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Email Exchange with Randy Ubillos, FCP X Designer
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You say that FCP 7 (and 4.5 for that matter) still work, and “great” at that, but do they? Being limited by old tech like the 32-bit walls and such do not allow progress or even keeping up with the rest of the industry, who will take advantage of the new tech that comes along.
It seems like the still-believers are hoping that by having their car explode mid-race will turn out okay, because Apple will pull a rabbit out of a hat and *poof*… in drops a new super-car that suddenly speeds past the rest of the track. In the meantime, they’re just expected to get out and push the car down the track while others pull away with every passing second.
This isn’t ok. It’s unrealistic to keep pointing out that you could still edit on an older system, because so much of this industry is about pushing the limits, inventing new ways of storytelling, and getting others to notice and ask, “How did they pull that off?”
This is the same reason US Armed Forces attempt to destroy their secret high-tech aircraft when they crash, before the enemy arrives. Sure, they might still have guns that fire bullets, but it’s no match for what DARPA-DAVE and “Q” just invented. It’s about keeping ahead of the pack.
What Apple did to their fans was tell everyone to take a fifteen minute intermission, then switch reels and start a new show as soon as the audience left the theater. Some will hang on and try to get immersed in the plot of this new picture, but meanwhile in the other theaters, everyone is enjoying the show.
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[Walter Soyka] “This is not, and should never be, about the code or the AV Foundation data model. This should be about storytelling.”
But people who have only ever used pen and paper can’t fathom the typewriter in this case. Heck they complain the keys aren’t in alphabetical order.
It should be about story telling but it decidedly is not. if it were about story telling the venomous antipathy wouldn’t be the case.
Sometimes it’s important to tell people why a gasoline engine driven car is not a horse. This is especially the case when people dump hay in front of and start complaining it’s not eating. They need to know that engines don’t eat hay.
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[Craig Seeman] “People who have only ever used pen and paper can’t fathom the typewriter in this case”
But that’s also because typewriters limit you to using one font at one size, and the workflow is decided by the machine not the person behind it. With pen and paper you can write with any style in any direction you want and even make drawings.
Sure one day the fcp-x typewriter may become a full fledged wordprocessor. But right now it’s not.
Stephan
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[Craig Seeman] “Sometimes it’s important to tell people why a gasoline engine driven car is not a horse”
With respect Craig, you and Chris Kenny keep making this point over and over without actually elaborating a great deal on it, but as though it really changes anything meaningful about the end-user’s experience of the product.
What other piece of software for general use requires the end-user to understand how and why the code has been written the way it has in order to be able to use it properly? I think the answer is “none” and I think you’d have to agree.
Put it this way, you could have absolutely no knowledge of how QuickTime is written and still edit in FCP7 at then highest possible level.
I appreciate that you know what you’re talking about and I understand that for you this issue seems to be of significance and no doubt it is in terms of understanding where the product has come from and where it might be headed – but in the real world of the end-user it is surely a complete irrelevance.
Your hay/car analogy doesn’t seem to be sufficiently explanatory in this case.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
After reading his response, I seriously do not understand the mindset at Team Final Cut in Cupertino.
On one hand, Apple crashes the pro user conference at NAB, and boasts about Final Cut’s importance in broadcast media, how professionals are important to them, etc.
On the other, Randy Ubillos states legacy support wasn’t a priority because, get this: they didn’t think anyone was going to switch in the middle of a project.
What?
SOMETHING is seriously wrong at Apple – major internal miscommunication between marketing and development, incompetent leadership… Whatever it is, I’ve never seen them appear so weak.
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Sorry if I was unclear, Craig. I wasn’t suggesting that we shouldn’t talk about AV Foundation because we should talk about storytelling instead.
I am saying FCPX’s design should have been influenced by the needs of a storyteller, not by the AV Foundation data model — hence the McLuhan tools quote.
For what it’s worth, I have studied up a bit on AV Foundation, and I think you’re reading way too much into it. At its core, AV Foundation is just “one of several frameworks that you can use to play and create time-based audiovisual media” [link]. FCPX is introducing some new editorial and organizational concepts, and it’s using a modern framework for media creation and playback, but I don’t see why they are as inextricably linked as you suggest. AV Foundation contains the tools used to build FCPX, but AV Foundation doesn’t strictly define the FCPX feature set.
For example, I’ve seen you suggest that gaps must be added because AV Foundation can’t have a hole in a composition. Even if that were the case, FCPX could hide that unnecessary detail from the user. Don’t you think it’s more likely that gaps are there to make connected clips behave consistently in the UI?
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 -
seconded. I could care less about the technical underpinnings right now, and I have no interest in having anyone explain the minutiae of the AV foundation to me.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
Nothing’s wrong at Apple and they know very well what they are doing. This is, obviously, deliberate and quite amazing in its deliberate deceitfulness. Attract the pro market, make a product a household name for professional use and then abandon that small pro niche market and sell a new product that has nothing in common with its predecessor but the name to thousands of consumers who have heard of the apps reputation in the past. Apple has become a very, very dubious and mean company that cannot be trusted and relied on in a business environment. And as I have said elsewhere, this is just the start. FCP X is a single monitor app, no Mac Pro is used anywhere in any official pics of the app, Thunderbold soon to be in all the Macs so no need for PCI-E or several internal hard drives – bye bye Mac Pro hardware.
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All they had to do was upgrade iMovie to iMovie Pro and just say the FCP suite wasn’t ready. They’re not a cash-strapped company.
I agree that this is going to make them look weak in general.
Why blatantly misrepresent something? Are they too successful to be burdened by a small customer segment? Does some nutcase think they need to change their identity? Have two years of wild success corrupted the company? IS the consumer side OK with losing the rep of the pro side? Wow, someone just lit one at the party.Plus the Mac Pro line is overpricing components in its hardware.
The consumer side is the side with the most competition. iPads are pricey compared to 7-inch Androids. Maybe the guys following Steve don’t know what they’re doing after all. Wouldn’t surprise me. Creative people don’t stay in bureaucracies once they make money. Only untalented paperpushers stay in comissariats. Apparently all that talk about Apple being high on itself has turned out to be true.
The ridiculous thing is that amateur filmmakers are just now getting their hands on more pro gear with HD dSLRs and GoPros and moving on up into the ranks of pro creators (mtn bikers, snowboarders, extreme etc). iMovie works for a while, but once you get it, you want to move up. These guys have built FCP as much as anyone. Now Apple’s telling them – don’t buy our software and don’t buy our laptops either. Go back to the PC where things are cheaper and you can customize the software.
I would say its baffling but it actually reminds me of the old days of APPLE, when getting on the internet wasn’t that important.
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[Joe Campanale] “Randy Ubilious states legacy support wasn’t a priority”
Obviously iMovie legacy support was more important than FCP7 legacy support.
Stephan
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