Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Andrew Kimery] “What I meant was, the core demographic for Avid and Adobe are professional users. The same isn’t true for Apple. Apple could drop Logic, Motion, FCPX, Compressor & Aperture and it would be like a semi running over a squirrel.”
Adobe wouldn’t suffer all that much without Premiere. After all, it hasn’t been taken very seriously to date, and they’ve been doing just fine. It’s not clear how many additional copies of Creative Suite Adobe can even sell by improving Premiere. For instance, if we decided to migrate to Premiere here, it would result in zero additional sales for Adobe, as the systems we’d use it on already have Creative Suite licenses which were purchased to get Photoshop/Illustrator/AE/Encore. This is probably true for a lot of potential Premiere users.
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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] “I suspect this is wishful thinking. My read of the market in my area is that FCPX is not on the radar as a replacement for FCP7. Some have already jumped to AVID or CS5.5 but many more are now saying that sometime this year they will add AVID and /or CS6 to their system. Many still want to squeeze life out of their MacPros and FCP7. “
I’ve seen zero interest thus far in Premere among real-world contacts, and a lot of FCP users chose FCP over Avid for reasons that continue to hold, or perceive Media Composer as a risk because of Avid’s dicey financial situation and long-term market share erosion.
[Michael Gissing] “Almost no editors or facilities that I talk to consider critical high end features to be sufficient in FCPX in spite of efforts by third parties. Indeed the perception is that only because of third parties is FCPX vaguely a consideration.”
We seem to keep hearing that FCP X’s feature set is still considered insufficient, but I can’t help but notice that unlike a year ago there aren’t many specific features being mentioned.
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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] “When/if it does how many of the high-end users are going to be the market to switch NLEs… again?”
This question assumes they’ll switch to a competing product in the meantime. Truth is, most of the critical higher end features have already been added back to FCP X (or are available from third parties in its ecosystem), and no mass exodus seems to have occurred. When classic FCP users do look for something new, FCP X should be right there in the running.
[Andrew Kimery] “And why toss the baby out with the bathwater on the rebuild if that’s a market you want to keep? If FCPX didn’t ship with Import from iMovie or Share to CNN iReporter I don’t think anyone would’ve raised a fuss over those missing features at launch.”
I find that very unlikely. The only realistic way Apple could have changed the perception of who was being targeted with the first release would have been to hold the entire release until additional high-end features could be implemented. Even then, the pump was primed — there were many people already buying into the “Apple is abandoning pros” narrative (ironically because an FCP replacement hadn’t shipped yet). People were looking to fit anything Apple shipped into this narrative — it would have been very hard to avoid.
[Andrew Kimery] “Obviously they couldn’t go from nothing to king of the hill over night but that was the long term goal. To go toe to toe with Avid.
Maybe that still is the goal but they are going to do it by building a more profitable business as opposed to building a better product. ;)”
There are two ways to unseat a competitor — build a better equivalent product, or build a product that redefines the market to make their product irrelevant. Apple is to some extent taking a hybrid approach with FCP X. They’re supporting some standard industry formats and practices, but also trying to push the industry the way they think it should go.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Seeman] “Also it’s not clear that the number is specifically FCPX. Many facilities are still on FCP7 or 6 given the comments about the diminished 7 uptake which is believable. “
I’m virtually certain that number includes all versions of FCP. Its primary interest to this discussion is it demonstrates Apple’s additions of higher-end features to FCP X is not “too late” — existing FCP users have either been moving to FCP X or sticking with classic FCP (I would guess mostly the latter) for now. Those still on classic FCP will have to go somewhere eventually, but FCP X’s feature set has expanded enough now that it will at least be in the running when they do.
[Craig Seeman] “And the following implies not much for Adobe. Again who knows how they’re counting.
The 3% Final Cut Pro X lost in the last year largely went to (no surprise) Media Composer.”
This is also good news for Apple; Avid is likely to be a weaker competitor in the long run, meaning it will be easier for Apple to recapture short-term losses to Media Composer than it would be to recapture losses to Premiere.
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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] “Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that plus other things that happened signals to me that Apple is targeting a different demo w/FCPX.”
See, I think this is the key point. People are assuming that because FCP 7 had these high-end features and 10.0.0 didn’t, it means Apple’s focus has shifted, presumably with long-term implications for high-end users.
