[Chris Kenny]

[Lance Bachelder] “I wonder how many facilities that were FCP7 would have just waited it out if Apple had kept X under wraps until this year and shown 10.04 as the new FCP?”

The SCRI numbers (which show no market share erosion for Apple) and what we’re seeing from our clients seems to suggest most people did just wait it out. Is this really that surprising? Editors/facilities often take a year or more just to install incremental updates to their current editing systems. That implies that a) there was no reason to expect FCP X to spark a sudden large-scale migration to other NLEs and b) even if FCP X 10.0.0 had shipped with more conventional features and had a more conventional interface it probably still would have seen very little immediate high-end adoption.

I said this last year — that because the high-end market wasn’t, for the most part, going to do anything very quickly, FCP X’s 10.0.0 feature set probably wasn’t going to be a big problem as long as Apple diligently filled in the more important gaps over the subsequent months — which they were saying they would do, and which they have now actually done.

Meanwhile, of course, Apple has sold a lot of copies of FCP X to the (much larger) mid-range market, to the point where they’re saying FCP X already has more users overall than FCP. And given its App Store ranking, it’s probably one one of the best-performing Mac app in the world in terms of revenue. This makes it pretty hard to fault Apple’s strategy of shipping a mid-range product ASAP and only subsequently adding higher-end workflow features.

Yes, they took a bit of a PR hit in forums like this in the process, but did this really do widespread long-term damage? Will a significant number of high-end FCP 7 customers for whom X is a good choice on its merits really choose something else as they finally do start to migrate away from 7 just because X had a rocky introduction that’s now more than a year in the past? I was always skeptical of this. Internet firestorms around Apple products aren’t all that rare, and never seem to hurt sales much.

I guess we’ll find out over the next 18 months or so.

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[Chris Kenny]

Why did Lion start adding support for additional NVIDIA cards (like the 5xx series) all of a sudden, and even drop the requirement for Mac-specific graphics cards? This seems like an odd thing to do a few months before discontinuing the only machine with PCIe slots. So even if there isn’t a new tower form-factor Mac Pro, there’s probably going to be something. There were rumors a while back about a slightly smaller rack-mountable form factor, now that the Xserve is gone. That could he handy, and they could probably get away with dropping down to two drive bays and two 16x PCIe slots, now that they’ve got Thunderbolt.

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[Chris Kenny]

The Ars Technica message board has a ‘Battlefront’ forum for general platform wars. Perhaps this could become the “NLE Battlefront” forum and “FCP X Techniques” could become “FCP X”. This maintains an outlet for NLE debate/advocacy without singling out a particular NLE.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Roth Weiss] “Then you’re out of touch with the other human beings in your chosen field. I deal with stranded users daily who have no idea where to go because their MacPros are old, there’s no replacement, and they still have no idea where to turn.”

Err… I thought we were talking about FCP here. As of right now, there’s nothing about the current Mac Pro’s extended product cycle that can’t be explained by the a lack of new Xeons from Intel. Intel recently announced some, and as was noted in the other thread, HP seems to think they’ll be able to ship a product with them in late May. If there’s still no new Mac Pro by, say, mid-June, that would start to become suggestive, but as of right now the alleged cancelation of the Mac Pro is a matter of speculation and rumor. And even the rumors I’ve seen were non-commital, to the effect that Apple was considering canceling it, not that it was actually being canceled.

[David Roth Weiss] “So, because others don’t feel the same way as you they’re thoughts, feelings, and aspirations are invalid? Get out of that dark room sometime Chris and talk to other pros, it’s obvious you’ve been in isolation far too much.”

Meh. I’m not just sitting here doing unsupervised grading all day. I do supervised grading, workflow consulting, and end up in business-type meetings on a regular basis (as a consequence of owning a chunk of the company). I talk to a fair number of people, and they often pick my brain at length about industry developments once they figure out how nerdy I am about this stuff. I’ve had a couple of people over the last year express skepticism about what Apple is up to with FCP X, but nobody has ever given me the standard line from this forum about how Apple isn’t to be trusted and it therefore makes sense to migrate to Avid or Premiere (in fact I can’t recall Premiere ever being mentioned). We are, as I noted, seeing FCP 7 and Avid projects in the same ratios we were seeing a year ago (and nothing else, for all that Premiere gets talked up in Internet forums). I was on a workflow conference call just yesterday discussing whether the project would be edited in FCP or Avid, and absolutely none of the anti-Apple talking points I see repeated ad nauseum here was even hinted at.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Roth Weiss] “Could it be because they stranded the vast majority of their reported 2-million users without any warning, without a “true” replacement, and without a solution for opening their previous years of projects?”

I don’t buy the “stranded” rhetoric. Had FCP 7 broken with the next system update and never been fixed or something, that would be Apple stranding its users. But FCP 7 continued to work — it still works just fine to this day on Lion. We still use it regularly, because our clients still regularly bring us projects edited in it. It doesn’t feel like we had something before the FCP X release that we suddenly lost after it.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Eric Parker Andersen] “I was actually curious to hear others’ take on the Broadcast monitoring. I wanted to hear of any potential problems since I’ve been starting to use it in earnest for actual delivery on HDCAM tape.”

