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Apple Announces over 1 million installs of FCPX
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “That figure was from fall 2012; it was widely reported. There is probably a better source but this is Bill Roberts from Adobe:
https://www.beet.tv/2012/09/adobepremiere.html“So what I get from that is that he’s saying 2.5 million total seats in use regardless of version.
So the appropriate affiliate to that on the FCP side would be active Legacy plus active X users.
the 1.8 million CC subscribers number is current, from their last earnings call.
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[Marcus Moore] “So what I get from that is that he’s saying 2.5 million total seats in use regardless of version. … the 1.8 million CC subscribers number is current”
Marcus,
Your math implies total sales of Premiere + CS 1-6 + CC subscriptions as of Sept 2012 totals 2.5 million though, which is implausibly low.
He’s vague, I agree. I think he’s likely counting CC downloads of Premiere (not everyone has to download it) + CS purchases.
Franz.
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Except that he’s saying active users, vs just how many they’ve sold over the last X number of years.
Active users means they’re probably not counting anything below CS, and likely very little below CS3/CS4.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] ”
– Adobe Premiere Pro, 2.5 million (Fall 2012)
– FCP 1-7, 2 million (NAB 2011)
– FCP X, 1 million (NAB 2014)”But the bigger question that will never be answered is how many of these installs are being used with any regularity.
For instance, I have all 3 on my system currently, but I’ve only used FCPX with a smattering of FCP7 in the last year or two. Others probably have FCPX installed but are only be using Premiere.
Though I suspect that I will eventually be using both Premiere and FCPX more often than not. And I imagine that this will be true of most other editors as well.
The time of one primary NLE is no longer IMHO… time will tell.
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[Steve Connor] “Marcus Moore] “we have an over-inflated sense of the size of our industry…..
”Agree, considering the industry wide resistance against it I would say 1 million is a good number.”
I generally agree that MANY people have an over-inflated sense of the size of the industry, but I’m not one of them.
I’m not saying this to brag, or try to deflect from how far off my posts two years ago are LOL — but when I was a product manager at Boris FX, we had bundling deals that were paid by the unit. One of those bundling deals was for a title tool that shipped with every copy of FCP — I knew EXACTLY how many units there were.
When I was a senior manager on the product marketing team for Media Composer, I could tell you not only how many customers there were, but how many boxes of our software were sitting in inventory on dealer shelves. I knew how many students were registered in every college media program in the entire country.
The ONLY part I got wrong was how many installs of X there are…and wow, did I get that wrong. LOL My ASSUMPTION, based on my own experience running a Mac-based video production company before I became a corporate weasel is that damn near everybody with a Mac would download a $295 product just out of curiosity, whether or not they’d even been using The Legend of FCP.
Back in MY day, you couldn’t buy a pack of gum for $295 LOL so that number sounds like no-brainer money to at least take a gander…but I haven’t bought production gear in the 21st century, so maybe $295 seems like a lot these days.
For the record, I never said one million is ridiculously low. I said I’d be embarrassed…but that’s the wrong word. The right word is disappointed. As a manager, I wouldn’t be at all happy to see that number cross my desk this far into the game.
But let me tell you a little story about disappointment and going with the story you’ve got.
You can look this up yourself, but one year around 10 years ago, Avid had precisely ZERO new news of substance for NAB. ZERO. So I came up with the only plan I could think of — if we can’t tell people about our NEW features, because there aren’t any, let’s tell them about our IMPORTANT features…because we do in fact have a ton of “important” features.
And so that’s what we did. That’s what we built the NAB demos around, and what we took on road shows. Our greatest hits. We didn’t even dust off old demos. We took our most important stories — media management, editing tools, etc. — and built new demos around them, to address the realities of how editors WORK.
As the guy who not only wrote them (with acres of help of course), but actually DID many of the demos – including all day, every day on the main stage at NAB – I was right in the middle of it. It not only turned out to be NOT embarrassing, it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Yeah, people were pissed to not see new features, but the overwhelming reaction was people thanking me for reminding them how much fun Media Composer is when they weren’t yelling at Avid. LOL It was a blast. One of my favorite experiences in corporate life.
Here’s the punchline. One of the strongest reaction was to an OLLLLLLD set of features based around voice recognition for clips in bins, called ScriptSync. I showed the shit out of that thing, and people LOVED it…and whaddya know, right after that, voice recognition is in other NLEs, both natively and with plug-ins.
Moral of the story: you can change the game with a GOOD story, even if it’s not the story you’d been hoping to tell. But it has to be a GOOD story.
Is 1 million users a good story? I think not. I don’t see it helping Apple much, and I don’t see it shaking up competitors much. It doesn’t seem to me like it would help generate new users, or make existing ones feel validated in their choice.
But hey, Apple has to love that you guys think 1 million really IS a good story. You’re a tough crowd, and if this sounds like good news to you, then they’ll take it as a sign that they’re on the right track.
Also for the record, I’ve ALWAYS said that FCPX is on a good track, and that I approve of everything Apple has done with it, INCLUDING killing FCP 7 when and how they did. I’m just surprised that they have “so few” LOL licenses to show for it. That’s all.
What I’m NOT surprised by is being wrong again. LOL THAT, I’m used to….
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One of the main themes in this forum has been the underlying shift in focus of Apple with FCP X: that they forsook the “niche” professional market and sought a wider user-base.
