What Features Does Apple Final Cut Pro Still Need?
Last week, Apple released a statement responding to a petition from hundreds of Final Cut Pro editors that Apple recommit to continued, active development of Final Cut. Apple answered, in part:
“While we believe we have plans in place to help address your important feature requests, we also recognize the need to build on those efforts and work alongside you to help support your film and TV projects and keep you posted on important updates.”
NOTE: Read their entire statement here.
– – –
For many years, Apple offered editors the ability to suggest features using the “Provide Feedback to Apple” form in Final Cut Pro. However, this form presents several problems:
- Apple never responds to suggestions made using this form. So we have no idea whether anyone in decision-making authority at Apple actually reads these.
NOTE: Apple has told me on several occasions that these are read. However, “read” and “act upon” are not the same.
- When we provide feedback to Apple, we have no idea what anyone else is suggesting. We can neither agree nor disagree with the need for a specific feature.
- There’s no way to reinforce how important – or unimportant – a feature is because we don’t know what’s suggested.
- Apple has a long tradition of “not invented here.” If Apple engineers decide something is a good idea, it gets developed. If a user suggests a good idea, it is frequently ignored.
I created this article to begin an active and open discussion of missing features in Final Cut. If you think something needs to be added, suggest it in the comments. It’s not as good as a web-centered, multi-user database with instant vote totals. But it’s available today and gets us started.
- If you have a feature, suggest it.
- If you think a suggestion is good, reinforce it.
- If you think a suggestion could be better, improve it.
- If you think a suggestion is misguided, comment.
NOTE: All comments are moderated – so be polite. Inflammatory or off-topic comments will be removed.
My hope is to inform the Final Cut community, Apple and the advisory panel they hope to create so that the features Apple adds are actually those desired by editors.
Share this link with your friends on social media. Spread the word. Because, if there’s no interest in adding new features, that tell’s Apple something, as well.
Don’t wait for Apple to convene an advisory panel – let your voice be heard now.
LARRY’S TOP FIVE FEATURES
To get the discussion started, here are my top five feature requests for Final Cut Pro:
- Scrolling timeline. As a project plays, the timeline should scroll to keep the playhead in view.
- Effective speech-to-text creation, integration and editing.
- Either develop an audio application specifically for mixing audio to picture or provide tighter round-trip integration with Logic Pro for audio mixing. The current audio mixing capability in Final Cut is limited and clunky. Audio mixing should be as easy in Final Cut as it is in Premiere to Audition.
- Better, smoother collaboration features when editors are not on the same network. Adobe was so convinced this is an essential feature, they bought Frame.io. Perhaps include better media management and review tools.
- Fix all the bugs in creating both DVD and Blu-ray Discs. The future may be downloads, but thousands of editors make their living creating physical media for clients. Burning DVDs/Blu-ray Discs in Final Cut has not worked properly since FCP X was first released. Support burning multiple movies to disk. Support custom menus. Support stories. Support multiple languages in both audio and captions.
I’m sure you have your own list. Share it in the comments and let’s get the conversation started. Spread the word.
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151 Responses to What Features Does Apple Final Cut Pro Still Need?
← Older Comments Newer Comments →-
Stacey Sanner says:
May 23, 2022 at 8:48 am
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Larry says:
May 23, 2022 at 8:50 am
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Richard Wright says:
May 23, 2022 at 9:08 am
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Larry says:
May 23, 2022 at 9:14 am
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Merrick Dupea says:
May 23, 2022 at 9:34 am
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Tim Gallagher says:
May 23, 2022 at 9:11 pm
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Avtar says:
May 23, 2022 at 9:57 pm
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Merrick Dupea says:
May 23, 2022 at 9:36 am
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May 23, 2022 at 1:53 pm
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David Peterson says:
May 23, 2022 at 2:25 pm
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Merrick Dupea says:
May 24, 2022 at 1:49 pm
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David Cole says:
May 23, 2022 at 9:38 am
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Larry says:
May 23, 2022 at 9:45 am
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May 23, 2022 at 9:52 am
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May 23, 2022 at 9:53 am
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May 23, 2022 at 10:07 am
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May 23, 2022 at 10:49 am
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Chris Hocking says:
May 23, 2022 at 12:07 pm
← Older Comments Newer Comments →I agree with scrolling timeline and disconnected audio! Two requests – keep in mind this may be user error!
