[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Harlan] “You ask “who would do such a ting?” Maybe some other company would have a similar interest? Who knows. Is it gonna happen? Doubt it. But you posed the scenario.”

I posed a technical scenario. Tech isn’t nearly the hurdle that the economics is. I can’t think of a company that could both execute such a product and also stand to benefit from it without selling it for way more money than we are used to for NLEs.

I almost argued for AJA doing it (heavy investment in ProRes, development talent, hardware to sell), but they can now sell Konas and Ios to every major NLE on the market, so there is no business case for building an NLE to help sell their hardware.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Robert Brown] “There would probably be millions of reasons -$$$$$$- to. It’s what a lot of editors wanted, a better FCP.
It’s all I wanted. But I would guess there would have to be some legal hurdles to make a clone of FCP but if not maybe somebody should. It would take somebody with serious resources to pull it off though.”

That’s the key- how much would you pay for it? The business model du jour seems to be “software for cheap, hardware required”. This is and was true for FCP and the Mac, is probably the case for Da Vinci and DeckLink cards, and is arguably true for Avid as well (most of their money is made in their big systems like ISIS). Adobe doesn’t sell PPro outside of Creative Suite, and they recently announced they are tightening their upgrade pricing policy (to much gnashing of teeth).

A lot of editors wanted FCP8, but without Apple subsidizing development with Mac sales, how much would it cost? $5,000? $10,000? Your point about serious resources being required is the key- who would do it, and why would they do it? It would still be such a costly undertaking aimed at such a small and demanding market that it just seems like the economics don’t wash for me.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Harlan] “You’d have to ask the people who are keeping Lightworks alive. I DO know that I would be a volunteer supporter of any volunteer fringe group that tried to do the same for FCS. It would be quite the hobby.”

Lightworks is being kept alive by a well-established company in the business of selling expensive hardware (EditShare), it won’t stay free once it gets out of beta, it comes from a very well established codebase, and it is cross-platform. I don’t see how that is similar to the idea of someone spinning up a spiritual successor to FCP from scratch.

How much would you PAY for the FCP8 Apple never made?

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

What is there to buy? The Final Cut Pro brand carries on, such as it is, so that isn’t going anywhere. The legacy FCP codebase has no future since it is all based upon legacy QuickTime.

There is nothing stopping any third party from developing a Mac-only NLE that had 99.9% of the look and feel and mechanics of legacy FCP upon the 64-bit APIs in Lion that FCPX is built upon. They’d have to roll their own riff on the UI for copyright compliance, but aside from that, there is nothing stopping anyone.

Except, why would anyone do that?

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Walter Soyka] “I joked about FCPX pricing yesterday, but by setting the base price of the application so low, Apple may have also established very low pricing expectations for third-party plugins and possibly damaged the viability of the market. “

This was a problem with Final Cut Server as well. $999 for the software but $20K+ to make it do anything. That still beat $100K software that took $20K to make it do anything (artbox), but few people had that frame of reference.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

If the software you are using to write the tape allows you to treat it as a blank, yes. Do not attempt to degaus the cassette, that will render it unusable.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Paul Provost] “this is for shared archival storage (commercial production company’s entire library – 15 years x 20 directors, many thousands of commercials + room for more)”

RAID/SAN is not ideal archival storage, LTO is. If you all need to edit from the same footage at the same time, get a SAN. If you only need to archive and let everyone get access to the archive via the network, look at solutions from Cache-A or Storage DNA.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Craig Seeman] “Top iMac has two ports…”

But only one controller:

“A single Thunderbolt port is capable of 20Gbps of bandwidth (10Gbps in each direction), so that works out well (if you don’t use any of the other PCIe devices in the system at the same time). While the 21.5-inch iMac has a single Thunderbolt port, the 27-inch model has two. That’s a total of up to 40Gbps of bandwidth to Thunderbolt devices, but only 20Gbps to the controller itself. Don’t be fooled by the presence of two Thunderbolt ports on the 27-inch iMac, you don’t get any more bandwidth than you would on the 21.5-inch model – you can just hook up more displays.“

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Craig Seeman] “‘d love to see the details on Xeon schedule roadmap for those who need desktop power.”

Q1 2012 for the E5-2600 likely to be used in a new Mac Pro, assuming they employ a similar architecture to today. A benchmark of an engineering sample has surfaced as well. Dig that bandwidth- 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0 per chip. Dang….

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Walter Soyka] “In other words, Apple has one idea for how an NLE should work. That same idea — and many of the same tools — is expressed very simply in iMovie, and more richly in FCPX.”

I agree. Clear philosophical lineage. I was taking issue with Aindreas’ contention that FCPX is “is made out of iMovie spare parts with a bunch of buggy new stuff soldered on”.

Best,
Andy