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FCP history
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WHAT! Out of New York? How could that be?
Harumph.
I once posted here the I remember using FCP in April 1999 and as I remember I was called a nut.
Chris
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April 99 was NAB when Apple showed it. It was available immediately, and version 1.0.1 shipped before the end of the month.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs
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I bought it, on the floor, the day it was released, and haven’t looked back since.
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It will be “HAPPY 8th BIRTHDAY FINAL CUT PRO!!” at NAB this year.
Hard to believe it’s been around that long!
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Ahhh…the good ‘ol days. 😉
I remember when I was in NYU back in the early-mid 90’s…there were only two of these things called the AVID in the school, both owned by professors who didn’t know how to use them. Heck with that…give me a six-plate Steenbeck, a roll of tape, and a razor blade, and I’ll call you when you’re movie’s done. 😉 Picked up AVID and ProTools in the field (there were none of those cute instructional mini-academies at the time, that I can remember), then started working for a company that swicthed from AVID to this darling thing called the SPHERE (Accom Stratasphere, evolved from the CUBE as I recall). Good interface and software, absolutely HORRIBLE hardware. It got to a point where I’d be spending 20 inutes out of every hour rebooting/disc maintenance/recovery. You can imagine my all-nighters right before delivery deadline. Loads of fun. Just as I was leaving the company in early 2001, FCP 2 (I think) was out, and the first thing that hit me was it resembled a mix betwen the two, AVID and SPHERE. But at the time, being more ‘in-the-box’ and all, it seemed more pro-sumer than professional. BUT…I could have it on a Power Mac…and since I was going freelance, it seemed like an economical way to at least start off. They switched to FCP about a month after I left.
When I look at how reliable every FCP system I’ve worked on has been, along with the advances in computers…I want to bill them double-overtime for the countless hours I spent just getting the Sphere to work.
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Hi Michael,
I think one of the succes of FC is that has catch on, better than other systems-aplications, with the old-school video editors. I’ve been editing since 1.985 and I remember the first time I tried to learn Premier (!966) I felt really uncomfortable. It was like that has nothing to do with my job. I just gave up. But first time I tried FC (2.001) in my laptot conectet Firewire to a small camara and monitoring in a big TV set, I thought that was great. And, here we are..FC 6 (?) 🙂
Rafael -
[walter biscardi] “1999 and the Product Manager was Andrew Baum who went on to head up the Pinnacle Cin
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One year early. KG was 98, and release was definitely 99.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs
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Interesting post, since I worked at Ga Tech in 1993, where the first video cube in Georgia, version 1.0, was put into service. I’d never heard of Avid. When I finally saw one a year later, it was at the point where it could play back 30 frames/sec (not 60 fields) on a computer screen but not output to any sort of tape really. It was used primarily to create an edl. What a piece of crap I thought.
The cube was a simple real time ONLY device at the time. There was no option to even composite a couiple layers together. You had 2 real time streams and a graphics layer. But there was no rendering. There were no dropped frames. It was an awesome hardware device. Over the years immix was sold to scitex, and then someone else. The software added layers but no way to manage them. They switched to mjpeg an QT and their hardware and software fell apart. They were first out with 60i nles, and they were in front for a year or so. Media100 jumped in and had the codec, but that’s really about it. Their images were pristine even at 5:1 mjpeg but it took them years to even have a real time dissolve. They too seemed to be bought and sold or mismanaged or soething. The whole time, Avid seemed to keep plugging away at the software and making their codecs better. The whole time the codecs were in line with the power of the hardware at the time is the way I see it. It really wasn’t until around 96 that they had a codec worth broadcasting. AVR77. Sadly, as they grew in dominance over the next 4 years Apple’s hardware couldn’t keep up. Avid threatened leaving the Mac platform. They announced it was some sort of misunderstanding right around the time FCP came out! I always thought the purchase of FCP by apple WAS a completely desperate defensive move. All they had at the time were graphic desingers. Some folks may not even remember that most adobe products weren’t even available on the PC until Windows 95, and they weren’t worth crap for a few years. So with Adobe finally on both platforms, and Avid moving to PC with Symphony only being a Pc product I think Apple was quite worried. They had a niche market if nothing else, Editing and Graphics. That niche could have vanished in a year had Apple not bought FCP. Independent producers and freelancers started using it in conjunction with 3 chip broadcast quality DV cameras. Did Avid or Media100 even support DV? Nope. Avid announces continued support for the mac. Adobe stays the course as well. I think FCP may have saved Apple even more so than the iPod.
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[rafalaos] “since 1.985 and I remember the first time I tried to learn Premier (!966) I felt really uncomfortable. It was like that has nothing to do with my job. I just gave up. But first time I tried FC (2.001”
What’s with the bizarre dates with periods and exclamation points? I think the latter is a typo.
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