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Why all the hate?
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You have no idea what “long-term” is.
It can’t be defined.
If you really think that this piece of software will not evolve by Apple and the help of 3rd party developers then you haven’t been paying attention. -
[Walter Soyka] “Running a business based on discontinued software puts the owner in a bit of a tenuous position.
Other applications will require OS or hardware updates. Sooner or later, one of these updates will break compatibility with FCP7.
Relying on FCP7 for the long term will require keeping lots of duct tape and baling wire on hand, or giving up the benefits of multiple applications on a single desk, or building convoluted workarounds for new workflows which are natively supported on newer platforms. Ask an Avid Meridien owner.”
I can see your point… to a degree, but I think I could easily get a couple more years out of FCP 7. I ran FCP 5 on Tiger for well over 3 years and only upgraded because I wanted, not needed, some features. I’m no Hollywood post house, though… perhaps I’m just less demanding than everyone else.
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style! -
And you’re totally right, those things should be included. That said, we always archive a quicktime file, to to lay back to tape I’d just open fcp7 and work it out like that. OMF export – well, I’ll bite the bullet and get Automatic Duck and try that (we have an older version of it, so the upgrade cost of 195 isn’t so bad). The multi camera support – yeah, that’s annoying. For our business, we pretty much never used multicamera, so it’s not the end of the world. I would suspect a great deal of these issues will be resolved in an update, so we are going to play with this for now and learn it’s tricks. There’s a whole lotta cool stuff in here that I really like. The waveform monitor is a really cool. I love the effects layout now, too.
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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I’m posting the start of this thread with the full knowledge that some pieces are glaring omissions from our day-to-day operations.
We output EVERYTHING to tape. Well, time to upgrade, I guess. We’ve been talking about an entirely tapeless workflow for two years, so this is our proper nudge.
Multi-cam – we use it extensively. It’s a necessity for our operation, but I venture to guess 90% of FCP users never even use it. So, I guess concerts and multicamera shoots will have to be edited in FCP7.
Sometimes, these problems solve themselves.
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[Lou Borella] “You have no idea what “long-term” is. It can’t be defined. If you really think that this piece of software will not evolve by Apple and the help of 3rd party developers then you haven’t been paying attention.”
I’m not arguing with you there. Read my other posts here. I have stated several times that I do believe that FCPX is a great foundation for the future, and that its feature set will grow in time. I’m paying a lot of attention — to Adobe and Avid, as well as to Apple — and I believe that all these packages will evolve, and that they will evolve faster than they have in the past.
But as of today, Final Cut Studio (FCP7) is no longer available at the Apple store. FCPX is your only choice for new installations from Apple today, and there are many, many workflows that FCPX is not ready for yet. There is no timetable for the addition of any of the big “missing” features — or a guarantee that there will be one.
Apple’s track record on progress is mixed — for every amazing new technology, full of promise, that they release, there’s another amazing, cancelled technology. Consider Shake and Color — both major applications that were bought, briefly maintained but not seriously updated, and then killed without warning. Consider the XServe and Final Cut Server — both now discontinued with no warning and no roadmap for customers who built their businesses around them.
Apple has handled some transitions very well. The PPC to Intel switch was really well-managed, especially when you consider its complexity. The OS 9 to OS X switch was not. OS X wasn’t really usable until 10.2.
FCP7 to FCPX seems to be one of the transitions that Apple is not handling well.
It’s perfectly reasonable to be wary.
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 -
[Jason Jenkins] ”
I can see your point… to a degree, but I think I could easily get a couple more years out of FCP 7. I ran FCP 5 on Tiger for well over 3 years and only upgraded because I wanted, not needed, some features. I’m no Hollywood post house, though… perhaps I’m just less demanding than everyone else.”I totally agree with you…but only up to a point. While FCP 7 will work for years to come, it’ll only work in certain capacities. Sooner or later your clients will start shooting more and more on tapeless workflows, and If they are shooting AVCHD or h.264, you’re going to get tired of the hassle of transcoding to ProRes. So yes It will work for years to come until your workflow has to shift due to your client’s needs.
-mattyc
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“Sure, I’ll miss multi-cam, but I have a hunch it will reappear”
No multicam editing???
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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And we were about to expand our business by 10 edit suites and were planning on installing X in all new suites and upgrading the rest. What to do with the 10 new suites? Can’t buy 7 anymore, can’t use X for shows that need to go to broadcast facilities. eBay I guess.
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There’s a lot of “The sky is falling!” going on, to be sure.
For what it’s worth, here’s my perspective:
My workflow involves the use of XML. That being the case, FCPX is not a tool that I can use for the vast majority of what I do — now. Thankfully, FCP7 is on my system, and will continue to be the workhorse for what I do.
I have iMovie on my system. I use it rarely, and generally not for work. But it’s there.
Now I have FPSX on here, too. I doubt I’ll use it for much that’s serious — but I’m going to play with it a bunch, and I’m going to learn the interface. I’m going to get comfortable. And when XML arrives (and I’m fairly certain it will — at least that appears to be the case), I’ll be good to go. If it takes a month, great. I’ll have had a month to get up to speed and start doing my serious work seriously (if it was here now, I’d be fumbling around, trying to get work done, but learning as I go, which is less than optimal).
The way I figure it, I can look at this in one of two ways: this is really a kind of public pre-release, I’ve bought the program for a nominal amount of money, and I’m getting the opportunity to fart around until such time as the rest of the feature set that I anticipate is coming arrives — or two, the feature set never arrives, and I’ve invested a nominal amount of money into something that will replace iMovie for me and the things I use it for. I’ll stick with FCP7 until such time as I decide that another platform is superior, and I’ll move over.
Either way, it’s not the end of the world for me. My work is going to get done. I’ll learn some new stuff. And the sky will not fall.
Easy.
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When you’re making critical business decisions regarding the future of your company, things like this can be more than enough to make people jump ship and go with an entirely different platform. We need to know that Apple hasn’t abandoned certain features altogether, and if they haven’t how long we can expect to wait before they come back. It can mean the difference of thousands of dollars in investments. For instance, FCP was the entire reason our company invested in Apple products to begin with. Were it not for this, we would easily have gone down PC path and invested in Premiere or Avid. Today we have many thousands of dollars invested in multiple mac platforms, an AJA Kona LHe, Logic Studio, and multiple licenses of FCS3, as well as the mac versions of Adobe Creative Suite and Office.
Having so much invested in Mac means that I want desperately to be able to continue using Final Cut as our editing software. However, if these key issues are not addressed in a timely manner and I’m forced to continue using FCP7 indefinitely, this creates a HUGE problem for the future.
We are a relatively small company. The decision to stay with Apple or not is a huge one for us, but it is even bigger for larger companies with not thousands but hundreds of thousands or even millions to lose if the wrong decision is made. It really is a big deal.
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