Final Cut Pro Review

Final Cut Pro is recognized worldwide as one of the best software for professional video editing. Its interface offers a giant amount of functions, both basic and advanced, and stands out for its speed and reliability. If you are a macOS user and are interested in video editing, you will surely want to give this program a try. Here I tell you its most important features. In this Final Cut Pro Review review, we’ll look at Apple’s video editing software Final Cut Pro from a variety of perspectives, including pricing, user-friendliness, performance, color grading, audio editing, and third-party plugin availability.

What’s new in Final Cut Pro?

The most recent version, 10.6, includes sophisticated motion tracking, support for editing videos captured in the iPhone 13’s Cinematic mode, voice isolation, duplicate clip identification, focus choices, and performance enhancements.

The last significant version, 10.5 brought support for Apple Silicon CPUs, automatic media transcoding when you copy or consolidate a project, and searchable and downloadable user manuals. Other notable recent features include Smart Conform, which works similarly to the Auto Reframe tool in Adobe Premiere Pro to crop widescreen footage to fit the screens of mobile devices and social media platforms.

Pro-level functionality that was previously unavailable from Final Cut, such as Multicam editing, XML imports, and support for external monitors, have long since been added. Many additional features have been added to those, such as 3D titling and an outstanding Flow transition to eliminate jump cuts. Version 10.4 introduced a variety of new features, including enhanced support for 360-degree VR content, updated color grading tools, support for HDR, and HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Codec, also known as H.265), in addition to a number of smaller improvements. And now let’s look at our Final Cut Pro Review key features.

Final Cut Pro features review

Final Cut Pro Interface

Because of the persistent dark gray color of the interface, the item you are changing appears to be the most prominent on the screen. Default, Organize, Color & Effects, and Dual Monitors are the four pre-configured window layouts in Final Cut (the latter of which is grayed out if you don’t have dual displays). You can design your own unique workspace arrangements. Panels cannot be undocked to allow them to float freely, unlike in Premiere Pro.

With its free-form, trackless Magnetic Timeline view, the Final Cut Pro timeline resembles that of iMovie, but the professional tool has significantly more editing power. Final Cut Pro displays the typical three-pane interface, with source clips on the top left, preview on the top right, and timeline across the bottom, just like pretty much every other video editing tool. Below the preview window, a timecode indicator and a percentage of rendering completion indicator are displayed. You can enlarge any panel in the preview to full-screen and change its size, but you cannot separate any panels into their own windows. While Premiere Pro’s history pane allows you to return to any point in your editing, Final Cut only offers to Undo and Redo.

Editing Video on the Timeline

Final Cut provides incredibly accurate, user-friendly, and powerful tools for clip arrangement and trimming. Trimming and splitting can be done in the timeline or directly in the source entry for the clip in iMovie style. Any choice on a clip can be quickly marked as a favorite for later use. When you double-click a clip, the Precision Editor appears. With just a click and drag, you can trim either end and if you later decide against it, the portion of the clip you had previously removed will still be present. The Blade tool splits the clip in half at the edit point, which is what one would expect from a tool with that name.

Compound Clips, a crucial feature of Final Cut Pro, allows you to bundle together clips, audio, and effects so that you can move them as a single unit while maintaining sync. Displaying just one clip for the compound significantly declutters the timeline. Nothing is ever flattened or linked permanently throughout the compounding process; you can easily expand the Compound clip at any point for more fine-tuning. It’s a practical method for handling complicated mixtures of elements.

Auditions are a great new invention that allows you to free up space on the schedule. You have the option to add a new clip as an audition when you drag it over an existing clip in the timeline. When you do this, a tiny spotlight icon appears in the clip entry and clicking it brings up a viewer/chooser with all of the Audition clip selections you’ve added.

Effects

With Final Cut’s extensive selection of color tools, transitions, effects, and text tools, you may polish and glitz up your clips once they are all in place. You start out with 149 editable video effects and 109 editable audio effects. There are also many third-party plug-ins for Final Cut available. FxFactory Pro by Noise Industries was installed for my testing. It requires no separate window after installation, unlike some plug-in interfaces in other products, and its options appear in the Effects panel. This makes it appear as though it is already a part of the program.

