Long-time FCP editor here. I learned on FCP 7 and made the jump to X back when half the internet swore they never would. These days I direct and edit client work, mostly interview-driven docs and brand pieces.

How I get to a first cut has changed a lot this year, so I figured I'd share the actual setup. I'm also curious how the rest of you are handling this stuff.

The setup: two monitors. Final Cut on one, Claude Code on the other.

1. Every project gets a folder, and the folder gets read

Brief, goals, brand guide, fonts, colors, client samples, the names of everyone we interviewed. It's the same folder I've always kept. The difference is that Claude Code reads it, so when I ask for a lower third it's already in the client's typeface and the right blue. I never re-explain the client.

2. Motion graphics come out of a conversation

I use Claude Code with Opus 5.5 to build the graphics for every project now. Because it's read the brand guide and samples, everything comes back on brand. I ask for a ton of options at once: ten lower thirds, six ways to animate a chart, three end cards. Then I pick the winners the way I'd pick selects. Iterating is plain English: "slower, and draw the line on instead of fading it." That used to be a lost weekend or a subcontractor, and I'd see two options, not twenty.

3. Read the interviews before I watch them

Every interview gets transcribed before I scrub a single clip. Speakers labeled, then I read for the throughline and pull selects, and the selects go back into Final Cut as a stringout. Use whatever transcription tool you like. The habit matters more than the tool. Read first, then watch.

4. MCP, if you're into that

MCP is basically a standard plug that lets an AI assistant read from an app on your Mac, with your permission. So I can ask Claude Code "read the A02 interview and give me three ways to open this film" and it's working from the real transcript with real timecodes, not something I pasted. Copy and paste works fine too. I did it that way for months.

5. Then I actually edit

This is still where the job is. Pacing, flow, which line opens the film and which one you hold for the end, the music coming in a beat later than you'd expect. When the middle sags, I ask the AI that's read every transcript for a better soundbite for that turn, or just ask what I'm missing. I'm back in the timeline in a few minutes instead of an afternoon.

What actually changed for me

I feel more like a director than an editor now. Not because I cut less. The hours I used to spend scrubbing go into the only question that ever mattered: what is this film about, and does every cut serve it? I'm taking on more work, and I'm pickier about which work.

For the skeptics (honestly, I get it)

No generated b-roll, no synthetic interviews. Everything on screen was shot by people who were in the room. The AI part just gets me to a first cut I'm proud of faster.

And the tools have always changed. FCP 7 to X, Premiere, Resolve, people making genuinely good stuff in CapCut on their phones. Nobody in the audience has ever asked me which NLE I used. They felt something or they didn't. Story has always been the point. I'm just trying to keep up with the tools around it.

So, curious: is anyone else bringing Claude, ChatGPT or similar into their FCP workflow? What's actually working for you, and what's been a waste of time?

I edit almost exclusively with FCP X....but I don't use too many plug ins.

I'm wondering what folks favorite plug ins are? I'd love to discover new stuff I don't know.

For reference, this is an old film that was projected onto a screen and recorded (convoluted, I know, but it's what I'm working with).

Hello everybody, it's my first time posting here. Im from Brazil and im working with video editing for 6 years, in the last month I begin my journey to move from premiere to Final Cut. Im super excited with FCP performance and how easier it's to work on this magnetic timeline. But im having a big issue with fc, and the issue is that as im from Brazil, all my videos are in Portuguese and I need to create Portuguese subtitles for them and fcp lacks resources to it. It only transcribe English audio. So, im doing all the edition I need to do inside tcp and, after everything done, I save my video and open it in premiere to create my Portuguese subtitles. And I also use premiere to insert the music track. Because sometimes I work in long footage and I enjoy the "remix tool" of premiere that extends audio automatic.

So I tried a few resources to work 100% inside FCP but I didn't enjoy any one of them.

so im looking for some advices on how to handle this lack of non-english languages automatic transcription. My goal is to stop to pay for adobe Premiere. After FC is a pain the ### to work inside premiere. I don't want to come back.

Any other tip is welcome to improve my workflow is welcome ˆˆ

Nothing too fancy, a test shot with the iPhone 17 Pro in ProRes Log 2 HQ, edited in Final Cut Pro. For a smartphone... the image quality is truly impressive.

I guess I'm looking for a standard workflow I can apply to my voiceovers to make them sound more professional. Thank you.

I'm having some trouble getting started with object tracking on FCP 10.6.2. I've used FCP for several years but am new to object tracking.

I have a multicam clip in the timeline of a vertical project and set to the angle I want to track. I've followed the method described in this video but once the analysis is done, nothing happens. The video doesn't move and acts the same as if object tracking were off.

I also tried this method and the same thing happens. Once the clip is analyzed, nothing happens.

Hopefully I'm missing something obvious but the first video I linked shows the same straightforward method and after multiple attempts, I'm still not able to get any movement in the frame. Thanks for any help

Whenever I try to use my Samsung T5 SSD with the app to film in ProRes RAW it gives me a pop up to tell me the device needs to be formatted in ExFAT, which it is. I tried formatting it multiple times, but the pop up remains. It works perfectly fine in the Blackmagic app.

Is it a bug or am I doing something wrong?

I’m editing a golf YouTube video for a client. I made the overlays through handicap tracker, the export setting was for .mov

When I play the video in Final Cut Pro it looks great with the overlay, once exported it shows a black screen and the overlay but none of the footage till the overlay playthrough is finished.

How can I fix this?!?

Hey guys, I run into this issue pretty much everyday, and wanted to see if I could get some insight on it. In the attached video there are two clips with different behaviors when speed ramping. I would like for the first section to behave like the second section.

