Video editors aren’t happy with Final Cut Pro, and I’m going to share with you four big reasons why, and how Apple can fix it.
I’ve noticed a trend lately in the world of video editing that is a bit concerning, and that trend is that not nearly as many video editors are talking as positively about Final Cut Pro as they once were. And whenever they are talking about it, they’re more complaining than sharing things they love about the program.
A couple of years ago this wasn’t the case. If I posted a YouTube video about Premiere Pro, I would consistently find several comments asking why I’m not using Final Cut Pro, and in the Facebook groups I’m part of I would constantly see filmmakers arguing about why Final Cut was superior, either from a lack of crashing standpoint or a speed standpoint. Lately that hasn’t been happening, and it’s got me wondering. Are video editors not as excited about Final Cut Pro as they once were?
So I started asking my friends who use Final Cut, and I think that word, unexcited, really sums things up well. To be clear, video editors who use Final Cut don’t hate the program. In fact many of them have told me they still love it. But just like how you can love someone through good times and bad, this feels like more of a bad time.
Reason 1: Apple’s Secrecy
Apple is a secretive company. We all know that. They do not like revealing any of their hardware or software until it’s ready. But in the world of professional software, keeping everything secret can be a bad thing, because professionals need to know that updates are coming for the tools they’re using.
Because Apple is so secretive about the development of Final Cut Pro, every couple of years rumors start to circulate that Apple is going to abandon the program and stop updating it, like they did with their photo editing software Aperture. This culture of secrecy really makes editors who use Final Cut Pro nervous. They don’t need to know Apple’s entire roadmap. They just need to know that the editing software they use is being actively developed and not abandoned, and they need to be told that ideally several times per year.
This is made all the more apparent whenever you look at Apple’s competition in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Both Adobe and Blackmagic have very healthy beta programs where they not only tell editors early on that they’re releasing updates, they even let them download those beta versions to experience the updates for themselves and give feedback on how to improve the software.
Adobe in particular has been advertising their beta program very heavily. Whenever you open Premiere Pro it presents you with a banner at the bottom of the screen talking about how many new features are coming and how you can download the beta to try them today. Heck, they even hired me to make some sponsored Instagram Reels promoting the features of their new beta. They are being very aggressive about talking up their updates right now.
And above all, that reassures video editors that both DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro are being actively developed, and that you can expect at least one big update per year, if not multiple, because these companies want to constantly improve their software and add more features.
Reason 2: Inconsistent Updates
Editors on Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve have grown very accustomed to there being new updates every single year. Typically Adobe will introduce bigger updates in April or May around the NAB conference, and again toward the end of the year, sometime around November or December. With Blackmagic they release updates throughout the year even more frequently, and in 2023 nearly every month there was a new upgrade or tweak of some sort. By my rough count it was nine or ten updates. I lost count.
Editors have grown accustomed to this year after year, and as someone who uses both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, I find it very reassuring to consistently see updates. If Adobe were to suddenly announce hey, we’re not going to be doing updates as often, or Blackmagic said hey, we’re going to skip a year and not release anything new for DaVinci, I would start to be nervous about the platform.
So whenever you look at Apple, with an incredibly secretive culture where they don’t announce updates, they don’t have a beta program where editors can test the software ahead of time, and they don’t have a regular update cadence you can expect like their competition does, the natural question is how many updates did Final Cut actually get?
According to Apple’s release notes, they had five updates last year, which doesn’t sound bad. But when you look closer, only three of those added new features, while the others were smaller bug fixes. And Apple had a big gap where they didn’t release any updates at all between October 2022 and May 2023. Really, if you look at that October 2022 update, it was more of a speed and stability update, which means you have to go all the way back to April 2022 to find an update that had a lot of substantial new features in it. That is over a year between big feature updates.
So while Final Cut is still getting multiple updates per year, many of them are stability and bug fixes rather than big feature updates. It’s hard to be excited about a program as a professional if you don’t know what’s coming and the updates you are getting aren’t substantial.
Reason 3: A Lack Of Big Updates
We are living in an era of video editing where we’re seeing a ton of innovation in AI and machine learning that will hopefully make our jobs a lot easier. And Apple’s main competition, Adobe and Blackmagic, have both been extremely good at shouting the benefits of their tools from the rooftops.
It feels like every time Premiere Pro has an update, Adobe is talking about some AI feature they’re adding or improving. Premiere just added AI voice enhancement to the program, and Adobe showed off at their MAX conference in 2023 that they’re working on object removal for video, and a generator that can add objects like a tie onto a person while they’re walking in mixed lighting using just a text prompt. It’s really cool stuff, and it makes me, as well as a lot of other editors who use Premiere Pro, excited about what Adobe is doing. Whereas for a while it felt like everyone was complaining about the bugs in Premiere Pro, now there’s a significant portion of the userbase talking about AI, which is definitely more positive.
Likewise, Blackmagic has not been lacking in introducing AI features to DaVinci Resolve, with a feature called Voice Isolation that uses AI to remove background noise from someone who’s speaking and make them significantly easier to hear. Most editors I’ve talked to know about these new tools in DaVinci and Premiere, and I’ve heard many stories about how they’ve saved audio that would have previously been unrecoverable.
But then you have Apple, and their updates aren’t nearly as flashy or attention grabbing in comparison. They have added AI features to Final Cut, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t see anyone raving about them, or really about any of Final Cut’s new features.
