FCP X and the Tour de France

[Marcus Moore]

I’m curious to see if Apple does a UX revamp of ProApps to go along with OSX this fall. Apple has been quick to get ProApps onboard OS changes in the past- see the 10.0.5 update to FCP X to go along with the release of the Retina MacBookPro. Pretty much simultaneous if I remember correctly.

With all the ProApps now sharing a common design language, I wonder how that sort of shift is handled? Do they all just work from the same graphical asset toolkit, or could there even be an internal ProApps “Xcode”, making any global shifts across ProApps easier for all the teams.

[Charlie Austin]

[Marcus Moore] “Do they all just work from the same graphical asset toolkit,”

I believe they do. They pull some stuff from the OS UI kit, but the majority of it comes from either within the apps, or some sort of common repository. We can always look to iMovie for clues, but it’s more closely tied to the OS I think. I don’t imagine they’ll take it that far. Which means, of course, they will. 🙂

————————————————————-

~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Bret Williams]

I’m literally blown away at the Atlanta Cutters group. They literally look at X users as sub class. The barely even acknowledge it’s existence. But the connection between Motion and FCP X should be a huge discussion point. Instead it’s somewhat predictable. When the Adobe guys were there showing off CC 2014 (hey adobe I thought there weren’t going to be versions anymore?) everyone oohed and aaaahed over the ability to edit AE text from within premiere. A feature FCP has had for what, a decade and WITH drop zones? I guess if we could have a demonstration on publishing it might blow their minds. And if they saw rigging in action there’s no telling.

I figure rigging is likely the killer feature of AE 2015. Hopefully we’ll have send to motion back by then. That’s one of the 3 or 4 killer feature X needs to add to push them into the forefront. Roles has already been shown to be more versatile than tracks. so if the timeline remains the only excuse people have left, so be it.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bret Williams] “When the Adobe guys were there showing off CC 2014 (hey adobe I thought there weren’t going to be versions anymore?) “

Adobe never said versioning was going away. In fact Adobe employees openly talked about versioning. The vanishing of versioning, like the idea that Photoshop et al would now run ‘in the cloud’ like Google Docs, was bad information, born out of ignorance, that was passed along as gospel because, well, it’s the Internet and on the Internet there are some people that think Steven Spielberg killed a triceratops.

[Bret Williams]

And they trust Adobe that actually DID ditch the Mac platform for about what 4, 5, 6 years? And Avid who was about to ditch the Mac platform until they heard wind of FCP 1.0. Apple half got into this business because they could no longer trust that the companies that they helped thrive, would continue to produce software for their platform. Office and IE were always lagging behind their counterparts, so out comes Safari, Pages, and Numbers.

And out of the 3 As, I’d have to say that X is the most professional looking. I guess Resolve looks like a toy now too?

I’ll rehash my image I posted at some point-

[Steve Connor]

[Bret Williams] “And out of the 3 As, I’d have to say that X is the most professional looking. I guess Resolve looks like a toy now too? “

That should stir the pot nicely

No sig on my posts as it’s apparently very old fashioned

[Bret Williams]

Well they did copy the interface look pretty much to the letter. But maybe people do think it looks like a toy. There are those that aren’t completely excited about resolves focus on x.

[Bret Williams]

I guess I was more focusing on Adobes continual talk that the cloud will be better because you’ll get the updates as they’re available, not in the big yearly updates. But really not much has changed. When I had the boxed set, we got a number of updates throughout the year over the internet. There’s nothing about CC that empowers that any more or less. True, they did have a couple larger than usual releases, but that was adobes choice. There’s no reAson they couldn’t have done that before. And of course a year later the big feature up came as 2014. In fact, the features were demoed and teased months before 2014 was released. IOW we had to wait for the big yearly release. So there’s nothing new except the payment structure. The rest is hype. No reason it couldn’t have been a boxed set with a separate CC subscription for the syncing, fonts, etc.

[Ryan Holmes]

[Bret Williams] ” guess I was more focusing on Adobes continual talk that the cloud will be better because you’ll get the updates as they’re available, not in the big yearly updates. But really not much has changed. When I had the boxed set, we got a number of updates throughout the year over the internet. There’s nothing about CC that empowers that any more or less.”

