Open Letter to Apple About Final Cut Pro

From an open letter signed by over 100 industry professionals:

Final Cut Pro is a wonderful application used by many YouTubers, education and small business content creators worldwide. We know why it is successful. It is liberating, efficient and fun to work with. But, unfortunately in professional film and TV, editors who use Final Cut Pro are a tiny minority.

I seldom link to open letters because I generally think they’re pointless. And I wavered on linking to this one because it isn’t particularly well-written. The above paragraph that I quoted is the nut of it: Final Cut Pro has great bones, many pros who do use it love it, but it’s hard to use in many pro workflows because so few pros do use it. This quote from the preface to the actual letter addresses it:

Steven Sanders, editor in chief of the Fox TV series War of the Worlds season 3, said, “The two main reasons why I am often not allowed to choose my favourite editing application, which is Final Cut Pro are:

  1. Collaboration! Editing big productions needs collaboration. Different users have to be able to access the same library at the same time. There is no way around this. Avid Media Composer does it and even DaVinci Resolve does it. Apple still targets the single user. They have to change that. That will change everything.

  2. Many professionals do not know how Final Cut works. They are afraid of it, even regard is as ‘iMovie Pro.’ I hear that all the time in my business. This perception really has to change.”

In other words, these Final Cut Pro-using professionals are asking Apple to do whatever it takes to make Final Cut Pro more popular in the industry. That it’s so seldom used — to name one example, it’s not on Netflix’s list of approved products for their own commissioned productions — is proof that something has gone deeply awry.

Scott Simmons, writing at ProVideo Coalition, has culled a bunch of insightful comments from fellow signers of the letter.

★ Tuesday, 19 April 2022