Speaker 1: Final Cut Pro is an awesome piece of editing software, but with apps like DaVinci Resolve becoming more popular and even Premiere gaining advanced AI features, it does kind of beg the question, where does Final Cut Pro fit in today's editing landscape or is it just a dead app? Well, absolutely not. I think you could not be more dead wrong. In fact, I have my own Resolve to stick up for Final Cut Pro, even though I've actually been kind of skeptical of Apple's tendency to sometimes act as though they've forgotten that Final Cut Pro is a thing that exists. But recently, Apple pushed out a 10.8 Final Cut Pro update that brings quite a few improvements, including machine learning elements. I'm so skeptical of all of these things, machine learning elements, which all of those things I think in a best case scenario hint towards bigger possible updates in the future. But at the very least, they show that Apple still acknowledges Final Cut Pro exists and has some kind of future plans for it because they're still investing time and resources into it. So what I'm gonna do is put a link to the 10.8 overview from a channel called Ripple Training, where they do an excellent job, way better than I ever could, of breaking down all the new features. So you can cover that if you just wanna know like, hey, what are those new features? What I wanna talk about today is more of where Final Cut Pro sits in today's editing world and who it is and isn't for. So first off, when we're talking about today's editing world, I'm talking about three main pieces of software, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Adobe Premiere. There are other ones out there, of course, and if you're in the movie TV industry, Avid is the one that you are probably an Avid user of, but we're not talking about Avid now because it's its own separate thing. Basically, it's one of those things where if you need Avid, you're probably not watching this video because you know you need Avid. We're focusing on right now are things for, you know, small solo creators, maybe small groups, teams, businesses, things like that. So I also want to acknowledge that I have my own personal bias because I've been using Final Cut Pro since 2011, and I really love it. It's my personal editor of choice. I taught it as a high school digital media teacher for 10 years. I also have a Final Cut Pro editing course called Rough Cut to Final Cut. Go to learnfinalcutpro.com to check that out. I don't think there's anything simpler or faster, especially for a solo editor, and the thing is, when I was a teacher, I spent so many years teaching, you know, students ninth through 12th grade. So sometimes a 13-year-old would show up in my classroom having never done any sort of video editing before, and it did not take very long at all before they were super comfortable with Final Cut Pro, and it just kind of, it does such a good job of getting out of the way once you learn the basics and just letting you make your projects. You don't have to kind of fight with it or figure it out. It's such a great tool, and I've seen that with people of all ages, from, you know, young middle school, high school students, all the way up to, you know, senior citizens. Final Cut Pro is the editing software that I feel most comfortable having people dive into and feeling like they're not going to totally get lost. It's something pretty much anyone, even with no experience, can pick up. Final Cut Pro is also, I have found, to be the most stable editing software out of all of them. Premiere is just a dumpster fire of instability. Resolve is pretty darn good, but Final Cut Pro, especially if you run it on a silicon-based, you know, M-series Mac, it's so good. Although, to be fair, in the past, maybe year and a half or so, I have noticed it has more bugs than it used to, and I don't know if that's because it's adapting to Apple Silicon or whatever, but I have noticed sometimes, especially things like just plugging in headphones or unplugging headphones sort of screws up the audio drivers and then it has to close and reopen. They're just, it's a little more buggy, but it's still, I think, the most stable of all the editors, and it has an amazing auto-save feature because even when it does crash, the rare times it does, whatever I immediately did right before it crashed is still saved. Even on other things like Resolve or Premiere, when I've had auto-save turned on on those applications and something crashes, it's kind of a coin toss whether or not I'm gonna open it up and actually have my recent changes be automatically saved. There are some limits, of course, to Final Cut Pro that are important to understand if you're kind of thinking of diving into it. Obviously, if you're not a Mac user, Final Cut Pro is not an option for you because it's Mac only. That's one of the strengths because it works on the hardware that it's designed for, and that's it, but if you're a Windows person or some other operating system, then it's not for you. It's also definitely not the strongest software if you need to work on a larger team or edit with a group, something where you need to share and collaborate easily. If you have access to a super fast server where you can edit from a library located on the server, maybe, but it's still, it's definitely the clunkiest of the three when it comes to collaboration. But if none of those limits apply to you, if you're somebody like me who is, you kind of just do everything yourself and you're a one-person crew, then Final Cut Pro, I think, is an awesome option. And I do think that there are a lot of things that it doesn't get enough credit for, and it is a bit underrated, but the reason that those things are the case is because it absolutely fell out of favor