But I think people may be misjudging what FCP’s primary target market actually was. What if FCP has always been primarily targeted at the wider world of video editing, and the main reason it had high-end features 10.0.0 lacked is some combination of the fact that a) it had been in development for long enough for Apple to get around to lower-priority niche market features and b) it was actually an outside acquisition in the first place, meaning even the 1.0 release might not have fully conveyed Apple’s focus?
If this is true, it stands to reason that if Apple’s focus managed to produce a tool that met the needs of high-end users last time around, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do so again.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “They kind of are off in their own bizarre world. No one else has a parent/child timeline model, and that’s the critical factor here in interchange.”
The parent/child timeline is just a richer way of arranging stacked clips in time. It’s entirely possible to throw away the original richness (the clip relationships) and reduce the timeline to clips stacked on tracks. It isn’t really all that uncommon for content creation apps to have a rich internal data representation to aid in their operation, that is simplified or entirely discarded when moving data out of the app in an industry-standard interchange format. I don’t see a problem with this. After all, what’s the alternative? Apps never supporting anything that can’t be encoded in a pre-existing industry standard format? That would slow apps to the level of progress seen from, say, web browsers (especially in the days before WHATWG), where lots of vendors spend years arguing over things as part of a standards process before new features can be made available to users.
[Walter Soyka] “In order to work with FCPX, other apps must develop specific FCPX support.”
Or the ecosystem surrounding FCP X needs to provide a general solution for getting an EDL out of FCP X (for the probably 5% of FCP users who have ever needed this) — which seems to be happening. I don’t really see a problem with Apple leaving certain features as third-party ‘market opportunities’. Particularly if doing so encourages progress, and I rather suspect Apple has left EDL out of FCP X to date at least in part because they want to pressure other developers to support richer interchange formats.
It’s not that different from leaving ADB and serial ports off of the first iMac, thus creating pressure on peripheral vendors to switch to USB — and that was a case where Apple didn’t have a ‘clean slate’ and their actions were rather disruptive, but it worked. Apple’s OS 9 to OS X transition was also significantly more disruptive than, say, Microsoft’s transition of the consumer market to NT-based Windows. Apple has always been willing to subject its users to more disruptive transitions in order to push the market to move a little faster.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Seeman] “I’d add that the approach a new facility makes vs a well established facility makes may be very different. Today someone may consider starting with just a few FCPX seats, iMacs, DaVinci, ProTools and find a much lower point of entry. “
This.
If I were building a new facility today for in-house create editorial (i.e. not suites rented to outside editors, where you have just offer what they want), the ‘standard’ editing machine would absolutely be iMac + Thunderbolt RAID & video I/O + FCP X.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Harlan] “You keep referring to “forums like this” as if this is the only place that has anything negative to say about X. I don’t know what its like in NYC, but here in LA that is far from reality. “
The level of negativity in this forum is not something I’ve ever encountered in real-world interactions. Most of what I see in the real world is cautious interest or at worst skepticism, not hostility.
[Chris Harlan] “And “really choose something else?” “Migrate away?” FCP X is something else. The only thing it has in common with FCP 7 are the words “Final Cut Pro.” Using other companies’ software is actually a closer experience to using FCP 7, than using X. How is choosing X not choosing something else? How is going with it NOT migrating away from FCP 7.”
FCP X is something new, yes. My point was that some people seemed to be predicting, 12 months ago, that there would be some mass exodus from FCP 7 starting immediately, such that any work Apple did to make FCP X suitable for higher-end users would come too late, as those users would already be on Avid or Premiere. This does not appear to have occurred. Apple has now added most of the critical missing features to FCP X, and consequently FCP X, while not the automatic choice for people moving off of FCP 7 (because it is, after all, a totally different app) will at least be in the running. (For anyone who isn’t actively hostile, at least — which I don’t think most people, once you move beyond those fanning the Internet firestorm, actually are.)
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “I don’t disagree with this at all, but I do think that reality is somewhat subjective. I’m a designer and finishing editor, and in my little niche, I have yet to see an FCPX project. All my clients are still mostly FCP7 with a little Avid. “
Yes, this is what we see as well. But this is a conservative industry. People were still bringing us FCP 6 projects two years after FCP 7 was released. So I don’t think this lack of FCP X adoption 12 months in really means very much.
[Walter Soyka] “This is an interesting example, but I don’t think it’s the same as what FCPX is doing. Apple made the iPhone fit into the industry; Apple is asking the industry to fit into FCPX.
