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Can Apple Be Trusted Ever Again?
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[james carey] “I watched as they bought Shake and Color and then abandoned them”
External products are not a good guide.
[james carey] “They also dropped xserve, xsan. It seems they are abandoning the high end pro market, good for them and their stockholders, bad for those of us who depend on continuity in our purchase decisions.”
Xsan is still for sale (and integrated into Lion Server, i.e. about to get a hell of a lot cheaper to deploy). As far as Xserve goes, based on the rumors of rack-mountable Mac Pros, it’s not clear we’ve seen the end of Apple in that market. And in any event, Xserve was always a fairly marginal product for Apple, much more so than Final Cut Pro.
I don’t see what any of this has to do with FCP anyway. I’ll say if again: if Apple really weren’t interested in the pro video market, FCP X wouldn’t exist. They’d have EOL’d FCP, not done a rewrite, and added some more features to iMovie to go after the prosumer market if that was the intent. The prosumer market doesn’t need many of the things already in FCP X.
[james carey] “As for XML and OMF, if it’s so easy to fix, why not ship with it.”
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I suspect Apple’s approach with FCP X is going to be to provide an API for third-parties, not directly implement export features for every format. An API is something you really don’t want to rush, because if you need to make changes later it breaks other vendors’ code.
[james carey] “I will continue to use FCP7 but am in the process of upgrading to CS5.5 for PPro, and that looks amazingly promising. AE is of course one of my workhorse tools, and its integration with PPro and PS is just gravy. Maybe i should thank Apple, what do you think?”
I think it’s silly to make a long-term decision during a short-term information gap, unless doing so is entirely unavoidable.
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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 agree, even a partial procedure for importing old projects would be preferred. Opening old projects happens all the time in my shop. And importing via XML as well, I mentioned just recently I imported an Abobe PPro project this way and was pleasantly surprised how much information came through, and how much time it saved. In fact XML would be the answer.
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] “You can’t run a business on uncertainty. At my facility we were ready to purchase 3 brand new mac based editing suites running FCP. After the release of FCPx we have decided to go another direction.”
You can’t run a business on uncertainly, but if there’s no pressing need to make a decision immediately, you can wait for the uncertainty to recede before doing so.
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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] “There are millions of copies of this app kicking around in the world.”
Apple apparently pulled it from the retail and VAR chain. I’m not sure if a facility will want to trust EBay and Craigslist for purchase decisions.
[Chris Kenny] “The number of multi-seat facilities that might need to add seats while waiting for FCP X to mature is effectively trivial”
Relative to 2 million copies sold but are all 2 million on FCP7? People who FCS2 as not a significant upgrade are not only looking for new seats. They’re looking at supporting new workflows. While I think FCPX will support nearly all the features they need in the up and coming months that too is only speculation on my part. That’s why Apple’s silence is the problem There’s a point where people no longer want to speculate. It becomes a risky business proposition when they way the cost of workflow compared to other products, even incorporating the cost of transitioning a facility.
I’m not sure whether that’s trivial or not without any real numbers. All we have anecdotal info from some “noisy” folks. Sometimes even a 5% shift can have far ranging repercussions. Sometimes things begin to escalate or spiral. I think of where Avid went from as an example as FCP began to grow.
[Chris Kenny] “Anyone choosing to make a major investment in Avid/Adobe now, however, should do so with the knowledge that they may be making a long-term choice different from the one they might choose to make six months or a year from now, once FCP X has had more time to mature. The benefits of switching now have to be weighed against the possibility that you might be using Media Composer for the next decade when FCP X would have been a better choice, because you made a decision during the specific window of time when FCP X wasn’t yet a viable option.”
No doubt this is being weighed. The problem is that given what Avid and Adobe focus on as companies, short of bankruptcy or sale, they will attempt to be competitive. People don’t have the same security with Apple even if it’s only perception, not reality. Apple’s dropping FCS2009 concurrently with the release of FCPX has exposed that insecurity. True or not, there’s a perception that Apple can drop the Pro Post market with little harm and therefore might.
Keep in mind that even students and schools make their purchasing decisions based on the perception of the market direction. If they feel Avid or Adobe will lead to better marketable skills that will influence their decisions as well. Again it’s perception but it’s a significant factor.
Do you think the FCPX refunds are all coming from facilities for example? Of course we don’t know the real numbers (and never will), facilities aren’t going to sweat the $300 purchase. It may well be Apple’s immediate target market responding to the perception that FCPX will not give them a future.