Given that there are over 100 built-in transitions in Final Cut, the option to search by transition name is useful. A keyboard shortcut can be used to add cross-dissolve, the type that is most frequently required. Transitions are simple to add; for connected clips, there is a one-step transition insertion option rather than having to manually create a secondary storyline. High-quality transitions and effects are used. Custom effects can be saved as presets and set as the default video and audio effects that can be activated with a single keyboard shortcut.

Color

Color correction in Final Cut is fantastic. You can have the app automatically balance color, saturation, and exposure, or you can manually adjust them using the Color Adjustment panel. The panel includes a color picker for adjusting a clip’s color values, saturation, and exposure, which can be applied separately to shadows, mid-tones, highlights, or the entire image.

Color Wheels have a puck in the center that allows you to move an image towards green, blue, or red, with the result displayed on the wheel’s side. You can also use the wheels to adjust brightness and saturation, as well as control everything (with the Master wheel) or just shadows, mid-tones, or highlights.

To dig deeper even deeper into color correction, the Color Curves tool allows you to adjust each of the three primary colors for very specific points on the brightness scale using multiple control points. The Luma, Vectorscope, and RGB Parade monitors provide incredible insight into the color usage of your film. You can even use a dropper to change a single color value. Color LUTs (lookup tables) from camera manufacturers such as ARRI, Canon, Red, and Sony, as well as custom LUTs for effects, are supported by Final Cut. These effects can be stacked with others in a stacked configuration.

Titles

In the latest version of Final Cut, titling is also simple and powerful. With 183 animation templates, you have a lot of control over title overlays. You can change the text, position, and size of the titles right in the video preview. An external title editor is not required. Though Final Cut Pro lacks the instant movie feature found in most consumer video editors, it does include Themes, which are essentially just combinations of transitions and titles that work well together.

Final Cut includes extensive, truly professional-level captioning capabilities. You can import CEA-608 and ITT caption files that sync with your video. You can also position and format them in the video preview window, as well as preview them in the video preview window. Captions can be embedded in the video file or included in a separate sidecar file when exported. Captioned projects can also be sent to Compressor, which can make them iTunes Store-ready.

Is Final Cut Pro worth it?

For most professional users, the benefits of Final Cut Pro outweigh the barriers to adoption, making the software purchase worthwhile. Final Cut Pro is a good choice for video enthusiasts who work on Macs because it has a smooth learning curve. The software provides a lot of power, ease of use, and fast performance. Final Cut Pro is ready for the future, with rich support for 360 VR content editing, excellent new motion tracking, and broad color spaces. Its powerful, nimble tools combined with a fluid, highly usable, and precise interface.

Final Cut Pro Review | Pricing

Final Cut Pro is available on the Mac App Store, much like any other contemporary Mac app. It costs $299 to install on several Macs, and it automatically updates itself without the need for a subscription. Although there isn’t upgrade pricing, $299 is essentially upgrade pricing when compared to the $999 cost of the original Final Cut. In contrast, Adobe’s rival Premiere Pro is only available with a Creative Cloud membership for $19.99 a month. All updates are yours once you’ve purchased Final Cut Pro. Apple provides a generous 90-day free trial that may be accessed with just an Apple Store account.

Final Cut Pro Review: final thoughts

If you’ve used iMovie, Final Cut Pro X will provide you with a familiar-looking workspace to adapt to, making the learning curve easier to climb as you master a new non-linear editing package. Final Cut Pro X has a much larger preset title library than iMovie, as well as many more drag-and-drop effects layers that you can customize to create unique looks. You also have more grading control, the ability to reduce artifacts like picture noise, and access to more powerful compositing tools. The ability to auto-sync separate audio and video clips saves a significant amount of time when compared to manually aligning them in iMovie.