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apple’s response to David Pogue
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I may be wrong, but I think MC will edit ProRes via AMA. You should be able to edit the footage as soon as you mount the drive. Plus Avid has terrific Multicam, plus it’s only $995 for FCS users.
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AMA is working just fine with prores but not for a 15 HD stream multicam editing.
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[Chris Kenny] “… And “If they thought it was important they would have worked it out” shows no understanding of the complexities of actual software development. …”
I suspect quite a few of the people reading this forum know a fair amount about software development, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop discounting their knowledge and experience.
In any event, it doesn’t take a PHD is computer science to know that, given Apple’s _billions_ in cash, and specifically the cash cow formerly known as FCP-7, Apple could have created a much, much better FCPX by this date (today) than they have.
The _only_ reason they did not is because the _chose_ not to deliver a more complete product. It’s apparent Apple made several decisions throughout FCPX’s development to specifically, purposefully not implement many very important features of FCP-7 in FCPX, and then, to make matters worse, they chose to make a disaster of FCPX’s release by stopping sales of FCP-7, and (more!) also by not having a free trial version available on day one.
Committing the many, many decisions required to make all that happen simply doesn’t happen by accident. And committing that many _bad_ decisions doesn’t happen because “software is hard”. They happened because the FC dev team management is arrogant and/or out of touch, or worse.
That’s why the burden is on Apple, not us FC users. Rather than you asking us to be “patient”, we should be angry at Apple for disrespecting us. And Apple should be apologizing ASAP directly to FC users as a group, and stop hiding behind the skirts of folks such as David Pogue and others.
If Apple has something to say, as always they should communicate it clearly & directly to the adults who use FC professionally.
[Chris Kenny] “… A major product like this, especially an initial version, pretty much always ships while there’s still a long list of things the developers really wished they’d had time for. …”
FCPX is _not_ a version 1.0 product, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead it’s the result of at least 10 years of FC development & market experience. Yes, I know FCPX was written from scratch, but it’s not like Apple never created a product similar to FCPX before, or never worked with the likely users of FCPX before, or never experienced the huge multiplier effect a product like FCPX can have on the rest of their (hardware) business, an so forth.
This endless repeating of “it’s just version 1.0” sounds like making excuses, and isn’t particularly honest.
Sorry to repeat, but what happened this week with the FCPX release did not happen by accident. Apple’s dev team managers & execs made many, many decisions over the course of at least the past several months that resulted in the clusterf*ck that is today’s the FCPX feature set & release.
I will counter your earlier statement by saying that anyone who knows anything about software development (and marketing) understands that what Apple did this past week was deliberate, and in hindsight, a series of serious mistakes. Worse, Apple’s hiding behind the skirts of others only makes their mistakes (plural) much worse.
Apple can recover from their mistakes by addressing FCPX’s many serious shortcomings very quickly (in weeks, not months or years) and by immediately communicating directly and comprehensively with their customers, not via rumors, whispers, nods & winks from Apple’s paid (“Thank You For Smoking”) spokespeople.
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[Peter J. DeCrescenzo] “I suspect quite a few of the people reading this forum know a fair amount about software development, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop discounting their knowledge and experience.
In any event, it doesn’t take a PHD is computer science to know that, given Apple’s _billions_ in cash, and specifically the cash cow formerly known as FCP-7, Apple could have created a much, much better FCPX by this date (today) than they have. “
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the implication that you can necessarily make better software by throwing more money at the problem is precisely the sort of thing you don’t want to say if you want people who have experience with software development to think you’re familiar with how it works. If money created good software, Windows Vista would have been the best software product ever released.
[Peter J. DeCrescenzo] “Committing the many, many decisions required to make all that happen simply doesn’t happen by accident. And committing that many _bad_ decisions doesn’t happen because “software is hard”. They happened because the FC dev team management is arrogant and/or out of touch, or worse.”
Could you be more specific about what these ‘bad decisions’ are? I’m hard pressed to think of anything objectively ‘bad’ about FCP X that can’t be attributed to an inability to implement all desired features prior to the desired release date.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I didn’t say it would be easy and I didn’t say it would be fast. What I didn’t say is that if a project manager at Apple had said that one of the “have to’s” for the new software was that it read old legacy projects, then it would have been part of the software. Period. To say other wise is to ignore the entire history of programming.
When Microsoft updates Windows one of the “have to’s” is that it be backward compatible with older versions. No matter what they do, that’s one of the givens. It probably makes things incredibly difficult for their programmers and contributes to the inefficiency of their code, but they do it, because they deal with big business as a client and they would get annihilated if they didn’t. Now your telling me that writing an NLE is harder than upgrading Windows? Microsoft can do it but Apple somehow can’t. I don’t think so. It simply wasn’t a “have to,” it was probably more of a “that would be nice to.”
And, like I said, the list of “have to’s” tells you everything you need to know about how they are targeting their software.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Herb Sevush] “I didn’t say it would be easy and I didn’t say it would be fast. What I didn’t say is that if a project manager at Apple had said that one of the “have to’s” for the new software was that it read old legacy projects, then it would have been part of the software. Period. To say other wise is to ignore the entire history of programming. “
That’s probably true of that particular feature, but I think making that happen would have required Apple to make sacrifices with respect to implementing the new timeline they way they wanted to. There was a judgement call to make, they made it, and it’s not as obvious as you seem to think it is that they made the wrong long-term choice.
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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 –
You keep on explaining FCPX’s limitations by saying it’s an “initial release” or it’s a “1.0 release.”
But it’s not. It’s a version TEN release and I know it’s so because Apple says so on all their packaging. Final Cut Pro Ten ( X = 10 in Roman numbers, in case you didn’t get that.) And for a version TEN release, this product has some problems.
Of course if it truly were an initial release, then Apple is marketing their product fraudulently, wouldn’t you say.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Herb Sevush] “You keep on explaining FCPX’s limitations by saying it’s an “initial release” or it’s a “1.0 release.”
But it’s not. It’s a version TEN release and I know it’s so because Apple says so on all their packaging. Final Cut Pro Ten ( X = 10 in Roman numbers, in case you didn’t get that.) And for a version TEN release, this product has some problems.
Of course if it truly were an initial release, then Apple is marketing their product fraudulently, wouldn’t you say.”
Come on, don’t play dumb here. It’s the first version of a newly written app. This is not really disputable. Companies mess with version numbers all the time. UNIX folks may remember how Solaris 2.7 became Solaris 7. The product sold as “Windows 7” has an internal version number of 6.1. OS X is not actually the same operating system as OS 9. It’s not ‘fraud’ because version numbers are not required to have any particular meaning.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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As Apple doesn’t communicate with us, i have send an email to the 2 public relations of Apple in charge of the launch of FCPX. I have found their email down the page of the (discreet) news on Apple’s homepage. I NEED to know what we can expect and when.
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Chris –
There was a judgement call to make, they made it, and it’s not as obvious as you seem to think it is that they made the wrong long-term choice.
Finally you got it. They made a “choice.” Thank you. We are finally on the same page. I’ve never argued that they made a good or bad choice, I’ve only argued that they made a choice, and that choice tells you a lot about their values. We can infer what we want about what their highest values are, but we know that protecting the investment of long term FCP users wasn’t one of them
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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