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FCP X and the “industry”
This is going to be a long post, but it was triggered by David Roth Weiss’ interview with Mr. Lawrence, when the latter spoke of the importance of language, and how language reflects philosophy, and is tied, by necessity, to the way a program functions.
Let me begin with 3 strands, and then tie a knot. Culture, the “elite,” and education.
Culture.
Language is tied to culture, and culture is borne by sharing a common philosophy and language to describe it. A culture’s vernacular also becomes the secret handshake of that culture, allowing us to quckly identify whether we’re dealing with someone who is familiar with our world and our methodologies – or not.
For instance, walk up to some-one who is building mattes for a composite, and say, “Hey, cool white silhouettes! I like how they follow the footage” and you’ve just identified yourself as an outsider.
But say, “Are you using planar or point tracking to match-move your rotos?” and you’ll likely have started a conversation.
In one sentence the artist has a pretty good idea of whether he can talk to you like a “outsider” or “insider” – professionally speaking.
We, in our communities, live in a culture (or, more accurately, in sub-cultures) where certain behavior and certain terminology is expected and highly regarded, because a common culture creates efficiency.The “elite.”
Within any industry, there are those who stand out at the top of their profession. These positions are not attained easily, and usually require a great deal of commitment and insight into the industry in order to achieve this status. And while the word “elite” can carry negative connotations, it is also a word that means exactly what I want it to mean – those who have worked hard to achieve a measure of greatness through personal dedication and devotion to their profession. These are people we respect for their contributions back into our own profession, and it’s something that needs to be stated here.
Now, within these forums there’s an argument often being made that the top 5% of our industry don’t really matter when it comes to FCP X’s target clientele – they are insignificant in terms of sales – and usually have access to whatever software they need simply because of the “massive” availability of funds they work with. So Apple would be financially foolish to seek their approval or modify software simply to meet the needs of the elite.But to simply dismiss these people because they are numerically insignificant seems short-sighted – if not just motivated by a little jealousy. The elite, in any industry, have enormous impact on that industry. They represent both the financial and intellectual peak of that profession’s achievements. They are the measuring stick by which a culture defines success, and their opinions carry weight, because the intellectual component to their success is undeniable.
Education.
Education is a business. And as a business it survives on reputation, a reputation of turning out students who can at least find employment or, better yet, achieve varying degrees of greatness within the industries they enter. Schools don’t fill their brochures with stats on how many graduates end up flipping burgers or serving as greeters at Wal Mart. They are interested in turning out as much cream as they can for their own competitive reasons. As a result, schools build curricula based on several parameters, in order to be successful.
One of those parameters is industrial standards. It is of no benefit to teach a student to use tool A, if tool A’s application is limited to the bottom 10% of an industry, when tool B can be taught, and is applicable to 99% of the industry.So the question then is, how do educators discover which tools have the widest acceptance within industry?
They talk to the elite.
Think about that.
A school’s goals, out of pure self-interest, must be to teach its students a curriculum that gives each student the maximum chance of success, with the fewest limitations.
The maximum reach of any industry is defined by its elite.
So, schools teach what the elite define as their culture, as well as the tools the elite accept as useful, or at least representative, of their own tools.This doesn’t require or assume that each student will end up at the top of their profession. It doesn’t even mean the students all want to work there. But it does mean that every student is learning in an environment with the most opportunity for employment and growth.
So here’s the irony. Those “insignificant 5%” elite end up being the gatekeepers to our own culture and to the educators who keep filling our ranks.
FCP X (you knew this was coming)
FCP X arrived as an update – anyone saying different is using damage control.
And FCP X broke FCP’s upgrade path for all 3 of the just mentioned strands in my comments here.
An FCP X upgrade breaks functionality with the elite – on many levels.
FCP X cannot be used to upgrade the curriculum for the educators – because it comes with a glass-ceiling.
