Pro Video Editing on iPad Pro M4 with FCP 2? Hands-on at Apple Event

by Nino Leitner10 days ago

At the Apple launch event at Apple UK HQ in Battersea Power Station in London, I was able to have a hands-on with the newly announced iPad Pro M4, as well as preview versions of the upcoming Final Cut Pro 2 for iPad and the newly announced Final Cut Camera app which allows a feature called “Live Multicam”.

Exciting times, first time CineD was invited to an Apple launch event. Of course I wondered why as the invitation already hinted at an event heavily targeted at the iPad, not so much filmmaking-related topics. While watching the keynote there, it became clear: Apple not only relaunches the iPad Pro with the entirely new M4 chip, but they also showcased an entirely new version of Final Cut Pro for iPad that is now really fully optimized for touch (just a reminder, the original FCP for iPad was announced last May), and an entirely new app called Final Cut Camera that allows for Live Multicam shooting.

iPad Pro with M4 – Tandem OLED, much lighter, M4 more power-efficient

As mentioned in the video report above, I was impressed how light the M4 iPad Pros have become. 100 grams less is a lot for a compact device like an iPad, and you can feel it when holding the new 13 inch version in one hand and operating with the other hand. It now finally feels like you can operate it for an extended period of time holding it in one hand.

It seems like the reason to debut the M4 chip in the iPad Pro is the fact that it’s more power-efficient than the M2 (and M3, which was skipped in the iPad lineup), which means it will generate less heat and need less power in order to operate at comparable speeds to the M2. This way, the iPad can be build even thinner (and it’s really thin now … probably the closest Apple has ever gotten to that “magic sheet of glass” they envisioned when introducing the iPad in the beginning). iPads “traditionally” last about 10 hours on a full charge, and by my own experience, those are conservative estimates (will last longer if you do mundane tasks) – I am guessing that they built in a smaller battery because the processor is less power-hungry, meaning they could shed some space and weight by incorporating a smaller battery).

It will be interesting to see how the iPad Pro fares in real-life pro scenarios which are render-intensive, and I look forward to reviewing this. There have been some reports of power throttling happening on its predecessor, so let’s see if the M4 fares better in this regard.

The “Tandem OLED” screen is really impressive and super bright for an OLED screen. They achieved this brightness by basically putting two OLEDs on top of each other and have them “work in harmony”. The level of detail is staggering and I can see this screen show up in professional productions everywhere. I have no doubt this would be a perfect preview monitor on as well as off set. There is a “nano etched” version of the screen available for the 1TB and 2TB versions of the iPad Pro for an extra $99 which will diffuse light even more and make it less reflective. They target this particularly at pro colorist workflows.

Final Cut Pro 2 for iPad – very responsive touch, AI functions

Apple is entering the AI game with Final Cut Pro 2 for iPad, which not only feels much snappier to operate in its latest iteration but also fully enabled for touch – which wasn’t the case before. There is a virtual jogwheel for exact navigation, and setting in and out points as well as pinch zooming works a treat. The new Apple Pencil Pro enables Final Cut Pro 2 for iPad to go into “Live Draw” mode where you can draw directly onto your footage and animate that. Neat and surely a way to creatively and easily add graphics to your footage. Regarding the aforementioned AI functions, they now have machine learning incorporated in various functions, for example a keyer that removes the background based on machine learning, without a green screen. It’s not perfect but surely very useful for quick isolation of subjects. They demoed it by putting a title in between a dancer and a wall in the background and that worked really well also when being reproduced. I will be very curious to test the ability of this tool when reviewing the new version. The new version of FCP for iPad also supports external SSD drives to store libraries, which is a long-awaited feature.

Final Cut Camera – Live Multicam

Apple also announced a free new app for iPhone and iPad called Final Cut Camera, which can be seen as a bit of a competitor to Blackmagic Cam. While probably not as fully featured (for example, unfortunately preview LUT support seems not to be there in version 1, however Apple Log shooting is available), it allows for manual adjustments of ISO, shutter speed, white balance and focus, even including focus peaking – neat!

But the main feature of this app is its “Live Multicam” functionality which allows you to use up to 4 iPhones (and / or iPads) to stream live footage and then do a multicam live edit on one of the devices. You can change all the settings of the other devices from the “master” device, and also press record on that master. It will then record streaming proxies which you can start editing right away as a multicam clip on the device after pressing stop recording. As you are editing, ProRes originals are transferred from the other devices in the background and automatically onlined. It will be interesting to see how well this works over Wifi with the large amounts of data ProRes generates, because as I learned, it will be the quite data-heavy ProRes 422 HQ versions. In my opinion, ProRes LT would have been plenty good quality from iPhones / iPads, considering it’s also 10-bit, and much less data-heavy. Looking forward to trying this feature out.

Conclusion

Apple is clearly targeting content creators with their updates of the iPad Pro M4 and Final Cut Pro 2 for iPad and Final Cut Camera (also Logic Pro, but that is not really our topic here at CineD). It will be interesting to see if it will be an efficient desktop-less editing workflow for both normal edits and also the live multicam edits, and I look forward to testing this out in the near future.

What do you think about editing professionally on an iPad? Please share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.