Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Herb Sevush] “I am merely pointing out that it is sometimes very Apple not to question interface assumptions. That they chose to do it here cannot be explained by the argument “but they always do that” when quite clearly they don’t “always do that.””
They almost always do it with totally new products. Compare iOS to classic PalmOS, for instance — the latter brought over all sorts of desktop interface conventions like drop-drop and popup menus and desktop-style scrollbars. iOS is much more radical departure from traditional desktop UI conventions.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “So where is the “assumption questioning” with Safari?”
A browser is quite limited in this respect because much of how it works is dictated by how the Web itself works, which is outside of Apple’s control.
[Herb Sevush] “Itunes is the least “Apple” program they own, I don’t see them tossing it out the window.”
iTunes was originally an outside acquisition (though it did get a major UI makeover), and I’d actually consider it quite likely that Apple will toss it out the window. It still contains Carbon code and some archaic UI (unnecessary model dialogs, etc.). It was built for the era when the Mac was your “digital hub”. Now iCloud is. I think it’s inevitable we’ll see iTunes replaced with a a ground-up rewrite designed more as a client than a hub — probably within the next two years.
[Herb Sevush] “This mantra that Apple questions and rethinks everything is PR bullpoo.”
Because they don’t do it for every generation of every product? Doesn’t follow.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “If “one-click” installation is such a big deal, other vendors will follow suit. “
Adobe and Avid NLE products are presently packaged, priced and implemented in a way that makes them impossible to sell either though the Mac App Store or Microsoft’s forthcoming Metro app store.
[Herb Sevush] “If “one click” Youtube is a big hit, every NLE on the market will adapt it, it’s not like it’s difficult technology.”
[Herb Sevush] “In what way is it optimized for laptops more than any other NLE? Do you mean PPro on a MBpro can’t use a TBolt raid?”
The above two arguments are analogous to an argument one sometimes sees in geek circles that Apple is doing things all wrong with the iPad — that if you were to take a ‘real’ desktop operating system and graft on some touch features, you’d have something more powerful and consequently ‘better’. The massive success of iOS suggests this isn’t true — that the market values Apple’s simplicity and focus. In many respects, FCP X is the iOS of the NLE market.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “No matter how you look at the recent “seat” numbers, they are loosing percentage in market share.”
Margin-of-error losses in a survey that probably ignores most the target demographic (see below).
[Herb Sevush] “I don’t think a perfect rollout would require a near constant backtracking by the “roller.” I think Apple took their #1 position in the NLE market and threw it in the toilet for many of the reasons you laid out. I don’t know if that larger market they think exists, exists.”
It has existed for years. It’s the market that bought most of the copies of classic FCP as well. How many people do you think are employed by post facilities or broadcasters in the US? FCP X had more than 2M licensed users. I doubt more than 5% of them were doing film/broadcast work — and this is before we even discuss all the freelancers who probably pirated classic FCP, many of whom might buy legal copies of FCP X now that App Store distribution has made it cheaper and easier.
[Herb Sevush] “the other thing to consider is what would have happened if they created FCP8. 64 bit, anything on the timeline, metadata intensive – but with tracks, 2 viewers, multicam, broadcast out, XML, OMF, EDL. They could have changed the data structure but kept it operationally similar. It could have been as “Apple” as they liked, but still respected basic editing conventions.”
It’s not “Apple” to not question basic user interface assumptions. Which is why I predicted they’d do precisely this with FCP X over a year before it shipped.
An “FCP 8” certainly would have been better received in these forums, but whether it would have had the same long-term potential is unclear. FCP X’s long-term potential will be determined primarily by its appeal to new users. I suspect Apple believes its new interface will have more appeal than a traditional NLE UI, and Apple has a pretty good record with these things.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “Then, should Autodesk become the next real powerhouse, the big question will be, will schools across the country want to teach X to aspring legions of future editors? And, will Apple’s pro feature set, added to what may become just a pure Youtube NLE, ultimately become the Classic Coke or Edsel as some have prognosticated?”
Has everyone forgotten history so quickly? The original Final Cut Pro initially found its way into the market because it was one of the first NLE products to seriously embrace DV/FireWire — consumer video technologies that pros initially didn’t take seriously (one recalls extensive arguments over the definition of ‘broadcast quality’).
There is a long-term trend away from high-priced specialty products. Look at the long-term erosion of Avid’s market share — none of the fundamental factors that were responsible for that trend have changed. The idea that a high-end-only product will win the next round of the NLE wars runs contrary to all of this. It’s highly unlikely.
Over the next decade, I like FCP X’s prospects. FCP X is available for one-click App Store installation at a dramatically lower cost than competing applications. It’s easier for new editors to learn. It’s built around file-based acquisition and focuses heavily on Internet deliverable formats (causing you to pejoratively imply it might be a “YouTube NLE”). Its UI is based around Internet-age taxonomy — relationships and tagging. It’s designed for a world of speedy laptops that can connect to Thunderbolt storage fast enough to handle even uncompressed HD.
In a way its detractors are right — FCP X is from a different world than competing NLEs. But that world isn’t the consumer market. It’s the future. And it’s arriving fast.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Dennis Radeke] “Have you heard about Speedgrade?
https://success.adobe.com/assets/en/downloads/guides/SG_CS6_Intro_Reveal.pdf
https://tv.adobe.com/watch/no-stupid-questions-with-colin-smith/introduction...”
