Cinematic button not working

How exactly are you importing?

I don't have an iPhone 13 or 14, but I gather that there are two copies of each video, and you need to ge the right one with the cinematic metadata.

Check out this support document:

Edit Cinematic mode video in Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and Motion on Mac - Apple Support

There is also a great video by the rippletraining guys but I can't find it at the moment.

This is the video that I had in mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR4_zYrp8S8

Steve explains how to use the cinematic mode in FCP.

At around 6:40 into the video, he talks about the proper way to import cinematic video from the iPhone and keeping all the necessary cinematic metadata.

I think you need to have a Mac running Monterey in order to use the Cinematic Editor.

I'm having the same issue with everything up to date: Monterey 12.6, FCP 10.6.4 and iOS 16, which I suspect is the one causing trouble. I don't use very often with Cinematic videos, but the last time I did tried them, they where working without any problem and I think that the only different version I had was from iOS.

I will try to find some old cinematic videos in my backups to see if they work ok in FCP.

There is a reddit thread where some people are posting about the same problem, so it seems that it is a bug.

When I try to enable Cinematic checkbox in FCP I get a message that says that "The Cinematic effect can’t be enabled."

But I suspect this problem started after updating iOS in my iPhone 13 Pro. That's why I will try tomorrow with older clips, recorded before I updated iOS to version 16.

What is your mac model? Which FCP and OS version?

Yes, but you can open the Cinematic editor in FCP. It’s in the screenshot. It also shows Cinematic data and focus points. It would seem everything is coming from the phone, just FCP can’t deal with it correctly. Something may have changed in iOS but it’s FCP that isn’t responding. iOS 16 has been in development for months so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

I’m not clear. Where do you say the problem is? In the iOS recording? In the transfer to FCP? Or in FCP reading the Cinematic days?