Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Michael Hancock] “We know it’s not natively supported and that, when FCPX launched, Red wasn’t working with Apple to provide native support. We know it’s the only NLE that doesn’t support native .r3d files. We know that Apple has made no official statement about .r3d support. That’s pretty substantial to quite a few people. To say we really don’t know anything about .r3d support is rather dismissive.”
I obviously mean we don’t know anything about Apple’s future plans with respect to R3D support. Which is true. Is there some reason you’re being pointlessly argumentative?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Julian Bowman] “Dude, seriously, if Jobs said invade Poland you’d be at the front. Did you notice the hypocrisy in your post? You criticise about someone doing something but do exactly the same yourself.
Personally, I get it. Hardcore fanboi. Fanatical about Apple. Cool. Enjoy. But I see that little logo of yours now and i’m seriously just going to skip by (and i’ve only been reading this forum for a week).
It’s like listening to neo-con oil baron’s opinion on global warming.”
Pure ad hominem. If you disagree with my points, make an argument.
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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] “However your offensive patronizing insistence that all the experienced editors on this board are behaving like children is so completely off base that I can’t reconcile it with the rest of your posts.”
I haven’t actually accused anyone of behaving like a child. I do believe that some people are being extremely shortsighted. So shortsighted that the ‘case against FCP X’ has already had to evolve considerably over the last couple of weeks, as new information has come out. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the narrative was basically “FCP X will never be a pro app, the new interface and the features Apple left out of the first release prove Apple is abandoning this market”. Now that people have had more time with the new interface, and information has come out about feature gaps Apple is planning to fill, the narrative has changed into something more like “Apple can’t be trusted, and I think it’s going to take them two years to turn FCP X into a pro app”.
Somehow this transition happened seamlessly, without the folks arguing against FCP X really admitting they’d been wrong about anything. This has happened before in this debate. Two years ago, the “Apple doesn’t care about pros” crowd was using the lack of an FCP rewrite as its primary evidence in favor of that position… yet someone, when it was confirmed Apple was rewriting FCP, their position never got reconsidered.
[Herb Sevush] “It is easier for a FCP7 editor to migrate to Premiere Pro than it is to migrate to FCPX and that is the way Apple wants it. That is a fact. They have no interest in any migration path for FCP7 users. If they did they would have built one. The fact that this doesn’t seem important to you is simply proof of your youth and inexperience.”
If you look at the technical issues involved with moving projects over, it’s clear that while it could be done, it couldn’t be done well. It’s understandable (particularly in light of Apple’s corporate culture) that Apple would rather ship no implementation of this feature than a bad one. I believe Apple fully intends for existing users to move over by simply continuing to work on FCP 7 projects in FCP 7 during a transitional period. The extent to which this is not a viable option has been overstated by many. It’s true that some shops may need to regularly reuse sequences or portions of sequences from projects years old, but most do not.
[Herb Sevush] “The fact that this doesn’t seem important to you is simply proof of your youth and inexperience.”
Kind of hilarious in a post that you start off by chiding me not to be patronizing.
[Herb Sevush] “”Contrari-wise we look at Apple (now) and we see a business that only happens by chance to be traveling the same path as we are. Somehow we have chosen to ignore this for a number of years – suddenly the truth of it is inescapable. We have everything to lose, they have virtually nothing.”
Avid is focussed heavily on our market, and can barely pay the bills, because that market isn’t all that big. They also have the oldest UI and oldest architecture of the three major NLEs. (Why does oldest UI matter, if you know it and like it? Because it impacts uptake by new editors, which in the long run is what determines platform strength.)
Adobe has little more financial reliance on Premiere than Apple has on FCP, and did their own disruptive major rewrite of it back in 2003.
It is really not especially obvious that either of these vendors is less risky than Apple long-term.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Brian Langeman] “But the RED info is one of the most important things to me. You can’t just “dismiss” that.”
