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Risk and failure
It’s always bothered me that we — humans in general — have a hard time accepting that stunning creative risks, which are so highly praised when they succeed, are inevitably accompanied by occasions of stunning failure.
Apple has always seemed to be a risk-taking company. One assumes that most of the failures are hidden in the folds of the company’s legendary cloak. But now one has emerged into light it should probably never have seen.
All of us in this business, who either engage in attempts at creativity ourselves or spend our lives trying to shepherd it — or both — should be able to recognize this phenomenon in this case. So should Apple. It’s part of the territory. It just requires a rapid and complete recovery, and that’s what the best creative people know how to do. Not without anguish, but without hesitation.
From all the evidence — Apple’s efforts to court the pros, its touting of FCPX as a professional tool, the new FAQs — Apple is not actively trying to abandon us. It’s more likely the FCP team believed FCPX was a daring, glorious risk. But it seems clear now that it is a failure. The capable users it should have challenged and thrilled are disappointed and feel betrayed. FCP1 opened doors; FCPX in many ways appears to close them. It is not the creative breakthrough that its team expected. I suspect there is pain.
I’ve been lucky enough to know some effective creative people, and that pain is common, even among the best. From what I’ve seen the only way they get through those failures is to acknowledge them honestly and get past the inevitable defensive mode into recovery. In film and writing it’s either wholesale revision or abandonment of the project altogether. A reputation often depends on whether that recovery effort is forthright or truculent.
So the main question seems to be whether Apple is willing to accept this failure and acknowledge it quickly enough to recover and advance. From what I have seen of that kind of acceptance, it helps define the flexibility and persistence that marks the most genuinely creative of individuals. Because, painful or not, the acceptance of failure can offer insights and breakthroughs that success doesn’t.
The question is just whether Apple still has enough creative spirit in this field to accept the short-term embarrassment of acknowledging failure in order to continue seeking long-term achievement, or just moves away from the terrors of creativity into the safer but sadder path of mediocrity.
Good luck to everyone.
Mike
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102 Replies
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Time to revisit this information:
https://www.flickgym.com/2009/10/top-ten-reasons-avid-beats-final-cut-pro.html
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[Mike Parfit] “From all the evidence — Apple’s efforts to court the pros, its touting of FCPX as a professional tool, the new FAQs — Apple is not actively trying to abandon us. It’s more likely the FCP team believed FCPX was a daring, glorious risk. But it seems clear now that it is a failure.”
I agree with you about Apple’s view of FCP X, but I strongly disagree that it’s is ‘clear’ at this point that they have failed. The truth is, most of the backlash has not been a direct consequence of people reacting negatively to the product’s substance. It has been a consequence of people erroneously believing, as a consequence of a handful of missing features, some superficial similarities with iMovie, and a whole lot of preexisting paranoia, that FCP X signals Apple’s departure from the pro market.
Many people who have actually sat down to edit something with the app, giving it a fair shot on its own terms instead of merely being frustrated that it works differently, have said positive things about it. My experience has been that the new timeline is really just a lot of fun to edit with (the importance of this should not be underestimated), there are some great new organizational features, and in terms of speed and quality, the new engine is a home run.
Six months from now, you will be able to take a sequence out of FCP X an bring it into Resolve. There will probably be a way to export OMF that doesn’t cost $500. You will have more control over audio track exports. You will almost certainly be able to hook up a real video monitor. While some people will still grasp at straws, and while there will still be a few gaps and limitations here and there, the claims that FCP X is not a pro app will have been pretty thoroughly undermined. Pros will start doing interesting things with it. A little later someone will cut an indie feature with it, and Apple will run a profile on them where they rave about the importance of metadata and the freedom of the magnetic timeline, and talk about how they did assembly edits on location using MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt RAIDs.
Word will get around that rumors of Final Cut’s demise were greatly exaggerated.
Nobody has to believe me about this today. We’ll all have to wait and see. But, not to toot my own horn too much here, I am the guy who predicted this whole present blowup, in broad strokes, over a year ago:
We’re going to get the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch goodness that everyone wants. But we’re not going to get an app with a strict superset of Final Cut Pro’s functionality. Instead, we’re going to get an app that Apple believes is better overall for the tasks video editors perform, even if some features are cut. And we might also get a significantly overhauled UI; something that results from a process of sitting down and questioning every assumption about how editing interfaces currently work.
In short, I think they’ll come up with something really interesting… that will probably cause a bunch of people to totally freak out about how Apple has ruined everything and make forceful public declarations about how they’re leaving the platform. Meanwhile, people actually willing to embrace the thing might discover it has a bit of that iPad ‘magic’.
I think I have a pretty good feel for these things.
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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: Nice post!
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[Mike Parfit] “So the main question seems to be whether Apple is willing to accept this failure and acknowledge it quickly enough to recover and advance…
…whether Apple still has enough creative spirit in this field to accept the short-term embarrassment…”
Hi
I don’t think Steve Jobs ‘does’ embarrasment/acknowledgement/acceptance.
He blew out IBM over the 3GHz G5 affair, and he’s blowing out MobileMe – “not our greatest moment”.[Mike Parfit] “….away from the terrors of creativity into the safer but sadder path of mediocrity.”
Hmmm.
I don’t think I would describe the Cloud and Apple’s new huge datacentre in those terms at all.[Chris Kenny] “I think I have a pretty good feel for these things.”
Maybe 😉
But I think you’re underestimating the spin-off impact of Apple’s recent change of direction. -
I plan on buying it and learning it when the price of FCX drops to $100.
Editor/Videographer
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Chris,
You really have to drop this argument that this is all about FCP X being too much like iMovie. The majority of us are concerned that Apple has presented itself as being incompatible with the business requirements of the industry. It is about pulling the current version of FCS and has little to do with FCP X.
I have spelled this out at least once a day for the past week or so and so have many of the long time pros and so has even Apple/FCP apologists like Larry Jordan. Look deeper into this. It is about the industry’s needs and continuity with licensing requirements and not the immaturity of FCP X.
Myself, I am so past this point in the discussion. Right now I am trying to figure out the best way to move forward in a business case scenario and so are many other people and production facilities.
-Andrew Stone
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Steadicam & Camera Operator -
but chris, well actually, that was an incredibly prescient posting, but still:
That like, is, you know, the guy who was coding FCP for six years, he was there when FCPX was cranking up – he definitively says FCPX is a prosumer app for a prosumer market. Thats who apple is going for. to quote him directly for a second.
“Apple doesn’t care about the pro space “
and
“The pro market is too small for Apple to care about it,”
I mean well, this is going to be tricky for you Chris, I am extremely curious to see how you’re going to turn this one around.
Because Chris, if the app does restore professional features like.. in and out points that sustain, markers on the timeline, and the ability to select clips without having the playhead jump to your location… ahem… it will be, to a certain extent, happy chance, it might work out, but apple is in no way focused on the professional market. That guy just said so. He seems like he would know.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Andrew Stone] “Apple has presented itself as being incompatible with the business requirements of the industry… …the industry’s needs and continuity with licensing requirements…
Right now I am trying to figure out the best way to move forward in a business case scenario and so are many other people and production facilities.”And it appears that Apple doesn’t even care.
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[Andrew Stone] “I have spelled this out at least once a day for the past week or so and so have many of the long time pros and so has even Apple/FCP apologists like Larry Jordan. Look deeper into this. It is about the industry’s needs and continuity with licensing requirements and not the immaturity of FCP X.”
And I have addressed this at least once a day or so for the past week. You believe temporal discounting will prove to be a relatively weak effect in this instance, while I believe it will be a relatively strong one. That, essentially, the vast majority of people will be evaluating FCP X one year from today in terms of the capability of the product, not the mess Apple made of its introduction, or what that might imply if the product undergoes another major transition in another decade.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Because Chris, if the app does restore professional features like.. in and out points that sustain, markers on the timeline, and the ability to select clips without having the playhead jump to your location… ahem… it will be, to a certain extent, happy chance, it might work out, but apple is in no way focused on the professional market. That guy just said so. He seems like he would know.”
Final Cut Pro X’s crossover appeal to the prosumer market is certainly no accident. In point of fact, the line between the pro market and the prosumer market is getting pretty hazy these days. I mean, what’s the difference between a random guy with a DSLR, and and indie filmmaker? Maybe nothing but a couple of months involving pointing that DSLR at some actors.
This really reminds me a lot of the arguments that have been all over various Mac forums over the last few years. There, you’ve seen this emerging meme that Apple is a consumer electronics company, and can therefore be expected to increasingly neglect the Mac. There was a lot of paranoia about this when Apple removed the ‘Computer’ from its name. But the key insight here is that Apple itself sees no distinction between these markets. Computers are consumer electronics devices; Apple thought of them that way at least as far back as the original Mac.
Apple sees markets in unusual ways. People who see things differently from Apple have a tendency project motivations onto Apple that make no sense in light of Apple’s own understanding, and then make what turn out to be hilariously inaccurate predictions about Apple’s future behavior on that basis. It’s an old, tired game.
In the video world, pros need a few tools consumers don’t. Scopes. Support for formats larger than 1080p. Organizational features that support long projects. These are already in FCP X. Pros also need some specialized workflow features, which Apple will deal with by publishing an API and allowing third-party vendors to handle specific formats. Probably better than Apple did in FCP 7.
The necessary capabilities will be there. That’s what matters. People are entirely too obsessed with this notion that paying attention to them is the key to Apple’s long-term success in the pro video market. But the idea that tools targeted exclusively at professionals will beat out tools with crossover appeal in professional markets is highly ahistorical… or we wouldn’t all edit video on “personal computers”.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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