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One year later…
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The only reason apple will ‘care’ about the top end pros is because of association. I bought a mac and FCP when I started because the top end pros were using it and I could afford it. I knew of avid from my time in TV but FCS offered too much at a good price and had been pre validated.
And not just by the Leverage team.
Apple care about money. If they cared about The industry they would form a little ProApps offshoot that could even run at break even and could have delivered FCS and Pro Macs forever. Even at a small loss it would have been sensible and its not like they couldnt hire in more coders to do it: there aren’t a finite amount of them.
Apple is where it is because of the iDevice purple patch they hit, but part of that is the association with the creative sector. I would say a high percentage of people associate Apple with creative professionals.
They have started damaging that association now. it will falter further as time passes. apple will be superseded by others in people’s perceptions of who are associated with professional creatives. and then Apple just won’t be as cool.
so sure, they want the world to believe they care about the professional creatives. They want the world to associate them with the professional creatives. And yep, some professional creatives will love their iPhones and iPads. But believing they care about the professional market is folly my dear little blinded chums. They’ll keep pretending they do because they want that association. And you’ll keep trotting out specs and possibilities and theories and beliefs of what and where and how glorious it will all be, but the cold hard truth is they care about the middle classes disposable income. Stephen Fry espousing the aesthetic beauty of the iPhone 4 is far more knicker wetting to them than Walter Murch going ‘meh, it’s not as shit as it was’.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “for sure, you swim in different scale facility waters – we’re more darting our gaze madly in all directions –
Although nicely, everyone seems to be holding out choccie bars and profoundly better software? “
Profoundly! Yeah, maybe. It is true, a person can’t resist the choco bars being handed out around now.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “it does feel like Adobe are stepping up in a particularly serious way – and with clear meaning and intent. Thank God frankly.
that adobe guy who was demoing at Nab on fresh DV- he was making camera eye contact as often as he could when he was outlining the scale of change in the app. right down to the nitty gritty, like footage in use indicators in the bin, scrubbing IO set clip methodology in the bin etc.
nevermind the new trim architecture.
You have to feel Adobe are palpably serious here. And the only way they make money is if we buy the thing.”Adobe’s communication is commendable. There is no joking about that. It is quite obvious they are listening intently. Can’t wait to see what they do with it.
My fear with any company is that they try and go to FCP7 like. FCP had some great strengths, but at the same time, it could have been much better and needed major improvements. I would hope that any company moves forward in a confident direction. Not every NLE has to be like FCP7, and it shouldn’t be.
As has always been said, the best NLE would be a mixture of all of them.
Jeremy
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[Andrew Richards] “I think it is unfair to say Apple isn’t listening. They aren’t talking (much), but they insist they are listening.”
I hate beating a dead horse, but one could argue that if they were listening, we’d be able to keyframe the ColorFX. It’s been asked for everywhere since 10.0 and it still isn’t even listed for delivery in 2012…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “my thing is: I basically agree that, having drifted out of telly into any old thing, this kind of broader creative interflow is, I think, likely to be rather big going forward: am I mad in thinking that, for a large sector, if PPro proves an easy stable swallow, a lot of us are quite likely to find ourselves walking into Adobe Premiere town?”
When the dust settles and we look back in retrospect, I think we’ll see that Apple did (inadvertently) a really good thing for this part of creative world.
They gave “David” a chance to get a slingshot and rock. Whether Apple responds/recalibrates in a way that makes FCP the real deal or Adobe comes to the rescue of the professional community, Apple has set up some genuinely high drama in a usually stable, geeky corner of the world.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Adobe’s communication is commendable…. Can’t wait to see what they do with it.”
I think one can see pretty clearly what they have done with it – it looks pretty damn good? there’s a beta tester down the thread saying 6 is as solid as a rock, it has avid scale trimming tools, FCPX bin scrubbing (with a viewer), genuine USP tasties like warp stabiliser (don’t you just love that thing? for promos?)
I have been pretty consistently rooting for it, but I don’t actually think this release requires rooting for. The toolset is ferocious, its 64 bit, cross platform, its opening into CL..
so say as an editor – he said grandly… your concerns would be asset acquisition, management and categorisation, timeline/modal trimming for story and output no?-
this thing dynamically trims as well as Avid, say the people who actually know what they are doing, I know I can operate in the timeline as I have in FCP, and instead of being in FCP, I’m in a kissing cousin of AE and PS?
But, the thing I find genuinely interesting about all this, is that adobe look to have analysed and fully replicated Avid’s renowned dynamic trim workflow, in a heavily compressed competition driven timeframe.
And this after ten years of Apple completely failing to do anything like the same.
I never knew, until I saw the full Avid demos a few months ago, how obviously critical dynamic trimming could be, and.. it’s interesting to say the least, that Apple never got it together in ten years, the current incarnation X with the precision trimmer has nothing like it, in fact worse, given the conflict between the skimmer and the timeline marker, the play forward, slap spacebar stop to mark doesn’t work to my understanding?
bottom line: Adobe put an entire best in class editing trim architecture together quick smart for uncomplicated, competitive reasons.
