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Apple are hilarious
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I too only saw FCPX once. It was looping video at the Intel booth as they showed off Thunderbolt speeds. As for Mac Pros, several but tucked away under tables, back rooms, etc. Certainly not like other years where they were prominently displayed. Thunderbolts and iMacs, everywhere! Interesting and likely telling of things to come friends.
Ben Rojas
Editor|Artist|Dir. of Post Production
KSC KREATE
3850 N 28th Ter. Ste. 101
Hollywood, FL. 33020
P. 954.326.7600
F. 954.326.7766
C. 305.301.2771
E. ben.rojas@ksckreate.com
http://www.ksckreate.com -
“I too only saw FCPX once.”
Well, it was displayed all over the place. At least a dozen booths that I can think of in both the South and Central halls. Not necessarily actual presenter demos, but in the vendor’s booth and something people could get their hands on.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Come on, we can’t even agree on what we saw! Good thing we don’t have to testify about it.
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“Come on, we can’t even agree on what we saw! Good thing we don’t have to testify about it.”
LOL. For the record, I’ll testify to:
AJA
Blackmagic Design
Matrox
MOTU
SONY
Dashwood
Quantel
1 Beyond Systems
Tools On Air
AutodeskOthers that I don’t 100% remember, like storage vendors.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Ok, Oliver has jolted my memory. Yep, Aja & BMD for sure. I think Apple lost a prime opportunity to face its critics, skeptics and spurned user base! They could have come to NAB in full force and proven to all that they learned a valuable lesson and committed to the pro market. Hell, while at it, they could have handed out iPads like mints and all would have been forgiven ;0) Kidding aside, Adobe & Autodesk hammered Apple… And Avid as well !
Ben Rojas
Editor|Artist|Dir. of Post Production
KSC KREATE
3850 N 28th Ter. Ste. 101
Hollywood, FL. 33020
P. 954.326.7600
F. 954.326.7766
C. 305.301.2771
E. ben.rojas@ksckreate.com
http://www.ksckreate.com -
[Chris Kenny] “I was making a somewhat different point. The specific lesson of these numbers, I think, is “Just because a narrative (about e.g. FCP X’s failure) dominates Internet discussion of a subject doesn’t necessarily mean that narrative has any relationship to reality”.”
Oh, I get it now. I misunderstood your point. My apologies.
I don’t disagree with this at all, but I do think that reality is somewhat subjective. I’m a designer and finishing editor, and in my little niche, I have yet to see an FCPX project. All my clients are still mostly FCP7 with a little Avid.
The adoption numbers are totally meaningless to me. I’m not in a position to see FCPX’s total market penetration; I can only see FCPX’s penetration among my clients and prospects, and there, it’s currently zero. When that number ticks up, I’ll dust off my copy of FCPX. I rather miss the skimmer.
Until then, FCPX is pretty inconsequential for me. It’s just another NLE. From where I sit, FCPX has been a “game-changer” (I just put a virtual dollar in the virtual swear jar) in that it hit the reset button on the NLE market, made all the other developers scramble, and gave the market the opportunity to diversify a bit instead of continuing to consolidate.
[Chris Kenny] “Four years ago, the narrative about iPhone in the enterprise was much like the narrative about using FCP X for high-end work today. It was missing basic enterprise management features! It was a consumer toy! Meanwhile, off in the consumer market, the iPhone was winning over a lot of fans — people who’d never previously owned a smartphone of any kind. It was also building a massive ecosystem around itself. As Apple began to add enterprise features, a lot of the iPhone’s new fans started demanding to use them as work phones — and a lot of existing enterprise users saw that value in iPhone’s ecosystem.”
This is an interesting example, but I don’t think it’s the same as what FCPX is doing. Apple made the iPhone fit into the industry; Apple is asking the industry to fit into FCPX.
The iPhone was adopted in enterprise because Apple added Exchange support. By making the iPhone interoperable with large companies’ existing infrastructures, Apple made the iPhone a viable handset choice.
Apple has taken a different tack with FCPX. Rather than supporting existing industry standards, Apple has invented new ones, and are now waiting for the industry to adopt them.
iPhone was workable in the enterprise, by Apple’s design, out of the box in iOS 2. FCPX is only workable in the facility to the extent that companies like Autodesk, BMD, Intelligent Assistance, and Marquis Broadcast support it and customers update their own infrastructures.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “I don’t disagree with this at all, but I do think that reality is somewhat subjective. I’m a designer and finishing editor, and in my little niche, I have yet to see an FCPX project. All my clients are still mostly FCP7 with a little Avid. “
Yes, this is what we see as well. But this is a conservative industry. People were still bringing us FCP 6 projects two years after FCP 7 was released. So I don’t think this lack of FCP X adoption 12 months in really means very much.
[Walter Soyka] “This is an interesting example, but I don’t think it’s the same as what FCPX is doing. Apple made the iPhone fit into the industry; Apple is asking the industry to fit into FCPX.
The iPhone was adopted in enterprise because Apple added Exchange support. By making the iPhone interoperable with large companies’ existing infrastructures, Apple made the iPhone a viable handset choice.
Apple has taken a different tack with FCPX. Rather than supporting existing industry standards, Apple has invented new ones, and are now waiting for the industry to adopt them.”
