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.
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.
Similar Products
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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 expect. You can display an on-screen keyboard showing them all and edit key functions to taste. You also need to use keyboard shortcuts to simply get to the beginning or end of a clip or movie because there are no buttons for these functions in the video preview window, like in most video editing applications.
Adding clips to the Magnetic Timeline is a simple dragging operation, and clips snap to neighboring ones or the start (you can use a Position cursor tool). You can also use buttons at the bottom that let you insert or append clips to a sequence in your timeline (the keyboard shortcuts W and E do this, too, but there's no context menu option for it). The first button on the left connects a clip you enter with the existing nearby clip above the main track, which Apple calls the Storyline. This Connected Clip 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 it categorizes clips into Roles. Roles define what clips are for, like video, titles, dialogue, music, and effects. The real power of this feature comes from creating custom sub-roles, such as background, or B-roll, dialogue, and effects. You can even customize how these roles appear from a tasteful palette of a dozen colors.
Final Cut gives you precise, intuitive, and impressive tools for arranging and trimming clips. You can trim and split in the timeline or right in the clip's iMovie-style source entry. You can easily mark any selections on a clip as a Favorite. Double-clicking a clip brings up the Precision Editor. Here, you can trim either end with a simple click-and-drag. A Blade tool splits the clip in two at the edit point.
I like the Region Selection tool, which lets you mark in and out points to select part of a clip. I do, however, miss PowerDirector's multi-trim tool, which lets you mark multiple in and out points to easily remove undesirable bits in the middle of a clip. Still, Final Cut Pro lets 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. Edits are nondestructive, meaning you can always restore a part of a clip after you trim it.
One of Final Cut Pro's unique features, Compound Clips, lets you group together clips, audio, and effects so that you can move them as a unit and keep everything in sync. It effectively declutters the timeline by showing just a single clip for the compound. You can easily expand the Compound clip at any time for further tweaking.
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. It puts a little spotlight icon in the clip entry, which, when you click it, opens a viewer/chooser for as many Audition clip options as you added.
Say you shot five takes for an opening scene for your wedding video. This 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 best. It's very cool.
Once your clips are all in place, you can fine-tune and bling them with Final Cut's rich collection of color tools, effects, text tools, and transitions. You can access these in the lower-right-hand panel, and can preview their changes by hovering over them. You get more than 200 customizable video effects and more than 100 audio effects. The video effects break down into groups such as 360°, Basics, Color, Comic Looks, Light, Looks, Masks and Keys, Reframe, Stylize, Text Effects, and Tiling. A helpful magnifying glass icon at the bottom lets you search the collection.
Quite a few third-party plug-ins are also available for Final Cut. I installed Noise Industries' FxFactory Pro for testing. Its choices appear directly in the Effects panel rather than in a separate window, like with some other video editing software.
Enhance Light and Color
A prominent button in the Final Cut interface applies the AI-powered Enhance Light and Color effect. In testing, this evened out harsh lighting and gave clips a more natural look. Below, you can see a clip in Precision Edit mode before the Enhance effect.
And here's the same image after applying the effect.
It's a subtle difference, but you can see improvements to some of the harsh lighting. However, the leaves in the sun look too muted for my taste. In another test, the feature corrected an overly warm clip's white balance, a good correction in my eye. Here's how it looks before the change.
And here's how it looks after.
I wish there were a slider to adjust the strength of this effect, but you can still fine-tune using the light and color adjustment sliders. The Balance Color tool gives you more control, letting you choose a white point with a dropper tool in your image.
Reframe Tools
The Reframe section includes two fairly similar entries: Callout and Picture in Picture. You could already do most of what these tools offer using Transform and keyframes, but these are easier to use and remain customizable. Callout is for when there's a smaller section of your frame that you want to pull out and enlarge. The effect includes build-in and build-out animations, rounded corners, and outlines. The only difference with Picture-in-Picture is that you're using these effects on a secondary clip.