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/7132
(June 2011)
[Chris Kenny] “Apple did this because they think it’s better. They think it will get them more users in five years than implementing the standard generic multi-track timeline and bins approach.”https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/21678
(Nov 2011)
[Phil Hoppes] “… once again, technology has significantly lowered the barrier of entry to making your own movie, allowing a significantly larger user base of movie makers, who simply won’t follow the previous traditional methods used to create a movie. They want to work with more media, do it faster and do it cheaper.”https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/19418
(Nov 2011)
[tony west] “Randy Ubilos, who created Premiere Pro left and ended up making FCP X … You have to expand the base to sell to. Apple has that part figured out.”https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/38697
July 2012)
[Bill Davis] “I think Mr. Ubillos’s original approaches to these things focused on a tool that worked better, for more editors, than any one else’s solutions. …That’s precisely what I think he’s done again with X. Designed a great tool for a new era of content creation and consumption. … In part because he wasn’t overly blinded by what a minority needed – but rather started with what the majority of editors actually needed, then added additional “high end” features once the core was correct.”https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/42405
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/42450
(Oct 2012)
[Craig Seeman] “Ahh the shrinking of the size of the TV Broadcast/Feature Film niche compared to the overall video post industry which actually is growing faster in other areas.”
[Craig Seeman] “Overall video production is growing rapidly. TV/Film may even be growing. I believe they are a smaller piece of the pie though as other forms of video are growing more rapidly. I think this is impacting what a “facility” itself is (or at least how technically constituted).”https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/44553
(Nov 2012)
[Bill Davis] “Right now the focus of X is on evolving into the finest “personal” editing program it can be – NOT the finest “facility” editor it can be. I firmly believe more enterprise capabilities will follow (precisely as they did in Legacy) … Your view isn’t wrong at all. It’s just coming from a type of editing seat that is still important, but less and less the “average” one any longer.”One million in 3 years seems “disappointing” to me (to quote Tim) – it seems clear that that 1 million FCP licences are not making any significant contribution to Mac sales, though I suppose some fraction of those users are going to buy new Mac Pros. But I’m wondering, in light of the announcement of 1 million users at the 3 year mark, does this change the perception or interpretation of success on the issue of a broader user base?
Does 1 million users support the idea that Apple is achieving a wider, less specialized user base outside of facilities and traditional ‘professional’ enclaves?
Franz.
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pretty royal spread of claim chowder there franz.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Does 1 million users support the idea that Apple is achieving a wider, less specialized user base outside of facilities and traditional ‘professional’ enclaves?”
I think that FCP has always excelled at exactly this. It grew the market WAY beyond the group of people like me and most of you, who built our businesses around $30,000 NLEs. While a lot of folks in that category turned to AJA, Blackmagic, Pinnacle, Aurora and others — a bunch of people said, “Wow, Firewire and a laptop, and I’m in the door.”
So even if one has OVERALL market sizing correct, there’s a huge gap between who’s posting here and who’s lurking here. The COW’s heritage has always been professional editors, using heavier iron…but there’s a gap between people posting and people lurking. People who edit as only one part of their job, or whose primary platform is a single laptop or iMac, tend not to post as much — but there are acres of them. Corporate will always be a bigger market than classic post.
My belief — SOMEWHAT informed, but absolutely not as well-quantified as historical user counts — is that FCP’s biggest platform is laptops. That’s something that HAS been visible over the years in the COW, even moreso now with X and a retina-book.
So to answer in another way, I think X HAS grown the market, but the fact is that the TV/film post market has been growing too. I’m not sure that 1 million X customers tells us anything about that either way.
It also doesn’t tell us anything about the number of people who opened it and said, “Welp, time to move to Premiere or Media Composer.”
Nor does it tell us anything about the number of Media Composer or Premiere users said, “No way was I gonna kick the tires on a $1200 suite, but maybe I can run this at home for a couple of projects. Who knows? Maybe the modern tech underneath it will make it worth my while to do more.” I’m pretty sure there was a meaningful number of those.
But “only” 1 million downloads in 3 years says to me that X hasn’t yet caused the massive market shift away from pro users that many had feared. I think the Venn diagram overlap of “X users” and “Hardcore Pro users” out that 1 million is pretty dang big.
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Lets see – they’re counting me as one of those 1 million downloads….
Yet after paying with it for a month or so….and then again when they updated a dozen times to get it from Alpha to Beta to what should have been the first paying release……
I use it not at all
how many of the original downloads are like that?
I know a very large organization that bought and downloaded quite a few licenses….only to realize it didn’t work well with their network, “old time” editors couldn’t get their head around the new Apple way…..and they gave up and moved on to Premiere Pro
Guessing those are counted in the million downloads too?
Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852 -
As far as the numbers game go….
With Adobe stating 1.8 million CC subscribers, there’s an unknown portion who may actually be using Premiere Pro CC.
With Apple stating 1 million separate installs of FCPX there’s an unknown portion of who may actually be using it.Even if both were at 50% (and we have no idea) that would be 900,000 vs 500,000 regular users. I think it may well speak to the small size of the industry.
Of course I can make wild conjecture that since Adobe has a significant DTP and Photo base that maybe the percentage of Premiere users as part of CC subscriptions might be smaller and there may be many AE users who are otherwise using Avid but, one can equally argue that a large number FCPX install kicked the tired and didn’t go further.
From Apple’s business perspective though, if there are a significant number of FCPX users who are regular users that might be a worthwhile pool of people to continue to push their more powerful Macs to.
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