A screenshot of Apple's Final Cut Pro for iPad page. The headline says: Bring your entire studio to your shoot.

Pundit fact check: Final Cut Pro and iPadOS

Yet another installment of an “Apple pundit ignores the facts to write a clickbait story about the limitations of iPadOS”. It’s a bummer that they just make stuff up to fit their preferred narrative. Filipe Espósito over at 9to5Mac in his work of fiction, Final Cut for iPad highlights iPadOS limitations:

This week, Apple finally released Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for the iPad – two highly anticipated apps for professionals. While this is a step in the right direction, these apps highlight the limitations of iPadOS.

I tried using Final Cut for the iPad, but…
I wasn’t expecting the iPad version to have all the features available on the Mac in version 1.0. However, the limitations go beyond what I was expecting. And some of these limitations are due to how iPadOS works.

The “limitations” he attributes to iPadOS:

  • That FCP does not allow editing off of an external SSD is true but it’s a limitation of FCP. LumaFusion and DaVinci Resolve both have this feature
  • The lack of some keyboard shortcuts in FCP has nothing to do with iPadOS
  • The interaction of FCP with Stage Manager is critiqued but again, this is how Apple has implemented FCP. I’ve not used DaVinci Resolve but LumaFusion has no problem with Stage Manager on the iPad screen or full screen on an external screen. It’s excellent.
  • Round-tripping a FCP project from iPad to Mac and back. Again, this is likely a limitation of FCP not iPadOS.
An iPad is connected to an external display. The app LumaFusion is full screen on the display.

Using LumaFusion on the iPad with an external display

Okay, background export of a movie. To some degree this is a limitation of FCP but also I suspect iPadOS. Certainly Apple made it a choice to not allow it. Using an M1 iPad Pro with 8 GB of memory it’s possible to do a background export with LumaFusion. I just did it. That said, it does fail if I try to do many other tasks with LumaFusion in the background the whole time. I can hop to Notes or Mail or Safari with no problem. But if I were to leave an export in the background and try to hop from Notes to Mail to Safari then back to the export it will have failed. I’d guess that an iPad with 16 GB of memory would do better. And I’d guess that more could be done with iPadOS to allow for apps to be given priority for such background tasks.

Espósito concludes, “And with all these limitations, I’ve given up using Final Cut on the iPad. I’m sure a lot of first-time video makers will have a great time using Final Cut on the iPad. But for those professional users, having a Mac is still the way to go. Hopefully, iPadOS 17 can put an end to some of these limitations.”

He seems to consider himself a “professional” but I would think a professional journalist would have more regard for the truth. Ignoring or distorting the facts to fit a narrative doesn’t make much of a case that one’s journalism is professional.