Forging the future of editing at the 2024 Final Cut Pro Creative Summit
Every year, the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit feels like a combination of a pilgrimage and a family reunion for FCP editors. It’s a chance to gather with people who share the same passion for developing smarter, more efficient workflows. In a profession that involves so much sitting in front of computers, speeding through the tedious parts of the work means liberating mental and physical space for the more valuable use of our time: creation and storytelling. This year was no exception, and as the 2024 summit in Cupertino comes to a close, I'm struck by the seemingly endless potential the world of video editing still has ahead of it.
The headline, of course, was the release of Final Cut Pro 11, which the summit participants were able to witness during a live keynote at Apple Park, with the same level of polish you would see in a WWDC Keynote, but at a smaller scale. This is the most significant update since Final Cut Pro X was released in 2011 — it’s hard to believe it’s been over 13 years! And as one of the presenters said, “we’re turning it up to 11” (provoking a chuckle in anyone that gets the Spinal Tap reference).
But the uptick in the version number isn’t merely a marketing strategy, or in direct proportion to the number of new features included. This is the symbol of Apple’s renewed commitment to aggressively advancing the platform into a new era powered by AI, Apple silicone chips, and the rapidly evolving needs of the media industry.
Under that light, the new features are like the initial threading of much longer threads that will gradually become an integral part of the software as it matures into this new era. For example, the auto-captioning feature is not merely a way to quickly make the final edit compliant with the client’s Closed Captioning requirements. It natively integrates a speech-to-text capability that is increasingly becoming a daily part of how we edit documentaries, search for sound bites, or organize our creative thoughts about the edit. It’s adding another dimension to our raw materials, which used to be a flat string-out resembling a linear tape deck to be fast-forwarded and rewound, then played back. Now we can instantly jump to what we need with a simple word search. FCP X was the first to begin shifting our thinking in these ways, and FCP 11 promises to take us even further.
Some might argue that Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve has had these text-to-speech features for months or years. But this is where Apple prioritizes stable, consistent, functional design, rather than the speed with which they roll out features to market, merely for the prize of being “first”. I’ve used Premiere’s auto-transcription tools, and while they’re useful, the overal experience of trying to edit in the way Premiere wants me to edit, can only be described as clunky, messy, and frustratingly inconsistent. Meanwhile, I’ve been importing .SRTs as captions into Final Cut Pro and using them to speedily navigate my interview content for years without a problem.
But if someone needs to scratch their itch for “flashy” features, they need not look further than FCP 11’s Magnetic Mask tool. The ease and accuracy with which an object or person can be highlighted and isolated from the background is literally astounding. One of the presenters, Mark Spencer from Ripple Training, used a piece of stock footage as an example, in which a woman danced across a sidewalk, her hair blowing in the wind, as the camera freely moved all around her, moved closer and further away, and she moved partially offscreen and back again. The Magnetic Mask was able to track every part of her at all times, down to the loose strands of hair, without even the slightest wavering edge or glitchy hiccup. This mask could then be used an infinite number of ways to apply effects, adjust color correction, or add layers of graphics — for example, a title that could appear against the sky in the background while the woman danced seamlessly in front of it. In the past, this would have literally taken days or weeks of painstaking manual keyframing. Being able to use AI to assist in tasks like this is not only time-saving, but game-changing. It enables a level of creativity we couldn’t even consider as editors until now.
On the second day of the summit, the opening presentation by Michael Cioni was another standout moment. Michael has a thrilling way of zooming out to the bigger picture, and his analysis of where the industry is heading—based on five years of meticulous research—was insightful and encouraging. AI is already here, but while Generative AI receives most of the attention, it’s Utility AI as he calls it, that will truly revolutionize the way we function as creatives, making our work more efficient, filling gaps in our areas of skill, and increasing the quality of what we’re capable of doing.
Cioni then introduced his new product, Strada, which is hands-down one of the most mind-blowing tools I’ve seen in years. Imagine logging and searching footage at lightning speed, all powered by AI-driven image recognition, audio-analysis and automatic keyword tagging. These are the kinds of workflows designed by people who know the actual problems in filmmaking that need solving. And no, this doesn’t replace the job of an Assistant Editor. I can’t count the number of projects I’ve worked on that outright skip the step of footage logging and organization, simple due to lack of time or resources, basically creating a headache for the lead editor down the road when they can’t locate that one shot of that street sign that is buried somewhere in a 700-hour haystack of footage. Now with Strada (or a similar tool called Jumper) that editor or AE can spot it after a few seconds of word-searching. In another nearly-tear-jerking live demo moment, Michael processed a batch of footage shot that very morning, then used the dialogue transcription feature to read what summit participants had said on camera, in MULTIPLE LANGUAGES, instantly detected and translated to English without even such much as a click on a “Translate” button. These kinds of workflows feel like science fiction, but they’re real, and it’s exciting that they’re now possible on a platform as efficient, elegant, and forward-thinking as Final Cut Pro.
As always, one of the most meaningful aspects of the summit is connecting with other companies and freelance editors, especially those who—like me—grapple with the challenges of remote collaboration across borders and continents. It’s not just about figuring out how to share files faster; it’s about leveraging every advantage, from higher internet speeds to more capable hardware to the incredible third-party services cropping up from within the editing community itself. While this area still feels very nascent and full of quirks, the speed of innovation is staggering, and being in a space like this feels like a playground for testing various permutations and customizations of complex software toys all these collaborators are forging on the go. One such example came from the team behind Cinema Therapy, the hugely popular YouTube channel that blends film analysis with mental health insights. Hearing them talk about their technical hurdles implementing the same remote collaboration platform I’m using at my company was both sobering and encouraging, with possible solutions on the cusp of being discovered.
Then there was a deep dive into the massive video production effort behind Apple’s own Fitness+ Studio, with approximately 13 hours of content being released every week. I’ve been a user of Fitness+ for a while, and have always been impressed by the clean and polished presentation of their workouts and meditations, secretly hoping but never sure if they were using Final Cut Pro to ensure the efficiency of their operation. Well, I was right, and it was amazing to get a peek behind-the-scenes of what turned out to be 10 times more elaborate than I ever imagines. And I can’t forget the final event of the summit, a live Q&A with members of the Pro Apps development team at Apple. While they couldn’t spill the beans on future plans for Final Cut Pro (no surprise there), it was fascinating to hear about the care, design sensibility, and rigorous process that goes into shaping the tools we use every day.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the summit, and the reason Final Cut Pro editors worldwide keep coming back, is that palpable feeling that “we are not alone”. As much as Apple is ubiquitous, their editing software is not, at least not in the mainstream North American film industry, and it can feel like swimming upstream trying to persuade industry professionals to take it more seriously than just a glorified iMovie. However, talking to summit participants I am finding more and more evidence to the contrary. I spoke to a former BBC employee, now an independent media consultant, who said while BBC uses a proprietary old-school video editor at their main broadcast station, outside the building, all their field reporters worldwide use FCP to cut their segments, amounting to approximately 800 seats. They chose it, he said, because there simply isn’t anything faster (their benchmark is to be able to edit a 3-minute segment in only 15 minutes).
From the small production company IFX in Quebec City, to high-profile Australian film and animation studio Late Nite, millions of talented people are using Final Cut Pro to make “weird and wonderful things”, as Late Nite founder Chris Hocking said himself. And being able to count myself among those people is a pleasure indeed.
