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“Or Not” was born of the FCP X Launch. So…
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[Andrew Kimery] ” Or am I misunderstanding you?”
Yes. You are.
Creator of XinTwo – http://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Wow, Just pushed the wrong button and my post in progress totally disappeared. Shoot.
Anyway, restarting…
[Oliver Peters] “To add further context to this, FCPX launched after a string of Apple withdrawals from the professional video space. This included the demise of Xserve, Xserve RAID, and Final Cut Server. Add Color to that, although that was part of the FCPX launch. Another data point, but a bit behind the scenes, was that Apple’s custom sales and support personnel, who serviced professional customers, were reassigned. Those services were turned over to resellers who did a far worse job. Plus the withdrawal from major industry shows, like NAB and IBC. So what sort of message do those things suggest?
“To me the message was that the “professional video space” was changing fast. And Apple wanted to get ahead of that.
Look at the landscape.
FAR fewer Broadcast stations making big hardware investments. Bye bye healthy indy TV and smaller operators buying broadcast gear – now a handful of Megalith media giants doing ALL the production and feeding it via satellite into local markets. In fact, your local TV station might not be doing ANY production anymore,.
Production companies with mega investments noticing that talented kids with camcorders can suddenly make pictures that are just as pretty as any others.
Laptops that do everything (and more) that yesterday’s tower could do regarding video production.
Huge “in house raids”once necessary for pro editing getting pressure from much smaller, cheaper, desktop solutions.
That’s not the whole picture, certainly, and LOTS of professional solutions are still needed. But everyone knows that instead of a pair of BVU series Cameras on the purchase order like the old days, a production concern can spend the same for A C-500, Maybe a PAIR of C-100s and half a dozen Panasonic DSLRs for the reporters.
Look back at what Apple shed. Stuff that’s pretty much ALL supplanted by new approaches.
Color? Selling color software for more than dinner and a movie money for two couples -(which sadly today might be a couple of HUNDRED bucks! ) is kinda tough.
Trade shows? When you get at best hundreds of thousands of eyeballs for a million dollar investment in a trade show – and Apple can get Millions for a webcast of WWDC or a product launch, the value proposition is kinda stark.
Again, the change wasn’t so much OF the industry – it was kinda imposed ON the industry. Parts of it, at least.
Who knows where it will wind up.
Creator of XinTwo – http://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[David Mathis] “I can choose what I need and go from there.
“Poppycock! – (laughing)
If the customer has been buying six packs of root beer for YEARS and is HAPPY – don’t ever make them switch to a new-fangled soda dispensing robot machine.
They’ll go NUTS and hate you.
Some months later…
“Honey, you want regular or diet, caffeine or caffeine free – lime, raspberry, cherry, or vanilla flavor in your soda?”
Creator of XinTwo – http://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “To me the message was that the “professional video space” was changing fast. And Apple wanted to get ahead of that.”
Well that’s a funny spin on it :). First of all, I don’t interpret Apple’s use of the “pro” moniker as ever meaning “for the professional”. Merely that it’s for the advanced user more so than the non-pro or “standard” user. Secondly, when Apple pulled back from these tools, they actually burned quite a few customers who were building businesses around Apple products in a certain configuration. That left a very bad taste, enough so that I’m personally aware of companies who put out the word internally that they would never accept any RFP that contained Apple items – hardware or software.
I think the change from the FCP Studio era to the FCPX era was a course correction made by either Jobs or Schiller. They probably felt that this trend was moving Apple into a direction that they didn’t want to go in so they pulled the reins in. So while X has many wonderful features for professional video users, I don’t think the target (outside of maybe the ProApps folks) is the professional video market. The target is much broader and if that overlaps with video pros, so much the better. (PS – add Aperture to the list.)
Color – that was a market they were building. I doubt money factored into the decision. Dropping it was another middle finger.
Trade shows – you are talking about mass appeal. I’m talking about a relationship with the industry. Two different approaches. Clearly Apple used to think they wanted a relationship, but obviously changed their mind. Given that, I think it’s pretty obvious why the industry reacted the way it did. As Walter Murch so famously said (paraphrasing): “I think Apple likes us, but I don’t know if they love us.”. 🙂
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I agree… It keeps it from becoming bloatware with a bunch of stuff I rarely, if ever need.
Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLC17″ MacBook Pro | 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 3 | FCPX | Motion 5 | Compressor 4“If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject, you can create the consoling illusion it has been mastered.” – Stanley Kubrick
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[Bill Davis] “If someone as “outside” as ME could kinda see what Apple was actually doing – the fact that much more industry connected, experienced and smarter people then me missed the early potential is kinda MORE shocking. “
Determining the present value of future potential is very, very hard.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Oliver Peters] “To add further context to this, FCPX launched after a string of Apple withdrawals from the professional video space.”