In the first clip, I’d have to click and drag over and over and over to get the desired speed percentage, so I pretty much have to open the custom speed ramp controls and input a percentage. I’m trying to get it to behave like the second part, where one click and drag changes the speed by multiple hundreds of percents.

I feel like this is a weird request and super specific, so if I need to clarify anything please let me know. Any help would be much appreciated.

EDIT: Thanks for the replies, I’ve added a video better explaining my issues with the speed ramping in the comments. Hopefully that will be better context.

In this video I show you how to create animated text and custom backgrounds with Acid Trip and Audio Effector in FCP without any keyframes.

Hi! I'm using FCPX to edit a three-camera interview. The clip frames are not aligning exactly in the timeline or when I go into the multicam clip editor. They keep missing each other by a single frame.

I've edited several podcast interviews before and never had this issue. It's doing it both in Angles and in the regular timeline.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought there was a more "free-flow" way to edit where the placement didn't try to auto-align to a frame timecode in the timeline? (Maybe I'm not explaining that clearly?) You could just place the clips wherever you needed them.

Please help. It's driving me batty.

Thank you.

Hi,

I need to delete all clips other than the hooks audio custom role clips (want to delete the greyed out ones) from the timeline in final cut pro. Is there any way to do it quickly instead of manually selecting and deleting?

I tried selecting the roles and pressing command+a in the hope that it will select only the selected roles clips but it selected all of them.

Currently editing a wedding film and the speeches in the exported file seem to drop out at specific points (just the dialogue track - the music on a separate track remains fine throughout), which wasn't happening when previewing in Final Cut. The audio track was recorded on a Zoom F6 in 32-bit stereo (2x XLR inputs for LR channels from a mixer).

What I noticed is that changing the track from stereo to dual mono solved the issue. Is there anyone who's more knowledgeable in audio that can explain to me why this was happening?

It's almost like they're doing this on purpose. Things were running fine until 12.3. Upgraded thinking 12.4 would fix things. I think it's gotten worse. Preview monitor lagging, editing timeline stuttering. For reference I have an M1 16gb/2tb Mac mini that's been running well. 4tb thunderbolt 4 external SSD shows good speeds. Running Tahoe 26.6.1. I'll update that and see if things change but I doubt it. Not ready to go to Golden Gate yet.

Hey guys,

I am new to FCP and for my recent edit, I want to use some golden hour, that dreamy blur and golden light effect which we usually come across in Lana Del ray's Albums or as that of in the song "Blue".

Is it too hard to achieve or are there any simple filters so such things to get it done?

Coming from Premiere, the one thing that kept breaking my editing flow in Final Cut Pro was zooming the timeline. FCP only lets you zoom with ⌘+ / ⌘−, the zoom slider, or a trackpad pinch. If you edit with a mouse, there's no way to just hold a key and roll the wheel.

The tools I found were either paid or didn't work for me, so I built my own. It's called “STUPID SIMPLE ZOOM”, because that's exactly what it is:

- Hold Option and roll the scroll wheel over the timeline to zoom in and out
- Smooth, and one wheel tick is always one small, consistent step, so you can zoom precisely, all the way in to frame level
- Lives in the menu bar: no windows, no dock icon, nothing to configure
- Adjustable sensitivity, reverse direction, launch at login
- Universal build for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs (only tested on Apple Silicon so far)
- No internet access, no tracking, no data collection
- Completely free and open source (MIT license)

Under the hood it drives FCP's own timeline zoom slider through macOS Accessibility, so it doesn't modify Final Cut Pro in any way.

I've been using it in my own edits and it's honestly fixed a big part of my workflow. Before I clean it up and put it out, I wanted to ask:

Would this be useful to anyone else?

Not affiliated with Apple. Final Cut Pro is a trademark of Apple Inc.

Une petite mise à jour du tableau de compatibilité des versions de Final Cut Pro et de macOS. Dans les Chaussettes d FCP.

so - i shoot doc stuff A LOT - multiple angles of the interview - and then use FCP multicam to synch them all - i usually drop the multicam into a timeline and listen back, raise my selects above the primary storyline, then take ALL those into another timeline and start assembling the narrative.

I really want to figure out how to do this by just highlighting in a transcript - anyone know if the apps out there can work with multicams? descript or eddieAI?

thanks

I'm a nice guy but sometimes not so bright. I was demonstrating creating a change of seasons scene to a friend using two clips shot at different times during the year. At the time I was working on an unrelated Event but I just created a new project in that unrelated event and pulled down a few clips into. Those short demos were really quite good. I quit FCP and when I came back to the Event that -had- my changing seasons clips my Project was not there - obviously. Problem was I could not understand why - I'd forgotten they were in another event. I have 28 events in that library and knew it was in one of them. Finally found it. Lesson learned.

Top bar is kinda thick, which is especially noticeable on smaller MacBooks like the 14” MacBook Pro.

With that being said, I like the small new changes to the UI! I also noticed performance has improved a lot, now when I drag and drop stuff it doesn’t do the spinning beach ball anymore - I used to have that issue all the time on Tahoe and on Final Cut Pro 12 to 12.3.

I’m glad is gone! That was especially infuriating considering I have an M3 Max MacBook Pro which is quite spec’d up.

How do you guys feel about the new versions of Final Cut?

I think Creator Studio is a really good deal and I’m happy to see that more and more people are subscribing which gives the Final Cut team the funds to actually invest in the software and improve it and update it more frequently.

Curious to know what you think 🙂