I’ve had a lot of weird existential feelings trying to use Final Cut Pro for the iPad, which is available today along with Logic Pro. Existential because, well, I’m not a pro video editor. Could I be? Should I be? This is Apple’s ongoing creative invitation it extends through the possibilities of its pro hardware. I’ve been here before.
The Apple Pencil was my invitation to be an artist, and I never took it. It’s nice that it’s there, though. The same is true for Final Cut Pro, an overdue pro video editing tool made only for iPads running M1 chips or later. This is one of those pro apps I was expecting Apple to have when the M1 iPad Pro first arrived back in 2021. Now that it’s here, I’m also wondering how much I will ever personally use it.
Apple already offers free iMovie and GarageBand creative apps that are perfectly fine, although iMovie has always felt too limited in its layout and design. Final Cut Pro immediately feels a lot more flexible, with overlapping timelines for video, animation and audio, a really cool scrubbing jog wheel that feels more granular for minor edits (and brings me back to my old linear video editing days 25 years ago), and works well enough for touchscreen and keyboard/trackpad. Or, maybe, both at once.
I played around with Final Cut Pro on an iPad Air with an M1 chip, the lowest entry point in Apple’s iPad catalog that works with Final Cut Pro (the M1 and M1 iPad Pros are also supported). It worked well enough for me, although the smaller iPad display, compared to my 13-inch MacBook Air, made looking at some preview windows and track details feel a little more challenging.
I’m particularly interested in that last part because Macs still don’t have touchscreens, and some inevitable further fusion of Macs and iPads seems like it’s been in the works in slow motion for about five years now. Final Cut Pro isn’t as full-featured as the Mac version, and it’s also designed, weirdly, to funnel its output up to the Mac app but not the other way around. In that sense, it feels like an intermediary step for any pro video editor… something you’d use in the field, maybe, beginning video editing work before perhaps finishing off on a Mac.
Because the Mac app has more plug-ins (something I haven’t even begun to play with), and has the advantage of larger Mac displays and external monitors, I’d expect any video editor doing professional work to default to that, especially since Macs with M1/M2 processors are so good and small already.