Adjustment Clips
This takes a page from photo editors like Adobe Photoshop, where you create an image layer just to apply effects to the layers below. In Final Cut Pro, you start with either the Edit > Add Adjustment Clip menu option, with or without selecting the effect you want first. The clip appears as a thinner, purple lane. I tried this with video and text, and indeed, changing the lighting affected both lanes below.
Speed Changes
Final Cut Pro lets you speed up or slow down a clip or a selection's playback speed. An Apple silicon-only option for this is Smooth Slo-Mo. This uses machine-learning AI to try to produce a convincing slow-motion effect, like in the clip below.
The effect looks ghostlike and fuzzy to me. Creating a 4-second freeze-frame is a simple matter of pressing the Option-F shortcut. You can shorten or lengthen it to taste.
Excellent Chroma-Keying
Final Cut Pro's chroma-keying effect works better than that of any Windows video editor I've used, performing admirably even despite some imperfect green-screen lighting in the source. It removed my background nearly perfectly for transparency. Although Premiere offers more adjustment choices with its Chroma-Key effect, I couldn't tune all its adjustments to get as good a result as with Final Cut. Final Cut's Color Selection tool here stands out. It presents a color wheel with a matted color range, letting you visually adjust it to include more or less of a color.
Final Cut comes with more than 100 high-quality transitions, which you can search for directly. Adding the most common type, cross-dissolve, is possible with a keyboard shortcut. Other transitions are easy to add, too. Instead of having to create a secondary storyline yourself, Final Cut Pro allows you to do it all in one step. 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 for when you're editing jump cuts. Editing to remove slips of the tongue in interviews is very smooth. I tested Flow transition on footage of an interview, and the result was remarkable—far better than with Adobe Premiere's Morph Cut transition. Even though I cut out several words in the middle of a sentence, the Flow tool made the cut invisible. My subject's 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.
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 don't cause playback to stutter, either.
Modular Transitions
Modular Transitions are similar to Wipes, except you get control over their positioning. You can certainly choose the Star wipe transition and call it a day. But with the Modular Shapes Inset transition, you can use the star shape (among others, including Hexagon, Oval, and Rectangle) and (as with the aforementioned Reframe tools) pick where in the frame the shape originates, its move style (Grow, Wipe, or Combo), and outline options.
With title editing in Final Cut, you get good control over title overlays, with hundreds of animation templates. You can edit text, as well as position and resize 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 in most consumer video editors (save in the iPad version), it does offer Themes, which are really just pairings of transitions and titles that work well together. Standard title fonts are HDR-compatible.
Final Cut's 3D Titles are a lot of fun. There are basic 3D templates and a few Cinematic ones, including a cool 3D Earth choice for your sci-fi projects. You can add texture to your fonts by choosing concrete, fabric, plastic, and so on. You also get a bunch of lighting options, such as Above and Diagonal Right. You can use titles in HDR projects without them looking dull, too; they are adjustable via a Graphics HDR Level slider.
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 computer with some oomph. 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 pro-level captioning capabilities. You can import standard CEA-608 and iTT caption files, which sync with your movie. You can also preview them in the playback 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 sidecar file. You can also send captioned projects to Compressor, which makes them iTunes Store-ready.
Like Premiere, Final Cut Pro now has AI-powered auto captioning of spoken words in your video or audio clips. The first time you use this feature, you have to download the transcript AI model. With my first test talking-head clip, the transcoder did a perfect job, better than any I'd previously tested. Other test clips with more than one speaker sometimes missed the second speaker's words, even though there was no background noise.
The only thing missing is text-based editing like in PowerDirector and Premiere, which lets you remove all of the pauses and filler words like umm, uh, and ah. You can certainly edit the captions via Final Cut Pro's properties panel, but you'll still have the audio and video of them. You don't get translations like with some competing tools, either. Some alternatives can even identify and label multiple speakers, which Final Cut Pro can't do.
Like several of its consumer-focused competitors, Final Cut Pro includes motion tracking, formerly the sole province of the companion Apple Motion app. To get a photo or video to follow an object on the screen, you drag it from the source panel onto the preview window. A rectangle appears over an object in the main video if Final Cut detects it, while an oval indicates a face. You can track multiple faces and objects in the same clip.
