Oh, hi, Mark.
Hi, Jonathan. What are you doing on my desk? I hear you're editing the next Mac Address.
That's correct, yeah. I thought, instead of using this big, cumbersome computer with all these screens, you should
edit the next one instead with this. Oh, this should be interesting.
What? You may have already seen the video Mark edited on the iPad.
It's the long-awaited review of the Samsung Viewfinity S9.
It turned out pretty good, I think. Final Cut Pro on the iPad is looking like a dream, eh?
What is, like, the dream editing setup for you? I love the concept of touchscreen with editing.
That is something that I've always craved.
Just being able to have, like, a more fluid kind of environment where you can just move
things around, draw whatever you need, just, yeah, more flexibility, and not be restricted
to, like, a mouse and keyboard.
So in a previous video, we actually set the iPad up in a different room.
Do you want to edit in that booth, or do I have to set this desk up?
That booth's cold. Final Cut Pro on the iPad is a big deal, showing just how Apple is committing to the Pro in
iPad Pro, because that's basically what you'll need to run it as it requires an M-Series
You also have the most experience with Final Cut, I think, here, correct?
Probably. It's not just a radical shift in form factor either, because Apple priced this at $7 a
month, or $70 for a year.
Ugh. Alright, let's see if this justifies the cost.
See, I can get you 10 gig Ethernet. Wait, how am I going to plug this into a monitor?
The monitor has a daisy chain port. Where do I get the, um... You have access to the server in the files app.
So if you go, there's one down there. All footage.
Content unavailable. Okay, so what we do is we eject the drive, and then you just reconnect it.
So it's the server's fault. Always the server's fault.
I'm like literally dumbfounded. The folder works on a Mac.
There's all the files. The one folder that's not showing up on this iPad is the footage folder.
So I guess we'll ingest it manually. Okay, so we fixed the folder.
It just had a weird symbol in the folder name. Yeah, that sounds...
Okay, so we got to import the footage. Alright, let's do it.
Ah. I don't think it's running off the files off the server.
I think it's trying to copy them over. Yep, that's what's happening.
How much storage is on this one? Oh no. 128?
That is not enough. Uh.
I need to get a different iPad. So this iPad is also an M1 iPad Pro, but this one has a terabyte of storage.
The price difference... Staggering.
Oh, s***. It's like, it doesn't support it.
It's an MXF? Uh-huh. It's funny because MXF, in theory, should be recognized on most professional editing
software. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that is frustrating.
That is really dumb. It's literally called material exchange format.
Let's do what it transcended to ProRes. ProRes might be the best bet.
So essentially to even be able to edit with an R workflow, the ingest procedure is
just completely unworkable because we have to re-encode every clip on a Mac.
Just use a Mac, then. It took the better part of the day just to get Mark set out to edit on the iPad.
Things are not looking good. Something about this experience feels familiar.
It reminds me of when Final Cut 10 came out. Back in 2011, most of the video production industry was using the original Final Cut
Pro, both Mark and I were. But it was an old 32-bit relic incapable of handling all the new digital codecs that
were emerging at the time. Us editors were all eagerly waiting for something new, and that's exactly what we got, Final
Cut Pro 10. The new Final Cut Pro has a completely different final cut.
It was a disaster. Apparently, it's so different from the last version of Final Cut video and film editors
all over Hollywood having a very hard time adjusting to it, okay?
I noticed it was incredibly difficult to use at the start, going in with the mindset
of any other NLE that existed up until that point.
It required a complete re-think of how you interacted with something as fundamental
as the timeline. If you understand it, it's great, better than Premiere even.
Then I gave it a shot, timed myself for a few edits, and lo and behold, it was a lot
faster. How long did it take to get to that point? At that point.
It doesn't bode well for the iPad's version of Final Cut Pro to be ready for professional
editors. This new version of Final Cut does feel like a departure.
If you're used to the Mac version, you'll find yourself a little lost.
The media pain, for instance, is on the right side of the screen instead of the left on
a Mac. But this version of Final Cut is nicely optimized for the touch screen.
In fact, the best features are because of it.
The one cool feature that really stood out to me was the skimming tool for touch.
This is genius for editing on iPad or any type of touch screen.
Having a built-in jog dial that you can open and collapse, it worked great.
The other thing is the markup for clips, being able to draw things and animate with the pen.
I use that multiple times. Being able to highlight something on a page is probably the coolest thing.
So you've been editing on Final Cut this video. How is it?
I was going to swear at you as a joke.
Not good. Really? Yeah.
I was a lot more optimistic than I should have been. How so?
To be honest, Jonathan, it's more half-baked than a subway cookie.
It's missing a lot of essential features like search for clips.
I can organize by name or date or whatever, but that's it.
Try sorting by a list. Can you make it a list?
There's got to be a list view.
There's no list view. There's a list view in files.
Why wouldn't there be a list view here? I really assume that you're just wanting to edit iPhone videos with this.
This is a nightmare.
Sometimes you can only do certain things with a mouse and keyboard.
Sometimes you can only do certain things with touching a pencil. I want to be able to take this with me and just go anywhere.
And I can't if I'm connected to this. The whole idea of flexibility of working anywhere, Final Cut Pro and iPad actually makes it more
restrictive. So you have to sit at a desk.
If you want to edit anything, really.
That looks grayish. That looks gray? Yeah.
You have a vectorscope. Amazing. I've never seen a vectorscope without a skin tone line.
Okay, let's all try it. Where are we on a spectrum here of...
I wish you could make the audio meters bigger.
It's so tiny. It doesn't tell you what the decibel level is.
You can scale to fill a clip in two separate ways.
In the crop menu or in the scale menu.
Why? They do have three dots up here that gives you access to video tutorials.
But you have to pay for it. Okay, okay, Mark, you've said enough.
To be fair to this version of Final Cut, the project we gave Mark is a complex one, full
of demanding sequences using many microphones plugged into our heavy and professional cameras.
They record eight tracks of audio per clip.
This causes many headaches because Mark can only manually mute one track of audio at a
time on the timeline per clip. Yeah.
Yeah, they actually made it worse, like significantly worse, significantly worse than Premiere.
All the moment that I discovered the audio issue, I was like, okay, this is going to
take a lot more time now, just because of all the extra work I'd have to do for every
single clip.
Because of all these glitches, this project is taking a lot longer than it should.
In fact, it took so long, Reddit was asking where we went.
The simple answer was this dang thing. Worse still, we couldn't even finish the video on the iPad because of the way it handles
color and audio. How's it going?
It's going. Whoa, what do you do in there? I have a proposal for you.
A proposal? Yes. Instead of finishing this Final Cut Pro project in Final Cut Pro, I could finish it in Final
Cut Pro. Oh, like the computer one.
What's the big obstacle? Audio, really.
It works, but I'm only getting it out of one ear, and I have to use this DAC, and it's
a bit of a nightmare. It's not going to be a video edited fully on an iPad, but it's going to be fully edited
on Final Cut Pro. I mean, we've got to get the video done.
It's already been a while. Two weeks. So let's, sure.
It's 90% there. It gives you the ability to do these things, but then it takes away the one thing that
you need to make it actually work the way you want it to.
So as a result, it just slows the whole process down.
Oh, it's bouncing.
Okay. Yeah. Wow.
It even keeps all of my in and out points.
Oh, I wonder. Can I?
Can I? I deleted it.
I feel kind of bad putting Mark up to this. Despite knowing the history, I thought that this version of Final Cut would be a lot farther
along than DaVinci Resolve even, which when I tried earlier this year, I only attempted
to edit a simple short. Who do you think this is for?
I think this is for social media producers. Do you think it would be, is even good for them?
If you're coming in blind, you might have a better experience than I had.
And that's probably the best way to get into this. While Mark has been editing, I've been playing around with the iPad version of Logic Pro
that was launched alongside Final Cut. I've never even touched the Mac version of the app before, so I have nothing to be
frustrated about. This feels like a big step up from GarageBand that introduces me to more advanced audio
concepts. The question is though, how long before I need even more capability?
And will the iPad version be able to provide that in time?
I'm being hypercritical, obviously, because I just got through editing a Mac Address
video on an iPad. How much slower is it?
Like by what factor, how much slower is it?
Nine to one. It takes nine times longer.
Yeah. I'm still hopeful. It could get better, you know, just like Final Cut 10 when it first got released.
It did get better, and this could get better. Okay, last question.
Does Final Cut Pro for the iPad Pro make the iPad Pro Pro?
No. Thanks, Mark, for editing that video on the iPad.
If you think that a tablet is the next foray for professional work, give this video a like.
And if you missed the video that we made, you might as well subscribe.
I'm curious in the comments below how long you think it's going to take for Final Cut
to catch up.