Sending FCPX Feedback to Apple

[John Rofrano]

That’s a great article Noah. As a developer myself, the three critical questions I ask customers are:

1. What steps did you follow to reproduce the problem?
2. What happened?
3. What did you expect to happen?

The last one is critical because sometimes what you expect to happen is not what is supposed to happen which tells the programmer that it may be a misunderstanding about how the program is supposed to work. This is especially important when beta testing software because if enough customers expect something to happen that doesn’t, then maybe that’s the way the program actually should work.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Paul Figgiani]

[Noah Kadner] “Thought this might be useful to folks looking to send feedback to Apple about FCPX: bugs, feature requests, etc. Here’s how to make it most effective:

https://www.fcpworks.com/submitting-better-fcpx-feedback-to-apple/

Noah”

Noah,

Great article. In fact I was wondering why you went dark there for a while and barely appeared on this forum.

I hope all is well,

-paul.

[Mitch Ives]

Nice job Noah.

I admit that one part did make me chuckle though… your section on “ER” where you suggest that we should explain why we need something, after listing “Round-tripping to Motion” as an example. I would have thought the Round-tripping to Motion would be such an obvious thing that it wouldn’t need to be explained… but then maybe I’m the only one that feels that way.

Good to see you back, Noah…

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

[Noah Kadner]

I’ll put it this way: self-evidence is not the same to all selves.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training

[Mitch Ives]

Ahh… Zen Hour… I like that.

Given how often it’s been mentioned here, I thought it was obvious… but I guess you don’t think it’s a necessary thing?

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

[Noah Kadner]

Oh it’s very necessary but the specific use case is sought.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training

[Bret Williams]

I too feel that if some features need to be requested, then perhaps the wrong people are making the software.

[John Rofrano]

[Bret Williams] “I too feel that if some features need to be requested, then perhaps the wrong people are making the software.”

That depends on the software development philosophy of the team. Some development teams include features they think customers need and run the risk of wasting development resource on features no one will use (or a very small percentage of people). Some development teams only include features that customers request. This ensures that your development efforts are not wasted.

How many people need round-tripping from Motion? I would certainly make use of it, but I do a lot of motion graphics. It would be interesting to see the sales numbers from FCP X and Motion to see if most people who buy FCP X buy Motion too (I certainly did). If the number was small then round-tripping would not be at the top of the developers priority list.

It’s always good to ask for features no matter how obvious you think the need is, so that development teams can gauge what are the most important things to customers. There will always be more features than developers so helping the development team prioritize customer needs is always a good thing for us to do as customers.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[David Mathis]

Speaking of Motion and FCP X integration, I would love to see the ability to build a template you can actually use directly inside of X, would make life a bit easier. For example, I would like to add a choice of a matte to a clip and have that over a background.

Example:

Have three mattes to choose from, apply that to a clip and place that over a background. Matte option would be from a rig set up inside of Motion, with ability to invert said matte and choose from a different background. This way, it would be possible to avoid a compound clip and make direct changes. Love to hear what others think.

[Craig Seeman]

I can’t help but think FCPX developers are aware of the demand but have some new way to handle this that’s been difficult/time consuming/AVFoundation dependent to implement. Granted this is highly speculative.

As time goes on, I think we’re not seeing certain “obvious” features implemented because they’re working on a more difficult to implement alterantive.

I do wish Apple had some base level of communication. It would be nice to get even a basic:

“We hear you, we have something in mind, it’ll take time to implement.”
Something like that would at least let us know that a feature request is on their radar even if they can’t say much else.