More than ten years after the launch of Final Cut Pro X, Apple’s video editing software takes a step forward. The app is now being updated to Final Cut Pro 11, after removing the number from the name in recent years. The update includes new AI masking tools, the ability to generate subtitles directly in your timeline, spatial video editing features, and a range of workflow improvements. The new version is free for existing users and a one-time purchase of $299 for new users. Final Cut Pro for iPad and Final Cut Camera are also getting some updates today.

I’ve been testing these new features over the past week and many of them are great improvements. I’m especially impressed with the speed and accuracy of a new feature coming to the desktop: Magnetic Mask. With one click you can easily isolate a subject, such as a person, from the background and apply various color adjustments to that part of the footage.

I tested Magnetic Mask in various scenarios, such as static videos with talking heads and fast-moving snowboarding footage. In each scenario, Final Cut Pro isolated the subjects very well. But don’t expect a pixel-perfect mask every time. I still had to jump in and make a few smaller adjustments to help it along. You can manually refine your mask with a brush or add or remove tracking points and let Final Cut Pro analyze the footage.

I was impressed with the speed of the entire process. Admittedly, these were fairly short clips (about 45 seconds each), but each mask took less than a minute on my four-year-old 10-core M1 Pro MacBook Pro — much less time than the tedious and tiring process of manually rotoscoping in After Effects .

I did notice that the analysis slowed down considerably when I started recording my process on the screen. This feature also works on Intel-based Macs.

I’m an avid user of Adobe’s Premiere Pro, but features like this always make me want to give Final Cut Pro another try. But I may not be far behind: Adobe announced a similar feature for Premiere earlier this year. DaVinci Resolve also has a similar feature called Magic Mask.

The next new highlight is the ability to automatically generate subtitles in your timeline. Final Cut Pro does this using an Apple-trained language mode, and the entire process takes place locally on the device without sending any information to the cloud. The process is quick, but not always accurate and often misspells commonly used words. It looked for proper names like ‘The Verge’ and even more general nouns like ‘machine’, where it would just write ‘macine’ instead. Those are just a few of many examples. There’s also no way to stylize your captions if you were hoping to add them to your TikToks. For that, you’ll need to check out some third-party plugins.

It’s a good update, but I wish Apple would go a step further and add text-based editing, which would let you edit videos solely using text rather than on the timeline itself. Text-based editing in Premiere has helped me immensely when working on longer documentaries or sit-down interviews, and I wish this was possible in Final Cut Pro 11.

Other changes include the ability to edit spatial videos for the Vision Pro and some new keyboard shortcuts. My favorite is Option + Up Arrow / Down Arrow to move clips between layers. It’s the little things!

Final Cut Pro for iPad is also getting a few new updates. The AI-enabled “light and color enhancement” tool originally released in Final Cut Pro 10.8 for Mac is making its way to the iPad app. It’s the fastest way to quickly improve the color, contrast and overall tonality of your footage.

In a few tests I ran, the tool did a very good job of getting me started with my coloring process. It cleans up the overall lighting nicely and adds very subtle stylistic color choices. For much less subtle color gradations, Apple is expanding the number of presets available in the app. In addition to these presets, Apple is also adding new modular transitions and new songs to its soundtrack library.

If you use the Apple Pencil Pro for editing, you can finally unlock all those new brushes released alongside the M4 iPad Pro and features like tilt recognition, and take advantage of the haptic feedback. Haptic feedback works particularly well on the iPad, and I’m enjoying it more than I expected. It really makes the editing process feel a lot more tangible. In fact, I wish more gestures had some haptic feedback.

Finally, there are some small but important improvements to the workflow. You can now adjust the height of your clips in your timeline with the pinch gesture, you can edit in 120fps timelines, and the picture-in-picture mode is dynamic. Apple also mentioned that there are new keyboard shortcuts, but I only found one: Render Entire Timeline.

I’m glad to see more frequent updates for the iPad version of Final Cut Pro, but there are still features that are desperately needed to make this app truly worth the $4.99 per month subscription. At the top of my wish list are things like custom LUTs, better file management, and some of the other AI-powered features that have already made their way to the desktop version. Since my first review, I’ve started using DaVinci Resolve primarily on the iPad, which continues to impress me with its similarity to its desktop equivalent.

The trifecta of updates ends with the Final Cut Camera, which can now film HEVC files in Apple Log – no longer having to stick with storage-hogging ProRes files. HEVC Log recording works both for standalone recording and as part of the Live Multicam session. Final Cut Camera also includes LUT previews while recording, meaning you can track your exposure and color in Apple Log while filming.

And to ensure your framing is correct and aligned, Apple is adding a new level indicator to the app. The new leveler also includes tilt and roll indicators and a reticle for top-down and bottom-up shooting.

The introduction of new AI features and workflow improvements mark significant steps forward for content creators, but they fall short of some of the community’s requests to fully compete with companies like DaVinci and Adobe. I’d still like to see text-based editing, more robust color options, and custom captions. It will be interesting to see if these new updates convert new users. Magnetic Mask alone can be sufficient reason to switch.