FCP X Six Months Later – Blog Post

[Chris Harlan]

Bill, I agree with many of your assessments, but to me they argue in favor of 7 and not X.

[Bill Davis]

I get that this has mad you angry. Anger is a useful human emotion, but generally most useful to the person who is stuck feeling it. It typically encourages us to change things so we don’t have to stay angry.

For everyone else it’s most functional as a signal that theres something bothering the person feeling it.

The big problem here is that the anger has been understood and well acknowledged for months now. Everyone here gets it. Thoroughly.

So the communications function job is well and truly done.

Now it’s becoming a bit self indulgent, IMO. The signal was sent. Mission accomplished. At some point the message changes to “see how superior my analysis STILL is… Or perhaps,” I’m obsessed with my anger and can’t move on.”

Neither is particularly useful, IMO.

But whatever.

“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’Connor

[Mark Morache]

Hmmmm…

Do I feel like I have a lack of control with Final Cut Pro X? Not a lot. There are many clunky things that I need to do now to make my edits happen, but I expect these are things that will go away as new versions come out.

I have 7 and X on my computer, and I keep coming back to X.

Art: Having FCPX on your resume is not getting you into any post house, network TV, or feature film set anytime soon.

I don’t believe this. What will get you a job is a great reel. If a post house sees a well edited reel from an applicant their first question may be “what did you edit this on” and when they say FCPX, I think the answer will be “You did THIS on THAT? You’re a better editor than I thought.” It’s not about the interface, it’s about the talent in orchestrating pictures, sound and emotion in a real time experience. If you can do that in iMovie, who really cares.

And if your only experience has been on FCX, then you’ve only been editing since June 23, 2011. That more than anything will keep you from getting hired.

Apple has a history of making the interaction between the user and the instrument a magically intuitive one. Remember the first time you picked up an iPod? That’s what FCX feels like for me. I can very easily sort and label and find things. I can edit nearly as fast as I think, and that’s a wonderful thing.

For me, that’s why I keep going back to it, even when the little details to finish the edits are taking me longer. Even though there are bugs in it. Even though it crashes more frequently than FCP7.

I trust they will keep working on it.

Yes, I have difficulty trusting Apple. They can fix that any time they want to, by simply communicating with us openly about where they are going. Are they silent because they are hiding the truth from us or because it’s just their way of doing things and they aren’t about to change that now. I don’t know, but I’m going to stay on the ride, because I’m excited about the future.

I hope they can change the universe with their $299 application, by giving me an awesome application that lets me have my creative way with my project, with as much finishing and polish as I care to put into it.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Craig Seeman]

[Bill Davis] “I get that this has mad you angry. Anger is a useful human emotion, but generally most useful to the person who is stuck feeling it. It typically encourages us to change things so we don’t have to stay angry.”

The big issue seems to be the inability for those who are angry to resolve it.
Warning lots of speculation that may offend some.
If moving on doesn’t resolve the anger then the thing that lingers is a poison, a cancer.

It may be they trusted a business when they shouldn’t have. Avid, Adobe, Discreet and on and on have all made, or threatened to make, product moves that raised the ire. Shortly after people made decisions about their future directions.

It may be they genuinely fear the potential popularity of FCPX in certain post workflows even if it’s a couple years down the road. Whereas some of use will be veterans, others fear they will be tossed into an alien and distasteful environment.

Maybe they fear that the broadcast/feature film niche is finding it harder to sustain developers with Avid having a tough time of it and Apple clearly taking a different approach to the industry altogether.

Remembering what Avid did around 2000 to Mac Avid users, with the risk of tends of thousands of dollars per seat, or, what Discreet did a few years later to those who used Edit*, the money stakes were much higher than the move from FCP7 to Avid or Premiere these days. Yet the anger festers. To me it seems disproportional to real world costs and even the learning curve.

If it’s simply “trust” then these editors must never have experienced this in their past post history (where such costs would have been much higher).

I can’t help but think there’s something else that bothers them. Something they’re not admitting to IMHO but “trust” doesn’t hold for me, assuming one has been around the post industry for a few decades . . . when changes in technology bankrupted companies. I haven’t heard of facilities closing due to the EOL of FCP legacy.

Something else is causing the anger IMHO.

[Craig Seeman]

[Herb Sevush] “Don’t you find it odd that Apple claims X will have all the functionality of Legacy and that it will be appropriate for the TV and Film industry? This has been Cupertino’s position since they released X, with the admonition that we would have to wait for third party developers to supply the missing pieces.”

Over the next few years both the TV and Film industry and well as FCPX itself will change. The two will meet again. It will take some time though.

I find it odd that TV and Film is heavily dependent on Avid which apparently hasn’t been able to make money (get out of the red) for five years and counting, with that industry’s heavy dependence.

So if TV and Film can’t support the one NLE company they depend on, it would be odd to base a business model primarily on those industries.

