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FCPX for the online editor
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “this is on a pretty large scale tho – apple provided comprehensive Q+A time with senior personnel for all the last major iOS revisions to allow for communication channels with developers – but for the entire dependent editing community, they chose broad scale blind side PR.”
Anybody they talked to about FCP was under NDA so I doubt anyone can assume they weren’t talking to some key facility personal.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “we are not here to be simply wowed, and even if the demo wasn’t for us, we surely deserve a quiet follow up to simply know what is going on”
I have been complaining that point for years, if Avid, Adobe, The Foundry or even I as a business treated the clients with such childish secrecy we would not have many clients. But Apple assumes they have more power than I think is safe for them to assume. It was ok when there was no alternative for £ or function but the gap is pretty well closed, in short, they had better have made FCPX an awesome product or they will loose their clients, I think from reading the blogs a lot have made plans to not be so dependant on an erratic supplier.
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nah – they’ve got me, I really can sort of see my future editor in that software, I’m going to sit down and eat the manual – I just think they could comport themselves better as a professional company with professional clients.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Roland Manuel] “It will definately make lunch for your clients, I saw it in over colourful glossy boxes, which will hurt my eyes to look at because they are all just too beautiful.”
People have been wondering what Apple has done with Siri
https://siri.com/
since purchasing the company that makes the app.Apparently you spotted the icon in the FCPX interface. Click on it and give it your order and the meal pops out of your SuperDrive (well they need to use that space for something if there’s no Blu-ray burner).
[Roland Manuel] ” I don’t even care if there’s no Color or Motion or compressor or even DVD studio”
Actually this is may be one reason why people have been asking open exporting to other tools in a high end post workflow that might include ProTools, Resolve, Nuke, etc.
Apple did say to someone after the SuperMeet that there is more to come. I strongly suspect that relates to a more complete post workflow. I too think Apple will have complete integration of the features found in most of the rest of the Suite but I do think they realize there’s professional need for professional export to other programs.
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[Roland Manuel] “or they will loose their clients, “
I don’t think many of those will be gone for long if Apple understands the industry as they well do.
I remember the resistance to Avid in 1989 because it had horrible compression at such low resolution you couldn’t see any details in the frame. I was editing linear for nearly a decade at that point and non linear on a laser disc based CMX 6000 for about a year. An Avid system was around $100,000 give or take and cost pennies compared to a full blown online room and about 1/3 the price of a CMX 6000. Avid won the war over linear and blew out the non linear competition.
In 1999 I remember Avid editors were resistant to Final Cut Pro as it was bereft of key features and cost about $1000. FCP market share has blown past Avid although it took a few years for the features to be developed enough to make the huge cost savings actually worth it.
It’s now 2011 and once again editors, even old guard FCP editors show some resistance. Once again the new toy on the block will gain traction and blow past the competition and go beyond the “old” FCP as well.
Apple has been good at what they do for over a decade in the NLE market and not only do they know where the industry is going, they have resources Avid didn’t have, and even Apple themselves didn’t have in 1999, to make it happen IMHO.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I just think they could comport themselves better as a professional company with professional clients.”
This is probably the one area where Apple is trying a new approach and they’ve hit some bumps along the way. Bouncing out the entire SuperMeet schedule when they only had a one hour presentation seems a bit odd. It certainly might impact the mood of the audience.
Additionally the historically secretive Apple has been trying a new marketing approach, still under development, for the last couple of years. It more or less seems to have begun with Steve Jobs answering his email. Apple went from complete silence with rumor opposition with calculated approaches to managing and propagating the rumor mill rather than outright opposition. They began to see rumors as another form of viral marketing. This change culminated with the “sneak peak” to End Users rather than an Apple Press event to the Media. Apple may not have anticipated “unanswered questions” leading to doubt rather than anticipation amongst many of those end users.
I think they’ll recover from it because, ultimately, judgement will be on whether Final Cut will meet or exceed people’s needs and expectations. Businesses, whether one person shops or bigger facilities, will determine whether it streamlines workflow, drives down overhead, expedites return on investment.
It’ll be interesting to see how the handle the “official” release event. Also we’ll see if they learn better how to handle the rumor/viral marketing which, in this case, should have better managed getting needed information into the professional market.
But my gosh, have you seen this much attention ever before for any not yet “officially” announced professional video product? The problem is a lot of it is not positive or even cautious optimism.
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Great points you make there, Craig. It’s actually kind of interesting to see what the response has been these last few days. Are they using that preview to gain online feedback and polish their product accordingly? Are they reluctant to release more info because they’re gonna wow us all over again with a presentation including Color X, Motion X and more?
The fact that this public display was produced, but not followed up by an updated Final Cut page on their webpage tells me we don’t really know the whole story. And I’m pretty sure Apple will release more info as soon as they’re ready. It’s just a couple of months, anyway. I’ll use that time to finally clean up my Mac Pro rig and set it up all over.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “see below – the feature request thread is pretty good, many participants.
on a personal note, I find it mind boggling that, in order to preserve mystique, apple are willing to literally torture an entire profession.”
Honestly, I think people are reading this in a rather screwy way, because of the sort of narrative that has built up over the last couple of years. According to that narrative, Apple was neglecting pro video because a) there had been no major Final Cut Pro update in a while and b) Apple couldn’t possibly care that much about pro video (or even the Mac) when they were selling all those iPhones.
But that narrative never made any sense. The lack of FCP updates was easily explainable by Apple quietly working on a major overhaul, which was what they obviously had to do at this juncture given the technical limitations of the old FCP, and which we now have confirmation is precisely what they were doing. Meanwhile, the “Apple can’t focus on more than one thing at a time” meme is bizarre nonsense that somehow never gets applied to other companies. Ever seen any handwringing about how Sony is going to neglect pro video cameras because PlayStations are selling too well? Me neither.
Well, despite the fact that the very existence of FCP X (arriving at about the time you’d expect if they’d started serious work on a major overhaul after shipping FCP 6) substantially undermines the case that Apple was ever actually neglecting this market, many people are still interpreting the entire FCP X announcement according to a mental framework in which Apple is neglecting this market, and picking at every little detail that could be read as supporting that. This has turned what was, based on the actual substance, an early announcement about a few interesting new features, into round after round of baseless speculation that anything Apple didn’t explicitly announce, no matter how basic and essential, might be on the chopping block.
Apple isn’t torturing people. People are torturing themselves. And it wasn’t, as far as I can see, Apple’s responsibility to design its announcement to comfort people who insist on torturing themselves.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.
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There was one huge positive for finishing mentioned in the sneak peek, and I really don’t understand why it’s not getting more attention. FCPX will have color management and a linear, floating point color space. FCP and QT’s total mismanagement of color and gamma has been a thorn in my side for years, and I’m hopeful that FCPX’s new color model will change all that.
A lot of people are making a lot of noise about the disappearance of numbered tracks. I hate to break out the cliché analogy, but I think this might be like asking Henry Ford for a faster horse. The sneak peak showed really pervasive use of metadata, so I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that there will be new ways to group clips which will entirely replace the notion and functions of numbered tracks. I’m trying to wait until June before I freak out that I won’t have any way to quickly turn off all graphics to generate a clean version of a video or output multi-channel audio.
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 -
[Bjarki Gudjonsson] “Are they using that preview to gain online feedback and polish their product accordingly?”
I certainly thinking Apple is paying attention to forums and blogs in the industry. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that a real part of the “radical change” is their approach to marketing (viral marketing and the rumor mills) started when Jobs started answering emails, knowing very well his responses would go all over the net.
I think they realized the best way to get a “full measure” is the “sneak peek” and see what happens. That they said it was a sneak peak, publicly stated that they were showing a BETA, even expressed the hope that it would work that night, makes it quite clear that what was being show was NOT FINAL.
The App Store distribution gives them a very different “final round” for the product then they’ve every had before. Without the need to replicate disks, print boxes, have the marketing material done before all that, distribution and shipping time, they can work on things up to just days before distribution.
In fact, this “viral” observation means they’ll already have a sense of what they need to work on for X.1 if they missed a demand for a key feature.
[Bjarki Gudjonsson] “The fact that this public display was produced, but not followed up by an updated Final Cut page on their webpage tells me we don’t really know the whole story.”
Yes, and there will likely be a “more formal” release event in the future. They’re probably banking on a lot of “Ah, Ha!” when many of the questions are answered at that event.
IMHO the really big shift in Apple is not simply the product but they’ve moved from “secretive” to “managed rumor” as a form of distributing information and gathering feedback. That doesn’t surprise me at all as it started with Jobs himself. It surprised me that in all the postings virtually NO ONE has caught this. That a “sneak peak” is very un Apple like historically UNLESS one considers that this has been an ongoing marketing transformation initiated by Jobs.
People don’t even seem to understand the price drop makes sense with the cut in their manufacturing and distribution costs, NOT simply “consumer” pricing. That this distribution model allows them to implement changes and updates lightening fast. Heck people don’t even get the Thunderbolt tie in although that was made clear by Apple at “sneak peek”
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