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The Fog Thickens
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[Chris Kenny] “IMO the framing in the discussion of FCP X has always been wrong. It was viewed as an instant failure because it wasn’t a drop-in replacement for FCP 7. But it’s not FCP 7’s successor in any technical sense. It’s a new product. FCP X is properly viewed as a promising challenger that needs some time to mature,”
It would seem only “the old guard” insist that it’s a failed replacement for FCP7. Of course it’s not in heavy use yet, it’s new and still under serious (and rapid) development. That there was standing room only crowds during the NAB presentations around it, show serious interest. People are watching the development very closely to determine if/when they can safely jump in.
That there’s so much negative response is about currently running facilities who can’t consider it . . . currently. It seems all the big A companies have burned people at some point. At the point when one sees a potential ROI they reconsider some years down the road. There’s no reason for it to be any different with Apple.
[Chris Kenny] “But — and I realize that people who’ve been using Avid products for the last decade or more can’t, for the most part, really see this — Media Composer is virtually impenetrable to new users. We’ve seen this in-house.”
As someone who used Avid for more than 10 years as an editor and later as an engineer and trainer, it’s related to why I won’t go back. Even knowing it, I found it very “unfriendly” in the way it handled many tasks. Of course right now, without the FCPX being alternative, some are struggling through it again. But just as their profit bump seems to be temporary, I think so to is the interest in Avid in the GROWING market (not the niche). It’s one reason (of several) why there’s so much interest in Adobe. The fact that Premiere hasn’t been a big player in the “pro” market may be a plus in that it seems the “prosumer” finds it friendly to use.
[Chris Kenny] “I think FCP X itself is maturing quite rapidly and its price and easy app store distribution will make it the go-to option for many new editors. My guess is that in five years FCP X will be a major force, mostly battling it out with Premiere, and Avid will have further retreated into specialty niches.”
I agree. NEW EDITORS will be key. FCPX is friendly to people who don’t have prior knowledge of other interfaces or, at least, don’t have issues grasping the new way of doing things. It’s people coming into the industry and people looking for low cost startup who will be more likely to adopt. It’s an attrition battle that I suspect Apple feels they will win.
While the original formula for legacy FCP success isn’t exactly the same, the combination of cost and user friendliness helped its success even when it wasn’t close to Avid’s feature set (and never matched it in some areas like Trimming and maybe Media Management). FCPX will creep up the later over time. We can see though, that Adobe is watching it closely and responding . . . something that Avid never did well.
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Well said!
[Robert Brown] “The art of something still can’t be programmed into a computer – at least for now.”
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[Chris Kenny] “What I see is that FCP 7 and Avid projects are coming through in about the same ratios they did before FCP X. For all that people talk up Premiere as the solution to everything in various online forums, we have yet to even receive an inquiry about whether we can handle a project edited in it. We also haven’t received inquiries about finishing projects cut in FCP X, but in my capacity as our resident workflow geek several clients/contacts have at least asked for my opinion about it, which they haven’t for Premiere.
“That’s largely what I’m seeing too, other than–because I work in a gfx intensive advertising market–I’ve had maybe two questions about FCP X and a dozen or so about Premiere. The Premiere questions come from AE designers, who feel their lives would be a tad easier and their power base more consolidated if Premiere became the shop NLE.
[Chris Kenny] ” FCP X is properly viewed as a promising challenger that needs some time to mature, and I think people would have recognized this had it been from a company other than Apple or had Apple’s messaging been better.”
Here, we disagree. I instead question whether it would exist a year after its intro if it had been from someone else other than Apple. BUT, I have come to agree that it has its uses, and that it should not be judged as a replacement for FCP 7, even though you can hardly blame those of users who did for doing so.
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[Walter Soyka] “I think a lot of people are still holding on to FCP7 and are just starting to evaluate their options now.
“Yeah, “the rush back to Avid” for many of my FCP7 co-workers has been in theory only.
[Walter Soyka] “Once all the cards are on the table later this year, the market can start picking winners and losers. We’ve still got months of fodder for discussion here, if not a few years. I’d be very surprised if the bulk of FCP7 refugees all chose the same new NLE.”
I agree, except perhaps regionally. Here in LA the lean to Avid is fairly strong.
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[Chris Harlan] “Here, we disagree. I instead question whether it would exist a year after its intro if it had been from someone else other than Apple.”
