Final Cut Pro Gains iPhone 17 Support
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Over the past few years, the iPhone Pro models have earned their name by introducing a range of powerful features specifically designed for professionals. While many of us opt for Apple’s highest-end models merely to enjoy the better cameras for our own personal creations, there’s now a whole crop of people who actually make a living from them.
This began in 2020, when Apple introduced the iPhone 12 Pro as the first smartphone capable of both shooting and editing Dolby Vision HDR video natively. For most of us, that sounded like just a nice checkbox on the spec sheet, but to emphasize its significance for professionals, Apple demonstrated an iPhone 12 Pro directly feeding Dolby Vision into a professional grading suite monitor. It also added ProRAW for still photography that same year.
This continued with ProRes video recording and Cinematic Mode on the iPhone 13 Pro, the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) and ProRes Log in the iPhone 15 Pro, accompanied by a USB-C port with support for recording directly to an external storage device, and, most recently, ProRes Log 2 and ProRes RAW, and Genlock support in the iPhone 17 Pro.
These are all features that are of little interest to everyday iPhone Pro users, but make a huge difference for those who want to use an iPhone in a professional studio setting. Along similar lines, Apple upped its software game last year when it unveiled Final Cut Pro 2.0 for iPad alongside a companion Final Cut Camera app, allowing professional-grade video to be recorded into Apple’s pro editing suite, and turning the M4 iPad Pro into a director’s console that could mix up to four iPhone video streams.
As this month’s iPhone 17 Pro debut shows, Apple has no intention of losing steam when it comes to turning the iPhone into a preferred smartphone for cinematographers, and it’s just released an update to its suite of Final Cut apps to take full advantage of everything the new iPhone models have to offer.
Apple announced Final Cut Camera 2.0 right after its “Awe Dropping” event, noting that it would also be accompanied by Final Cut Pro 11.2 for Mac and Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.3, collectively rolling into support for ProRes RAW footage captured from an iPhone 17 Pro.
The set of updates didn’t roll out right away, which is fair, as the new iPhone models didn’t go on sale until last Friday. However, they’re here now and include not only support for the new video formats, but also Genlock support, allowing users to set up multiple iPhones to shoot time-synced scenes from different angles — a technique that was most famously used in The Matrix, where it came to be more commonly known as bullet time.
Final Cut Camera 2.0 also supports genlock, allowing creators to precisely synchronize iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max with other recording devices to the same reference signal, ensuring each frame is perfectly in sync. This technique lets creatives achieve professional, frame-accurate edits without hours of manual frame-by-frame alignment.
While Final Cut Camera 2.0 will provide software support for this feature, you’ll still need multiple iPhones connected to an external timing source, such as Blackmagic Design’s new Camera ProDock, which Apple briefly highlighted during its presentation earlier this month. Devices like this can also be used to enable Timecode recording, allowing footage to be more easily identified and matched up during editing. Naturally, there’s also support for the 200mm 8x telephoto lens and the new front-facing camera with dynamic video orientation.
Meanwhile, ProRes RAW support lets the new Final Cut Camera app capture the full sensor data, much like RAW still photos have been able to do with traditional DSLR cameras for years. This provides significantly more flexibility in post-production workflows, and Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.3 takes advantage of this by letting editors make direct and precise adjustments to exposure, color temperature, tint, and more. Apple Log 2 encoding also provides an even wider color gamut when capturing footage with an iPhone 17 Pro.
In addition to the new iPhone 17 Pro formats, Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.3 adopts the new iPadOS 26 design, most notably introducing a menu bar for easier access to the app’s extensive range of commands and shortcuts.
Final Cut Pro for Mac remains a one-time purchase, so this month’s updates are free for anyone who is already running an older version. Final Cut Pro for iPad remains a subscription-based app, with a monthly payment of $4.99 or an annual payment of $49.
Final Cut Camera is a free download, and while it’s designed to be paired with Final Cut Pro, it can also be used as a standalone camera app, providing professional-style controls that you won’t find in the native iOS Camera app. These features include shutter speed, ISO, precise Kelvin-scale white balance, manual focus pulls, zebra stripes for overexposure, focus peaking, false color, histograms, and ProRes recording on supported models. The footage from Final Cut Camera can also be imported into any non-linear editing (NLE) app; it’s not limited to use with Final Cut Pro, so Final Cut Camera could even be a valuable companion to DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, or even Avid.
