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Jeep Cherokees & Image is Everything
Ever notice how Jeep promotes their Cherokee line by singing the praises of it’s off-road ability, when maybe 5% of eventual buyers will ever need that feature?? It’s simple marketing….creating and selling an image.
Apple has established itself as a purveyor to Hollywood’s post-production workflow, and that’s quite an accomplishment, considering how many doors they had to break thru.
I think Apple is choosing a path here that is seriously misguided. Alienating the post production community is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Even if the real money is selling to prosumers, it’s in Apple’s best interest to at least foster an image of FCP being a professional application.
I’ve used the product since it’s inception — mostly for documentary / news-based type work. In the last 3-4 years in particular, I’ve found many aspiring media communicators buying FCP when all they really need is I-Movie. Why? They want to appear professional.
Loose your professional cachet, your risk your image going down the tubes.
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8 Replies
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This post does a great job of revealing a fundamental issue with the release of FCP-X and that is this question: do you want the same tool set as Walter Murch or that of your neighbor’s 14-year old kid?
Apple has spent a lot of energy the last few years showing the world (through marketing) that real filmmakers use FCP to accomplish real, high-end things. The Cohen brothers anyone? And now Conan O’Brien and his staff are mocking it. Sigh…
It’s hard to feel good about a product that releases with an “export to CNN iReport” coded before edl.
Loss of professional cachet? Check.
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That is genius – a very good analogy.
The fact that major feature films have been edited with FCP is great marketing. It’s the idea that if you wanted to edit a feature you could, that the software won’t be hold you back. Most never will, but it’s about striving, not about settling.
Meanwhile, Randy’s new home video editing paradigm is appealing to very few. It’s a marketing disaster at best.
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I was editing on my uncles Avid when I was 14 (yes, I know how lucky I am). By your reasoning though, that would make most editors unprofessional.
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But the fact remains that all the Final Cut Pro software ever sold and its attendant hardware are but a tiny drop in the bucket of Apple’s revenue, especially now. Therefore a choice like this is at worst for them penny wise…..and penny foolish. They probably spend more promoting the iPhone in France than all the revenue they get from editing-related products.
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[Ted Levy] “But the fact remains that all the Final Cut Pro software ever sold and its attendant hardware are but a tiny drop in the bucket of Apple’s revenue, especially now”
I don’t know how you can call this “fact”. Even the most conservative estimate of 1.5-2 million users x$1000 hardly seems like a “drop in the bucket”. I have been seeing your argument more often than not with never any substantial data to back that up. And even if it were true, the branding of their pro division would benefit far greater than any targeted marketing. Google loses an astounding amount of money on youtube (over a million a day by some estimates) but the branding and marketing from that ownership pays itself in dividends by their own admission.
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Everyone of those users had to have a little more RAM. A little better computer. A MacBook pro, or Mac pro. If the extra ram is sold by apple the profit margin there alone is equal to 5-10 iPod/iPhone sales alone. Add in graphics card upgrades and cinema displays sold to these folks committing to the whole apple ecosystem and the profits from Final Cut Pro was enormous. Apple is a hardware company. They make software to sell hardware, which is immensely more profitable for them. It drives everything they do. They make the best operating systems not so they can have them installed on Dells or HPs en masse. They do it so you’ll have to buy an (expensive) Apple. So why they have done this to FCP is currently baffling. It’s going to drive iMac sales. Not Mac pros or 27″ cinema displays, or expensive graphics card upgrades, etc. And if people look elsewhere like Avid or Adobe, then they are free to leave the ecosystem entirely.
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[Ken Zukin] “I think Apple is choosing a path here that is seriously misguided. Alienating the post production community is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Even if the real money is selling to prosumers, it’s in Apple’s best interest to at least foster an image of FCP being a professional application.”
I think it’s misguided to judge Apple’s intent from an initial release, given Apple’s history with this sort of thing. For instance, the first iPhone, with no Exchange support or third-party app support, didn’t look like much of a threat to RIM and Palm. But it was a serious mistake to believe Apple wasn’t interested in the enterprise market or in building an applications platform.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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