Huh? I wasn’t dismissing the importance of the feature, I was dismissing Pogue’s information about it. We don’t really know anything on the subject of R3D support at this point. My guess is that Pogue was passing on a corrupted version of something about some sort of mechanism to allow FCP X to be extended to support more codecs, but we’ll have to wait and see.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Richard Cardonna] “Apple took nearly 2.5 years to upgrade Final Cut Studio from version 2 to 3 (and v.3 was only a moderate upgrade at that). Until then, updates had come at a much more aggressive pace.”
Apple was probably already retooling to work on the rewrite (i.e. FCP X).
[Richard Cardonna] “Apple cancelled the popular Shake, promising to replace it with a new tool that never came.”
Apple is unreliable with externally purchased products. In general, Apple is obsessed with having as few products on the market as possible. You can’t read lack of interest into a market into a product in that market being canceled.
[Richard Cardonna] “Apple got lazy with its Logic Pro app as well, letting development creep along with an upgrade about every two years.”
A release every two years is not especially egregious. Adobe is on a formal schedule of a major release every two years with a minor release in between, for instance. Over the last three years Apple did a major rewrite of Logic Pro, modernizing the interface and turning it into a 64-bit Cocoa app. This doesn’t look like neglect.
[Richard Cardonna] “Apple stopped updating the Pro page on its web site long ago. There hasn’t been a new item posted in almost two years: https://www.apple.com/pro/
“Trivial.
[Richard Cardonna] “Apple took more than a year to fix a glaring Final Cut 7 bug that made its Close Gap command unreliable. To break a core Timeline feature like Close Gap and not fix it for 14 months was offensive and inexcusable.”
There’s a longstanding bug related to file renaming in HFS+. And by “longstanding” I mean it’s been there since OS X 10.0 shipped. Does this mean Apple doesn’t care about Mac OS X? (Or iOS, which also uses the same file system and almost certainly has the same bug?)
[Richard Cardonna] “Apple cancelled its Xserve RAID then its Xserve hardware.”
Xserve RAID provided little value over third-party offerings. And let’s see how these rumors of a rack-mountable Mac Pro pan out. For out industry, that would be a more useful product than Xserve, which didn’t have enough slots.
[Richard Cardonna] “Apple started taking longer and longer to release Mac Pro workstations, and absolutely phoned in the latest upgrade last July. 511 days in the making, the newest Mac Pro was one of the most un-inspired hardware upgrades I’ve ever seen from Apple.”
Mac Pro tech specs are almost entirely determined by what Intel has on offer.
[Richard Cardonna] “Apple pulled out of industry trade events like NAB.”
Apple pulled out of MacWorld Expo as well. They prefer to run their own events, and they’re big enough now that they get as much attention as they want whenever they want it.
[Richard Cardonna] “Multiple rumors (and confirmation of rumors) of significant layoffs in the Pro Apps division.”
Very possibly related to lifecycle issues with the FCP X transition. The were probably parallel FCP 7 and FCP X teams for a while, and the layoffs could have been a consequence of reducing the former to a minimal staff to handle maintenance releases at some point.
[Richard Cardonna] “Multiple rumors that Apple was trying to sell off its Pro Apps division.”
Not reliable.
Virtually every point you’re making has an alternative explanation, in many cases a better one. And in any event, you’re just cherry-picking. I can just as easily make a list of items that show Apple does care about pros:
– Two years ago, the “Apple doesn’t care about pros” crowd was citing the fact that Apple hadn’t rewritten FCP as evidence that Apple didn’t care about pros. But somehow, the fact that they were, we now know, busy rewriting FCP, doesn’t get counted as evidence to the contrary.
– Thunderbolt. Yes, Apple presumably hopes it will also be picked up by the consumer market, but USB3 would have been fine for that. Thunderbolt is for us. Almost all of the announced peripherals are squarely targeted at pro content creation.
– Apple continues to sell some pretty damn high-end hardware. The most recent round of MacBook Pros are hilarious overkill for the consumer market.