FCP X was designed to appeal to a much larger market than is mostly represented in these forums, and it seems fairly plausible that it’s actually quite successful in that market. As far as I can tell, Apple is doing the ‘appeal to the low-end, then move upmarket’ thing. People ‘upmarket’ are judging it as a failure because the ‘move upmarket’ part of that hasn’t happened quite yet (though with respect to features, it’s progressing rapidly), but at this stage it could only be definitively said to have failed if the ‘appeal to the low-end’ part weren’t working. And that part seems to be working. There’s absolutely no reason to believe FCP X is a commercial failure. It’s the top-grossing app in the Mac App Store (following Lion, but Lion isn’t actually an ‘app’), which means it’s probably one of the most successful apps on the platform. And the current version has a 4-star rating there — many people seem to be buying the app and liking it.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Andrew –
Once again we’re back to what I’ve been hoping for for years – a big sticker required on the side of all creative software saying “TALENT NOT INCLUDED!”.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
[Chris Kenny] ” to appeal to a much larger market than is mostly represented in these forums, and it seems fairly plausible that it’s actually quite successful in that market. As far as I can tell, Apple is doing the ‘appeal to the low-end, then move upmarket’ thing. People ‘upmarket’ are judging it as a failure because the ‘move upmarket’ part of that hasn’t happened quite yet (though with respect to features, it’s progressing rapidly), but at this stage it could only be definitively said to have failed if the ‘appeal to the low-end’ part weren’t working. And that part seems to be working. There’s absolutely no reason to believe FCP X is a commercial failure. It’s the top-grossing app in the Mac App Store (following Lion, but Lion isn’t actually an ‘app’), which means it’s probably one of the most successful apps on the platform. And the current version has a 4-star rating there — many people seem to be buying the app and liking it.”
I agree with everything you are saying. I was simply responding to your statement “I think people would have recognized this had it been from a company other than Apple.” My guess is that if it had been released by anyone other than Apple, it wouldn’t have been particularly noticed.
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[Daniel Frome] “It’s funny. The “flocking back to Avid” definitely seems to be happening, but they aren’t buying Avid’s money-maker systems (ISIS, etc), just the edit software.”
I’m sure places that are large enough to be in ISIS territory either already have one or already have a large enough data infrastructure in place that changes on this scale take a couple of years to implement.
[Chris Kenny] “IMO the framing in the discussion of FCP X has always been wrong. It was viewed as an instant failure because it wasn’t a drop-in replacement for FCP 7. But it’s not FCP 7’s successor in any technical sense. It’s a new product. FCP X is properly viewed as a promising challenger that needs some time to mature, and I think people would have recognized this had it been from a company other than Apple or had Apple’s messaging been better.”
Maybe that’s why Apple killed FCP 7 right off the bat? They knew that few people, given the choice, would start using FCP X in any meaningful way if FCP 7 was still around.
[Chris Kenny] “As we saw with ‘classic’ FCP, the way to succeed in the long run is to get the ‘kids’ using your product today. Having user interface that new users bounce off of is fatal in the long run.”
I think that’s only part of it. I’d be very surprised if having FCP classic used on high end productions, and having very successful people evangelizing for it, didn’t play a large role in creating a halo effect. At $295 + 4 years of free updates Avid’s EDU license is pretty freaking compelling. Sure, the UI has a steeper learning curve but if you want to edit movies and the editors you want to be like use Avid…
A couple of NAB’s ago Avid showed a prototype of what it thinks cloud-based editing could be and they arguably have the best editing software on the iPad right now so who knows where the future takes us. Maybe Avid knows that its ‘local hardware’ products (I/O cards, ISIS) aren’t going to be enough anymore so they start offering cloud base solutions at both enterprise and boutique levels.
[Chris Kenny] “The modern Apple rarely kills is own in-house products (acquisitions are another story), and there is no particular indication that FCP X is being starved for developer resources.”
While there is of course no direct evidence of the FCPX team not getting much love, Apple is known for keeping its teams lean and mean and moving them around to the products that need the most support as opposed to expanding during busy times. Apple delayed development of Leopard to put more resources towards the iPhone launch so I don’t think they are beyond starving FCP X development for, well, just about anything iDevice or Cloud related. I think the very un-Apple-like hijacking of the SuperMeet last year and the launch itself is evidence that things weren’t running smoothly when it came to FCPX (at least at that time).
-Andrew
2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5) -
[Joseph W. Bourke] “Once again we’re back to what I’ve been hoping for for years – a big sticker required on the side of all creative software saying “TALENT NOT INCLUDED!”.”
From the classic An Open Letter to Canon video: “What’s in the box? Tears.”
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
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The new Smoke is Mac only.
Ofcourse because Apple is a consumer platform.Sarkasm off.
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