-
Risk and failure
-
[Ben Holmes] “I don’t honestly believe Apple did not forsee ALL of this. Cancelling 7 was as clear a marker as we could ever hope to get about their views. … It means all of this is actually going according to plan.”
Hi
Yup. 🙁
Maybe they reckoned that as there are mature alternatives for their erstwhile customers to immediately switch to the spin-off would be less high-profile. -
[Mike Parfit] ” the only serious marketing Apple did was to real pros in its private then public sneak previews, “
that meetup press bonanza, which was, lets face it, white hot – in all the press, articles in USA today for gods sake – lets just say this: the function of that exercise on Apples part was to maximise the visibility of FCPX – that we can agree on.
We now know the presentation was incredibly careful in how reductive it was about the true capabilities of the software in the professional environment. Had they told us what we know now, beers would have been hitting the screen during randy’s presentation. But that didn’t happen. this all feels pretty carefully planned.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “that meetup press bonanza, which was, lets face it, white hot – in all the press, articles in USA today for gods sake – lets just say this: the function of that exercise on Apples part was to maximise the visibility of FCPX – that we can agree on. “
I disagree Aindreas. That event was not about FCP X, but rather about trumping Avid, who had been planning on appearing at that event for months before Apple got them booted.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “We now know the presentation was incredibly careful in how reductive it was about the true capabilities of the software in the professional environment. Had they told us what we know now, beers would have been hitting the screen during randy’s presentation.”
On that part I completely agree.
[Aindreas Gallagher] ” this all feels pretty carefully planned.”
Far from it… I suspect the planners were off planning something else. From the decision was made to sneak the peek in Vegas, I’d say this deal was as shabbily planned as just about anything Apple has ever done.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’t miss my new tutorial: Prepare for a seamless transition to FCP X and OS X Lion
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/FCP-10-MAC-Lion/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
-
[David Roth Weiss] “I suspect the planners were off planning something else.”
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, we all don’t know – the problem was are facing as a creative community is that we have no idea what apple truly entails for this software.
The thing that infuriates me about the broader public perception is that they don’t understand the madness of this. It’s like transformers – your typewriter gets up and reconfigures itself with clarinet keys! your guitar becomes a chello with two strings! your pencil sprouts wings! the stuff we are doing represents an actual virtualisation of the physical creative craft of editing – the inputs are unchanged, its not a geo-location app to re-imagine at will. Any attempt to alter all of its basic function should not occur within a messianic blackbox of igniting computer/cultural revolutions.
It is not within Apple’s remit to completely Rip Up Editing As They See Fit.
..Or at least talk to us for Gods sake, oh I know, skate to the puck, but apple, are you listening sweetie? this is not your puck apple. It does not belong to you.
“Do you not understand?!?” he said shrieking a little – No. Look mate: this is our Puck. You are playing with our Puck.
Apple please for God’s sake take some care with it for the simple reason that – This. Puck. Does. Not. Belong. To. You.
and that would be another rant.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
And there’s more than one pro market.
For the MANY people cutting for daily or weekly broadcast on single workstations, with one producer or reporter sitting next to one editor, FCP X has few, if any, drawbacks.
What happened to all those people who used to say “Don’t buy the first generation of anything” who are now so thoroughly furious that this one doesn’t do everything they want in the first week? (Apple’s one huge mistake here is signalling lack of support for older versions).
For MANY pro users, as well as a huge mass market, FCP X is a step forward. Let’s face it: track based editing is basically a literal porting of the physical process of editing film, mag tape, etc etc, into an electronic environment. I’m in my fifties, and it’s familiar to me too. But I would hate to see the new paradigm of FCP X get sunk rather than find its place, wherever that may be. It may even turn out that the magnetic timeline proves itself and AVID and Premiere will end up going to it too. What a ruckus that would cause.
-
[Chris Kenny] ” they’ve always been obsessive over inventory management and small product lines.”
Not judging by the fact they never get enough new products in the stores in time to meet demand at rollout. I’ve seen companies with greater demands manage it. (Oh, did someone say “hype” and “marketing ploy”?) 😉
No disagreement with most of your other points though.