Yes, but again, a lot of production workflows aren’t the sort of end-to-end-under-one-roof affairs that make this kind of integration work. Often when an indie feature starts cutting, nobody on the production has any clue what facility will be grading the project or what software they’ll be using, and the offline editor wouldn’t pick a particular NLE just to make things easier for the online facility even if they did know.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Gissing] “Again wishful thinking and observational bias. Just today on this forum issues like keyframing, auto saves, opening multiple sequence, copying file attributes were mentioned. For me I add lack of machine control, the fact that the output via SDI is still not video and audio synced. Yes I can work around these things but why should I?
The only reason why specifics are not being mentioned is because many here have just grown tired of reminding the forum of what is still missing. Great that our list is getting smaller. “
It used to be the case that there were big, critical headline features missing, that made FCP X fundamentally unusable in certain workflows. A tool that couldn’t put an image on a broadcast display and couldn’t move a sequence to Resolve was totally useless to the projects I work on, for instance.
The kind of omissions/annoyances that remain today are not like this. They’re more like the sort of gripes people used to a particular app routinely have with alternative apps. Should there be selective copying of clip attributes? Sure. But let’s say this transition were working in reverse — that you’d been editing on FCP X for years and were moving to FCP 7. I suspect you’d find all sorts of feature omissions of similar or larger scale in FCP 7. Yet FCP 7 was (and still is) widely used for high-end editorial.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Dennis Radeke] “I think many people miss what I consider to be the main point – namely the workflow of Production Premium in its entirety. In this case, Premiere Pro is the ‘hub’ application – where things like After Effects, Photoshop and others feed into the main organizational, story-telling tool.”
I get the argument for integrated tools, and I’m sure for some types of projects (VFX-heavy music videos or commercials that have the edit, composting, graphics, etc. all done under one roof, for instance) it’s extremely useful. But my reaction is the same as it is to Smoke’s integrated toolset. This sort of thing seems like it’s hugely important to a couple of market segments, and not really all that useful to others. For instance the kind of integration you’re describing wouldn’t do us much good with our indie feature projects — editors in our world choose software they enjoy using (because they’re going to be cutting with it for months) with effectively no regard for workflow considerations, VFX and graphics are usually done by outside facilities, and everything is going to end up getting fed into some color grading system that isn’t part of Adobe’s ecosystem in the end anyway.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Andrew Kimery] “I agree that if FCPX would’ve launched with high-end features enabled that would have given a different perception to the launch. And what you are saying furthers my hypothesis. At some point during the development of FCPX the choice for launch features was set (iMovie thumbs up, XML thumbs down). If it was a time crunch issue why didn’t they get started on development earlier? I’m sure w/all of Apple’s in-house development experience they could do a good job of planning out realistic development schedule.”
Despite the bad PR, it seems to have been the correct choice for Apple to ship as soon as it had a release suitable for mainstream editors, rather than waiting on high-end features — they seem to have sold a lot of copies over that first 12 months, after all. Consequently, had they started earlier, I imagine they’d still have done a minimalistic initial release.
[Andrew Kimery] “Honestly, I think the resources got pulled to work on iOS projects, which also explains the final, lackluster update to the FC Suite, and so there was a rush job to get FCPX out because they natives were really getting restless.”
I suspect the final lackluster update to FCS was due to resources being pulled to FCP X, and was also an illustration of why FCP needed to be rewritten from the ground up — a lot of the features people would have wanted in that update were probably impossible to implement within the old codebase. Native support for non-QuickTime media, better use of GPUs and multicore processors, 64-bit, etc. This stuff just wasn’t reasonably possible in a creaky old Carbon app.
[Andrew Kimery] “Sure, Avid and Adobe might not be reinventing the wheel (though they are both doing a better job of supporting old media and new media workflows than Apple currently is) but I don’t worry about the next version of MC or PPro getting delayed, or under-delivered, because they diverted massive internal resources to work on an iDevice app. I can’t say the same for FCPX.”
As I noted previously, Premiere is probably not one of Adobe’s more important products (and because of the way almost everyone buys CS apps in bundle form, it’s not even clear how many actual additional sales improving Premiere with produce for Adobe), and Media Composer faces some risk posed by Avid’s problems at the corporate level. It’s not immediately obvious to me that FCP X is the most risky long-term choice here. It’s true that it’s not Apple’s primary focus, but Apple has 250x Avid’s revenue and actually sells a smaller number of products than Avid does, so it doesn’t logically follow that FCP X will receive less investment than Media Composer.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “I do understand mass market economies of scale. As I have written in other threads I believe that the era of high-end video riding on the coattails of mass market computers is coming to an end. My guess is that many of us will be working on Linux boxes in the next few years and paying a lot more to do that. I don’t believe Apple is interested in arresting that trend or serving that market.”
I guess I get the logic here — mainstream computing is moving to a more appliance-like model (iPad, Metro, etc.) and you don’t think pro video editing is compatible with that model? Not sure I agree.
First off, I think traditional personal computers are going to take a pretty long time to exit the stage — even if 80% of consumer computing happens on phones, tablets and maybe ARM desktops in five years, there will likely still be a viable market for high-powered traditional desktops and laptops. It’s not just pro video customers — it’s gaming enthusiasts, engineers, scientists, developers, etc. And there’s the whole server market, which also largely shares the same hardware platforms. It’s enough of a customer base to keep prices reasonable, I think.
Secondly, I’m not sure appliance-like computing is inherently incompatible with what we do, the hardware it occurs on becomes more powerful and developers and platform vendors figure out how to handle problems like sharing data between apps better within the new model. I doubt many people looked at the Mac in 1984 and saw a system of relevance to professional video editing — today’s iPad is already much closer to being useful to our market, and we’re already seeing video editing tools there. Nothing that could substitute for a desktop NLE yet, but it’s early days.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.