The iPhone was adopted in enterprise because Apple added Exchange support. By making the iPhone interoperable with large companies’ existing infrastructures, Apple made the iPhone a viable handset choice.
Apple has taken a different tack with FCPX. Rather than supporting existing industry standards, Apple has invented new ones, and are now waiting for the industry to adopt them.”
Your point about Exchange with respect to enterprise adoption is taken, but consider that the iPhone was primarily a consumer product selling into a market where it was commonly believed consumers wouldn’t buy expensive smartphones and data plans, the iPhone completely eschewed mobile standards like J2ME, instead requiring developers to write new apps for Apple’s proprietary APIs (and buy Macs to do it with!) and the iPhone ignored conventional wisdom about how business users demanded hardware keyboards. So in both the consumer and enterprise markets, Apple was in many ways trying to bend the market to the product, rather than the other way around.
FCP X adopts a lot of industry standards as well. It works with ProRes. It works with native formats from many cameras. It supports standard frame sizes and frame rates. It supports timecode and reel metadata. It can export color information as CDL. It can export in industry-standard formats ranging from H.264 to DPX. It’s not like Apple is completely off in its own bizarre world here. Yes, FCP X abandons some established conventions and standards. But Apple has the clout to establish new standards — classic FCP’s XML files were no more of an actual standard than FCP X’s XML files, after all — developers had to add support for that format just for Apple, and now they’re supporting FCP X’s equivalent.
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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 find AI’s analyses more on target than yours. They brought the app to market to suit this new demographic and took almost a year to bring to market the other features desired by the less important “higher end” of the market.”
I considered the AI analysis implausible because I didn’t believe Apple would abandon the high-end market. And they didn’t. What I failed to account for was that Apple’s pattern of shipping minimalistic initial releases provided a mechanism by which they could ship a more mainstream initial release despite not indenting to abandon the high-end.
[Herb Sevush] “They brought the app to market to suit this new demographic and took almost a year to bring to market the other features desired by the less important “higher end” of the market. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to be the desired demographic for the products I use. I’m not as interested in building my business around a product that treats me like “oh and here’s something for you, when we get around to it.””
I addressed this argument a couple of days ago. The argument you’re making seems plausible at first glance, but it doesn’t take into account some important market dynamics. There’s a lot of overlap between what the high-end needs and what mid-range users need. Really, if you go down the list of every single feature in a modern NLE, the difference between an app that works for mid-range users and an app that additionally works for high-end users probably comes down to less than 5% of the features.
Now, consider that the amount of development effort a vendor can invest in an application isn’t contingent on its per-unit cost, but on the total revenue that they derive from that application. You start to see my point, yes? A more mass-market application that brings in more total revenue can, and generally will, have more resources invested in its development. This makes the app better for all of its users, including its high-end users who are, after all, mostly using the same features the more mainstream users are.
We see this dynamic at work all the time. Consider the trouble that the iPhone is causing for RIM, for instance. The iPhone is primarily a consumer-targeted device to which Apple has added some enterprise features over the years, whereas RIM has focused the BlackBerry more closely on enterprise users. The iPhone’s mass-market success has created a very strong ecosystem around it, and has allowed Apple to make massive investments in iOS, such that it has better user interface, better bundled apps, offers more capabilities to third-party developers, etc. Consequently now that the iPhone has some enterprise deployment features, it’s suddenly a very strong product in that market despite that market not being Apple’s primary focus.
Or consider, in our industry, that we all use hardware platforms and operating systems were originally created primarily for office productivity tasks and that today are used by hundreds of millions of people primarily for things like browsing Facebook. We’re not using specialty hardware platforms and specialty operating systems built from the ground up for video editing. If you want a more specific example, consider that DaVinci has, over the last decade, gone from being and expensive turnkey system with custom hardware to being an application that runs quite nicely on gaming GPUs. Our market is too small to support the kind of R&D that the mass market can support, and consequently specialty products commonly lose out to more mainstream products in the long run. Nobody building graphics processing hardware solely for color grading systems could possibly afford to invest what NVIDIA invests in R&D.
Bringing this back around to our primary subject, I consider the fact that FCP X has mass-market appeal to be a significant strength vs. (say) Media Composer. It will result in Apple being able to invest more in the app, in the app having a stronger ecosystem around it, and in many entry-level users learning the app and some of them later taking it with them when they move upmarket.
[Herb Sevush] “If you predicted that everyone would freak out, why do you get so amazed that everyone is freaking out?”
I’m not amazed, just annoyed.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.