1. Keyboard short cuts for home and end.
2. When I play a clip in the browser, my timeline will jump back to the previous timeline. So if I have duplicated the timeline and I am working on version 2, it will bounce back to version 1.
Stacey:
On full-size keyboards the Home and End keys jump to you to the beginning and the end.
On laptops, press Fn + left / right arrow keys to do the same thing.
Larry
Yours are all great Larry so I concur.
Importing Blackmagic raw would be great but I suspect that is a BM issue.
I would love it if we could trim clips and then DELETE what we don’t. This is a big deal to me as I shoot a lot fo wildlife and end up with gigbytes I don’t want, clogging hard drives. Seems like a simple request to me, but…
Richard:
The trick with this kind of trimming is that you need to duplicate just those portions of the clip that you want to retain. Back when FCP was first released, Apple told me they didn’t want to duplicate the clip because it ran the risk of injecting artifacts into the camera master.
While that’s a true statement, I think it would be great if we had the option to trim clips then decide whether we want to accept the results.
Larry
I’ve had the same prime request since fcp6. Give us an integrated timeline with edit “modes”, so we can switch from cutting in Final Cut to layering effects with Motion to mixing in Logic all on the same timeline with the click of a button. They own all these software packages already there’s no reason their feature setts shouldn’t be fully integrated into a single timeline.
Next, let us resize tracks height individually so we can have one or two tall track and three or eight short ones however we like.
I’ve never liked the auto track creation for layers. I wish we still had an FCP7 mode where whatever you place on track 7 stays on track 7 forever.
Let us drag clips from the timelines back into a new bin to sort and categorize and keyword. Expecting us to always use text entry metadata to sort rather than drag and drop is to expect visual thinkers to become typists and think like software coders with a keyboard. It is deeply stupid and counter to how editors should work. Apple nearly invented drag and drop and then went full DOS on making FCPX a metadata data entry app. Gross.
Merrick Dupea – I like your “resize individual tracks”
Totally agree on individual track-height adjustment. That would be a real time saver.
Anyone remember creating a bin of favorite customized effects in FCP7 with drag and drop from times line to bin, then being able to drag those tweaked effects back onto clips in any project you are working on? It was powerful and intuitive and 10x better than the current jumbled list.
Yup, I remember! Miss that!
You can kind of achieve that by hitting “Save Effects Preset” in the inspector, and selecting which effects you want. It does it globally though, not for the current library/project.
Exactly. They took a very intuitive visual motion and turned it into a less powerful hidden menu item in the inspector. Just like a code monkey would.
I agree audio post is sorely in need of an upgrade. I understand that Apple may prioritize a workflow with Logic. But many of us in audio post use Pro Tools for sweetening. The current workflow with the third party app X2Pro is clunky at best. Please make the sharing of projects easier!
David:
Audio post in Final Cut is one of the things that drives me the most nuts.
Larry
I’d love to see better Apple training and bringing back the Apple certification. I know that something is coming through FMC, but Resolve and Premiere have pro training through the company. I’d love to see that back for Motion and FCP, directly from Apple.
How about round-tripping with Motion? I’m not talking about sending an effect to and from, but an actual clip? We bring a clip to Motion and then have to render it to bring it back to FCP. It would be great if we could bring a clip back as a Motion clip.
Yup. Lots of comments about tighter integration between Motion and Final Cut.
Larry
It’s been quite a while since I last used Apple’s Soundtrack Pro, but I remember liking its round-trip capabilities.
Mike:
I agree. One of the key features in Soundtrack that I liked was that if I moved a clip in Final Cut, it would move in Soundtrack. This simplified audio mixing a lot.
Larry
An upscaling feature would be great.
Also, I do appreciate that FCPX is not a subscription based software. If that changes in the future and Apple doesn’t implement the suggested improvements, I could see more editors migrating away from FCPX.
Yep
Final Cut Pro works really well for our workflows. Once you add third party tools like CommandPost, PostLab, X2Pro, XtoCC, Producers Best Friend, etc it ticks off most of the boxes. Personally, I’d love to see more focus on machine learning for automation and bug fixes!
FWIW – we have a GitHub repository where we keep track of FCPX bugs and feature requests. We basically try to keep it like “OpenRadar”, so if we send any feedback to Apple like the feedback form or “Feedback Assistant” we also post it as an issue in this repository.