-
[Gary Pollard] “It may even turn out that the magnetic timeline proves itself and AVID and Premiere will end up going to it too.”
Or, it may prove to be an unnecessary solution looking for a problem, that we’ll all be laughing about some day. Or are you suggesting the success of the magnetic timeline is a given?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’t miss my new tutorial: Prepare for a seamless transition to FCP X and OS X Lion
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/FCP-10-MAC-Lion/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
-
Chris, Kudos for keeping your cool. Of course I fall on the other side 🙂 One thing no one has mentioned (I think) is that Adobe and Avid are not standing still. Both are well on their way to version 6.0 of their respective softwares. I imagine they can, if they want, incorporate many of the desirable features of X while maintaining everything else we need.
Also, Chris, as a representative case, I was waiting for Final Cut X as I just finished shooting a feature at the end of May. I needed the promised DSLR native support, 64 bit rendering and I was liking the dual system sync. All perfect. How perfect?
I bought a new system and purchased $300 of iTunes gift cards (at a 15% discount). Then — release. no OMF. Killed the deal. No upgrade of DVD Studio Pro made it even worse.
I HAVE switched to Adobe as of today and Adobe is ahead of Final Cut X in the race. They have all of the professional features, tight integration, and native DSLR support. Apple cannot catch up. (But I’d love to be wrong as more is better) But the switch is a lot less painful than I thought it would be. In fact, it’s pretty awesome as the Adobe suite is fantastic.
Also, I suspect Avid is better for the higher end production houses…at least we have the choice.
-
[Chris Kenny] “I’ve grouped your points by explanation, with any specific comments included afterwards.”
Any one of the things I mentioned may be reasonably explained — but the pattern, taken all together, is alarming to the professionals using these products and may show that Apple is not well-focused on professionals’ needs.
[Chris Kenny] “Attributable to common Apple practices such as aggressively consolidating product lines, deliberately discouraging the use of media formats Apple disfavors, or shipping initial versions of software and devices with ‘important’ features missing”
Common Apple practices are not necessarily common software development practices, and in the cases I listed, certainly don’t align with professionals’ needs.
Apple has not aggressively consolidated product lines. They have ended every single pro product line they’ve ever had except FCP, Motion, Compressor, and Logic. Though FCPX may have better sound and color support than FCP7 did, the feature sets of STP and Color have not actually been folded into FCPX.
Why is Apple discouraging the use of a media format it disfavors? That may benefit them, since they distribute content electronically — but it doesn’t benefit me or my clients who want Blu-ray. A developer builds products that its core audience needs. If pros need Blu-ray, and Apple doesn’t care to provide a serious solution, are they a serious, professional-focused developer?
Shipping initial versions of software and devices with important features missing is fine — for real 1.0 products which don’t have pre-existing user bases. Apple’s previous version of Final Cut Pro had 2 million users who will lose important functionality if they “upgrade” from FCP v7 to FCP v10.
And how can you put important in quotes? Without external video monitoring, FCPX is appropriate for web video only. If you could currently get data out of FCPX, you could make the argument that it’d be a nice offline editor, given its new timeline and audition features, but that’s not an argument you can make today.
[Chris Kenny] “Attributable to Apple’s culture of secrecy”
I agree that Apple generally maintains a culture of secrecy (the sneak peek being a notable exception) — but a corporate culture of secrecy is not professional-focused. They should be seeking the input of users to improve their products, and they should do a better job managing our expectations, especially around radical changes in feature sets.
[Chris Kenny] “Attributable to factors beyond Apple’s control… Apple updates the Mac Pro whenever Intel releases a new generation of suitable processors”
Intel’s Xeon update schedule is beyond Apple’s control — but Apple skipped speed bumps and USB 3.0. Adding some more slots would have been a nice Mac Pro update, too.
[Chris Kenny] “Attributable to Apple believing it has a better way… Thunderbolt, VARs, legacy projects”
Thunderbolt came out, what, two or three years after the 15″ dropped ExpressCard? And now that it’s been out for months, how many Thunderbolt devices are actually even available? Even when Thunderbolt devices become common, PCIe 4x at 10W won’t help with GPU co-processing.
I understand building for the future, but you seem to forget that professionals also actually require solution’s to today’s problems, not just tomorrow’s.
VARs used to integrate and sell the whole package, which Apple has never done until now — since the FCPX package can’t actually include things like external monitoring now anyway.
As for legacy projects — I don’t care how hard it is for Apple to get old timelines into FCPX, this is a critical feature for many, many pros that will hinder the adoption of FCPX. I would be willing to hand-magnetize a timeline — it can’t be worse than eye-matching an online — and I think there are many others who would feel the same.
I like the idea that the magnetic timeline makes some of the implicit relationships in a standard multitrack timeline explicit, but to not acknowledge the importance of legacy projects is a very cavaliere attitude to take toward your current users.
[Chris Kenny] “Not really accurate… glossy displays and NVIDIA GPUs”
You say that glossy displays have higher contrast — I’d add that it’s artificially high contrast and an artificial saturation boost. The point of a glossy display is to make images pop. Professionals would largely prefer their images to be accurate.
You can certainly profile around this, but since the profile would live on the graphics card and not in a hardware LUT on a wide-gamut display, this will be of limited value.
On NVIDIA, I wasn’t talking about Apple selling ATIs in the Mac Pros and removing NVIDIA as a CTO option. I’m far more concerned about their relationship with CUDA. Apple chose not to include NVIDIA’s drivers in 10.6.7, and 10.6.8 broke existing and otherwise functional CUDA drivers.
OpenCL isn’t there yet (though I think eventually it will be). CUDA is there today, and professional applications are making use of it today. Apple treats it as if it were tainted with Not Invented Here syndrome to the detriment of professional users with CUDA-enabled products.
[Chris Kenny] “This discussion is about Apple’s motivations. And all of these actions are explainable without resorting to the explanation that Apple doesn’t care about the pro market. In fact, they’re all explainable by aspects of Apple’s corporate culture that are pretty widely understood and that we can see operating in other market segments.”
That’s actually exactly my point. Apple may like pro users, but I think that if they were focusing their business on pros, they would change some of these practices which work well in the consumer space and poorly in the professional space.
[Chris Kenny] “There are other things that show Apple does care about the pro market, including the fact that they rewrote FCP at all and many of the features FCP contains, Thunderbolt, some seriously high-end laptops, the continued existence of the Mac Pro, etc.”
FCPX and Thunderbolt will both have cross-market appeal, so I don’t think you can point to them as totally pro-oriented.
I’m happy to see that there are still high-end laptops and Mac Pros, and I hope that they continue. I wish that the Mac Pro line add some slots to be better positioned against the Z800.
FCPX is absolutely forward-looking, and I don’t want to take anything away from the great foundation Apple has built, or the very cool underlying technologies Apple has developed both for media and the operating system as a whole.
That said, some of the FCPX features which I suspect you think are evidence that Apple cares about the pro market, like 64-bit, multi-threading, and native file support, are table stakes in 2011.
If you’re building a whole new imaging engine in 2011, why not make it linear floating point? Floating point was far less practical with a 32-bit app’s memory constraints, but can be done on a modern machine and OS without really affecting development. Color management has been a staple on the Mac platform for years. Using CoreData to manage your project files gives you a lot of functionality for free without having to develop a massive project file saving and parsing engine.
I salute you for your tenacity, Chris, but I honestly don’t understand how you can’t see that there’s room for reasonable disagreement on some of these points. I don’t care if I sway you on your position about Apple’s focus or lack thereof on the professional market, but I do hope to show that it’s not unreasonable for pros in a niche market to be concerned about a niche product in the hands of an increasingly mass market-focused developer.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
I really don’t understand the depth of antagonism and hostility towards some of those who have the temerity to see some merit in FCP X.
“May” is a word with very clear meaning in the English language.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up