Although I didn't need to, you can drag the tracking shape to better fit the tracked object or face. Then, you have to choose Analyze, which shows the oval or rectangle as it tracks the object, going both forward and backward in the timeline. You can re-analyze motion and adjust position using keyframes. The process is the same if you want to apply effects to specific tracked objects and faces. The upshot is best-in-class results for both types of tracking.
Scene Removal and Magnetic Masks
For cases in which you don't have a green screen, the Mac version of the program includes two options: Scene Removal Mask and Magnetic Mask. The former requires you to have a static background, a steady camera (preferably on a tripod), and bright lighting. You should also roll the camera for a second or two without the subject in the frame.
Don't worry about having to use a black background after removing the actual background. Just drag the clip over a new background to get that good old green screen effect.
The newer Magnetic Mask tool requires less footage than Scene Removal. It also lets you apply effects only to the mask.
To use Magnetic Mask, drag its Effects panel entry directly onto the video preview window. It tints the object or person you drag it over in red. Alternatively, you can drag the effect onto the clip in the timeline, which requires you to select your objects with a dropper tool. You also get options for it via the Magic Wand button below the preview and in the Modify menu. With any method, you can add to or subtract from the selection using the dropper (holding down the Option key to erase). However, I wish the tool could recognize skin tones since you might want to apply corrections to a person but not their clothes. As with most photo masking tools, Magnetic Mask has trouble with frizzy hair on a complex background, as shown above.
Once you finalize the mask, you can use the Analyze buttons to track it forward and backward. Clicking the Done button turns the non-masked area black. Then, you can use the result like a chroma key, replace the background, or apply effects to the mask. You can also invert the mask to, for example, show text behind the subject using a duplicate clip. Below, I applied exaggerated brightness just to the mask.
Final Cut does wonders with customized color correction, even beyond the one-step Enhance Light and Color tool. The Color Adjustment panel has a color picker to set a clip's color values, exposure, and saturation, each of which you can apply separately to highlights, mid-tones, shadows, or everything.
The Color Adjustments effect gives you sliders for brightness, contrast, exposure, highlights, saturation, shadows, tint, and warmth. You choose the correct color space for the clip; Final Cut Pro is meant for work with HDR content but handles SDR clips fine.
The very useful Color Wheels have pucks in the middle that let you move an image toward green, blue, or red, showing the result on the side of the wheel. You can also adjust brightness and saturation with the wheels, separately control everything (with the Master wheel), or adjust just shadows, midtones, or highlights. It's a remarkably intuitive set of tools given the professional results; I find them more usable than Adobe Premiere'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.
For more granular 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, RGB Parade, and Vectorscope 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. You can combine these effects 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 the selected color or a mask. It worked impressively well in testing.
Audio editing is another strength of Final Cut Pro. It automatically fixes hum, noise, and peaks, as well as provides manual correction tools.
New with the release of the Creator Studio suite is Beat Detection. As its name suggests, this tool analyzes your background music track and places vertical lines in the timeline to show where the beats land. It even highlights more important beats in the music with a green vertical line. Then, you can align video cuts to match the music beats for a more polished result. If you enable snapping, doing this is, well, a snap.
More than 1,300 royalty-free sound effects are available, and there's plenty of plug-in support. One extraordinary trick is the ability to match tracks you recorded separately. For example, if you shoot HD footage with a DSLR and record sound simultaneously on another recorder, Match Audio aligns the sound source. You can easily add audio cross-fades either via a menu command or keyboard shortcut. Support for Apple Logic Pro plug-ins gives you even more professional sound editing options. Finally, you get a surround-sound mixer to locate or animate 5.1 audio and a 10- or 31-band equalizer.
Voice Isolation
This feature reminds me of a similar one in video conferencing software that reduces background noise so you can better hear a speaker in your video. You enable it with a simple checkbox in the Audio Inspector panel. In testing, it does exactly what it says. You can adjust its strength, though the results still sound a bit weird.
Final Cut Pro's multicam support reimagines the standard tool so that it's simultaneously simpler and more capable. It offers the traditional syncing method using time codes, and it can automatically sync 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 allows up to 64 camera angles.
