[Andrew Richards]

Seems like Apple’s attitude with FCPX is lot like their attitude toward the iPad an iPhone in the enterprise space. They’ll make it generally capable and (they hope) desirable by users, and let third parties do the dirty work of making it suit enterprise IT. The difference is that corporate users definitely desire an iPhone or iPad, but it is looking like not many working video pros desire to use FCPX. The new features that were supposed to appeal to the user have mostly alienated the pro users.

I actually like the new paradigm in FCPX, but will enough others? Will the third parties see a market to fill in the gaps? Only time will tell, but the market for such niche third party add-ons to FCPX seems to be shrinking by the day. Will AJA/Blackmagic/Matrox/Automatic Duck/etc. hang around to take FCPX the rest of the way to viability as a replacement for FCP7? Blackmagic sure looks like they are trying to be a platform and not an accessory. AJA could become the tape I/O kings of FCPX world if they wanted to. It is impossible to predict how the next 18 months will actually play out.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

That kind of level-headed, thoughtful analysis has no place here!

🙂

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

[james carey] “true enough, but it did take ten years for apple to grow its market share to just north of 50%. It will be interesting to see where they sit one year from now. Or if they even care.”

Indeed. They’re breaking a lot of eggs for this omlette…

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

[Jamie Franklin] “They also disingenuously told people this would be a replacement to FCS and the pros weren’t being left behind during the rumourfest surrounding the supermeet…people were right to have suspicions, but they tried to dismiss them knowing full well what they were unleashing…”

Totally true. They completely mismanaged expectations for FCPX and continue to botch the response with their inaction. The FAQ is not an effective response to the situation. Pulling FCStudio from the market exacerbated the problem, and in my opinion is the the worst part of all this. The company that shifted its users from OS 9 to OS X and from PPC to Intel should know better.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

[Greg Burke] “Well At the Post House I work at, as well as 4 other creative houses in the area that we work with have sworn off Apple “Pro” Products altogether so I have a hard time believing that Post houses will depend on such a consumer based program to get he job done. I mean it took FCP 10 Years to get respect in the Film and Broadcast industry. and apple just hit the reset switch.”

That may be, but that doesn’t mean the capabilities won’t be there. And again with the “consumer-based” canard; if superficial UI similarities to iMovie are where you stopped evaluating FCPX, then you really gave it short shrift. I won’t argue it is ready for broadcast/film/tape workflows today. It isn’t. But it has a very solid base on which it can rapidly eclipse the feature set of FCP7, and that seems to pass the “pro” litmus test, don’t you think? FCP7 was a hodgepodge of archaic code for deprecated APIs all based on a media playback architecture (QuickTime) that was built for event-based media and not time-based media. Hardly the platform to continue developing if you want to compete in a world of multiple cores and 64-bit OSes.

Also, it did not take ten years for FCP to get respect. It took more like 4 or 5. Ten years would have meant no one took FCP seriously till FCP7. It was a serious player at v4.5 in 2004, and Murch cut Cold Mountain on v3 in 2003. FCPX, if Apple follows through with it, will be ready for prime time in a much shorter interval. If the jilted FCP users of today want to hold a grudge after FCPX matures, that is their (and your) prerogative.

Avid and Adobe will surely benefit from all this, and that is a good thing. Competition breeds innovation from all players and delivers choice to us all.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

[james carey] “I think Apple has made a big mistake and underestimated the worth of the huge amount of cache it had garnered by having one of the most useful and professional editing tools in this market place. They made evangelists out of many of us, but now have turned as many into detractors. Not a wise business move in my opinion, but i am not privy to their books and projections. Their stock holders will have to decide for themselves – and they don’t care about my disruptions.”

Agree! Apple utterly failed at PR on this one. They made some pretty obvious mistakes for a company that should know better about uncomfortable transitions (OS X? Intel? Seriously?). Apple usually abhors bad PR, so we may not have seen the end of this (but it sure is taking them a long time if we haven’t heard the last of them on this). This is at least as bad PR-wise as Antenna-gate, even if the stakes aren’t as high. Conan? The WSJ? FCP went mainstream news and it was all bad press.

All they have to do is put FCS2009 back on the market and hold up their end of the bargain on the potential of FCPX and all will be forgiven (at least for my part).

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

[Greg Burke] “Allot of people are hopeful that updates are coming and they’ll fix missing features and such, but honestly…can you really see this app in a professional Broadcast house in the next 5 years?”

More like 2 or 3. Or less. The delta between FCPX today and where it needs to be in order to anchor a high-end workflow isn’t nearly as wide as everyone seems to think. Everyone is upset Apple is passing a lot of the pro feature responsibility off to third parties, but this is how FCPX will get full-on pro a lot faster than if Apple had to do it all itself.

[Greg Burke] “but the fact of the matter is FCP X presented itself as a Consumer product”

Oh? As far as I can tell that is a only the opinion of disaffected FCP users. Apple seems to think they built a pro app.