after it completely turned its entire Pro user base against it back around the time I started using it in around 2011. I think that's when Apple changed it from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro 10. And basically, Apple dropped the ball in this update where they completely rebuilt Final Cut Pro, and then pretty much every major user who wasn't using something like Avid just made the jump to Premiere. So Premiere definitely won that battle. I don't know that they won the war, though, because as much as Apple dropped the ball with their update to Final Cut Pro, and the reason people didn't like it is because it basically took the entire workflow and all of the Pro features that the application was known for and kind of got rid of them and sort of made it into $300 iMovie. It's kind of like it was barely a step above iMovie, which is the free video editing software that comes on a Mac computer, and Adobe and Premiere welcomed people with open arms. However, here's the thing. Here's the thing to keep in mind. The reason Apple did that, as horribly as they handled the situation, the logic under it, I think, was very sound, keeping in mind Resolve did not exist yet. Basically, Final Cut Pro, the original versions all the way up to Final Cut Pro 7 had been built on this kind of older code and older architecture. This is not my area of expertise, so bear with me. But in order to sort of progress into the world of high-definition video, upcoming ultra high-definition 4K video, all that kind of stuff, it kind of needed to be blown up and rebuilt in order to be a more efficient and more effective program. And so that's what Apple did. And years later, now we're, what, 13 years past that, it is back to being fully featured pro-level software and has been for a long time. I think personally, the 10.4 update, which was maybe four or five years ago at this point, was kind of where it like, ding, got kind of back to the level of power that it used to be before the crazy update. Problem was, much people already left for Premiere. However, even though Adobe kind of won that war of like, everybody's over here now and everybody loves Premiere, Premiere had the same problem of being built on really old kind of janky foundation of code and whatever infrastructure that goes into an application like that. And because they didn't want to do the same thing that Apple did and get people really upset about changing everything, they'd kind of just stayed the course and they've just been patching this sinking ship for years at this point and they're kind of stuck, which is a big reason why Premiere can be so incredibly unstable. And the reason I say that is because I started using Premiere back in 2003, maybe even before then, a long time ago. And the last time I used Premiere was, I don't know, a year or two ago. I have never edited a Premiere project that didn't crash at least once. And I think I've only edited very few Premiere projects that only crashed once. And that even goes back, it's just, I've had very bad luck with it on Macs, on PCs, every level of power, every configuration, I've just never found Premiere to be a, no matter what the computer's configuration, I've just never found Premiere to be a reliable, stable piece of software, even though there are some amazing features and it's very capable. But then of course, in like 2017, Blackmagic releases DaVinci Resolve and suddenly there's this new competitor here. It's not just Final Cut Pro or Premiere, now Resolve shows up. It kind of is a good hybrid of both, right? You have similar workflows from either, you have a lot of the power, maybe the more advanced stuff that people like Premiere for, but you sort of have the user friendliness and more of the reliability of Final Cut Pro. And it's all smashed into Resolve, which is now seven or eight years old and very regularly updated, super powerful. So I forget where we're going here with this, how we got on this tangent, but I'm essentially trying to explain why Final Cut Pro fell out of favor and is still pretty much in third place of those top three editing applications. I think a lot of people kind of remember it as iMovie Pro after that initial shift and don't know that it not only got back to being super pro, but then added in so many cool new features that didn't even exist back then. And this is kind of a weird analogy, but when I think of especially Final Cut versus Resolve, I kind of look at them as a buffet versus like a restaurant in that Resolve, when you open the application, it is like a buffet. Everything the application can do is right there in front of you. There's so much. And that can be very overwhelming if you've never edited a video or you never use the application, you open it up. It's a lot. Final Cut Pro, more like a restaurant. You sit down at your table, here's a menu. You kind of have to look through and see what there is versus seeing everything there. But if you look at all the ingredients, all the parts of the buffet, and you look at everything on the menu, you kind of realize, oh, it is a lot of the same stuff. It's just sort of, I can't see everything all at once. Everything is just available in my face all at once. It's just sort of different. Final Cut, of course, does have probably its most unique feature, which is the magnetic timeline. And this is something, again, people really dislike this when they move to it. But once you edit in the magnetic timeline, I just can't not use, I love it so much. And in case you didn't know this, you can press option W anywhere in your timeline to insert sort of just a blank chunk of video that you can then drag if you want to sort of not have everything be magnetic. There is no just on, off button for magnetic timeline, which