medium need, including true 360-degree titles, VR headset support, effects, and 360° Patch. The last is very useful for this kind of content: It lets you remove the camera rig from your production with a cloned area (usually the ground). Because 360 VR captures everything in every direction, the camera itself is not excluded, but often undesired in the final product.

After importing 360 content, you can view and navigate through it by dropping down the 360° Viewer option from the View menu. I tested with footage from a Nikon KeyMission 360 and a Samsung Gear 360 with no problems and snappy response. The latest update adds stabilization for 360-degree footage, but it took a loooooong time on my test Macbook for a 50-second clip—over 4 minutes—though the result was good. CyberLink PowerDirector has long offered both stabilization and motion tracking.

Effects that you can use on 360-degree content include variations of Blur, Glow, and Sharpen. If you have Apple Motion ($49), you can create custom 3D, 360-degree titles and motion graphics, but the base Final Cut includes a selection as well. When you're done editing, you can directly share to the biggest outlets for VR content these days: Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo. Each of those has specific requirements that the program handles.

Editing Video on the Timeline

Final Cut offers precise, intuitive, and powerful tools for arranging and trimming clips. Trimming and splitting can be done in the timeline or right in the clip's iMovie-style source entry. You can easily mark any selections on a clip as Favorite, for later use. Double-clicking a clip brings up the Precision Editor. You can trim either end with a simple click-and-drag, and, if you change your mind, the trimmed-away part of the clip will still be there if you later drag back the other way. A Blade tool does what makes sense for a tool with that name: It splits the clip in two at the edit point.

I also like the Region Selection tool, which lets you mark in and out points to select part of a clip, which you can remove or edit further. I do, however, miss PowerDirector's multi-trim tool, which lets you mark multiple in and out points to remove undesirable bits in the middle of a clip in a simpler process. Still, Final Cut Pro does let you do this kind of multiple sub-clip selection in the source panel. It also lets you easily make ripple, trim, roll, slip, and slide edits. The edits are nondestructive, and you can always restore a part of a clip after you trim it.

One of Final Cut Pro's key features, Compound Clips, lets you group together clips, audio, and effects so that you can move them as a unit, and everything will stay in sync. This really unclutters the timeline, by showing just a single clip for the compound. You can easily expand the Compound clip at any time for further tweaking, separating it into its component elements—nothing is permanently flattened or joined in the compounding process. It's a handy way to deal with complex combinations of elements.

Another clever innovation that lets you save space on the timeline is Auditions. When you drag a new clip on top of one already in the timeline, you get the option of adding it as an Audition. This puts a little spotlight icon in the clip entry, which, when clicked, opens a viewer/chooser for as many Audition clip options as you've added.

Think of it this way: Say you shot five takes for an opening scene for your wedding video. This little Auditions viewer lets you create a simple way to line up comparisons of all your choices. Just open the Audition window, select a track, and then play the overall video with the auditioning clip in place. Change clips and repeat until you see which one works better with your overall production. It's very cool.

Effects

Once your clips are all in place, you can fine-tune and bling them with Final Cut's rich collection of color tools, transitions, effects, and text tools. For starters, you get 149 customizable video effects and 109 audio effects. Quite a few third-party plug-ins are also available for Final Cut. I installed Noise Industries' FxFactory Pro in my testing. Once installed, it looks just like part of the program, with its choices appearing in the Effects panel, rather than requiring its own window as some plug-in interfaces in other products do.

Final Cut comes with over 100 transitions of its own, and the ability to search by transition name is helpful, given how many choices there are. Adding the most commonly needed type, cross-dissolve—can be done with a keyboard shortcut. Transitions are easy to add—instead of having to create a secondary story line yourself, there's a one-step transition insertion for connected clips. Both effects and transitions are of high quality. You can set default video and audio effects that you can summon with a single keyboard combo and save custom effects as presets.

The Flow transition is a great tool when your editing jump cuts. This makes those edits for removing slips of the tongue in interviews much smoother. I tested this on footage of an interview with our mobile guru, Sascha Segan, and the result was remarkable. Even though I cut out several words in the middle of a sentence, the Flow tool made the cut invisible. His head showed no motion at all, even though he had moved slightly in the part I cut out. The Flow tool simply filled in the missing bits, smoothing over the gap. This is an impressive tool.

In my testing, I found it easy to crop, rotate, resize, move, and do 3D skews on clips right in the preview window using handles. Composite picture-in-picture effects didn't slow down playback, as you see in some other video editing software, such as Pinnacle Studio.