[Greg Burke] “I even remember reading a Article about how the designer (Randy) and how he designed the program from the point of view on a vacation, and how he could make editing easier while on a boat or in an RV”

Yeah. He designed what ultimately became the new iMovie as a logging tool because all other logging tools sucked. They did, and the fact that Apple morphed that project into iMovie, which bears a superficial resemblance to FCPX, has nothing at all to do with what FCPX can and cannot do in a professional setting, now or in the future. Nothing.

[Greg Burke] “I recently Bought Avid 5.5, and Premiere pro, and Am training extensively, to become an asset in the Post world.”

Knowing multiple tools is a good thing for any editor. You won’t go hungry knowing how to cut on Avid, and that was true for the last ten years as well. Hone your craft. I’ll bet you a beer you’ll want to know FCPX one day too.

Good luck and good hunting!

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

[Scott Sheriff] “As far as ‘fanboy’ being considered a pejorative, that would be driven by context. If used to disparage an individual directly by name, perhaps yes.
As a label for a group, or to indicate someone is participating in ‘group think’, then no. At best it might be a stereotype.”

Context schmontext. It is a pejorative whether directed at an individual or whether used to generalize about a group of individuals.

[Scott Sheriff] “What would you call someone sitting in coffee shop with FCP open on a MBP grinding away on a render, reading the RSS feed from macrumors on his iPad waiting for this years keynote speech to start, while he’s talking to apple service on his iPhone about an issue he’s having with his iPod connecting to his iTunes account? Is that a casual user? No. It’s simply much easier to say ‘fanboy’.”

The benign, non-pejorative term you are looking for is “enthusiast”. “Fanboy” is an epithet inferring an unthinking devotion toward the object of affection.

Regardless, the context in which “fanboy” was used in the opening post and in nearly every other post in this forum the past week has been pejorative. It is invoked with disdain to marginalize the target(s). Just like “Luddite”. Both are disrespectful in the context of this forum and its topic. I know things get irreverent around here, and I like a good-spirited jab as much as the next guy. But I’ve had enough with all the belittling on both sides.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

[Jonathan Dortch] “What exactly is the drawback to a track system? It’s worked pretty damn well for the last 20 years. Why not keep the track convention AND add the keyword metadata in lieu of labels? Everything I love about FCPX can be adapted into the conventional, proven NLE track system. “

The drawback is in how it has evolved to be used. The tracked timeline was conceived as a visual metaphor for compositing. That’s it. It had no other design intent. Video over other video was “on top” and if made translucent or cropped or whatever it revealed what was underneath. Audio tracks are analogous to tracks on a mixer and there is not a top-down hierarchy to them. Overlapping clips mix together on output or they can be “patched” to outputs.

Over the years this ubiquitous track-metaphor convention gave editors a structure with which they could create a de facto set of organizational rules; lower thirds on V3, B-roll on V2, SFX on A3&4, NAT on A5&6, etc. But what if you needed to composite between to lower thirds? Or what if you wanted to use the tracks to mix audio in the timeline? The informal structure breaks down and all the “control” everyone keeps harping about becomes a series of workarounds to jam the work into the arbitrary track rules.

Yes, tracks are a convention, and the magnetic timeline throws them out. The end output is still one video track and a fixed set of mixed down or split audio tracks. The traditional timeline is just a metaphor, nothing more. The magnetic timeline is just a new metaphor.

There is no technical reason I can imagine why the magnetic timeline couldn’t support “views” that visually remix the metaphor on the fly and present a more traditional track layout, and this would be very useful. Imagine the audio connected to the main storyline with the click of a button rearranging and collapsing itself into virtual tracks based on the timeline’s particular outputs that will have different metadata tags assigned to them. Dialogue on A1&2, SFX on A3&4, NAT on A5&6, Music on A7&8, etc. You could use that view for master mixing, soloing output busses, and generally visualizing your outputs. Apple should do this, and I’m going to suggest it to them in a Feedback.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology

[Andrew Richards]

A

Even if nobody asked for it, that doesn’t make it bad. Chris Kenny put it best; the old timeline metaphor is like using a spreadsheet as a database while the magnetic timeline is like a relational database. That probably doesn’t resonate with a lot of editors, but it resonates for me.

I was flummoxed at first when I tried to use it. It isn’t at all intuitive for anyone used to the old timeline. Then I slogged through a tutorial and it started making sense. I still am not a fish in water with it, but I get why it’s a big deal in a good way.

• They need to have a mode that locks the playhead in place and scrolls the timeline under it during playback.
• They need to improve how you assign roles for audio and how those roles can be matched to outputs. THis is apparently already in the pipeline.
• They need to have more audio output options than 2 (Stereo) versus 6 (surround) channels. Why limit it? There needs to be a Multi-Track option that lets you define your own number of output audio channels. I’ve already formally requested this one.
• They should put in a view that collapses your outputs (a la compound clips) and represents them as discreet tracks under the main storyline. This would be great for doing a final pass mix and for visualizing the output and soloing busses.
• They should have a modifier key (like hold option or something) for dragging things apart to create gaps or slug (so that after you have ahold of a clip you can decide you really want to be using the position tool).
• They need to add the ability to set a starting timecode for the timeline.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology