-
The FCP X “tell”
-
[Oliver Peters] “[Aindreas Gallagher] “Adobe were, actually, incredible dicks to apple back when they thought they could be.”
Well, I’ve heard both sides of those stories and at best it’s a draw.”
It’s not often that my opinion differs from yours Oliver, but from a user prospective what Adobe did to us Mac users when they were in their “petulant child” phase was far worse than anything Apple has ever tried. Apple may eclipse them in the future, but as of today, I’d put Adobe in the lead for winning the “we didn’t appreciate our customers and shot ourselves in the foot” award for shafting Mac users.
Like many of us, I was at NAB that year when there wasn’t a single Mac in the entire booth. I located what was the apparent highest ranking person and challenged this. Apparently I wasn’t alone as their answer was defensive… there’s a Mac there. That was a personal laptop belonging to one of the presenters, not an official booth computer. Right then we knew something bad was coming.
I’d place that decision by Adobe right up there with the world’s poorest thought out decisions. To their credit, it eventually became obvious that “NO”, we weren’t going to switch platforms just because they were having a tizzy. They eventually reversed their decision with a bit of political spin that would make a politician blush, but from that point on Adobe became a second tier player for many years.
It’s nice to see them back up front where they could have been all along, though one could argue that the subscription model is the second act in that same stage play…
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
-
Back in the 70’s and 80’s, there was a group of analysts trying to figure out what the Soviet Russians were thinking. The nickname for these people were “Kremlinologists”. Their craft was a mix of statistical analysis, high-end game theory, and wild-ass guessing, and they were right about as often as they were wrong. Any thread I see that tries to read the tea leaves of Cupertino reminds me of the Kremlinologists and their endless “…But if they know that WE know that THEY know that we know.. ” games.
I guess it is entertaining to guess about, and I’m not trying to be critical of people who practice “Cupertinology”, but I’m skeptical of the overall utility.
-
[Aindreas Gallagher] ” Premiere Pro broke off the chain quite a while ago.
That thing is currently loose and knocking over trees.”Using both, I would say saplings or dead small ones….
😉
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
Hang on a second, Oliver.
Seems to me we have a pretty on-point example of how Apple looks at software evolution these days. Remember their flagship Video Editing Program and how when they tore it down, suddenly everyone wailed that they “dummed it down for consumers” and abandoned all the pros?If Photos simply follows the most current public Apple software model, then in about 4 years, Photos will likely be at the top echelons of the pro community and letting high end pro photogs save buckets of time.
; )
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
-
[Mitch Ives] “what Adobe did to us Mac users when they were in their “petulant child” phase was far worse than anything Apple has ever tried.”
Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I will just try to lay out the facts and counterpoints if you find them informative or useful.
Avid went PC only for a time based in part on what Apple was doing (going from 6 to 3 slot Macs and I believe system 9 to the first OS X).
Apple has never been cross platform so if we were to turn this on its head…
In addition, I’m sure we could all go back to June 21, 2011 and see the threads of the first couple of weeks and see what the actual comments were at the time. Even to this day in fact. Does that make them a petulant child? I think not!
More to the point, lets talk about why Adobe made this change.
As for Adobe, we are talking about the fact that Premiere Pro wasn’t cross platform for a time and was only available for the PC. This is true, but is not representative of products such as Photoshop and After Effects which at the time were (and some would argue still are) the more important products (especially to FCP and Avid users). They were cross platform for the entire time and remain so to this day. Whether Apple was up or down, we have been mostly cross platform on nearly all products. Why then did Premiere Pro go PC only for a time?
The engineering effort at the time of moving from Premiere to Premiere Pro (different product, different code base, different architecture) was such that we had to pause our initial effort of bringing the product to both platforms. It actually was a fairly late decision from what I heard. At the time also, FCP was starting to ascend and our market performance was stronger on the PC side at the time. Maybe not decisions that you agree by but certainly rational ones regardless of opinions.
Adobe didn’t ‘come to our senses’ so much as we wanted to get back to a true cross platform integrated software suite which saw its first fruition come at CS3. There we were able to see a complete suite of applications centered around the NLE as the central hub of a video workflow.
Hopefully, this clears up any misunderstanding for the folks on the forum. Clearly, all software makers have made their faux pas’ but in nearly all cases, they change directions and corrected course based on market demand. We’ve seen this true in Adobe, Apple and Avid’s cases.
Dennis – Adobe guy
-
[Dennis Radeke] “Clearly, all software makers have made their faux pas’ but in nearly all cases, they change directions and corrected course based on market demand. We’ve seen this true in Adobe, Apple and Avid’s cases. “
To be honest Dennis, and I’m talking about the financial model, Adobe changed direction totally through introducing their subscription based payment system and whilst most people seemed to have rolled over and accepted this change, they wanted your software that badly, others have gone over to Apples pay once and buy a complimentary computer model as Oliver pointed out earlier.
There was little advance notice of Adobe changing their financial model just as there was no notice of Apple giving FCP 7 the EOL notice.