And FCP X breaks with the established editing culture.Normally, when we break things for the sake of progress, we introduce new things that are better. Most people are very cautious about this step, since it does introduce a little chaos, and is usually best addressed over a period of time. Even Apple, in transitioning from OS 9 to OS X, never broke the old tech while introducing the new. Files created on OS 9 could be worked on with OS X. We still had a finder, hard drives showing up on a desktop as icons, etc. – in other words, the culture was essentially preserved and improved, not thrown away.
So FCP X’s arrival was quite unique – dare I say, radical – or foolish. And it occurred within the environs of a culture outside of Apple’s control – unlike Apple’s upgrades for OSes and hardware in the past.
But perhaps Apple’s goal is not to play the same role it did with FCP 7 – but rather just sell nifty software, with a more populist approach. In some ways FCP X reminds me of the work of another video pioneer. Maybe Apple could even improve its communication skills by imitating this marketing piece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VvG8y8Pzqc. Swell!
One thing is sure. Until FCP X can meet the needs of the elite, it will never regain the reputation and acceptance it had 1 month ago.
Man is that going to tick some people off.
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48 Replies
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“So FCP X’s arrival was quite unique – dare I say, radical – or foolish. And it occurred within the environs of a culture outside of Apple’s control – unlike Apple’s upgrades for OSes and hardware in the past.”
Interesting observation. Perhaps the goal of this release was to regain absolute control of their product? It is certainly part of the love/hate relationship that we’ve always had with this company. On one hand, sand-boxed systems are inherently more secure and somewhat more robust, on the other, they are typically limited.
I’m beginning to believe that they are trying to combine the best of open source development (core program with 3rd party development) with greater product control for a profit motive (all 3rd party apps sold via app store).
We’ll just have to wait and see what the long term benefits to the industry might be. Would have to agree this is a very ham-fisted way to attempt such an endeavor. Part of what was destroyed in the process is the trust of the very people most needed for success, pro’s and developers. It’s a huge gamble to rely on the broader consumer market to rebuild this trust via conscripted usage en masse.
Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv -
[Glen Hurd] “The elite, in any industry, have enormous impact on that industry”
What elite?
TV sweat shops? -
Very well put. I could not have said it better myslef.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
Very incisive post, Glen. It will be interesting to see how Apple addressees the issues you raise.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
Glen
Best post I’ve seen on the topic. In Vancouver, most of the colleges and universities teach FCP. One film school taught Avid. I’m guessing the others will switch to Avid. So the future “elite” 5 to 10 years down the road will have no knowledge of FCP.
I loved your culture reference. We have a lot of post facilities near my office. I was walking back after lunch one day and overheard two guys saying “and the software reads R3D files based on the EDL” I chuckled to myself, wondering what percentage of the population could understand this little random snippet of conversation.
Cheers
John
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I’m not a professional video editor. Heck, I’m not even an amateur (though I have an interest in learning). However, I am an educator in an area (Geographic Information Systems) that’s somewhat similar in that we’re both trying to teach students to perform a complicated task using very specialized and complex software made for a niche market.
When I took my first course as an undergraduate I was one of the last students to be trained on an old version of the software before a major revision. The difference between the old and new versions of the software probably wasn’t as big as FCP7/FCPX but it was pretty big, a lot bigger than your usual upgrade from one version to another. Effectively, my software skills were obsolete within about six months after I learned them. However, my knowledge of the underlying techniques remained. I might have to poke around to find out how to do something in the new software, but I still knew what it was doing, when a given technique as appropriate, etc.
Fast forward about ten years and now I’m teaching these things to students. Most of them come to class with the mindset that they want to learn to use this piece of software. I try to emphasize that they’re not just learning how to use a particular piece of software, they should be learning the underlying fundamentals. That way, when the next big software revision comes along and changes everything, they won’t be left behind. Or as Jeff Atwood puts it, “How lasts about five years, but why is forever.”
In this respect, I think that editing actually has an advantage over Geographic Information Systems. In my field, there’s one company (and one software package) that has about 90% of the market. I’ve got to make my points about the underlying fundamentals using just that one piece of software. The video editing market seems like it has several major players who are all fairly competitive (Avid, Adobe, Apple). If I had the luxury of multiple software packages to choose from, I would probably aim to teach students at least two of them. I would probably pick the two most different ones, to give students a broad a view as possible and to better illustrate how the underlying fundamentals exist separate from the software that implements them.
From everything I’ve read here, it sounds like FCPX is the odd man out. So, teaching it alongside one of the more ‘conventional’ products would probably do a better job teaching the students about editing than teaching the conventional product alone.
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“Or as Jeff Atwood puts it, “How lasts about five years, but why is forever.”
love that
Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv -
[John Christie] “Best post I’ve seen on the topic. In Vancouver, most of the colleges and universities teach FCP. One film school taught Avid. I’m guessing the others will switch to Avid. So the future “elite” 5 to 10 years down the road will have no knowledge of FCP”
Hmmm interesting! I would not even teach any students any software more the art of editing!
It’s like saying your elite knows how to drive a automatic Benz with all the assistant gadgets, well my know how to drive to drive the car. 😉 hihihihiIn fact I remember in school we never where forced to learn a program more the Fundamentals of 3D animation with a arsenal of applications.
P.S. I don’t need culture I create my own! 😀
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Thanks, David. You’re input here at the cow has been quite an inspiration.
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If your traditional “top down” analysis is valid, you will turn out to be right.
However.
From the advent of DV – a funny thing happened.
DV and Firewire and the MAC OS in very rapid order cut away the very foundations of the “top down” paradigm you’re describing.
I was there when ALL the people at the top TOTALLY DISMISSED 3.5 Mbps digital video as sub-standard, non-professional – and the mark of an amateur.
Many of us ignored that and simply saw that we could do work with less expensive tools and circumvent the prior era requirements of working in multi-million dollar shops with an active “priesthood” that while positively passing down the best possible practices, simultaneously had little interest in making their knowledge available to a larger pool of practitioners.
FCP always was and always will be a BOTTOM UP technology. Your so called “pros” were astonishingly late to the game. It wasn’t until a few guys like Walter Murch broke ranks and FINALLY came to the realization that you could work with non-custom hardware and off-the shelf software and do as well or better than the purpose built monolithic production house that personal NLE capabilities become a defacto standard across the industry. And Mr. Murch, himself, I believe, noted that what pushed him to adapt was a singular occurance where he was working on a project for Mr. Coppola had to work out of his house during an illness and so installed a functioning FCP system in his home.
The point is that your vaunted “top down” model is typically far less predictive than it is “reactive.”
The large players change only when it’s safe. And their reputational power very much protects them from needing to live on the cutting edge. The funny thing is that when Mr. Murch decided to make the change, he had to go out and find the very EARLY ADOPTERS that had adapted early – and these became the people surrounding him – NOT the guys from the shop who had kept cutting the old way.
Take whatever lesson you like from that reality.
But the truth is that in the modern distributed information access environment – by the time the industry adopts a tool, the guys in the streets have likely been using it for years. You can choose to be one of them – or not. Thats up to you.
If FCP-X should proved to be yet another “bottom up” evolution – and if history is instructive, listening exclusively to those “at the top of their profession” is a great way to slip significantly behind the curve. Facility pros, are often the MOST vested in traditional thinking and the slowest to truly adapt.
As a case in point, I saw a presentation by a very capable editor who works for a local public utility last night explaining why their shop is NOT moving to FCP-X. Bottom line? With their X-SAN infastructure, they’ve had to REMAIN on (wait for it…) FCP 6!!! purely for compatibility issues. He was very well versed in X as their shop was a beta seed site – and he could clearly see and articulate both great advantages and disadvantages to it’s deployment – but only from a perspective where change was functionally IMPOSSIBLE in his shop given his facility constraints.
Just different perspective.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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