Your point about Exchange with respect to enterprise adoption is taken, but consider that the iPhone was primarily a consumer product selling into a market where it was commonly believed consumers wouldn’t buy expensive smartphones and data plans, the iPhone completely eschewed mobile standards like J2ME, instead requiring developers to write new apps for Apple’s proprietary APIs (and buy Macs to do it with!) and the iPhone ignored conventional wisdom about how business users demanded hardware keyboards. So in both the consumer and enterprise markets, Apple was in many ways trying to bend the market to the product, rather than the other way around.
FCP X adopts a lot of industry standards as well. It works with ProRes. It works with native formats from many cameras. It supports standard frame sizes and frame rates. It supports timecode and reel metadata. It can export color information as CDL. It can export in industry-standard formats ranging from H.264 to DPX. It’s not like Apple is completely off in its own bizarre world here. Yes, FCP X abandons some established conventions and standards. But Apple has the clout to establish new standards — classic FCP’s XML files were no more of an actual standard than FCP X’s XML files, after all — developers had to add support for that format just for Apple, and now they’re supporting FCP X’s equivalent.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “So in both the consumer and enterprise markets, Apple was in many ways trying to bend the market to the product, rather than the other way around.”
And in this regard, FCP1-7 was the departure from the Apple norm. It was a product that was built specifically for the needs of a targeted market.
FCPX is more in line with Apple’s product design philosophy — built a good product the way Apple thinks it should be done, and let people buy it and do with it what they will.
See Tim Wilson’s Steve Jobs – A Personal Calendar Entry [link] for more.
I’ve been trying to explain this as the difference between a product that a professional can use, and a product that’s built for professional use. It’s a subtle distinction that may ultimately only be important in a small fraction of use cases — but for that small fraction, it’s very important.
[Chris Kenny] ” It’s not like Apple is completely off in its own bizarre world here. Yes, FCP X abandons some established conventions and standards. But Apple has the clout to establish new standards — classic FCP’s XML files were no more of an actual standard than FCP X’s XML files, after all — developers had to add support for that format just for Apple, and now they’re supporting FCP X’s equivalent.”
They kind of are off in their own bizarre world. No one else has a parent/child timeline model, and that’s the critical factor here in interchange.
Of course I understand that Apple invented XMEML, then it became an industry standard. (I theorize that they originally developed it for internal interchange among FCS software, then released it for public use because it is vastly richer than EDL.) However, XMEML ran alongside traditional EDL I/O, so FCP was usable in all kinds of workflows that didn’t directly support FCP. In order to work collaboratively with FCP, other apps just had to support existing common industry standards. In order to work with FCPX, other apps must develop specific FCPX support.
I have no problem with developers originating new standards. This is how progress is made. I just think that Apple could have smoothed this process out for us as users by taking responsibility for support of existing industry standards, too, or by involving third parties in development earlier.
Apple may have the clout to force a new standard on an industry, but anyone from Voltaire to Stan Lee will tell you that with great power comes great responsibility. The iPhone was new, so treating it as a blank slate with a minimalist beginning (web apps only!), then adding functionality later didn’t disrupt anyone.
FCPX, replacing FCP7, is a bit of a different case. The furor over the innovations — skimmer, range-based keywording, the magnetic timeline — has largely evaporated. The furor over the 7/X transition and future direction of the product continues, as all FCP7 users are tasked with migratation (whether to FCPX, Pr, MC, or whatever).
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “They kind of are off in their own bizarre world. No one else has a parent/child timeline model, and that’s the critical factor here in interchange.”
The parent/child timeline is just a richer way of arranging stacked clips in time. It’s entirely possible to throw away the original richness (the clip relationships) and reduce the timeline to clips stacked on tracks. It isn’t really all that uncommon for content creation apps to have a rich internal data representation to aid in their operation, that is simplified or entirely discarded when moving data out of the app in an industry-standard interchange format. I don’t see a problem with this. After all, what’s the alternative? Apps never supporting anything that can’t be encoded in a pre-existing industry standard format? That would slow apps to the level of progress seen from, say, web browsers (especially in the days before WHATWG), where lots of vendors spend years arguing over things as part of a standards process before new features can be made available to users.
[Walter Soyka] “In order to work with FCPX, other apps must develop specific FCPX support.”
Or the ecosystem surrounding FCP X needs to provide a general solution for getting an EDL out of FCP X (for the probably 5% of FCP users who have ever needed this) — which seems to be happening. I don’t really see a problem with Apple leaving certain features as third-party ‘market opportunities’. Particularly if doing so encourages progress, and I rather suspect Apple has left EDL out of FCP X to date at least in part because they want to pressure other developers to support richer interchange formats.
It’s not that different from leaving ADB and serial ports off of the first iMac, thus creating pressure on peripheral vendors to switch to USB — and that was a case where Apple didn’t have a ‘clean slate’ and their actions were rather disruptive, but it worked. Apple’s OS 9 to OS X transition was also significantly more disruptive than, say, Microsoft’s transition of the consumer market to NT-based Windows. Apple has always been willing to subject its users to more disruptive transitions in order to push the market to move a little faster.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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