What Features Does Apple Final Cut Pro Still Need?

Posted on May 21, 2022 by Larry

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.
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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?

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Randy Brown says:

June 3, 2022 at 10:24 am

If you do a virtual zoom-in using the Transform tool in FCP, you get this wild movement. Switching from “Smooth” (the default) to “Linear” is better, but still does little to remedy the problem as the movement is still jerky.

A third-party application, Add Motion, seems to have provided a workaround. But this should be better in FCP. At the very least, users ought to be able to change the default setting from Smooth to Linear, but why isn’t there an “Ease In” and “Ease Out” and “Ease Both” option?

Oh, and why is there no 3D rotation available in FCP? That’s nuts.
Karen says:

June 5, 2022 at 8:38 pm

I’m sure it was said by someone else, but the playhead in the video selection area on top needs to be thicker and a different color. I waste so much time looking to see where the playhead is when searching for a section of a clip to use.
Joe Langenfeld says:

June 6, 2022 at 4:16 am

Someone suggested smooth keyframe options…I’d like to see more options for key frame smoothing and control, similar to AE or even Motion.
Michael Prescott says:

June 7, 2022 at 6:54 am

When creating a compound clip with a Title, the poster frame/thumbnail in the Browser and Timeline appears as the Title, not the underlying clip. This makes it extremely difficult to identify which clip is being used. I understand that if you click the compound clip in the browser, or move the playhead over the compound clip in the timeline, the underlying clip will show up. But this is not a useful way of working.
Scott Markowitz says:

June 9, 2022 at 6:44 am

I would make great use of distortion tools such as extended bicubics or a mesh warper that can be keyframed. Also, I would like to have access to animation curve controls for all keyframes throughout the application.
Betsey Roach says:

June 13, 2022 at 9:31 am

So glad you have brought attention back to disc creation! For many client projects I am forced to go back to my 2011 MBP and use DVD Studio (customization counts). Because of the lack of any ability to produce a professional looking Blu-ray Disc from FCP I just don’t offer them to clients. Apple was so wrong for dropping the development of DVD Studio to include Blu-ray creation and even more so for abandoning the app with the intro of Final Cut Pro.
Betsey R says:

June 13, 2022 at 9:44 am

Bring back a professional independent app for Blu-ray/DVD Disc creation. Used DVD Studio heavily (still do) and Apple missed the boat when they made a decision to drop support of this app and pretty much abandon the support of the Blu-ray Disc. Many of us using Final Cut Studio and DVD Studio Pro (back in the day) specialized in client based projects and we still do. There is a demand for discs and Apple you have let us down terribly in this area.
Dirk van den Berg says:

June 16, 2022 at 1:50 pm

Since I am currently editing the 8th or 9th feature documentary on Final Cut Pro X, and docs have very different needs from feature films, my greatest wish is this: bring something like Speech To Text in Adobe Premiere. Allow us to transcribe interviews (video, audio) into text, generate subtitles and export both to universally compatible files (.txt and .srt). This would make FCPX enormously more valuable, and would help avoid the (amost daily) excursions into Premiere Pro. Since Adobe shows that this works (and very well indeed.), Apple should be more than capable to integrating this.
Les Bairstow says:

June 17, 2022 at 9:09 am

Playback speeds at 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75, etc.
Caesar Darias says:

July 5, 2022 at 7:37 pm

I agree. Speech to text would be a significant and beneficial improvement.

It would also be great to create a text to realistic sounding speech function. I can be used, for example, when you do a news interview, you have to translate and you want to use a different voice from your own.

There are other uses.