[Oliver Peters] “A lot of folks wonder if Apple can be trusted with FCP X and fear that at some point the application will be dumbed down or even dumped.”
Whilst this thread is based on a hypothetical scenario of Apple dropping FCPX I think Oliver has raised an important reality and that is that we are all, regardless of NLE platform, dancing to the commercial whims of the marketeers.
Either way most NLE editors are bright enough to pick up another set of tools should one become unavailable. But hopefully FCPX will see me out.
-
[Mark Dobson] “There was little advance notice of Adobe changing their financial model just as there was no notice of Apple giving FCP 7 the EOL notice.”
Creative Cloud and CS coexisted for a few years and once Adobe went CC-only CS6 was (and still is) available for purchase from Adobe. Contrast that to when Apple launched X and sales of 7 halted immediately. It wasn’t until a few months later when Apple allowed users to call a 1-800 number, for a limited time, in order to purchase FCP 7.
Kinda a night and day experience and one that Apple has seemingly learned from given that they announced the EOL of Aperture, and its removal of Aperture from the Mac App store, months in advance.
-
Dennis… LOL.
You question my use of the word petulant, but then close your post with “Hopefully, this clears up any misunderstanding for the folks on the forum.” That presupposes that I’m wrong and you’ve just corrected things. Jeez, that’s not petulant… or arrogant. 🙂
Your explanation makes sense to me and it’s the spin that was commonly handed out after the mushroom cloud hovered over Adobe headquarters. There’s just two little things that counter that:
1) When this happened, I contacted Adobe and made my thoughts known in detail. The entry level person I talked to couldn’t really do anything other than look me up in the database. They were pleasant as always, as was I… just firm in my points and my level of unhappiness. I made it clear that I felt I could no longer count on them and that I felt the need to find alternatives to all their products, not just Premiere. After all, what if they discontinued Mac Photoshop and Illustrator next month? So, no, I wouldn’t be buying any further CS versions.
A couple a days later Adobe calls me (I didn’t call them). This person is higher up… goes on to tell me that they see how many copies of their software I have and more to the point I’ve had them all since version 1.0… some since 0.8 Beta. Apparently this changed things. Anyway we hash things out a bit… I listen… he listens, then he escalates me up the food chain.
Now I’m talking to some executive type and while I don’t know why he cares, we go all through this again. I explain how I’ve paying Adobe forever, including those lucrative license fees for Postscript on the early LaserWriters (day one). At one point the conversation gets candid and he tells me straight out that they screwed up. I said wow, that’s refreshing. I ask him if they’re ticked at Apple and we discuss it. He tells me that they’ve been getting hammered with phone calls and emails and that from a PR perspective this is a nightmare. He used some colloquialism like “beaten like a rented mule” or something. I don’t remember the exact phrase, I just remember that it was very funny and he had a sense of humor.
He tells me that they are too far behind on development for the Mac version at this point (as you said) but that it didn’t have to be that way… they made some bad choices. He tells me that there will be new Mac version coming, he just can’t say when because they have a lot of catching up to do (another of your points).
Now all of this could be charted off to some hallucination on my part, except for point number two.
2) Not too much later, some senior Adobe person gets on stage at NAB (or the SuperMeet), I can’t recall because it was already old news to me… and basically says the same thing. He used the words “we screwed up”. He says “we heard you and we’re going to fix it, so you can stop calling and emailing”. Wow, Deja Vu all over again.
So while your story has some factual occurrences sprinkled throughout, it leaves out the backstory, which is precisely the point I made… that you seemed to feel needed correcting. Adobe got their panties in a twist (his words) and made some bad decisions. The word some mistakes struck me, as I was only thinking of one.
Now, I’m sure Apple isn’t innocent in all this. The whole change in development code hosed a lot of people, but the others kept developing. Whether Adobe was just too strung out to keep up or was pissed off, I can’t say. But the point is that they made a conscious decision to do it.
Dennis, Adobe has a right to do any damn thing they please. They’re a private sector company. And as far as screwing up goes, I think we’ve probably all done that a time or two. The thing is that they listened, and when they got hammered they did something about it. And in the end, that’s what counts… that and the fact that I bet they never make that same mistake again…
Either way, you’re in the hunt now and right at the front of the pack, so anything can change…
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
-
[Bill Davis] “If Photos simply follows the most current public Apple software model, then in about 4 years, Photos will likely be at the top echelons of the pro community and letting high end pro photogs save buckets of time.”
Four years is a lifetime in this business. So, you’ll be using Lightroom for 4 years then, while you wait for something useful in Photos? I guess we all have no choice.
It’s version 1 product, but I’m not impressed with it I suppose it’s a good replacement for iPhoto, if you don’t mind having the whole world revolve around iCloud?
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
-
[Bill Davis] “If Photos simply follows the most current public Apple software model, then in about 4 years, Photos will likely be at the top echelons of the pro community and letting high end pro photogs save buckets of time.”
That’s the FCPX model. There’s also the Pages/Numbers model, which is basically “one and done.”
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up