Smart Conform

New for version 10.4.9 is this feature that uses AI to automatically crop video for social network use, meaning to vertical for stories or square for Instagram. I tested this on several clips—a football game, an office walkaround, and skateboarders—and with all of them the tool simply moved the crop to the side a bit and then left it in that same position for the remainder of the clip. It did locate a face in a motionless shot, but even for the skateboarding clip, which included lots of motion, it kept the crop static for the entire clip.

Adobe Premiere Pro has had a similar tool, Auto Reframe, for a year, and that tool works two different ways: as an Effect on a single clip or by creating a new cropped sequence from a whole sequence. You can edit either with keyframes after the fact. Final Cut does a better job of letting you see how the effect worked by letting you see the full frame outside the automatically cropped area.

Color

Final Cut does wonders with color correction. You can either have the app automatically balance color, saturation, and exposure, or use the Color Adjustment panel to manually adjust them. The panel has a color picker to set a clip's color values, saturation, and exposure, each of which you can apply separately to shadows, mid-tones, highlights, or everything.

The very useful Color Wheels have a puck in the middle that lets you move an image towards green, blue, or red, showing the result on the side of the wheel. You can also adjust brightness and saturation with the wheels, and separately control everything (with the Master wheel), or just shadows, midtones, or highlights. It's a remarkably powerful and intuitive set of tools, and more usable than Adobe Premiere Pro's equivalent color wheel tools. If Final Cut's wheels are not to your taste, the Color Board shows a linear view of your color settings.

The color scopes adapt to HDR editing, as do the color editing tools. Supported formats include Rec. 2020 HLG and Rec. 2020 PQ for HDR10 output.

To get even deeper into the weeds of color correction, the Color Curves tool lets you use multiple control points to adjust each of the three primary colors for very specific points on the brightness scale. Luma, Vectorscope, and RGB Parade monitors give you incredible insight into your movie's color usage. You can even edit a single color value using a dropper. Final Cut supports Color LUTs (lookup tables) from camera manufacturers like ARRI, Canon, Red, and Sony, but also custom LUTs for effects. These effects can be combined with others in a stacked arrangement.

The Match Color feature lets you transfer color and exposure characteristics from one clip to the rest to give your project a consistent look and adjust specific areas of the image based on selected color or a mask. The Color Balance tool, according to Apple, can "increase contrast and remove color casts while making skin tones appear more natural." I didn't find that either tool made impressive changes in my testing, so I often headed to the Color Correction tools to adjust manually.

MacBook Pro Touch Bar and Sidecar Support

A feather in Final Cut Pro's cap is its support for the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. The Touch Bar changes its appearance based on what you're doing in the application. It's nifty to see your timeline tracks or color options on the Touch Bar. Below, you can see three Touch Bar displays, for basic editing, timeline scrubbing, and text customization. These and many other versions of the Touch Bar show up automatically to expose tools that might be otherwise hidden in the menu. It's a great tool for beginners.

Apple Final Cut Pro X and the MacBook Touch Bar

It might also be a good tool for higher-end users, too, but I can't help wonder if long-time Final Cut editors might be resistant to it. The biggest issue is that when you're working on a project, your eyes are intensely focused on the screen, not on the keyboard. And most video editors have the basic editing keyboard shortcuts in muscle memory by this point, so moving your gaze from the video content down to the keyboard introduces a disconnect in your workflow. Still, it's a good optional tool.

Apple Final Cut Pro X with the MacBook Touch Bar

If you just want to be able to scrub through a video with your finger, you could do this in Adobe Premiere Elements on a Windows 10 touch-capable display without taking your eyes off the screen. Yes, the Touch Bar is close to the screen, but I find that while I'm looking at that bright, beautiful display, I'm usually not even aware of what's on the Touch Bar. Of course, if I worked with it long enough, that would probably change.

If you think of it as an additional option rather than an essential part of the Final Cut interface, there's really no downside to Final Cut's support for it. For those who don't have deeply ingrained habits—or who are willing to make new ones—the Touch Bar might end up being highly efficient and useful.

After a few failed attempts to connect our 2019 iPad to our new iMac with Device Timed Out messages and Miscellaneous Error messages, I managed to get the dual display set up. To get this to work with Final Cut, you go to the Window menu and choose one of three things you can put in the Secondary Display: Browser (for source clips), Viewer (the video preview window), or Timeline. The last option results in on-screen congestion, but if you're on a MacBook, the Viewer could work well, especially if you have a large iPad Pro. The Pencil didn't do anything you couldn't do with your finger, but having the Touch Bar (either a the top or bottom of the iPad) is a boon for those using Macs that lack it.

Titling and Captions

Titling is also simple and powerful in the latest version of Final Cut. You get lots of control over title overlays, with 183 animation templates. You edit text and position, and size the titles right in the video preview; there's no need for an external title editor. Though Final Cut Pro has no instant movie feature like those you find in most consumer video editors, it does offer Themes, which are really just pairings of transitions and titles that work well together.

Final Cut's 3D Titles are a lot of fun. There are eight basic 3D templates and four more Cinematic ones, including a cool 3D Earth choice, for your sci-fi projects. There are 20 font presets, but you can use any style and size you like. Materials like concrete, fabric, plastic, and so on can give your titles any texture you desire. You also get a bunch of lighting options, such as Above, Diagonal Right, and so on.

For maximum control, you can edit the 3D titles in Motion, Apple's $49.99 ancillary 3D animation editor. Extrude 2D titles into 3D by tapping the 3D Text option in the Text Inspector. You can then position and rotate the text to taste on three axes. Even messing with 3D to this extent requires a powerful computer. I found myself looking at the pinwheel and dropping frames in playback on my test 21.5-inch iMac with a 3.1GHz Core i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM.

Final Cut includes deep, truly pro-level captioning capability. You can import standard CEA-608 and iTT caption files, which sync with your movie. You can also preview them in the video preview window, as well as position and format them with a choice of colors. On export, you can embed the captions into the video file or include them in a separate sidecar file. You can also send captioned projects to Compressor, which can make them iTunes Store–ready.

Chroma-Keying

Final Cut Pro's chroma-keying effect works better than that of any Windows video editor I've used, performing admirably in testing, even given some imperfect green-screen lighting in the source. My background was nearly perfectly removed for transparency. Though Premiere Pro offers more adjustment choices with its Chroma-Key effect, I couldn't tune all its adjustments to get as good a result as Final Cut delivered off the bat. And, in any case, Final Cut offers more control, letting you refine the sample color, edges, strength, spill level, mix, and more. But it's the Color Selection tool that really makes Final Cut state of the art in chroma-key. This presents a color wheel with the matted color range, letting you visually adjust it to include more or less of a color range.

Getting the Sound Right

Audio editing is another strength of Final Cut Pro. It can automatically fix hum, noise, and peaks, or you can manually adjust these, if you prefer. Over 1,300 royalty-free sound effects are included, and there's lots of plug-in support. One impressive trick is the ability to match separately recorded tracks; for example, if you shoot HD footage with a DSLR and record sound simultaneously on another recorder, Match Audio aligns the sound source. A new update makes audio cross-fades easier using a menu command or keyboard shortcut. Support for Apple Logic Pro plug-ins give you even more powerful sound editing options. Finally, you get a surround-sound mixer to locate or animate 5.1 audio, and a 10-band or 31-band equalizer.

Multicam Editing

Final Cut Pro's multicam support reimagines the standard tool making it both more powerful and simpler. It supports the traditional syncing method using time codes, but it can also automatically sync up multiple clips by analyzing their audio tracks for peaks. You can alternatively use camera time or place a marker on the clips for syncing. Multicam works with sources in different formats, including different resolutions and codecs, and, remarkably, it allows up to 64 camera angles.

I mentioned ease of use, and you get this right from the start when working with multicam. Just select the clips to include (you can add or remove clips later), choose "New multicam clip…" from the right-click or File menu, and choose a syncing method. After placing the multicam clip in your timeline, choosing Open in Angle Editor displays a grid previewing each angle—up to 4-by-4 tiles for 16 total angles at a time.

As with many Mac operations, using multicam is simple—as long as you know what you're doing. It took me a while to figure out that I could cut angles only when a multicam clip was in the Timeline, using the Angle Viewer—not the Angle Editor, which lets you add or remove clips (or stills) to and from the multicam clip, resync them, and edit the component clips (trimming and so on). It's actually simpler than Premiere Pro's multicam workflow, but not as easy as purely consumer products like PowerDirector and Pinnacle Studio make it.

Not only does Final Cut's Angle Viewer let you switch angles live, but it also lets you later tweak the cuts in the timeline. This combination of live switching and timeline tweaking lets you turn a three-angle interview into something far more compelling than a single edited clip could be. Newer options let you edit audio separately and even combine multiple audio channels from the angles.