Bret, just to be clear – with the boxed set (CS4, CS5, CS6) the updates that were pushed were for bug fixes, not new features. This past year Adobe has added features along side of bug fixes for nearly all apps (print, photo, and video). And this has been discussed at length over in the Adobe debate forums. Just to make you aware the change that is created by Adobe (and others, Apple included) moving their software to cloud delivery is largely tied to the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation (or SOX) which has had unintended consequences for software developed (I’m assuming untended here as the legislation happened in the wake of major corporate accounting scandals – Enron, Tyco International, WorldCom, Adelhia, etc.). Walter Soyka has written numerous posts about this and provided a pretty good explanation on why Adobe’s CC model is a justifiable move for Adobe to make to try to add more value to their customers more quickly. Here’s one from earlier this year: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/378/6600

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Bret Williams]

I know nothing of lawsuits and accounting, etc. But that doesn’t really matter to the consumer. What obviously matters is the extra cost/profit. Now I’m all for profit. And as an Adobe shareholder it’s been great. But as an Adobe user, I’ve taken a pass after 2 years of CC. The first, with CS6, provided zero major updates during the year. Yes, CC had a decent .1 update. As did Adobe products in the past. Like I said before, just making it a subscription model doesn’t prevent Adobe from distributing updates when they feel like it. Unless that’s part of the accounting scandal you speak of. Not sure you’re old enough to remember, but the .1 update was a frequent trend wit Adobe in it’s earlier days, even before web distribution. AE 3.1, 4.1 were big updates that came around 6 months after the .0. We’re talking late 90s now, just to date myself. There may have been a minor charge just because they actually mailed out a manual update along with new discs and even a dongle possibly.

All that aside, my beef with CC is the cost. As a small company, working internally mostly, I don’t always need the latest greatest. But I do use the whole gamut of Adobe stuff from print to web to video to animation. When CS6 came out I was on the Master Collection CS5. 5.5 wasn’t enough of an upgrade to warrant the $500 bucks or whatever it was. Might have been more I don’t remember. And when CS6 came along they were offering the subscription to budge holders for $30/month. Considering the box set upgrade was along the lines of $600 I went for the nearly half price subscription. But then you’re stuck. I can’t upgrade my CS5 serial to CS6 now as that serial upgrade has been used for the 1 year cheap CS6 subscription. So I continued on with CC for a year at full price. So now I’m stuck in the loop of spending $600 a year whereas I’d previously update the master collection every other version, costing on average half as much per year. And that’s for someone holding the master collection. Someone using only 2 or 3 apps from say the production bundle could update every year for much less than the current $600/year price tag. And if they were ever in a bind they could just make due with an old version for years and years.

But that’s all been beaten to death. it’s pretty obvious that CC is no biggie for corporations that were master collection and updating every year. Features come quicker/easier, there’s some cloud stuff, you can install on separate systems and turn them on/off. You can have it on PC or Mac. It’s nice, sure. But the downside that mostly affects the small business or the individual hobbyist is the huge extra cost and the life lock-in if you want to be able to open your CC projects in the future. If nothing else it’s a “fee” to rent a single app for a month just to open some old project for consolidating and housekeeping. it’s a tremendous revenue stream for Adobe, but they’ve certainly left the smaller companies and individuals to either scrape up hundreds and hundreds more a year or to find alternatives. As a user of FCP X, I’ve found my alternatives. Motion for all new projects. It’s integration is far superior anyway for now. And CS5 for any PS and Ai needs. I’ve got iDraw and Pixelmator as well because I don’t count on CS5 functioning too much longer. If I have to revisit a CS6 or CC project I pay by the month.

So the whole Motion/FCP X/3rd party solutions route so far cost about $460 for life. Unless Apple changes their app store update pricing (free) policies. But it’s been 3 years for X/Motion/Compressor and iDraw and PixelMator likely won’t be charging for any major updates any time soon either. I suggest cutting to the Adobe cord if one can. For me it’s an experiment. Last year I spent $600 on Adobe. Many months I didn’t need them. Thery’re still installed and ready to go if I need them in a matter of minutes. I won’t be losing any work over it. But I’m going the month to month route and need them less than I thought.

/rant