Why all the hate?

[Adam Mccune]

Big Deal? Yes. Worthy of loathing and seething over it on an online forum all day? No.

Edit some fricken’ videos!

[Lou Borella]

OK Dave – Valid point.
But at what point did your company decide to jump in the FCP water with that big purchase?
Was it version 1.
When there was no hardware support?
Way before there was even a suite of applications?
Way before Logic existed?

I highly doubt you jumped in THAT early and if you did it wasn’t whole hog.

Look at your capabilities now. Your patience paid off. Especially because if you went with an AVID solution your investment would have been 10 fold in software alone if you count the maintenance fees.
And Adobe’s pricing leaves much to be desired as well.

[Peter Krajcik]

Hi,

I would like to add my comment as an Apple Expert Solution provider, so my opinion is from other side (I mean not end user’s side).
That’s really fine that Apple finally moved on with Final Cut. Yes, it is an evolution (in context of what Lion and all other related pieces of puzzle could do).
But my hate as a reseller is because of total Apple ignorance of partners and customers.
We were working on couple of projects where FCS or FCServer were a key parts of infrastructre. Big projects with 10s of seats and lot of other technology related to broadcasting and designed to work with traditional workflow. We knew there will be new FCPX, but nobody expected it won’t be replacement for FCP. No body expected that Apple wil not notify partners they will discontinue FCP or FCServer. They just made a radical cut in place where they shouldn’t. if big customers realize that there is no stable future with Apple, they will go with Avid or Premiere. Ok, that’s business, but we have evangelized Final Cut, we made trainings for our customers, we made support, we convinced them to switch from Avid to FCP. No Apple representative came and made a deal. And now we simply can’t sell FCPX to customers because of App Store.
You can argument that you don’t need a middle man, but there is a lot of customers who simply need a service company to install and service things. I am not talking about small studios – I am talking about public TVs or big production houses. Apple has no business model how to manage this thing.
Yes, it will be colder tomorrow, but I simply hate this ignorancy.

Peter

[Lou Borella]

Peter
The writing was on the wall at least 4 years ago when it cam to FCServer and Xsan.
Apple decided it didn’t want to compete with the AVID Unity installs and focused on iOS and moblie hardware. No needed to tell me that.

Your customers sill have functioning installations I’m sure. They can probably still get 3-5 more years out of them easily. At that point the landscape will be more clearly defined and they will have to make a decision.

[Peter Krajcik]

Lou,

as it might be complicated for end user of FCP to switch to other platform, it is much more complicated for reseller to turn 180 degress and market Adobe or Avid. In enterprise business you simply can’t tell to customer: choose Avid, Adobe or Apple NLE and if they chose FCP, you come one day and tell them: ok, now we sell Avid so switch to Avid. They trust to you that you will pick a right product and make their investment safe. Yes, Apple can’t compete with Avid in broadcast, but they easily could in NLEs.
Pro market was one of the reasons why Apple survived when its market share was very low.

Will they do the same with QuickTime ?
I personally think that new QuickTime (or what will be the name of new version of product) is the main reason why basic ingest/output functions are not present in FCP X. QTKit is a toy, QuickTime framework is very, very old.

Peter

[Daniel Frome]

The “hate” is actually a pretty reasonable reaction considering that this is a professional forum and many people have a lot riding on features that FCPX has omitted. I won’t bore you with a list of them because all the responses here are rife with answers.

It’s a great and powerful editor with a lot of missing features that we’ve come to rely on.

[Lou Borella]

But think of it this way.
If one of your customers say 5 years ago invested X.XX amount in FCP workstations and shared media hardware – what would that cost have been if they would have done the equivalent AVID install?
I know the AVID solution would have easily be twice as high if not more. The service licenses alone would have cost a fortune. Which is probably one of the main factors why you pushed the Apple solution and probably a large factor in your customers decisions. The Adobe solution is a more comparable price point but their upgrade pricing is a joke. You also would have had media sharing issues over multiple workstations with Premier because its not set up for that kind of environment.

Take pride in knowing that you sold them the best product (because AVID editing solutions truly suck at this point in time) at the best price point and that your installs are still a functioning entity and will be for a few more years. Those installations will not owe your customers anything when it comes time to upgrade.

Also know that some developer will step up to the plate with a solution a void with a complementary product that Apple doesn’t offer. Such as networked storage and media solutions.

FCPX is 8 hours old at this point. Have a little patience.

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Adam McCune] ” A LOT of hate directed at this. I ask why…why? It has made me finally register as a user to say this: There is a lot of fear running through the pro ranks right now, and I finally see why.”

It’s unnatural to embrace the different, the strange, the unknown. If the Wright brothers had this attitude, we’d still be taking ships across the Atlantic. If Eric the Red had this attitude, there’d have been no Icelandic banking crisis because there’d be no people living there. If Marco Polo had this attitude, there’s be no lasagna. If Thomas Edison had this attitude, we’d still be using candles and gaslights at night.

Progress can be painful, it can be disruptive. It can also be transformative. Look at the internet. Sure, there’s a lot of risk of computer virii and identity theft, but it’s transformed travel, shopping, banking and even the Mideast. Computers have transformed the film & video industries.

Advances in software and hardware have raised the bar of what we can do, and lowered the bar of who thinks they can do it. At the end of the day, though, it’s still up to us to get the work done.

FCP-X is just another video editing program. But it’s different. Very different. As an editor, I’m excited. It’s a new way to work at telling stories. It doesn’t do everything I need today, but someday it might. And even if it doesn’t, there are other programs that do. And I expect those other programs to look a lot like FCP-X in a couple of years.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Adam Mccune]

Hate is never a reasonable reaction, I think that is my underlying point.

[Peter Krajcik]

Hi,

it seems to be complicated to explain you this matters – it looks you’re Pro not reseller.
It doesn’t matter if we sold them anything 5 years ago and know they should be happy because we saved them a lot fo money. They went with Apple, they trained people, they invested to Apple products (ok.less than to Avid but thats not a point). Now they need to buy 50 seats of FCS. Most of them needs ingest tapes and output to the tape. I simply can’t tell them with a smile sorry guys, Apple changed its mind and you should look around and shop for Avid or Adobe if you want to do things you did before.
Apple thinks you don’t need ingest and output to tape and you shouldn’t shot on multicamera because according to Apple it is old way of doing music video.
Well it is over guys. May I offer you Avid ? Yes, you can be pretty sure nothing similar happens to Avid in next 5 years. Believe to Avid.