Final Cut Pro's workflow is simpler than Premiere's, but consumer-level products like PowerDirector and Pinnacle Studio make it even easier. Just select the clips to include (you can add or remove clips later), choose "New multicam clip…" from the right-click or File menus, and choose a syncing method. After placing the multicam clip in your timeline, choose Open in Angle Editor to display a grid previewing each angle—up to 4-by-4 tiles for 16 total angles at a time.
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. 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. You can edit audio separately and even combine multiple audio channels from the angles.
Final Cut Pro exports to the common output file formats, but pros will probably want the greater transcoding control available via Compressor ($49.99). Final Cut can also output for Apple devices, discs, email, and the web. You can share Roles separately, so, for example, you might only want to export video but not background music.
Versions of macOS after Mojave no longer support formats with 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 (widely used for audio). The conversion tool might 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 available. You can change the background and logo, which is 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.
Final Cut Pro no longer lets you share your movie directly to Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube, but the export options include a Social Platforms choice, which exports your video in a compatible format. Final Cut Pro also supports 360-degree and VR exports (for the Vision Pro). You can add email as a sharing target if you allow Final Cut access to your Mail app. An HTTP live streaming option lets content creators send their creations to web servers for playback on iOS devices and web browsers.
Final Cut Pro supports popular Blackmagic and AJA cards connected to a broadcast monitor, HDMI screens, or displays with a Thunderbolt interface. AJA, Blackmagic, and Matrox all offer Thunderbolt devices, which means you can preview on broadcast monitors in the field using a MacBook Pro.
The program's code base takes full advantage of 64-bit and multicore processing, which eliminates a lot of waiting. It's a major deal for such a processing- and memory-intensive activity as video manipulation and encoding. The app processes everything in the background and even displays a completion percentage indicator, so you can keep working.
Indeed, even on a lower-end MacBook, editing response is nearly instantaneous. My stress test of compositing four video tracks has brought many a video app to its knees in the past, resulting in stop-and-go playback. But when I tested Final Cut Pro on an iMac, it ran smoothly after a brief initial delay.
For a more quantifiable look at performance, I test export time by creating a five-minute movie consisting of four clips of mixed types with a standard set of transitions. My test media files include some 8K and more 4K source clips. I render it to H.264 1080p, 60fps, using H.264 High Profile. The audio is AAC 192Kbps. For testing, I use a MacBook Air with an M1 processor and 8GB RAM running macOS Sequoia. It's on the low end of power for video editing, so it shows differences more distinctly than more expensive hardware.
Final Cut Pro leads the pack, clocking in at 94 seconds to export the test project, while the latest version of Adobe Premiere takes 159 seconds on the same machine. CyberLink PowerDirector nips at Final Cut's heels with a time of 95 seconds. Adobe Premiere Elements lags behind with a time of 370 seconds, despite claiming to use graphics acceleration on Apple silicon processors; strangely, the app's Windows performance has improved drastically in recent versions. Your results will vary depending on your hardware, the format of your source media, and output settings.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Apple)
Apple Final Cut Pro
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
Like most Apple products, Final Cut Pro is polished and technically impressive. It's a good option if you can benefit from its iPhone and iPad integrations, or need something more powerful than iMovie. The low subscription price of Apple's Creator Studio suite and the continued availability of the perpetual license version are additional feathers in Final Cut Pro's cap. But Adobe Premiere, our Editors' Choice winner for professional video editing software, is still ahead in terms of advanced features like AI video generation, caption translation, collaboration tools, and text-based editing. For nonprofessional video enthusiasts, we recommend CyberLink PowerDirector.
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About Our Expert
I've been testing PC and mobile software for more than 20 years, focusing on photo and video editing, operating systems, and web browsers. Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech and headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team. I’ve attended trade shows for Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.
I still get a kick out of seeing what's new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft misstep and win, up to the latest Windows 11.
I’m an avid bird photographer and traveler—I’ve been to 40 countries, many with great birds! Because I’m also a classical music fan and former performer, I’ve reviewed streaming services that emphasize classical music.