If I’m going to be a prisoner with a dilemma as Hurd has put it – as an editor, I would far, far sooner be a prisoner of Adobe than Apple.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Jim Giberti] “When the dust settles and we look back in retrospect, I think we’ll see that Apple did (inadvertently) a really good thing for this part of creative world.
They gave “David” a chance to get a slingshot and rock. Whether Apple responds/recalibrates in a way that makes FCP the real deal or Adobe comes to the rescue of the professional community, Apple has set up some genuinely high drama in a usually stable, geeky corner of the world.”
yes. this rather.
I’ve never felt like more of a consumer as an editor – as you say – whatever way one cuts it, Apple have ended up unleashing direct consumer market forces across professional media editing to an unheard of degree.
And then strike out their own turf with X.
I refuse however, to say that they could be playing 3D chess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaMf4cb-tAc
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “so say as an editor – he said grandly… your concerns would be asset acquisition, management and categorisation, timeline/modal trimming for story and output no?- “
From the demos, Adobe has done a fine job. The amount of listening and public communication is unprecedented, in as much as I can remember any NLE company to be. Production, at it’s very nature is collaborative and Adobe is collaborating as much as they can, I would imagine.
Warp stabilizer goes beyond shiny demos. It’s awesome. I’m glad to see it in premiere.
Dynamic Link is also very very good.
My guess is Speedgrade will need some more time in the oven to get fully interacted in the suite, but it will be useful at first, and get better.
As Oliver Peters said, these types of very creative and useful features are where Adobe simply excels.
Whenever a new workflow or piece of gear crosses the desk, I always take it through an entire workflow. Input, organize, edit, collaborate, collect finished assets, conform (a big deal), then master to multiple formats, mostly file, but sometimes rs422 layoffs, then archive. Then the proof happens and I restore it on another machine.
This is the type of testing where the rubber meets the road. I want to see what happens when dynmaicly linked clips go offline and are asked to be restored on another machine. I want to see how xmls, OMFs and aafs work. I want to do the same for Smoke. From what I can gather, Smoke has no interchange out besides OMF and maybe EDL. Sure EDL is still useful, but it’s not very deep.
This crazy tapeless world is extremely deep.
Native format editing is awesome, but what about consolidation? How hard is it, how easy is it? How portable is it?
It seems these days that no project is ever finished. I need things to be flexible and restorable, and also collaborative.
Adobe and Autodesk have my attention, now I need to see what they do with it.
Jeremy
*Edited as I typed this from my phone and missed a few things.
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[Andrew Kimery] “Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that plus other things that happened signals to me that Apple is targeting a different demo w/FCPX.”
See, I think this is the key point. People are assuming that because FCP 7 had these high-end features and 10.0.0 didn’t, it means Apple’s focus has shifted, presumably with long-term implications for high-end users.
But I think people may be misjudging what FCP’s primary target market actually was. What if FCP has always been primarily targeted at the wider world of video editing, and the main reason it had high-end features 10.0.0 lacked is some combination of the fact that a) it had been in development for long enough for Apple to get around to lower-priority niche market features and b) it was actually an outside acquisition in the first place, meaning even the 1.0 release might not have fully conveyed Apple’s focus?
If this is true, it stands to reason that if Apple’s focus managed to produce a tool that met the needs of high-end users last time around, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do so again.
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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 Kenny] “If this is true, it stands to reason that if Apple’s focus managed to produce a tool that met the needs of high-end users last time around, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do so again.”
When/if it does how many of the high-end users are going to be the market to switch NLEs… again? And why toss the baby out with the bathwater on the rebuild if that’s a market you want to keep? If FCPX didn’t ship with Import from iMovie or Share to CNN iReporter I don’t think anyone would’ve raised a fuss over those missing features at launch.
For a long time I’ve wondered about Apple’s commitment to the higher end of the market. They buy Shake, they kill Shake. They make an exclusive deal w/RED and they do nothing with it. Color, Final Cut Server… it’s like Apple wants that feather in their cap but they don’t want to do the demanding, end-user-centric work in order to get it. Ron Brinkman even said that when Apple purchased Shake all user input was basically severed.
I’ll try and find the link, but I remember reading an interview w/one of the guys that worked on FCP during the early days (like v1.0 early days) and he was surprised when the project lead said the goal was to get Avid. Obviously they couldn’t go from nothing to king of the hill over night but that was the long term goal. To go toe to toe with Avid.
Maybe that still is the goal but they are going to do it by building a more profitable business as opposed to building a better product. 😉
For better or for worse Avid and Adobe need higher-end users so, as long as there is competition, those companies will cater to those higher-end users. Apple, for better or for worse, doesn’t need higher-end users so they’ll keep doing whatever it is they want to keep doing. If higher-end users like it, I’m sure Apple will be glad to sell it to them. If higher-end users don’t like it I’m sure Apple will be glad to sell to the wider market that does.
-Andrew
2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5) -
[Herb Sevush] “Walter Biscardi dropped FCP within 6 months of the release. Bunim/Murray also switched within the year.”
I know, I guess I worded that badly. I meant they weren’t the ones proselytizing in the weeks following June 21 insisting that Apple had clearly signaled its intent and that anyone not throwing their Macs and iPhones on the bonfire was a fool. They just made business decisions and told us all about it.
Best,
Andy
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