Export Options and Hardware Connections

Final Cut Pro exports to the common output file formats, but pros will probably want the greater transcoding control available in the companion app, Compressor ($49.99). Final Cut can also output for Apple devices, discs, the Web, and email. You can share Roles separately, so, for example, you may only want to export video but not background music.

Speaking of formats, the version of macOS after Mojave will no longer support formats using codecs that rely on 32-bit QuickTime 7.x.A conversion tool scans your library for those formats and lets you convert them. Unsupported formats include QTVR, interactive QuickTime movies, and MIDI—the last of which is a widely used audio format. The conversion tool may not be able to convert everything, though, in which case it flags the incompatible media files and tells you to download external conversion software.

Five DVD and five Blu-ray menu themes are included with Final Cut Pro. You can change the background and logo for these—far less customization than you find in most consumer video apps. With Compressor, you can add chapters and names, something not available in Final Cut Pro. If your real aim is output to disc, though, you may be better off with Adobe Premiere Elements or a PC app like PowerDirector or Corel VideoStudio.

Like consumer apps, however, Final Cut Pro can share your movie directly to Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube. For Vimeo and YouTube, 4K export is supported, too, and there are 4K presets for exporting to Apple devices. It also supports 360-degree uploading to all three. When I shared a short video by email, the result played nicely in the inbox. Finally, an HTTP streaming option lets content creators send their creations to Web servers for playback on iOS devices and Web browsers. Bandwidth is automatically adjusted for connection speed.

Final Cut Pro supports external broadcast monitors. In addition to supporting the popular Black Magic and AJA cards connected to a broadcast monitor, Final Cut can connect to any HDMI screen, or to a display using the lightning-fast Thunderbolt interface. Black Magic, AJA, and Matrox offer Thunderbolt devices, which means you can preview on broadcast monitors in the field using a MacBook Pro as well as an iMac. Another, perhaps even more important, consequence of Thunderbolt is that it drastically reduces the time needed to transfer video from source devices.

Performance

Under the hood, the program's code base takes full advantage of 64-bit and multi-core processing, which eliminates a lot of waiting. This is a major deal for such a processing- and memory-intensive activity as video manipulation and encoding. Final Cut Pro 7 was 32-bit, meaning you couldn't take advantage of more than 4GB RAM. Thanks to support for the multiple cores found all recent Macs (particularly the ultrapowerful iMac Pro), the app processes everything you do in the background, and even displays percent complete in a timer-style indicator, so you can keep working.

Indeed, even on a lower-end MacBook, editing response was nearly instantaneous. My stress test of compositing four video tracks has brought many a video app to its knees in the past with stop-and-go playback. But when I tried the test with Final Cut Pro running on the iMac, it ran smoothly after an initial short delay. The MacBook Pro did everything snappily except for (understandably) a very large import. This version was free of any program crashes I'd experienced in previous versions, a positive development indeed.

For a more quantifiable look at performance, I tested export time by creating a 5-minute movie consisting of four clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions and rendered it to H.264 1080p at 15Mbps, 60fps, using H.264 High Profile. Audio was AAC 192 Kbps. I tested on a 2017 MacBook Pro with a 3.1GHz Core i5 processor, Intel Iris Plus graphics, and 8GB RAM running macOS Catalina—on the low end of power for video editing. Look for tests using an M1-based MacBook in the future.

The test project took Final Cut Pro 3:55 (min:sec) to export, while the latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro took 2:31 when tested on the same machine. Both Apple and Adobe use Metal, Apple's graphics acceleration technology. CyberLink PowerDirector, which is newly available for MacOS, took just 57 seconds for the same test, but Premiere Elements held up the rear, at 7:31. Your mileage will vary, of course, depending on your hardware, the format of your source media and output settings.

The Final Word on Final Cut

For video enthusiasts on the Mac, Final Cut used to be a daunting upgrade from iMovie. Final Cut Pro changes all that, making for a smooth learning curve. For most pro users, the gains in Final Cut Pro outweigh the hurdles to adoption. Final Cut Pro offers loads of power, ease of use, and fine performance. With rich support for 360 VR content editing, new proxy file options, and broader color spaces, Final Cut Pro is ready for the future. Its deep, nimble tools in a fluid, highly usable and precise interface help Final Cut Pro keep our Editors' Choice award for high-end video editing on the Mac.

Apple Final Cut Pro

Cons

The Bottom Line

Apple's professional-level video editing software, Final Cut Pro, brings a wealth of power in an interface simple enough for pros and consumers alike. Recent highlights include AI-powered cropping for social media output and support for Apple Silicon-based Macs.

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