Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Herb Sevush] “I never doubted that Apple knew the market they were aiming at, I simply concluded that it wasn’t me or mine. “
I don’t recall your specific position on the FCP X release last year, but what I’m addressing with this argument is the notion that it was valid to draw significant conclusions about Apple’s long-term interest in high-end customers from the feature set of the initial release. Shipping an initial release designed to serve your median customer as soon as possible (rather than waiting until you can also serve high-end niches) is just good business sense — it doesn’t really imply a lack of interest in serving outliers later.
[Herb Sevush] “They managed to piss off the most vocal and influential 35% of their user base. Not all users are equal. They would have been better off pissing off the other 65%, who would fall in line anyhow, rather than the influential few. “
I’m not sure this is right at all. I think our hypothetical 35% (really if we’re exclusively talking about broadcast/post people it’s probably much less than that) are more vocal, but I think the weight of that mass of users on the other side counts for more in the long run.
[Herb Sevush] “One of the big differences between Legacy and X is that Legacy was solely for the pro market. That doesn’t mean that X is not “pro” but it does mean that there are a lot of hobbyists that use it as well. That tends to skew arguments about relative strength in the pro market.”
Meh. The lines between “hobbyist” and “professional” are really, really vague these days. Are you a hobbyist if you use FCP X to cut comedic web sorts you shoot with your friends? How about if you make money from ads on your site? Does it matter how much money?
Or how about if you work for a post facility in some technical capacity, but cut personal projects in FCP X on the side?
Or take the indie film world. Say an individual with a day job that has nothing to do with filmmaking puts together a self-funded feature project, cuts it himself, gets into a festival, wins a prize and gets a distribution deal. Is this person still a hobbyist? If not, exactly when do they stop being a hobbyist? If so, are they still a hobbyist if they do the same thing a couple of more times?
The “hobbyist” vs. “pro” distinction has gotten really complicated. There are no rules anymore.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[katherine taylor] “There was social currency in using FCP 7 for amateurs, students and Indy film-makers precisely because it was a tool that was also used by “Pro’s”. Along with that came the perceived lack of “ceiling” to the creative potential. After all, if a Feature Film can be cut on it then what’s your excuse?”
This was eventually true, but it certainly wasn’t true on day one. There’s no reason FCP X can’t get there as well.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Joseph Owens] “And while its nice to think that it alludes to some kind of prescience or Hidden Understanding, you also have to comprehend the degree to which the game bent to his individual force of gravity, that was like the Einsteinian “warped space-time” which really means that the puck position, like gravity, was a tendency that found Mr. Gretzky, and why not if you are the leading scorer of all time?”
This raises another interesting point as well. It’s not like Apple just passively observes where markets are headed and figures out how to get in front of them. Take what they did with the iPhone — they looked at a market where their traditional strengths weren’t necessarily going to be useful and asked themselves “How can we ship a product that is based on our traditional strengths, and bends the entire market toward valuing products built along those lines?” The abrupt discontinuation of FCP 7, some of the features Apple has chosen to leave out of FCP X (e.g. deck control), the adoption of Thunderbolt, FCP X’s pricing and distribution model — Apple is up to some hardcore market engineering here.
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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 think that’s only part of it. I’d be very surprised if having FCP classic used on high end productions, and having very successful people evangelizing for it, didn’t play a large role in creating a halo effect.
Sure, but that came later. Murch didn’t edit Cold Mountain on FCP until 2003, four years after it was introduced. FCP X could have high-profile champions as well in another three years.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “What we know is that Apple pointed to a report based on a survey that “suggests” something. (… and as Aindreas likes to point out, they did it in a secret Las Vegas hotel room meeting.)”
You’re reading entirely too much into a wording choice. The quote is “Apple also pointed out a recent SCRI report on broadcast and post NLE purchases that suggests the company owns 52 percent of the market when it comes to new seats.” There’s a specific number in there. That number almost certainly either appears in the report, or is arrived at by adding together numbers that appear in the report (e.g. if the report breaks out FCP 7 and FCP X market share separately).
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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] “It has created a vacuum for a specific type of editor, not necessarily one interested in new paradigms. The companies poised to fill that vacuum are making it part of their marketing approach to emphasize how uninterested they are in creating new paradigms – to wit this from Autodesk:”
Apple says there are now more users using FCP X than FCP 7, and the latest SCRI report shows their share of new NLE installs hasn’t collapsed — it’s actually ticked up a couple of points. The logical conclusion is that FCP X is a) actually being pretty widely used (far more widely than Vegas ever was) and b) actually is a suitable solution for a lot of FCP 7 customers.
I think FCP X’s detractors might have to start acknowledging the possibility that Apple might have known some things about how people were using FCP that weren’t obvious to them. It’s quite probable Apple had data along the lines of (and I’m making up data here, but I suspect the general impression conveyed by the numbers is correct) “10% of users export XML files, 5% export EDL files, 25% use multicam, 15% use broadcast monitoring — and given the overlap, we can leave all of these things out of our first version and still address 65% of the FCP 7 user base”. At which point why should they have held it off of the market for an additional year (particularly with FCP 7 getting so long in the tooth) just to address the remaining 35%?
[Herb Sevush] “This article was not addressed to this Cow forum, it was addressed to the editing public at large, and it reflects Audtodesk’s impression of what the world wide editing audience is thinking at the moment. “
Smoke is a fairly specialized tool. It has zero relevance to literally 99% of the “editing public at large”.
[Herb Sevush] “I would say the paper they published within days of the release outlining the features they were planning but hadn’t had time to implement, like multicam, was plenty of evidence.”
I’m sure they were always planning to implement these things — I said this myself when people claimed Apple was “backtracking” by agreeing to implement these features. But it’s standard practice to have a roadmap that goes out beyond your initial release — “planning to implement X” doesn’t mean “planned to ship X in 1.0 but screwed up”.
[Herb Sevush] “They made a car with a great GPS and autoparking but it lacked headlights and breaks.”
This is a bad analogy. See the top of this reply. A car without headlights and breaks is useless to essentially everyone. FCP X turns out to have been useful to a large fraction of the FCP user base. Not most folks working on features or in broadcast, but those folks are a tiny fraction of the market.
And really, Apple has plugged the gaps pretty fast. To focus on my segment for a second, you could absolutely cut an indie feature in FCP X today. If you took it to a large post house to grade they’d probably look at you like you were nuts, but if you brought it to us we could have it in Resolve (with your primary grades intact!) inside of an hour I think.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “I don’t think any numbers have been given. It’s been said that “reports suggest”.
Would be interesting to see the report …”
It would be facinating to see the report. But what we do know is that Apple has 52% of NLE market share, which is slightly up from the 2010 number from the same source (49%). This is new installs, mind you, not installed base — the vast majority of those new new installs have to be FCP X, particularly to account for the other tidbit we’re given, that there are now more editors using FCP X than with FCP 7.
The real takeaway from this isn’t the specific number, it’s the illustration that number provides of how out of touch a lot of the discussions here are. People in these forums are mostly focused on a couple of specific segments of the professional video editing market — and not even very large segments. There’s a much wider world of editing out there, and if history is any guide, what happens in that world is very likely to significantly impact high-end market segments in the long run — possibly the not-so-long run, given how fast Apple is adding higher-end features.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Even for Apple that is a ludicrous pronouncement. How do they keep a straight face? They’ve just gotten hosed for a year, the release was a shambles, and barely anyone is using the thing. “
I seriously doubt the SCRI report Apple is citing contains falsified data or that Apple is misrepresenting it.
When you say nobody is using FCP X, I think you’re operating under the unspoken assumption that feature film and broadcast TV editing dominate the pro video editing market. They don’t in any numerical sense. Apple understands this. Instead of waiting until they had a feature set suitable for demanding high-end customers, Apple shipped when FCP X had a feature set that made it to the much larger low-end market, and then turned its focus upmarket only after already having a product out there for more mainstream editors to buy. These numbers validate that decision.
As I just noted in another thread, FCP X is the top-grossing app on the App Store (ignoring Lion, since it’s not an app). While this isn’t definitive, because there are, of course, many apps sold outside of the App Store, this probably makes it one of the most successful apps on the platform.
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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] “Here, we disagree. I instead question whether it would exist a year after its intro if it had been from someone else other than Apple.”
FCP X was designed to appeal to a much larger market than is mostly represented in these forums, and it seems fairly plausible that it’s actually quite successful in that market. As far as I can tell, Apple is doing the ‘appeal to the low-end, then move upmarket’ thing. People ‘upmarket’ are judging it as a failure because the ‘move upmarket’ part of that hasn’t happened quite yet (though with respect to features, it’s progressing rapidly), but at this stage it could only be definitively said to have failed if the ‘appeal to the low-end’ part weren’t working. And that part seems to be working. There’s absolutely no reason to believe FCP X is a commercial failure. It’s the top-grossing app in the Mac App Store (following Lion, but Lion isn’t actually an ‘app’), which means it’s probably one of the most successful apps on the platform. And the current version has a 4-star rating there — many people seem to be buying the app and liking it.
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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 new paradigms were a precursor to success then Sony Vegas would be a market leader.”
It probably should have been, on the merits. But Sony didn’t really have much clout in the software market (Apple does), and the discontinuation of ‘classic’ Final Cut has created a vacuum that didn’t previously exist, making it easier for new products (a category in which I include FCP X) to succeed.
[Herb Sevush] “It’s not nearly as cheap as Lightworks, which is free.”
I’m keeping a close eye on Lightworks, but I’m skeptical if development of a serious NLE can really be funded in the way they propose. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a business model in which the primary product is given away for free and the developer tries to make money from extras, and success with this model is quite spotty.
[Herb Sevush] “Most of it’s updates were merely to fix stuff it was supposed to have in the first place.”
This implies that Apple intended to ship these features in the first release but was unable to complete them in time. There’s zero evidence of this. Apple has an established pattern of minimalistic initial releases, and it’s consequently probable that the minimalistic initial release of FCP X was deliberate. So, we have Apple shipping a free update with major new features within 12 months of the initial release — and planning additional major new features this year, probably within 18 months of the initial release, and probably also free.
It’s always important to ask yourself if you’re being mislead by trying to fit facts to a particular narrative. One good way to do this is to ask “If the same result had been achieved in a different way, would I have a more positive or negative view?” In this case, consider the fact that FCP X has a bunch of features FCP 7 never had. What if FCP X had shipped with broadcast monitoring, stem exports, XML and multicam (which it all now has), but things like tagging, auditions, automated shot analysis, and 4K support had been subsequently added over the past 12 months? Would people be claiming there hadn’t been rapid significant feature additions because FCP X was supposed to have those features in the first place? I somehow doubt it. Yet logically there’s no difference here — either way Apple’s accomplishments to date are the same.
[Herb Sevush] “The virtually unlimited resources of it’s parent company are not aimed at this market at all and that same parent is infamous for it’s policy of software infanticide. In other words – who knows?”
The modern Apple rarely kills is own in-house products (acquisitions are another story), and there is no particular indication that FCP X is being starved for developer resources.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.