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[Herb Sevush] “And every one would have been happy.”
Frankly, you’re crazy if you think that’s the case. People would still be seriously freaking out about even minor UI differences, about backwards compatibility not working perfectly (despite everyone now saying they’d be fine with that), and about missing features in the first release.
You’re right, though: if FCP X’s new approach to editing is beneficial, it’ll be successful, and if it’s not, it won’t. Apple was taking a risk there. I’m sure they knew they were taking a risk there.
[Herb Sevush] “And that time is probably more than you have been guessing. According to the latest accounts the version released is basically identical to the advanced versions seen by Phil Hodgetts and Larry Jordan last February. Despite private assurance from FCPX designers, they weren’t able to add any functionality in the last 4 months. “
I suspect the “basically identical” judgement is kind of fuzzy, and anyway we have no idea what functionality might have been implemented during that time period that just isn’t quite release-quality yet, so we haven’t seen yet.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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“But we basically knew that was going to be true since we knew Apple was going to do a rewrite… and a rewrite has been inevitable to people who understood the technical limitations of the old architecture”
Your basic argument is that Apple was re-writing the underlying architecture and everyone should have known that this would cause the program to drastically change.You keep repeating this over and over as if it were true. It isn’t. It wasn’t inevitable that an underlying structural change was going to lead to a total functional change.
The simple analogy is a car. You can make a wankel rotary engine, a steam engine, an all electric car – as long as the driver knows where the steering wheel is and where the brakes are he doesn’t care. A total change in structure does not necessitate a change in the way a product functions.
About 8 years ago Discreet Edit*, the best NLE I ever used, underwent a total re-write. It took 2 years, and that delay helped contribute to it’s demise. however the actual product was a seamless upgrade to the previous versions – 100% new code, huge improvements in functionality, totally backwards compatible.
Apple needed to do a re-write. It chose to change the functionality. One is not the necessary cause of the other. No matter how many times you link them together, it just ain’t so. Not even when you repeat it.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[james carey] ” watched as they bought Shake and Color and then abandoned them”
If you look at Apple’s moves very carefully basically they’ve abandoned all outside purchases.
LiveType, DVDStudioPro, Shake, Color were all based on code coming from somewhere else.
This also includes Final Cut Pro itself.
Motion was theirs. The new FCPX is entirely theirs as is Compressor.Basically it seems Apple has decided that they want ground up control code. That may actually be a good decision in the long run because they’re no longer working on a patchwork fixes on somebody else’s idea.
I think this is very much part of FCPX laying the groundwork for the next 10 years. They basically tossed everything they felt sustaining would probably become a development problem at some point.I suspect one of things we’ll be seeing, over time, is better audio handling and improved color grading in FCPX. It’s not there yet but I think that’s where they’re headed.
I’m not quite sure how this will impact Logic which was from eMagic and how SoundTrackPro’s disappearance plays into all that, except that I think we’ll be seeing more audio mixing features at some point.
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[Herb Sevush] “If Premiere Pro can open a FCP project perfectly using XML, then FCPX could have done the same as long as they hadn’t arbitrarily decided to change the traditional multi-track system. And even so, a translation that wasn’t perfect in terms of transitions and effects would have been better than nothing.”
I can’t say for sure but I think a lot may have to do with AV Foundation. I think Apple is heading in a direction that Premiere isn’t and users are only seeing the superficial implications in the GUI. Apple is tying into technology and coding that other NLEs aren’t’ and I think the advantageous may not be obvious yet. It may be that trying to emulate traditional sequence tracks in FCPX would really have been a hinderance to the direction they’re heading in. I think this is what Randy Ubillos meant that FCPX is a beginning.
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[Herb Sevush] “Your basic argument is that Apple was re-writing the underlying architecture and everyone should have known that this would cause the program to drastically change.You keep repeating this over and over as if it were true. It isn’t. It wasn’t inevitable that an underlying structural change was going to lead to a total functional change.”
It was inevitably going to lead to an app that wasn’t going to be an immediate drop-in replacement. That’s significant, when you consider how much of the criticism of FCP X is reducible to “This isn’t an immediate drop-in replacement”.
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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] “External products are not a good guide.”
wait, Apple Shake and Apple color external product – not sure what you mean?
Jim Carey
Director of Video, Radical Entertainment
linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jcarey256
mobygames: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,17212/
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