– FCP X was introduced at an event for pros. It has many features clearly intended for pros. Apple claims it was designed for pro. Apple just held a briefing in London last night to discuss how the concerns of pros are being dealt with. Apple has said it intends to address many of these concerns on a fairly aggressive timetable (first major concerns addressed in weeks, not months).
– Apple created OpenCL.
– Apple is integrating Xsan into Lion.
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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] “The lack of Cinema Tools could also be a bummer.”
Not really an issue with digital acquisition, though, which is now entirely viable across all levels of production. So, possibly the lack of Cinema Tools might prevent cutting certain specific features in FCP X, but it doesn’t make it generally impossible to cut a feature in FCP X.
Also, it occurs to me that if Apple opens up third-party access to FCP X’s metadata storage via an API (which I think is quite likely at some point in the future), it wouldn’t be hard for third-parties to replicate and even improve on Cinema Tools functionality.
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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 Conlee] “Chris, your list is incomplete: we need film tracking, and shared workflow for assistants and additional editors. Taken together, that’s a pretty substantial list of missing elements.”
Film tracking is entirely unnecessary with many modern feature workflows, and another tidbit from the London briefing was that Apple has been working closely with several companies that plan to offer media asset management tools for FCP X. Depending on what kind of API access Apple delivers (and there are hints of something pretty interesting), FCP X could soon over shared workflows much more powerful than what FCP 7 offered.
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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 Baker] “Cut a feature on FCPX?! Bwha, ha, ha, ha, thats the funniest post I’ve heard in awhile. Let me shoot even a commercial on a Arri Alexa and then try to see what happens in FCPX. Sorry, tried FCPX and want no part of it, I’ll stick with AVID and Adobe.”
Huh? FCP X supports ProRes 422 HQ and 4444 footage just fine. I’m not seeing any huge obstacles to cutting an Alexa project in it.
Again, I really think people are overstating what’s missing. There are only three critical features that prevent FCP X from being used today a cut a feature film:
1) XML export.
2) The ability to map audio to specific tracks for export.
3) Real video monitoring.1) is confirmed to be showing up “in a few weeks”. It might take a little longer for the new XML variant to be supported, but some vendors will probably be fairly quick about it.
2) is confirmed for “summer”.
3) was reportedly confirmed to be coming “soon” at last night’s London briefing.
There’s a lot of FUD floating around about how “The magnetic timeline is not suitable for long-form projects” and so forth, but nobody actually appears to be able to support such statements.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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As far as I can tell, most of the panic has not been about what Apple has done, but about what people have decided it implies about Apple’s motivations, and therefore Apple’s future actions. Essentially, people have convinced themselves that Apple no longer cares about high-end users, and will not deliver software suitable for them in the future.
Many people are now simply treating this as an established fact, but the evidence for it is fairly weak, and every new release of information seems to undermine it further. Humans are, however, extremely prone to fitting the data to the model, when they should be doing the reverse. There’s also a well-documented phenomenon where people are much less likely to change their positions based on new information if they’ve previously stated those positions publicly. Someone is probably going to have to cut a studio feature on FCP X before some folks can be convinced to change their minds at this point.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Scott Sheriff] “It’s not that hard to understand the relevance of the OP pointing this out, considering the size of David Pogue’s megaphone at the NYT, and other media outlets. He has written much about X, most of which has had a rather positive spin that seems to be swimming upstream against a larger tide of negative opinion. That has led some to question his expertise, or judgment.”
The value in Pogue’s coverage of FCP X has been the fact that he’s been passing on information he was given by Apple (usually but not always accurately), with full disclosure that he was simply passing on information he was given by Apple. The kind of ethics issues raised by the behavior discussed in this thread don’t really come into play there.
Raising this ethics issues here seems a lot like sour grapes on the part of people who tried to discredit the information Pogue was passing on (most of which has now been confirmed). It simply has no relevance to the ongoing discussion of FCP X.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.