Final cut X A Diamond in the rough

[Scott Witthaus]

All due respect Rohan, but isn’t this blog post about 3 years too late? And my personal observation was that Premiere benefitted the most from the FCPX intro-debacle, not Avid.

Anyway, thanks for sharing. You can scroll back through the history of this forum for LOTS of opinions about FCPX! 🙂

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Noah Kadner]

It’s funny to read ‘change is hard’ as an opinion now that FCPX is 5+ years old. Guess we’re talking at the speed of glacial erosion.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops
XinTwo – FCPX Training

[Shane Ross]

This part:

“This all changed in 1999 as Apple computers launched Final Cut Pro. This was a non-linear editor that let you do a bit of online too. It streamlined the whole editing process. FCP too was met with a lot of scepticism and nobody wanted to learn the new software. But then it slowly grew on the editors and most Studios, Channels and production houses used FCP. A few films too were edited on FCP.”

This is not why FCP grew very popular, very quickly. You could online in Avid too…for YEARS before FCP came out. Avid Symphony and DS were out before FCP 1. No, what made FCP so popular were a few things:

1) Cost. It was $1000. You could edit your films for $1000. Avid at the time cost $65,000-$125,000. Media 100 was a bit better, but still in the $10,000 range. Those of us working on independent films need to either rent an Avid, for A LOT of money, or beg/plead/bargain with the production companies we worked at to use the Avid at night. And we needed to shell out a lot of money for our own storage. But then FCP hit the scene, and it was cheap. Now we could buy it and run it on the Mac we already owned, or could get cheaply. CAPTURE VIDEO VIA FIREWIRE! WOW! BEfore that you needed spendy Avid cards. Now, shoot DV, or telecine your film to DV and bam, capture via firewire and you are ready to go! Or get a DV converter box. Suddenly you had a large crop of Avid editors who cut features and broadcast TV shows who were also cutting with FCP, because we had side projects and short films we were doing. We learned out of necessity. I can tell you, we all thought the interface looks a bit Fisher Price…and the funny thing it, IT NEVER CHANGED. it remained the same. BUT, well all go to using it. WE WANTED TO LEARN IT…because we could cut our projects with.

2) Cost. Yes, another COST reason. Now there was this NLE that didn’t cost $65,000 that production companies could now BUY and OWN…or rent REALLY REALLY cheap. Because of that major cost savings, a lot of places jumped on this…starting with commercial and trailer houses, and then TV…and then film. But it didn’t start really migrating until FCP 3…when capture hardware came out for it…MATROX, ICE…so we could now connect to professional decks. And then Digital Film Tree developed a tool to help Murch cut COLD MOUNTAIN with this…that tool because CINEMA TOOLS. And then FCP 4.5 came out, and you could capture HD via firewire! DVCPRO HD! It was when Production companies bought and started using FCP 3 and up that it was forced on some editors who hated it…most still do. But it really REALLY took off because a very large group of editors already knew it, because they cut their own stuff with it…and kids in film school were learning it, so you had this new crop of editors coming in that new it, alongside the many old guard that knew it.

3) Streamlined the process…yes this did happen. Suddenly you could capture without ANY compression many HD formats, DVCPRO HD, HDV…and then make titles with Motion, send to COLOR, go back to FCP and add your titles. Rather than onlining in Avid, outputting to tape, color correcting tape to tape with DaVinci, capture back into Avid to add titles, then output to tape again. Although you could still grade in Avid Symphony, it wasn’t as good as other options…still isn’t, which is why those other options existed.

But it all boils down to cost. That’s what drove Avid to drop the cost of it’s software. That’s what revolutionized the NLE and how it skyrocketed to popularity. New filmmakers had access to editing tools, older filmmakers had access to editing tools. And this all happened during the DV revolution as well, so you had a LOT GOING ON!

But then Apple dropped the ball with FCX…big time. At least in the professional film and TV world. FCX is a MAJOR force in most other aspects of editing. FCP 7 required all sorts of professional know how and conversions…FCX did away with all that, you didn’t need to convert stuff, or it could do it in the background. You didn’t need to know lots of workflows…it made things easier for new editors to learn…and for expansion in other markets that was really really needed. Apple dropped the professional Film and TV market, for the much larger editing marketplace…wedding, corporate, web, realty, new filmmakers. Film and TV account for 2% of content creation. And it is still the most popular NLE out there…selling over a million (if not two million) copies. Avid is in the 200,000 range…not sure where Premiere is.

FCX bungled the release so bad that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of many of the people who were the champions of the original FCP. We were burned…and it’s tough to see past that. Avid burned us too, and it’s taken us a LOT to trust them again, but they have earned it, and continue to earn it.

FCX’s growth in the pro TV and film market will be VERY VERY slow compared to FCP Legacy. The conditions aren’t the same. There is not longer the same need for really cheap software in this arena. We have it. WE have access to the tools we need. And Premiere is similar enough to FCP Legacy, and Avid, that we can use that if we want…we don’t need to learn a whole new way of doing things. And FCX still doesn’t offer slick solutions to situations where Avid excels (multiple editors on one project)…it’s close to the way it was done on Legacy.