Lovingly chronicled here back in 2011, by yours truly:
FCPX and the Domino Effect 1: Setting Them Up
https://library.creativecow.net/soyka_walter/FCPX-Domino-Effect-1/1FCPX and the Domino Effect 2: Knocking Them Down
https://library.creativecow.net/soyka_walter/FCPX-Domino-Effect-2/1Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Bill Davis] “Yes. You are.”
Care to elaborate? ‘Cause this
[Bill Davis] “Which leaves only a couple of possibilities. Those that HAD been put under NDA were the source of the early “it’s crap” spin (which is awful to even consider) – OR, as I contend, it was opinions formed largely out of pure ignorance. “
and this
[Bill Davis] ” But I still contend that IF the default defensive position here is over-focused on the the preferences of those 100 folks who got the Apple sneak peak in 2011 (and their subsequently spreading so much IRE simply because it didn’t meet their needs at the time”
make it sound like you are saying the people that got the early look under NDA sowed the seeds of discontent that resulted in stuff going sideways enough that we are still talking about it 5yrs later.
[Oliver Peters] “So what sort of message do those things suggest?
“Right, which comes back to my point that the fireworks that happened when X launched weren’t just about X. There were a number of issues at play and X, and part of how Apple launched it, were the final straws.
[Bill Davis] “To me the message was that the “professional video space” was changing fast. And Apple wanted to get ahead of that.”
Ahead of it or mostly out of it because they saw higher margins, and less demanding customers, elsewhere? 😉
Shared storage and MAMs seem to be more common than five years ago, but Apple doesn’t do low margin hardware and X probably is probably as much of a MAM as they want to deal with. I think it’s the same thing that went down with Shake. Apple just reevaluated and determined they no longer wanted to be as deep down the post production rabbit hole as they had been.
I agree that many (most?) local TV stations aren’t all that local anymore, but look at where programing has increased (and I don’t mean YouTube). There’s the obvious ones like the original programing on services like Amazon and Netflix (I think Netflix said they wanted to release something like 600 hrs of original content this year) and then maybe the less obvious original content generators like the NFL, MLB, WWE and UFC. The NFL is the only one that doesn’t offer an OTT service, but between their cable channel and their website they generate a lot of content. These guys aren’t hiring randoms off Craigslist to work out of their mom’s basement to create this content.
[David Mathis] “I agree with what you are saying. On the other hand FCP X does not include so many features for the build as you go camp. Neither approach is wrong just goes with what works for you.
I prefer to add on as needed and the way Final Cut is built does encourage third party products which is a great thing. I can choose what I need and go from there.”Not all features can be added by third parties though. For example, multicam and a full quality video output had to be added by Apple. So would any advancements to audio mixing that many users seem to ask for. I agree with you about Apple’s ‘leave it up to 3rd parties’ approach as that could encourage more 3rd party development (since they wouldn’t be as worried about their product being made unnecessary by Apple rolling out the same feature in a future version of X). In a previous thread I’d brought of 3D text as an example of Apple adding a new ‘core’ feature (the 3D engine) but leaving it up to third parties to really exploit it. I’ve heard some 3rd parties devs say they wished Apple would open up X a bit more though. I was talking with a dev the other day and they commented on how much is available in Premiere but people are only just starting to tap into it.
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[Andrew Kimery] “Not all features can be added by third parties though.”
I think it’s important to note that Apple has followed two guidelines in their approach to this. The first is that some tools that existed in FCP “classic” used licensed software. EDL export is an example of this. Apple chose not to relicense third party code and, therefore, this and probably other elements were simply not added back in.
The second guideline is that Apple chose not to do things that they felt would result in an imperfect solution. Obviously they could have created the same tools to go between FCP7 and FCPX as Intelligent Assistance has created. In fact, Apple actually said it wasn’t possible. We now know that wasn’t quite true. It just simply might not have been the complete, seamless translation that Apple wanted to put their name on. Therefore they opted not to do it.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Obviously they could have created the same tools to go between FCP7 and FCPX as Intelligent Assistance has created. In fact, Apple actually said it wasn’t possible. “
The fiasco around brining in FCP 7 projects has always stuck in my head as an example of Apple being blinded by their own ideology. How someone thought not being able to import old FCP projects was a good idea is beyond me. And then to say it was impossible only to have Philip do it a few months later. To you point they obviously knew it could be done, they had to have known that the user base would want it (because the user base had always had it) but they omitted it anyway because it wouldn’t be ‘perfect’. Just tone deaf. The inability to bring in FCP 7 projects coupled with the ability to bring in iMovie projects was just iMovie Pro canon fodder.
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