Whenever I spoke to my editor friends who use Final Cut Pro, two recurring themes kept coming up. The first was that Final Cut is still by far the fastest way to edit a video, and they absolutely love the speed of it. But as positive as that first thing was, the second theme was just as negative, because all of these editors consistently said that to make the software work the way they wanted it to, they needed to go out and purchase multiple plugins to fill in the gaps where the program was lacking features. In short, Apple hasn’t been adding the features that video editors are clamoring for and need.
The All In One Trend Apple Is Ignoring
To make things worse, Apple has been ignoring where their competitors’ software is heading. The overall shift we’ve been witnessing in the wider world of video editing software is the rise of the all in one program.
Video editors are seeing Adobe add more and more features to Premiere Pro that they’ve pulled from After Effects and Audition, to make the editing process quicker. And heck, look at DaVinci Resolve. It’s the definition of an all in one program that can handle editing, graphics work, color grading and sound mixing all in a few clicks.
My editor friends on Final Cut Pro told me how they consistently had to download external plugins that they really wish were in the program natively, especially for color grading tools like you’d find on DaVinci Resolve’s color page. This has led to a decent number of Final Cut Pro editors choosing to edit their videos in Final Cut but handle all of their color grading in DaVinci Resolve, resulting in a significantly more convoluted workflow. It does work, don’t get me wrong. But whenever you combine needing DaVinci for color grading with all of the positive word of mouth around DaVinci and everyone telling you it’s a great editor, it’s no wonder a decent number of editors are considering switching to Resolve so they can edit and grade in one place.
In early 2024 I released a full featured course called Wedding Film Framework that shows editors how to quickly and easily edit wedding films in DaVinci Resolve, and as people have signed up I’ve discovered there’s a decent number of Final Cut Pro users joining, because they’re tired of waiting for these features and they’re ready to learn Resolve.
Reason 4: Apple’s Other Focus
So with this lack of feature rich updates that professional editors are looking for, and Apple ignoring the all in one trend their competition is moving toward, that begs the question. Where has Apple been spending their time? If they’re not releasing super compelling updates for Final Cut Pro, what have they been working on?
It’s no secret that Apple’s main driver of income for their entire business is the iPhone and iPad. iOS, and to a lesser degree iPadOS, is the main way they make money as a company and where they’ve been focusing much of their development effort for years. And what was easily the largest software development for video editors that Apple announced in 2023? Yes. A version of Final Cut Pro for the iPad.
Look, software development takes a lot of time, and Apple has a lot of money but they do not have unlimited software engineers. Considering that the desktop version of Final Cut Pro is probably not a massive revenue driver for them, I would bet their finance guys looked at how many users they have for Final Cut Pro on desktop versus how many millions upon millions of people have an iPad, and said hey, if we can create a version of Final Cut for iPad that’s built from the ground up for touch, I bet we can get a lot of those iPad users onto the software.
And then those same finance people said, look at how little money we’re making with Final Cut. Video editors buy it once for 300 bucks and we never make money from them again. Let’s take a page from Adobe’s book and start charging a subscription of $5 per month to use the iPad version so we can make recurring revenue.
So why have Final Cut editors on desktop not been seeing as many updates? Isn’t it obvious? Because Apple isn’t as focused on them. A lot of their engineers are working on the iPad version now, because that’s where the money is.
I’m not saying development on the desktop version is going to stop altogether. But considering that Apple is a company that wants to make money, and they’re especially focused on service based revenue, the potential income they can make from Final Cut editors on desktop is very small, and I don’t necessarily see that changing unless they were to start charging for updates, or more likely start charging a subscription fee for the desktop version.
And don’t get mad at me about this, okay? I hate subscriptions just as much as you do. But this isn’t coming from me. Apple is the one already charging a subscription for the iPad version of Final Cut. It’s not a big jump at all for them to say hey, we should do that for the desktop version as well.
Regardless of whether they do that or not, the fact doesn’t change that their attention is now split between the iPad and desktop versions. They are now going to be updating and improving two versions of their software, one of which needs to work as a completely touch based interface. Traditional editors on desktops and laptops are probably not going to be thrilled about this, because up until now it has meant longer development time for updates to their version of the software, and I’m not sure I see that changing. But who knows?
How Apple Can Make Editors Happy
Maybe Apple is getting ready to fix all of these issues. Maybe they’re about to announce a public beta program, start sharing their roadmap for future updates, roll out bigger feature updates that grab hype and attention from video editors, and shore up the other deficiencies that have editors looking toward other software.
Or maybe they’ll continue to rest easy knowing they’re still one of the fastest ways to edit video out there, even with their shortcomings. If so, then it’s not surprising why video editors aren’t happy with the program anymore.
A lot of the people I talked to said they loved the program but they weren’t excited about it. They used it and they were familiar with it. But at the same time, a lot of editors are hearing all the hype and excitement around programs like DaVinci Resolve, and they’re thinking, that’s cool. Let me know in the comments what you think Apple can do to fix this, because it’s really interesting stuff.
And if you want a deeper dive into how editors who use Final Cut Pro feel about it, there’s a documentary from Eric Lenz that I would highly recommend watching. It’s really well done and it interviews a ton of editors about why they’re not excited about Final Cut and what it’s lacking.
Can I tell you something you will be happy with, though? My free guide called Edit Videos Like A Pro. It’s going to show you the most important things I’ve learned after years of editing videos, and I’m happy to tell you that what I teach in it applies regardless of which editing software you use. Including Final Cut.
Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!