So that’s why FCX is so slow to break into the FILM/TV market. It doesn’t fulfill needs we have. The current tools do what we need. Yes, FCX can do some things better…but many of us don’t feel they are enough to justify spending months learning FCX’s interesting language, and unique way of doing things. It is happening, we all know this. But it won’t happen in the same time as it did with FCP legacy…it might take another 10+ years…if that. Apple doesn’t seem to be interested in our market…it is happy with the “new markets’ and “new mediums.’ And those mediums are also poised to take over Film/TV…so when they take over, perhaps FCX will as well. (In order for FCX to work in a professional film/TV market, it needs to rely on a good half dozen or more third party apps to make it function properly. THAT is how interested Apple is in our market…)

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Scott Witthaus]

[Shane Ross] “THAT is how interested Apple is in our market…”

Shane, would you agree that film and tv editing could be considered a niche market? High profile, but niche?

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Shane Ross]

EVERY ASPECT OF PRODUCTION AND POST IS NICHE!

Wedding..niche
TV….niche
Realty…niche
Corporate video….niche
Feature film…niche
training videos….niche

Everything is niche. And yes, film and TV are high profile, niche. Yet interestingly, people who don’t cut film/TV always ask “what NLE is used to cut film and TV…I want to use that!” Instead, they should ask, “hey, what’s the best NLE for cutting what I’m cutting?”

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Andrew Kimery]

Just going to echo Shane’s point that cost was the thing. In the early 2000’s almost every post house I went into had a copy of FCP sitting on a computer in the corner because why not? It was too cheap not to try. I worked at a post place once which was Avid based, but when they first started doing HD they bought a FCP rig to do their HD onlines because it was so much cheaper than upgrading to Avid’s HD offering at the time.

If FCP would’ve been even remotely close to the cost of an Avid then very few people would’ve given it a shot.

[Shane Ross]

And one of the contributing factors is that Avid Adrenaline didn’t do 720p HD…which was one of the most popular HD formats at the time….DVCPRO HD. Only FCP did…thus why my big leap to FCP 4.5.

Sorry, I was in the middle of all this, which is why I know it so well…

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Michael Gissing]

The other factor was that so many editors bought their own copy of FCP and started using it that I was approached by a group of editors to start a post finish service based on FCP becasue they didn’t want to go into an Avid online and have to redo all the stills moves, flops, dissolve fx, plugins and supers/ titles/ credits.

So thats why I started with FCP4.5. Once Color appeared it made a pretty neat round trip process with decent grading tools. However I switched to Resolve before abandoning FCP7 as a finish tool. As everyone has said it was cost but also codec support and a strong ecosystem of built in and add on plugin FX.

[Scott Witthaus]

[Shane Ross] “EVERY ASPECT OF PRODUCTION AND POST IS NICHE!
“

OK, let’s go up a bit more. You can very roughly divide visual storytelling workflows between broadcast (or screened) and non-broadcast, correct? Of course, those line are blurring too. And one might assume that the non-broadcast market is far larger than the broadcast market (in terms of number of editors and systems)? If true, broadcast is a niche in the global visual storytelling market. Agreed? So, from a business standpoint, it made sense for Apple to try and capture the non-broadcast market (first) with FCPX. With recent releases, however, Apple seems to want to move into that broadcast niche.

More to the point, I don’t think Apple gave a shit about old editors like me doing commercial (broadcast) work 5 years ago at the X release (and seemingly confirmed that with the bungled release and EOL of Legacy). Capture the new editors with a totally new workflow (“damn, FCPX looks like the free iMovie I have on my computer”) and grow with that group. Sooner or later, they will be in all niches of visual storytelling. Not being a company that needs to sell NLE software to survive, Apple had the option to make such a radical change (the good and bad of that are still debated). Long term strategy while iPhones fund the company. Avid can’t do that, and Adobe would have a very difficult time trying this. Of course commitment by Apple is another issue…

[Shane Ross] “Yet interestingly, people who don’t cut film/TV always ask “what NLE is used to cut film and TV…I want to use that!” I”

Avid has used this “aspirational” marketing strategy for years and one only needs to look at stock price to see how well that has done for them. It’s not a smart strategy and certainly not a smart way to choose an NLE.

[Shane Ross] “Instead, they should ask, “hey, what’s the best NLE for cutting what I’m cutting?””

Exactly. What product solves the problem you have. For me, the solution is not the fact that some movie or doc was cut on a Media Composer. But pose the product as a solution (“I need to have multiple editors cutting in various locations and need to be able to output multiple formats for different screens and regions, etc. . What system solves this problem…”) and then you can more easily sell it.

Just my humble opine.

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Herb Sevush]

It is no easy task to reduce the 100 year history of motion picture editing to a blog post, and you got the basics correct even when your facts are questionable ( “It was the first film that introduced the art of editing to the world.” The Great Train Robbery is the first notable American film to introduce the idea of cross cutting, I don’t know that “the art of editing” started there.), however I think your missing how large the transition was between film editing and video linear editing (the two overlapped from aprox. 1975 to 1995.) It is also not quite right to describe film editing as linear – it is linear meaning slow, in that you cannot jump from one point to another instantaneously, but it is non-linear in that you can edit any where in the film without having to reconstruct everything that comes after. If you never had to deal with a linear on-line edit process than you don’t realize quite how backward that process was from film editing and how far forward we have come.

Also, historically, Avid was the 2nd NLE; the EMC2 was the first modern digital NLE and came out a few months before. And as for this line – ” I still rate the Avid as the best NLE for its stability, accuracy and purity” I have no idea what purity means in that sentence.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf