In my recent article I Ignored Davinci Resolve - I Was Wrong, I explained why I was exploring DaVinci Resolve for my future video editing needs. Many of my issues with Final Cut, and may I add after a decade of using it professionally, are about sound. Here’s why I don’t think it’s up to the job of doing professional sound.

No Mixer

Apple, for some reason which still makes me scratch my head, decided to make all audio treatment in Final Cut, clip based. There is no mixer system of any kind. There’s no audio channels in the conventional sense, all audio is tied to clips, be that dialogue for a video clip or a music bed.

If you’ve got a 100 clips across the timeline then unless you create a group you’ve got to sweeten the audio on a clip-by-clip basis. Any mixing of volume is done using keyframes and, none of it in real time.

If, for example, you want to treat the entire mix with compression or EQ, then you need to group all the clips into a compound clip and then apply the effects. This is also the case if you want to measure the loudness of your entire cut.

If you’ve chopped up an interview, for example, there may be 50 clips across the timeline. To treat these you have two workflows. The first is to do the above and create a compound clip of all the individual clips where you can then apply effects, fix any issues and create keyframe based levelling, or you apply the treatment to one clip and then cut and paste it across all the other clips in the timeline. Yep!

There are workarounds, but none of them are pretty. It often means having to go back through a complex audio edit to unpick the compund clips, it can get messy. Just to do what would be moving some faders in a mixer.

If you want to see this workflow in action then check out this excellent video from the team at Ripple Training, you’ll soon get the idea! Note the presenters parting comments at the end of the video.

No Channel Relationships

The absence of a conventional mixer in Final Cut brings up other challenges too.

You can’t create subgroups of mixes, other than creating a compound clip. In more reasonable video editors such as Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, creating sub mixes is the standard and simple task one would expect from any basic DAW.

This leads to another problem, you can’t sidechain effects to create things like automated ducking of a music bed from a narration channel. Yes you can manually keyframe it over the length of the programme, but in 2023, really?

It’s not like Apple don’t know how complex mixers work, they make one of the best DAWs on the planet, Logic Pro. It’s as if the two teams working on two of Apple’s most sold professionals apps have never seen what the other is doing, or spoken to one another.

Apple used to include Soundtrack Pro with Final Cut, this application did have a DAW workflow, however it seems Apple decided to jettison that thinking when they introduced Final Cut X.

Below is the Fairlight section in DaVinci Resolve, if it looks to you like a DAW, that’s because it is!

No Simple Loudness Measurement Workflow

I mentoned loudness earlier, and because of the way Final Cut handles sound (I use the term loosely) it’s not simple to measure loudness to ensure delivery to specification.

We’ve been talking about the importance of loudness standards for at least five years, it’s front and centre in the minds of those making content for movies and TV.

Measuring that within Final Cut isn’t easy. It’s possible, many audio tasks are possible in Final Cut, just as it’s possible to walk from one side of the USA to the other… why make computers that fly if your workflows don’t too?

Again, to do this, yep it’s creating a compound clip of all the audio into a single stereo file on the timeline and then using the MultiMeter Level and Loudness controls in Final Cut Pro.

It Doesn’t Play Nice With Other DAWs

Well, you might be thinking, it’s not the job of the person cutting the picture to handle the sound, that’s the job of an audio professional. In some cases that’s true. However, there’s no simple way of getting the audio from Final Cut out to an industry standard DAW.

To create an AAF, for example, you need to export an XML and then use a third party application, enter the excellent X2Pro® by Marquis Broadcast. A $150 application just to get an XML and turn it into an AAF, remember Final Cut costs $299.

AAF Export comes as standard in both Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

Final Cut can export an XML for use in Logic Pro, but let’s be honest there’s not a lot of professional audio post people mixing sound in Logic Pro.

Summary

If you are looking for a video editor that offers a set of audio mixing tools that make sense, and don’t mean you have to jump through hoops to deliver the mix, then avoid Final Cut. As I said at the begining of this article, I’ve been using Final Cut for around a decade and invested a lot of time and money into it. Why am I only saying this now? Good question, perhaps the reason most of us stay with things that don’t work as we need them to, the inertia of using something else is too great!

Final Cut has some good things going for it, it can be incredibly fast to cut picture in, has a huge library of third party titles and transitions and more besides. Of all its great features sound isn’t one of them.

If sound in your video editor is important then our advice is check out Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve.