[Chris Kenny]

[Glen Hurd] “But to simply dismiss these people because they are numerically insignificant seems short-sighted – if not just motivated by a little jealousy. The elite, in any industry, have enormous impact on that industry. They represent both the financial and intellectual peak of that profession’s achievements. They are the measuring stick by which a culture defines success, and their opinions carry weight, because the intellectual component to their success is undeniable. “

But they are rarely first-movers. The dominant pattern in this industry over the last decade has been that new apps/techniques/approaches/whatever start with ‘outsiders’ (who don’t have unlimited budgets and aren’t wedded to current approaches), who prove them. They’re then picked up by more adventurous elites, which eventually makes them ‘safe’ for less adventurous elites, at which point they become accepted tools for high-end production. Whether you’re talking about the original FCP, AfterEffects or the Red One, it’s the same pattern.

Given this pattern, it is in fact expected (by Apple as well, I suspect) that FCP X, with its fairly radical changes, won’t be accepted by elites at first. People are making long-range projections on the basis of this lack of immediate acceptance, but immediate acceptance is virtually unknown for any new tool different enough to actually be interesting. The question to ask about a product in FCP X’s position is not “Will elites accept it immediately?” but “Is there a unique value proposition here that could cause some talented outsider to choose this tool over other options and do something interesting with it?” That’s the first step. And I think the answer is very clearly “yes”.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Kimery] “I was being vague again. I was meaning to reference that Apple has taken OS X from 32-bit to 64-bit w/o changing the look and feel. “

Obviously moving from 32-bit to 64-bit is not strictly related to look-and-feel. But FCP 7 wasn’t just using APIs that had their roots in the OS 9 era, it also had a UI that had its roots in the OS 9 era. So it’s unsurprising that Apple decided to modernize the UI in the process of rewriting the app.

[Andrew Kimery] “And even though OS 9 and OS X have a lot of differences they still function basically the same way when it comes to the end user. “

I think you’re understating the differences. People freaked out about the OS X UI. In fact, it was subject to criticisms almost eerily similar to those now being leveled at FCP X — it was, supposedly, too oversimplified, had too much eye candy (animations, etc.), discarded valuable spatial organization features, removed user control, etc. Some people claimed that Apple had ruined the Mac and that they were leaving for Windows.

[Andrew Kimery] “Why make an app that, out of the gate, can pretty smoothly take the torch from FCP7 and then add features that expand it out into a broader market?”

It’s a combination of things. First, as people keep pointing out in the “urgency” thread, FCP 7 was getting old. Apple wanted to get something to market as quickly as possible, and shipping the initial release with more features would have delayed it. Secondly, Apple isn’t just interested in today’s editors, they’re interested in tomorrow’s editors. They were clearly asking themselves what they could do to leapfrog other NLEs, and metadata-first organization and a timeline based on clip connections are what they came up with.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “You claim that Sony’s professional users don’t complain about how Sony treats them.

You claim that many of Apple’s professional users do complain about how Apple treats them, and that it’s been going on for some time.

This seems to highlight the difference in how Apple and Sony manage their consumer and professional divisions, rather than suggest that Apple and Sony are comparable.”

Or else is highlights a double standard. For instance, applying the same standards applied to Apple, Sony’s pro camera customers could have easily spent a couple of years complaining about the lack of a 4K camera from Sony, and making claims like “I can shoot my kid’s birthday party at 1080p on a $500 camcorder now; Sony must not care about pros if they’re not offering 4K yet”.

Maybe that did happen somewhere… but I doubt it.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “I specifically said in the post you responded to that hardware-calibrated wide gamut monitors would offer better accuracy than soft-calibrated 8-bit displays.”

Err… it sounded like the “wide gamut monitors” you were referring to were something other than ColorSync-calibrated computer displays. Reading it again, I’m still not entirely sure I understand your position.

[Walter Soyka] “Black levels vary wildly on standard computer displays. This is a fundamental technical reason why they may not accurately display video color. It’s inherent in the panel, and you can’t fix it with color management.”

If by “black levels” you mean the physical luminance of full black, this varies widely across displays and projectors in general, even professional gear, especially across different device types. I don’t see this being a major problem.

[Walter Soyka] “Because it’s not here now, we don’t know when it’s coming, and Matrox has said the hooks don’t exist.”

Any hooks would be in AV Foundation, not FCP X itself, and AV Foundation was private in Snow Leopard, so of course the hooks didn’t exist. We’ll probably find out in the next week or two if Lion has changed that, or if Apple is still working on this aspect of AV Foundation.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Harlan] “But maybe they just don’t care about it any more. “

This is absurd. It’s a brand new app, and the flagship app for Apple’s shiny new media architecture (available as a public framework in OS X for the first time as of today)… and they don’t care about it “any more”? What, you mean they stopped caring since last month?

And what’s the evidence for this rather surprising conclusion? That there are four or five features that probably matter to less than 10% of FCP’s installed base that aren’t in the 1.0 release?

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “To this, I’d add that ColorSync (hardware-measured software calibration) on a standard 8-bit monitor does not offer the same accuracy that hardware calibration on a wider gamut monitor would.”

I have no idea if Apple’s current utilization of ColorSync is up to the task, but better computer displays commonly have a wider gamut than Rec. 709 these days. There is no fundamental technical reason they cannot display accurate video color.

That said… I’m not sure why so much time has been spent discussing FCP X’s lack of ‘real’ video output, when there is good reason to believe this feature will be added.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “When has Sony released a broadcast or digital cinema camera which dropped everyday features from the model it replaced? Which didn’t interface with any other industry-standard equipment? Which had marketing materials specifically written for HandyCam users?

Your point that it’s possible for a large company to have separate divisions which focus on different segments is true, but I don’t think Apple and Sony are currently comparable.”

The “Apple doesn’t care about pro users” and even “Apple doesn’t care about the Mac” stuff has been going on for years. It’s not a consequence of what Apple did with FCP X. In fact, a great deal of how people have interpreted what Apple has done with FCP X is a consequence of these preexisting notions. Those of us who never bought into them see what Apple is up to with FCP X in a very different light.

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[Chris Kenny]

In other news, nobody should take Sony’s broadcast and digital cinema cameras seriously, because look at how many PlayStations they sell!

Seriously, this argument has always been silly, and for some reason the same sort of thinking never gets applied to other companies. Apple just released a huge OS X update, a new 27″ Thunderbolt display (that’s for soccer moms, right?), and updated half of the Mac model line-up, and people can’t give this a rest for a few hours?

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[Chris Kenny]

[Vincent Strader] “Oh.. the subject line.. what I meant by that. If people think that Apple is going to morph FCPX into the next Imovie, and eventually give us a FCP8 with what all the industry pros desired.. then I’ll definitely stay with FCP7 for now. But I know it’s difficult to look into a crystal ball.”

I think Apple is entirely serious about this app as a successor to FCP 7. More features will be added, but Apple is not going to go back to something more closely resembling the old interface.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Dean Isaacs] “I sort of think this is what the Apple engineers had in mind: Wife puts together a beautiful video of Kid’s 2nd B-Day Party. Titles, cut-aways, photos. A few songs. Beautiful. Husband watches the video and says,”Great, but you need to add in the clip of Aunt Ethal.” Wife drops the clip of Aunt Ethal in after the first two clips. Everything stays together. Video is done.”

Does not compute. That market does not buy $300 software.

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