More Napkin Numbers? (FCPX Units)

[Richard Herd]

[Tim Wilson] ” scale that The Legend of FCP never was”

That means, we’re just waiting for the movie — the one edited in X — that generates the halo effect. We should all really be downloading Final Draft and reading Syd Field.

[Tim Wilson]

[Richard Herd] “That means, we’re just waiting for the movie — the one edited in X — that generates the halo effect. “

I think the halo is already there, provided by Apple itself. If you don’t see what you need, no number of features being made can make up for the features you need that are missing.

To put it another way, Cold Mountain was the halo project that some people needed as validation of the faith that they were increasingly putting into FCP. It said to them, “C’mon in, the water’s fine.” For all that the FCPX halo is tarnished for a lot of old users…albeit shining back up for many others…it’s inconceivable to me that, short of giving away ponies or puppies, Apple can possibly make itself more attractive to the extended audience Apple wants to draw in with X.

For the record, I don’t actually believe that Cold Mountain provided that much of a halo. Anybody who took a closer look saw that it was a terribly convoluted workflow that was primarily organized around index cards, Filemaker, and a dedicated crew to wrangle FCP that was bigger than the movie’s entire editing team. Cold Mountain’s workflow was a nightmare, and did a lot to keep FCP AWAY from film production for several more years.

The halo was provided by you folks here in the COW, a far vaster FCP community than every other one combined, who helped each other see that FCP actually worked for the kind of jobs that most people actually do. You helped each other see that it was far more useful for far more work than it was actually even initially intended for. Widespread adoption would have happened even more quickly without Cold Mountain muddying the waters.

As I think about it, I think that some of the same dynamic contributed to the development of X. The Legend of FCP was developed by looking at existing professional nonlinear workflows, and quickly improving them and, more importantly, extending them.

So now Apple was looking at 2 million+ registered users who were extending that extension out even further. The largest part of these users was trying to do things that legacy NLEs were never intended to do, as the notion of “professional video” was exploding.

Yeah, traditional professional production has expanded, but the percentage of legacy NLE-style users has been rapidly shrinking relative to the new nucleus of FCP users for nearly the entire lifespan of The Legend of FCP. To get to the next TEN million users, TWENTY million users, Apple had to extend the extension being pushed by new users who had been enticed by Apple’s original extension to believe that this thing could do anything — which wasn’t remotely true. Apple knew it needed to start actually BEING true.

This is why Apple has so regularly blown up their existing customers to start over. Customers inevitably innovate faster than companies can — but Apple regularly, and understandably, wants to get out in front again, and remarkably, has the brass ovaries to do it.

In The Legend of FCP’s case, they saw customers moving more quickly than their own ability to refine — and in fact refinement had become a mug’s game. That’s why The Legend of FCP had been largely unchanged since 2005. The two biggest features added since then — multicam (2005) and ProRes (2007) — were copies of features that had been around for years (ProRes was virtually identical to Avid DNxHD, introduced 4 years earlier), with very nearly zero added to The Legend in 2009. I don’t think that that little movement qualifies as refinement. It certainly doesn’t count as innovation. YOU were innovating at lighting speed compared to Apple’s increasingly calcified pace.

The only way for Apple to even catch up with YOU, much less to be DRIVING innovation instead of dragging it down, was to throw everything else overboard. Racing against the wind, the most precious cargo becomes ballast.

That’s why I don’t think Apple is looking for a halo project. Look at their website and outbound marketing. The halo is provided by the Apple computer itself. X is just one more cool thing you can do with your new laptop while you’re waiting for Siri to show up. They’ve otherwise all but abandoned the concept.

You know what you’re waiting for, and it’s not based on anyone else doing anything else. You’re way, way past that. You need X do what YOU need it to do, and if you adopt it, it will be far more based on what you read here than in the Hollywood Reporter or at Apple.com, or see in a movie theater.

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

The typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.