Final Cut Pro

Somewhere in four hours of interview footage, the guest said the perfect sentence, and nobody wrote down where. Finding it, or the shot where a car drives past, can take hours of scrubbing through clips. Final Cut Pro lets you type what you are looking for. Transcript Search looks through spoken words, and Visual Search finds objects and actions in the picture. Both work in U.S. English only and need a Mac with Apple silicon or a recent iPad.

Editing happens on the Magnetic Timeline, where clips move closer together when you trim or move one, so sound and picture stay in sync. Magnetic Mask cuts a person or object out of the background without a green screen. Beat Detection marks the bars and beats of a song so clips snap to the rhythm. Color work uses curves, color wheels and LUTs, ready-made looks stored as files.

The companion Mac app Motion builds titles and effects in 2D, 3D and 360° and saves them straight into Final Cut Pro. Compressor adds export settings for HDR, HEVC and MXF files and packages films for the iTunes Store.

On iPad, Live Multicam records from up to four iPhones or iPads at once, and a project can move to the Mac to continue there. The Mac version needs macOS 15.6 or later.