would probably be the best of both worlds. But the magnetic timeline is such a cool feature that I think was overlooked when Final Cut Pro was first updated and people thought it was really weird, didn't want to get used to it. And now, especially if you've learned editing within it, it is so natural and makes so much sense. So I've kind of been all over the place here trying to contextualize Final Cut Resolve and Premiere, but I think a good way to look at this, where Final Cut Pro fits, is thinking where someone should start. So if you're someone who's brand new to video editing and trying to figure out which application to dive into, or even if you're not, if you can put yourself in those shoes of like, okay, if I were starting out, where would I go? I'm not attached to editing software. I think let's start by talking about accessibility. Before you start spending money on a video editing application, it's kind of nice to be able to try it out, right? And this is where Resolve and Final Cut are kind of the best. Final Cut has a free 90-day trial, so you can try it for three months, totally free. Decide if you like it or not. If you decide you want to purchase it, it is then $300 one time, and that's it. And I'm talking about the desktop version. There's an iPad version. That's sort of a separate thing I'm not talking about right now. Resolve does not have a free trial, but they have just a free version. So you can go download that right now, totally for free on Mac or PC. Start editing right away. It is very capable. It doesn't put watermarks on your exports or anything like that. Basically, the free version does have some limited effects and some limited more advanced features, but as far as basic editing goes, even in 4K resolution, the free version of Resolve is absolutely enough to get you going. If you decide you like Resolve and you want to dive into it, it's, again, $300 one time, just like Final Cut Pro. They are the exact same price. But something cool, where did I put it? Over here. Something cool that Blackmagic does is they sell a lot of other stuff. This is the Speed Editor. They also have their Pocket 6K Cinema cameras and all that stuff. A lot of their products come with a full license of Resolve. So the Speed Editor was 400 bucks. It's a cool accessory to use with Resolve. It's very tactile and fun. But $400, you get this plus the full license of Resolve. If you're someone who wants to buy a Blackmagic Cinema camera, there's a chance your camera's just going to come with a license for Resolve anyway. So Resolve is super accessible, especially with that free version. And then there's Adobe with Premiere. Premiere gives you a seven-day trial. It's a pretty lame trial, to be honest with you. And if you decide you like it and you want to buy it, you have to submit yourself to the hellish hellscape of Adobe's subscription pricing, which is just the worst. And as much as I do think Adobe software has so much cool stuff to offer, their billing, their pricing, their subscription model, if you already have it, if you have an Adobe account, you can get access to Premiere that way, then it could be totally worth it. But if you're not already, if they don't already have their claws into you, stay away, just stay away from Adobe's horrible subscription stuff. Now, if you have a Mac and you plan to kind of stay as a solo editor and you want the best combo of simple and powerful, then Final Cut Pro is the easiest thing in the world to recommend. That is 100% the way to go. If you're not on a Mac and you want a little bit more flexibility, especially when it comes to color, or you do plan to maybe work as part of a team at some point or you even want to go down the path to being an editor as a job or a career, then Resolve is probably the way to go as well. I mentioned that I do have a Final Cut Pro editing course, which of course I am very proud of and I definitely recommend you go check out Rough Cut to Final Cut if you want me to share everything I know about Final Cut Pro editing with you. But Resolve and Blackmagic have online training for free that is phenomenal. It sounds like I'm completely selling against myself here, but seriously, you can go right now, you can download sample project files, you can go through, it is incredibly high quality, maybe a little bit dry at certain points, but super easy to understand, incredibly in-depth. I can even get certifications online totally for free. You can download the free software, free training, free certifications. I mean, that's pretty awesome, right? So to kind of wrap this up and put things into a final context here and answer that original question of is Final Cut Pro still worth it? 100% yes, I do think it's still worth it from the capabilities, the one-time purchase fee, the stability, just the joy of using it. I have a lot of fun using Final Cut Pro. You kind of can't underrate fun there, right? I think Final Cut Pro is 100% worth it. If you're not into Final Cut Pro, I think Resolve is absolutely then the next way to go because it is also incredibly powerful, incredibly versatile, accessible, works on Mac and PC. So you have just a ton of options there. And if you're gonna be doing a lot of After Effects work or you already have access to Adobe Creative Cloud, then diving into Premiere, you know, Premiere does have a lot of capabilities and some cool new features that they've added in there. It's just definitely my lowest recommendation if you're not already in that ecosystem. But speaking of ecosystems, you may, might be, might, huh? Wanna join are the people who support my channel through Patreon and YouTube channel memberships. And if you wanna learn more about Final Cut Pro, check out these pro-fessional tutorials right here. ♪