Apple Updates Final Cut Pro ⇥ apple.com

The past week in Apple product news has been made more interesting by the meta commentary about its October 30 presentation which was, as noted, shot on an array of iPhone 15 Pro Max,¹ and edited on Macs. In the behind-the-scenes video released shortly after the presentation, it became clear there was a third layer of commentary.

Scott Simmons, ProVideo Coalition:

Once I saw that end card and realized they were going to lean into the actual production of this event video, I was actually quite surprised it wasn’t edited on Final Cut Pro, and that FCP wasn’t in the spotlight at least somewhere in the video. It really was the Premiere Pro and Resolve show. And looking at the BTS video, it does look like it was edited on Adobe Premiere Pro.

It is not that much of a revelation to me that Apple may not be using its own products wherever possible for the entire production pipeline, but it is made a little more bizarre when you consider that the behind-the-scenes look at this presentation is, itself, an advertisement for Apple’s products. Even the modern Apple keynote style and format originates, to some extent, with in-house software made for its own presentations.

Also, Apple’s October 30 presentation occurred just one week before this year’s Final Cut Pro Summit in Cupertino. I cannot speak for professional editors, but I wonder if that left some of them with a mixed message about the company’s commitment.

Apple:

Today Apple announced updates to Final Cut Pro across Mac and iPad, offering powerful new features that help streamline workflows. Final Cut Pro now includes improvements in timeline navigation and organization, as well as new ways to simplify complex edits. The apps leverage the power-efficient performance of Apple silicon along with an all-new machine learning model for Object Tracker, and export speeds are turbocharged on Mac models powered by multiple media engines. […]

I will leave it up to professionals to explain whether these updates are meaningful to their workflows. I do some light video editing for my day job in Premiere Pro and I would love if I could automatically colour clips in the timeline by role, for example; whether that makes a difference on a larger-scale project is a good question. Almost as good a question is what kind of changes would be required for Apple’s in-house editors to be using Final Cut Pro instead of Premiere Pro.

There is good reason to ask, other than out of idle curiosity. The quality of Apple’s products tends to drop when it is something seemingly few of its own employees appear to be using. Clips, for example, is updated infrequently, and has not seen a significant feature update in about two years.