Final Cut Pro allows users to import, edit, and process video footage, and output it to a wide variety of formats.

According to a 2007 SCRI study, Final Cut Pro made up 49% of the United States professional editing market, with Avid at 22%.

It also has multiple color-correction tools including color wheels, sliders and curves, video scopes and a selection of generators, such as slugs, test cards, and noise.

[16] As Projects, Events, and Libraries are stored in a database format; this has allowed many third-party developers to build workflow tools by utilizing FCPXML.

[18][19] One of the factors that contributed to the success of Final Cut Pro was the relative maturity of QuickTime and its native support for new DV cameras connected via FireWire.

The first fully broadcast quality, globally distributed TV show produced using Final Cut Pro was Women of Wrestling in 2000, which used the Pinnacle CinéWave uncompressed video card.

[20] In late 2001, independent producer Michael A. Bloom credited Final Cut Pro as being crucial to the production of his controversial film PlayCouples, A New Era of Swinging (2003).

In an interview with Larry King, Bloom claimed that the relatively new platform did not fail once while rendering the film, unlike his experiences with Avid Media Composer.

Bloom had been an advocate for Final Cut Pro since using it for beta testing under an agreement between his production company and The Oxygen Network.

The studio motion picture The Rules of Attraction was also edited using beta versions of Final Cut Pro 3, demonstrating that successful 3:2 pulldown matchback to 24fps was possible with an easy-to-use software product.

[19] The film's director, Roger Avary, became a spokesperson for Final Cut Pro, appearing in print advertisements worldwide.

(While the software had been capable of uncompressed HD editing since version 3.0, it required expensive video cards and high-speed storage at the time.)

Final Cut Pro 5 also added support for Panasonic's P2 format, which allowed for the recording of DVCPRO HD video to memory cards rather than tape.

Despite not having a booth at NAB 2009, the product was widely represented on the show floor by various vendors, including the Red Digital Cinema team, which relied heavily on Final Cut Pro during development.

Final Cut Pro X was unveiled on April 12, 2011 at the NAB Show, and released to the Mac App Store on June 21, 2011 along with new versions of Motion and Compressor.

The reaction was extremely mixed, with veteran film editor Walter Murch initially refusing to use it, citing a lack of features compared to Final Cut Pro 7.

[27] An online petition asking Apple to continue development of Final Cut Pro 7 or to sell it to a third-party gathered 1,600 signatures within a week.

[28] Some of the missing features in Final Cut Pro X that were essential for professional video production included the lack of an edit decision list (EDL), XML and Open Media Framework Interchange (OMF) support, the inability to import projects created in previous versions of Final Cut Pro, the absence of a multicam editing tool, missing support for third-party I/O hardware output, and videotape capture being limited to FireWire video devices, including capture with third-party hardware.

EDL export, a product of the early days of videotape editing, is now supported through third-party software[30] and creating an AAF (a newer version of OMF)[31] for passing projects to Pro Tools through X2Pro.

With version 10.0.6 released on October 23, 2012, Apple added native support for Redcode Raw and MXF through a third party plugin.