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Can Apple Be Trusted Ever Again?
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Avid was expensive. FCP was not. That’s the reason people went to FCP including myself. Avid as an editing tool has been consistent. They have never completely changed the format.
FCP did one thing I will always appreciate…they forced prices to drop for editing software.
Editor/Videographer
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[Craig Seeman] “Most are adverse to moving to new tools. They may eventually but movement is slow. “
This works in favor of FCP X, though. A lot of facilities weren’t going to upgrade to a new version of FCP for 12 or 18 months even if it had just been an incremental, backwards compatible update. This gives Apple a little time to continue adding pro features to FCP X, to try to get facilities to choose that, rather than Premiere Pro or Avid, when they are ready to update. None of this is nearly as time sensitive as the “It’s been five days and Apple hasn’t responded yet! They’re running out of time!” crowd is implying.
It’s true that by making a transition to FCP X as big a step as a transition to an alternative editing platform, Apple has opened the door for customers to switch. But Apple must have realized this. I think they’re just not very worried about opening the door, because in the long run they’re confident in the quality of the product that they’ll deliver and don’t feel like they need to rely on platform inertia to keep customers.
Indeed, as I’ve noted elsewhere, a huge part of the reason FCP is so successful it pro markets today is because its approachability made it the most common choice for students and new editors, who then moved out into the industry. FCP X, in terms of user interface and particularly price, is even more approachable. Once the initial launch hiccups have passed, I see no particular reason to believe this long-term trend won’t resume and even accelerate.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Actually the real question is why is there a platform change to begin with? To me the answer is obvious.
Editor/Videographer
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[John Chay] “Actually the real question is why is there a platform change to begin with? To me the answer is obvious.”
Virtually everything people where asking for required abandoning the 32-bit QuickTime/Carbon codebase. And the FCP UI was also clearly something from the classic Mac OS era; that was always going to get a major overhaul.
The only big ‘optional’ change, really, was the decision to try to improve on traditional muli-track editing and bin-based clip organization. If they hand’t done that, nobody would have to learn anything new, really, and backwards compatibility would have been easier to implement. But forgoing the implementation of an improved approach because some people will initially be uncomfortable with it is not a recipe for long-term growth, and even if Apple had tried really hard, importing sequences from FCP 7 was never going to be more than approximate, with an entirely different rendering engine, a different library of effects/transitions, different clip parameters, etc.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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And despite Avid dropping their prices radically they did NOT gain back market share. It wasn’t just the price. It’s perceived value. It’s whether the price was “worth it.” It wasn’t because of poor customer service.
Back in the days of linear rooms Avid was a comparative bargain and there’s was reluctance to move to it inspire of the price. Many facilities looked at it as a low “toy” in 1989. It was only when perceived value increased that moves escalated. It became the offline tool of choice until the resolution got to the point it was an online tool. Along the way it’s LOW price compared to an online room made it an easy purchase so Avid apparently didn’t consider customer relations critical since it was a low cost tool. They looked to after sales support contracts and expensive upgrade paths as a way to bring in more money for their low cost tool.
And then they were beaten at that game by FCP . . . which for Apple which became a way to drive Mac sales to professionals and escalated when Avid announced they were dropping Mac support. I would NOT call the announcement of Mac abandonment “consistent.” They want from Mac only to potentially Windows only and that was very much a “complete” change of format. They got hit hard, just as Apple is this week, and Avid back peddled. It was truly a sloppy back peddle too if you were their at the time.
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[Chris Kenny] “A lot of facilities weren’t going to upgrade to a new version of FCP for 12 or 18 months even if it had just been an incremental, backwards compatible update. This gives Apple a little time to continue adding pro features to FCP X, to try to get facilities to choose that, rather than Premiere Pro or Avid,”
Your logic is flawed. Facilities had no intentions of transitioning towards Avid or Premiere until they released Final Cut X. Apple could have bought themselves some time by doing nothing at all or releasing FCPx as a Beta version first. But to scrap FCS3 all together is ludicrous and a clear signal that the Pro Editing App from Apple is dead.
Editor/Videographer
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The big difference…Apple can take the hit where Avid could afford not to. Apple could drop all editing software all together and be just fine. If Avid dropped editing software there would be no Avid.
Editor/Videographer
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I came late to the Mac party, arriving just two years ago, mainly because of Final Cut. But I found that I loved the OS and environment as much as FC, and am a bit of an OSX fanboy (mainly the reduced maintenance vs. my 3 PCs).
I don’t buy the argument that this shift by Apple is all about markets and money. In fact, they’ve always told me to expect more of them then just bottom-line priorities. They could make all their hardware more cheaply, and increase their margins, but they’ve chosen to put other elements first (design, build, etc.). This has been the point of Aindreas’s “Technology/Liberal Arts” sig image. They’re doing fine financially, so there’s no pressure for FC to “save the company.” With a couple million registered users, it can’t be losing money can it?
And above all, FC was the pointiest spearhead of “Made on a Mac.” Film, TV, and video slowly adopted Final Cut, and much of the last 10 years of pop culture has been “Made on Mac” because of FCP. For this reason alone, they should have respected the pro market…not just for our notorious whining. They should maintain the pro apps to maintain their creative leadership position — even just as PR.
I know their ad agency was always required, even in 2000, to cut the Apple spots on a Mac, with FC. I wonder how they’ll grade, mix, and layback the next round of spots out of FCP X. We’ve seen over the last week how “Unmade on a Mac” works. It’s amazing that Apple seems not to care…maybe time will tell. Maybe they need competition to prod them to action, the way that Avid and Adobe did.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
[Chris Kenny] “Virtually everything people where asking for required abandoning the 32-bit QuickTime/Carbon codebase. And the FCP UI was also clearly something from the classic Mac OS era; that was always going to get a major overhaul.”
Really? EDL. OMF, XML depended on QT? Nah. And I don’t care if all my effects and such wouldn’t re-import, but it would be nice to get some current and older projects easily into the new system to take advantage of it. I just imported a project into FCP7 from PPro 5.0 using XML and with some minor adjustments was up and editing – how hard would a system like that would have been? FCP X is not a replacement for FCP7, and it may be years before it is, it’s that simple. Apple took a very arrogant approach, threw away 10 years of goodwill and STILL haven’t said a friggin’ word about this mistake. If i can stomach the purchase, FCPx will be fine for those non-pro projects our friends and families are always roping us into, and can easily be done at home on a laptop, But it is not ready for the types i jobs i have in the pro world, not by a long shot.
Jim Carey
Director of Video, Radical Entertainment
linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jcarey256
mobygames: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,17212/ -
[John Chay] “Your logic is flawed. Facilities had no intentions of transitioning towards Avid or Premiere until they released Final Cut X. Apple could have bought themselves some time by doing nothing at all or releasing FCPx as a Beta version first. But to scrap FCS3 all together is ludicrous and a clear signal that the Pro Editing App from Apple is dead.
“The logic you’re describing is flawed. The mere release of FCP X creates no additional material reason to transition to another editing platform. Uncertainly surrounding Apple’s future intentions seems to be the primary driver behind the folks saying they’re going to switch, but that uncertainty will be gone in 12-18 months (probably much less), so if you weren’t going to upgrade until then there’s no reason why some short-term uncertainty before then should cause to to move your upgrade date ahead and switch editing platforms in the process.
That’s just a fundamentally irrational knee-jerk response, essentially an attempt to remove the phycological unpleasantness of uncertainty by making a decision immediately, which it makes no sense to do when there’s no pressing need and it will be possible to make a more informed choice later.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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