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New rumor: Apple to abandon FCPX
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The source these guys are quoting is the same one that nailed what was going on with FCP X over a year ago. Still, tweezers.
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Actually, I’ve been thinking for a few days that Apple may have completely missed the boat on this release and pricing structure. They seem to honestly have thought they were introducing a professional application which would appeal to the pro market and therefore pull the YouTube set into the fold. As it turns out, the pros aren’t interested, and with the negative press it’s quite possible that the YouTube set isn’t that interested in spending $300-400 dollars on something that looks suspiciously like their freebie iMovie.
This release could go the way of the DoDo bird, if sales aren’t what Apple expected. I’ve seen mention of 5 million units moving, and I’m not sure that’s going to happen. For a pro, $400 bucks isn’t that bad. For a kid, it’s a lot of money. If the pros aren’t hyping the holy hell out of how cool the program is, and instead are bitching about how much it lacks, then what’s to inspire that kid in the basement to cough up his hard earned grass-cutting money to buy this thing?
And if the pros aren’t buying, then what 3rd party developer is going to put serious effort into it? It’s a chicken and the egg situation here. To answer Chris Kenny, no, I don’t think that is so outlandish a thought. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the price drop to $99 soon as a more reasonable upgrade to iMovie, so the amateurs will be more interested, and the pros can finally just leave it behind.
Chris
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If Aperture is any example, the price will drop to $79 after awhile. Aperture was $299 at first. And it is definitely a souped up iPhoto is the same respect that this is a souped up iMovie. Now it’s $79.
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I think that pretty much says it all, Tom.
bigpine
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[Keith Rocheck] “True, but when you consider how far the iMac has come and how powerful it is would you not agree that companies are buying more of them for production work in place of the Mac Pro than they would have … 5 years ago? Keep that trend up for 5-10 more years.”
Sure. I mean, eventually towers will be about as common as refrigerator-sized computers currently are. But that will be because practically nobody, even high-end video pros, really needs them.
With Apple’s characteristic timing, they’ll get rid of them early enough to cause people to freak out, but not so early that people more interested in getting their jobs done than in freaking out won’t be able to so do.
[Keith Rocheck] “Thunderbolt does not change all that much. Reality check here, and I’m being serious, one Thunderbolt port is the equivalent of a single PCIe x4 slot. I can’t put a high end graphics card on that. I can’t put anything better than a 2x4Gbps fiber channel card on that, not even 1x8Gbps. Most professional I/O are PCIe x4, but use a hefty amount of the bandwidth in those 4 lanes. Notice how none of the Thunderbolt I/O devices manufactured by BMD and Matrox have loop outs? The iMac has two of these ports, but reality is that they need at least 1-2 more and that still is not the same. We need at least one connector that gives a full 16 lanes before I’ll give in to iMacs and MBPs being suitable to living in an edit bay. Offline … have at it.”
A single Thunderbolt port should provide the bandwidth to stream uncompressed 1080p or 2K in off of a RAID and send it out via a video interface. Remember, it’s full-duplex, and these two operations move data in opposite directions. Oh, and it should be able drive an external 30″ display at the same time as well, over the other 10 Gbps channel (there are two on each port).
About the only thing that really needs 16x slots are GPUs, and even that’s mostly only necessary for slinging large textures around in 3D games. The kind of GPGPU processing done by Resolve or FCP X presumably just needs to send a stream of uncompressed video to the GPU and get a stream back.
Honestly, iMacs seem pretty plausible in editing bays already, if they’re strictly editing bays. Tools like Resolve might need a few more years.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Conlee] “Actually, I’ve been thinking for a few days that Apple may have completely missed the boat on this release and pricing structure. They seem to honestly have thought they were introducing a professional application which would appeal to the pro market and therefore pull the YouTube set into the fold.”
About the only argument along such lines that makes any sense is the “FCP X proves Apple doesn’t care about pro users” argument. Yes, if Apple really doesn’t care about pro users, they’ll leave key features out of FCP X forever, and it will never be successful in the pro market. But I think there are clear indications that argument is wrong (which I’ve listed off many times at this point), and that doesn’t seem to be the argument you’re making here.
Assuming you agree with me that Apple intends FCP X to be a pro app, and will continue expanding the feature set to make it suitable for high-end workflows, I don’t see how you can reasonably say, ten days after its release, that the high-end market has permanently rejected it. If FCP X has solid support for high-end workflows in a year or two, most people will barely remember any of this noise.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Bret Williams] “If Aperture is any example, the price will drop to $79 after awhile. Aperture was $299 at first. And it is definitely a souped up iPhoto is the same respect that this is a souped up iMovie. Now it’s $79.”
Apple dropped the price of Aperture when they put it in the App Store. Apple drops the price of everything when they put it in the App Store, presumably on the theory that it makes it so easy to buy software that they’ll make more money lowering prices and going for volume.
FCP X already has App Store pricing; there is no particular reason to expect pricing to drop further in the foreseeable future.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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As I said, it’s a chicken and egg scenario. If enough “pros” buy it to stimulate 3rd party development, it’ll grow. If short term acceptance is slower than anticipated, I don’t think it’s unlikely to see a drastic price drop and retargeting of Apple’s marketing to the tweeners.
I’d be curious to know how the sales volume jives with Apple’s expectations, thus far. My hunch is it’s not selling like they expected. Granted, it’s listed as the ‘top grosser’ but compressor is well down the list, and iMovie is still on the list. Says to me, the tweeners are the one’s buying, primarily.
Time will tell.
Chris
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I think the clear point here is that we should not have to wait for them to bring back features. It shouldn’t happen. Why can’t we open old FCP projects? I haven’t seen any indication that they will try to make this happen. Contrast that with Avid who has, except for color correction around the v3.5, v4 area, has maintained forwards and backwards compatibility in their product. Backwards capability can be meh depending on what you’re doing, but its there.
The only thing close to this travesty is Adobe re-writing Audition for inclusion in Creative Suite and not supporting Audition 3 and older projects. That’s the same non-starter for me.
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[Chris Conlee] “As I said, it’s a chicken and egg scenario. If enough “pros” buy it to stimulate 3rd party development, it’ll grow.”
What are we talking about, that Apple is really relying on third parties for? OMF? Already done. Hopefully someone will do it more cheaply once the APIs go public, but there’s already an option. EDL? The idea that FCP X is going to be so unpopular that nobody will bother to write an EDL export app seems rather hard to believe. Video I/O support? AJA already has a beta. I’m sure once Apple has APIs that allow for real video I/O, AJA and Blackmagic will be there. Deck support? There are already third-party apps for this; they’ll obviously take steps to work with FCP X to the extent that that’s useful.
I really don’t see a huge chicken/egg problem with ecosystem support here.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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