[Craig Seeman]

[Mark Morache] “Yes, I have difficulty trusting Apple. They can fix that any time they want to, by simply communicating with us openly about where they are going. Are they silent because they are hiding the truth from us or because it’s just their way of doing things and they aren’t about to change that now. I don’t know, but I’m going to stay on the ride, because I’m excited about the future. “

I think Apple has been communicating to the extent that there’s no competitive advantage in keeping something secret. They promised and began to implement XML support, promised multicam and broadcast monitoring. These don’t give FCPX any particular advantage. They’re “catchup” features. They wont want to reveal features, or even product direction more generally, that can influence competitors (and apparently Apple does consider Avid and Adobe competitors in the NLE space).

When a business chooses to communicate, or not, as the case may be, some tend to ascribe these as “personality traits” as we anthropomorphize businesses. They choose how to communicate as part of a business model which they believe will give them an advantage in the market place.

Certainly Apple’s business model creates problems for some, angst for other, but if Apple feels it works to their advantage in the market, they will continue to do so.

Some debate that it doesn’t communicate its roadmap has and will hurt Apple as business. I’d certainly guess that a bunch of suits in Apple talk about their public face and continue to do this because they still see an advantage the end user may not.

[Bill Davis]

[Herb Sevush] “Much of the fury and antagonism on this forum would vanish if Apple simply restated your position as their own. Why do you suppose they haven’t?”

Because it’s what a small sub-section of the small sub-section of professional editors want, but not what Apple feels it needs.

They own the product, they make the rules. Period.

They do not consult us, nor should they.

That’s not how companies win in the modern world. They’ve clearly proved this. Apple regularly markets products that nobody ever realized that they wanted. This is a world of hyper competition and instantaneous access to information. It’s not the same world where companies could make a good product in one decade and count on that to sustain an income flow for many future decades. Today, we ALL change our purchase patterns on a dime. Which means that any company can out innovate any other company and strip away market share. I spent a solid 15 years supporting Sony. Then they lost me. They were “out-innovated” by Canon. And if tomorrow Panasonic or Red or JVC, or Kawasaki has the best camera value proposition for what I need to do – they’ll get my money. That sucks for old style companies, but it’s how we all operate today.

Many here exemplify that. They’re pissed because the Mac Editing “brand” let them down. So they’re open to change. But HOW did the brand let them down? By innovating away from where they were. And risking that they would leave behind a chunk of the editors who aren’t as ready to change things.

Apple keeps innovating. They keep moving. They might move away from where you or I are positioned today – but maybe in doing so, they might actually move to where you or I need to be tomorrow. Nobody knows. That’s the exciting part.

If it’s true for more purchasers than it’s NOT true for – they win in the long run. Simple as that.

“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’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Chris Harlan] “Bill, I agree with many of your assessments, but to me they argue in favor of 7 and not X.”

As they will to anyone who’s in the class of “fully developed large, relatively complex and relatively expensive monolithic editing software” buyers.

Apple didn’t see that as the most important market of the future. But that doesn’t mean they think it’s un-important. Merely, IMO, that they think that if they “reinvent” the tool with a more modern focus – then let it grow and develop over time into something that builds on top of that “universality” with constant broadening and speciality use increases, then they get the best of both worlds. Software that is broad, modern and targeted.

Editing was increasingly becoming something done by massive swaths of people in the same way that word processing moved from the secretarial pool into the relm of “general purpose” software that is as attractive to the casual letter writer, as it is to an admin cranking out business correspondence for a “boss.”

I think the new FCP-X is a better tool for modern general purpose editing than Legacy was.

We’ll see if it also becomes a superior “special purpose” editing tool on top of that.

Only time will tell.

“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’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Mark Morache] “Yes, I have difficulty trusting Apple. They can fix that any time they want to, by simply communicating with us openly about where they are going. Are they silent because they are hiding the truth from us or because it’s just their way of doing things and they aren’t about to change that now. I don’t know, but I’m going to stay on the ride, because I’m excited about the future. “

The “silence” thing is interesting to me.

What are the potential downsides of such silence? Pretty much limited to “insecurity” on the part of upper echelon editors.

On the other hand, what are the potential upsides?

Let’s see. Off the top of my head some might be…

Keep competitive secrets more secure.
Keep the market guessing – which for Apple, has a history of building excitement for product launches and updates.
Maybe suppress “forward looking statement” hassles in financial markets.
And keep the coding team on task without having to deal with constant “explain where you’re going” meetings and presentations.

Sounds like a fair trade to me.

“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’Connor

[John Heagy]

My big trust issue with Apple is the way they launched an incomplete backward incompatible replacement for FCP 7 and at the same time killed FCP 7. In what universe does this make sense?

Three scenarios, and none are good.

1) Apple’s Pro Apps team actually believed FCPX was a valid replacement and that people don’t need to open old, even days old, projects.

2) Apple Pro Apps team knew that FCPX would be a nightmare for current FCP 7 users with any kind of collaborative workflows and simply didn’t care.

3) Apple Pro Apps team knew that FCPX would be a nightmare for current FCP 7users with any kind of collaborative workflows and wanted to keep selling FCP 7 and take the time to make FCPX backward compatible but were prevented by management.

I suppose #3 is the best scenario and maybe the huge backlash translated into a big “I told you so” from Pro Apps. If it was # 1 or #2 then I’ll let Bill Paxten sum it up…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY

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