Apple does warn that the audio sync is currently only accurate to the frame level with the broadcast output, not the sample level. Between that and FCP X’s lack of deck control, I think I’d be tempted to keep exporting and using an external app (e.g. Blackmagic’s Media Express) for laying down to tape.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jamie Franklin] “You said you couldn’t make sense of why people distrusted Apple using logic you simply invented…”

What logic are you saying I invented? That people distrusted Apple because Apple shipped the initial version of FCP X without certain high-end features, and people read this as an indication that Apple wasn’t interested in the pro market? I didn’t invent that. It was a very widely advanced argument. There are to this day people saying that even now that Apple has added most of the relevant features, they still distrust Apple’s commitment to the pro market because they weren’t prioritized highly enough to make it into the initial release.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “That’s revisionist history. It was obvious that FCP was going to be upgraded to 64 bit, and that Quicktime was a problem in going forward. Everyone expected an upgrade similar to PPro and Avid, and no one expected the EOL of Legacy and the creation of an entirely new, totally incompatible program that shared nothing with Legacy other than it’s name. If you were expecting otherwise before last March, direct me to the post.”

I did in fact predict major changes arising from questioning standard assumptions about how editing worked, and a feature set that wasn’t a strict superset of FCP 7’s. And I predicted that some people would be incensed by this. See this blog post from May 2010.

In general, [Apple is] willing to do things that they know people will complain about loudly — but this gives them the flexibility to sometimes make exceptional products:

I suspect this is precisely where they’re headed with FCP. We’re going to get the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch goodness that everyone wants. But we’re not going to get an app with a strict superset of Final Cut Pro’s functionality. Instead, we’re going to get an app that Apple believes is better overall for the tasks video editors perform, even if some features are cut. And we might also get a significantly overhauled UI; something that results from a process of sitting down and questioning every assumption about how editing interfaces currently work.

In short, I think they’ll come up with something really interesting… that will probably cause a bunch of people to totally freak out about how Apple has ruined everything and make forceful public declarations about how they’re leaving the platform. Meanwhile, people actually willing to embrace the thing might discover it has a bit of that iPad ‘magic’.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Roth Weiss] “Wrong! It is unavailable Chris. Apple put it back on the market for a very brief time, and for enterprise customers only, and even those could only purchase it direct from Apple for $1000, even if the customer qualified for $295 update. “

It was available for months. Enterprise customers were the ones for whom this was supposedly a huge problem. The number of people who actually waited until after FCP X was announced and then suddenly decided they might want FCP 7 upgrade licenses is probably miniscule. You appear to be making the argument that it wasn’t sufficient for Apple to have given people a window of some additional months to buy copies of an EOL’d product, but that they have some obligation to keep it on sale indefinitely. This seems somewhat unreasonable.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “Until the most recent release, 1.0.4 I believe, it was incredibly buggy and many of those on this forum who really love the design simply couldn’t use it for paying work. By all accounts the latest release is a lot better, but that been what – 2 whole weeks out of the last year. Version 1 it might be, but why would a working editor want to base his paycheck on that kind of performance.”

This accounts for people not running out and using FCP X for serious projects from day one, certainly. I myself was in here a year ago pointing out that it didn’t really matter much if Apple took a bit of extra time to add higher-end features because this was a fairly conservative industry and people likely weren’t going to switch over very quickly regardless.

Had people just been saying “Hey, it’s an initial release and it’s kind of buggy, I’ll give them a chance to ship the 2.0[1] first”, I would have had no objection. But they weren’t saying that. They were (and are) drawing wide-ranging conclusions about Apple’s plans for the product and the market based on a distorted understand of who the product was targeted at, and advocating and predicting wholesale migration to other NLEs, often while glossing over the issues those other products had.

FCP X was useless to my company as shipped 12 months ago. I stated this openly. I explained exactly why. I clearly wouldn’t have objected to others making similar statements.

[1] Which, given that Apple appears to be adopting the OS X version scheme, will probably actually be labeled 10.1.

[Herb Sevush] “Next, the magnetic timeline is not to everyone’s liking, to say it mildly. For many it is the answer to a question that they weren’t asking. FCPX has a distinct design style and for many editors it runs counter to the way they work. Since Apple chose to re-invent the wheel, it’s not surprising that those who simply wanted a better wheel are not enthusiastic.”

And this would also be fine if people were saying “I don’t like it” or even “I don’t like it because of X, Y and Z”. But many were saying “This makes narrative storytelling impossible and demonstrates that Apple is clueless about video editing” or other similarly hyperbolic things.

[Herb Sevush] “Finally there is Apple itself. Yes, many editors no longer trust Apple. I guess they’re all delusional, it must be something in the water they don’t drink. Or maybe it’s just the silence, the lack of communication. The unavoidable comparison between Adobe and Apple, and even between the “new” Avid and Apple, as far as communicating a vision for the product over the next few years contributes as much as anything to the distrust of Apple.”

Apple has never been a very communicative company. It’s unclear to me why this suddenly seems to have started bothering some people a lot more lately.

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