An Interesting observation

[Darren Roark]

The other thing to consider is that Apple only sold FCP to sell more Macs. They also made it really easy for people to loan their installers to other people. Avid and Adobe make their money from software, and make it pretty tough to share software.

So many people I know learned Final Cut that way over the years. And if they became professional, they either eventually bought it, or worked for a company that owned it.

I think piracy is wrong, but I suspect that Apple used that as a strategy.

[Craig Seeman]

[Darren Roark] “I think piracy is wrong, but I suspect that Apple used that as a strategy.”

I once heard an Apple employee respond to the question of piracy and FCP to the effect “but you need to buy a very expensive dongle to use it.”

FCPX presents a different story in that one uses the App Store with an account tied to a credit card but you can certainly log into your account and download it to a number of computers.

[Darren Roark]

Exactly! I never heard that story, but it makes total sense. I do think that in the end that X will become a standard of sorts for this reason.

A director friend of mine who’s only editing experience was vhs deck to deck and also not tech savvy started to learn iMovie. He was making a no budget feature, having trouble getting free time with his editor. I suggested to him to try FCPX, he was able to cut whole scenes within a day. Sadly, he also grew quickly frustrated with how many layers he had, so he did what he did deck to deck, rendered out a timeline, and started cutting that up.

Urgh.

I guess this brings this full circle to the original point. I don’t think directors will have less need for editors in the future as things become more accessible. The same way in literary publishing authors need their editors even though word processing has had auto spell for a long time.

As a director myself, I always prefer to work with an editor. Having someone who doesn’t care how long a crappy shot took to set up and poorly execute will be what will matter.