With Great Sadness……

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “[Tim Wilson] “They’re committed to this new direction, so COMMIT. I’m a fan. If I were their business consultant (hah-freaking-hah), that would have been my one strongest bit of advice: all or nothing, boys. Do it or don’t. ”

I strongly disagree with this sentiment. It is clear to me after eight months that FCPX is not an upgrade or replacement for FCS3. It is another NLE aimed squarely at a market that is different but has overlaps with FCS3.

Michael, I’m not saying that Apple did the right thing with FCPX as a thing unto itself. I’ve been very vocal about what I think are their, ahem, miscalculations. I do think that they looked at where things were — NOT at the the market and its needs, but the PRODUCT and its technology — and decided that they wanted to blow it up and start over….

…and if you want to start over, you begin by starting over.

[Michael Gissing] The EOL without notice and the haste with which they killed and attempted to bury the body has done irreparable damage to many people’s confidence in Apple as a supplier of a reliable professional NLE.”

Good. It SHOULD irreparably damage people’s confidence in Apple.

Apple has always been in this for Apple. If you liked it, fine – but you were collateral benefit, quite literally beside the point. They’ve been adamant from the beginning that they don’t build products for markets. They just don’t.

“[W]e didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research.”

There’s an extent to which they started going down the market-specific route with FCP. I see FCPX as a course correction, nothing more or less. Certainly NOT a deviation, but a return to what they’ve done from the beginning: create products that attempted to CHANGE markets, not to SERVE markets. Steve openly mocked companies who focused on markets and tried to build products for them.

and, re: Apple blowing up a market-leading position with FCP to start over with FCPX, well, they did they same thing when they blew up Apple II for Mac: zero compatibility, because

“Compatibility with the past is too limiting. [W]e needed a technology that would make the thing radically easier to use and more powerful at the same time, so we had to make a break. We just had to do it.”

Hmmm, torching a user base for something radically easier to use and more powerful. Where have I heard THAT before? Or, since Steve said the above in 1985, I should ask, where have I heard it AGAIN?

The thing is that Apple didn’t “just do it” with Mac re: Apple II. They supported both for a while. They also supported OS 9 and X for a while, which, as Steve pointed out later, was a bad idea. It created two companies, and if 21st century Steve was anything, he was focused.

I’m now starting to repeat myself, but my bottom line is that I agree with your conclusion about FCPX, Michael. I truly do. I’m just saying that if this is the course Apple believes in, they should go all in.

Even if that means that you and others decide to go all out in response.

[Andy Field]

The brave souls using FCP X for paying work seem like Charlie Brown hoping Lucy won’t yank the ball just before he kicks it and lands flat on his back. Lucy (Apple) yanked the ball last summer…and according to reports here…Lucy’s still hoping poor Charlie (us) keeps trying to kick it again.

We all know it’s not ready for reliable professional work and yet so many are willing to continue risking revenue by providing free beta testing on a program they actually paid for.

I beta test software for a few software companies…and they would be ashamed to release a product with this level of instability and call it version 10.

I’m still using FCP7…and migrating slowly to AVID although wish we didn’t have to. (really FCP7 has so many advantages with a vast array of plugs in and round tripping to external programs)

And yes, we would love FCP X to work, play well with others, have reliable external monitoring, tracks etc…..but it doesn’t and Apple isn’t telling us if or when we can expect it other than to …rely on “third party solutions”

That’s not acceptable when the previous version of their software solved all those problems right in the program itself.

Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852

[Renato Sanjuán]

FWIW, I spent a few months working on Lightworks/Heavyworks back in 1997/98. I came from a Media Composer background and it took a little getting used to, but it was in no way a turd. It was a superb tool to cut on and all the film editors I worked with preferred it to Avid. Which makes sense because it was designed precisely with film editors –who were still cutting on moviolas- in mind. Most of them didn’t want to switch and Lightworks was very much like a digital flatbed.

Trimming and media management (two big things for my type of work) were every bit as good as Avid’s. And it was rock solid. It hardly ever crashed and if it did you didn’t loose a keystroke, everything was instantly saved.

I have no idea what went on in the company, but I always felt that Lightworks got eaten alive by Avid because of it’s abismal fx toolset.

Lightworks is currently a beta release and they’re in the process of going open source, so bugs are to be expected. They boast some pretty cool features on their web site but I haven’t installed it yet, so I can’t say what’s real and what’s not.

I don’t think it will ever appeal to folks who do a lot of fx & compositing because it’s not built for that, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it.

And if it takes off and the price goes down I might even get myself a Lightworks console and edit away, free as a bird… (now I’m fantasizing, but the console was waaay cool).

[Bob Woodhead]

Where’s Craig S, with his positiveX spin to put on these tales of misery & woe?

[Timothy Auld]

And Bill D?

Tim

[Jim Giberti]

[Steve Connor] ”
As I’ve said in a couple of previous posts, FCPX is in effect beta software and I have a regular back up strategy in place for all the projects I work on with it.”

Hey Steve,

Me too…back up strategy that is. The same we’ve always had that’s always been effective.
But this is something else entirely…like a virus.
For instance it took a long time to isolate corrupted media trying to rescue this last project.
I’m talking about files so bad that FInder wouldn’t allow me to mouse over them in the browser.
Something I’ve never even heard of let alone experienced in decades of Macs.

One problem is if you don’t know there’s a corruption and you put tons of work into something the best you can do is lose all that work.

But associated things also get corrupted with the corrupt media.

I’m glad you’re not seeing this on a lot of boards but three people in this thread have had similar experiences, which is more than enough evidence that Apple isn’t doing there job.

I can deal with new software that requires a little massaging, but I can’t fathom software that destroys it’s own efforts.

This is all since 1.0.3.
As I said, at this point the software is probably corrupt so I guess I have to lose more of my life talking to Apple and downloading another 1-1/2 TB and reinstalling.

I’ve got 4 or 5 other projects all in FCPX now.

Yikes, thanks Apple.

[Steve Connor]

[Jim Giberti] “For instance it took a long time to isolate corrupted media trying to rescue this last project.
I’m talking about files so bad that FInder wouldn’t allow me to mouse over them in the browser.
Something I’ve never even heard of let alone experienced in decades of Macs.
“

I hope now you’ve got the job out, you’ll have time to work with Apple on this to try and find the issue.

Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television

[Andy Field]

Steve – if this was an Adobe product, Adobe would have it’s software engineers chiming contacting the user to find out how they can fix their broken software.

Unfortunately, this is the new Apple software — where there’s never a peep from anyone on the development team on any of these boards.

Have you actually gotten anyone from Apple’s Final Cut experts to help you on the phone? By Email? Acknowledge there’s a problem with their software? That would be something.

Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852

[Timothy Auld]

Yes, this has always been a big problem. Goodness knows I have have had my problems with Avid in the past – as in having my system totally lock up and having to get a “remote blessing” at ten o’clock at night. But the thing is, as annoying as that experience was, they were there at ten o’clock on that night. And they fixed my problem. I don’t have as much experience with Adobe but the experience that I do have tells me that they are similarly responsive. With Apple it has always been difficult to get them to even accept that the software in question even came from them. And if you were having problems with it then it was likely your own fault.

Tim

[Oliver Peters]

I think it’s fair to use the “1.0 version” argument for lack of features. It isn’t valid to excuse failure to perform as advertised in a reliable fashion. Apple has never had a deep beta tester pool from what I can tell. Also from what I understand, software is only tested in certified configuration, i.e. no third-party apps or plug-ins. As some of these posts show, their QA process is clearly flawed and doesn’t reflect real world use.

Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com