[Chris Kenny]

[Brian Langeman] “What about when he said they were working with RED? Then you could check the RED forum and find out straight from RED’s employees that the statement was not true at that time.”

I dismissed this at the time as Pogue misunderstanding what he was being told, because he’s a journalist with no specific knowledge of these issues. Others tried to use it to discredit all the other info he was passing on from Apple.

The other info turned out to be right.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Douglas K. Dempsey] “So we are justifiably worried that Lion will require fixes and updates to various apps. The concern is: if FCP7 completely “gone” or will it be updated if necessary via the continuing ProKit packages that Software Update send to your machine when it recognizes Pro App installations?

That is hardly paranoia, and it is more than justified. It is called practical experience.”

Apple has explicitly said FCP 7 will work under Lion. To respond to that with something like “Sure, but maybe it’ll run really badly, plus they might cancel the Mac Pro” is, indeed, unfounded paranoia.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Gary Huff] “Because there’s the possibility that FCP7 will not be usable under Lion (“running” and actually being usable can be two entirely different ideas), and Apple may drop their MacPro line.”

So, in other words, your answer is “unfounded paranoia about Apple’s future actions”.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Robert Brown] “Well that’s a scary thought I was already worried enough about FCP. But actually not as much as I was a couple of years ago. The entire industry has changed already over the last few years, hopefully FCPX doesn’t make that much of an additional impact. I think the clients get it at some point. Stuff does have to get delivered right. “

Did the widespread availability of laser printers (or, for that matter, pens) de-professionalize writing? Well… yes, in the sense that lots of non-professional writers now write all sorts of things. No, in the sense of eliminating the need for professional writers.

I don’t know why people get worked up about this subject. The writing, so to speak, has been on the wall for years. People can already shoot video with their cell phones that looks better than what broadcast cameras could shoot a decade ago… and edit it right on the phone. The barbarians are already inside the city. If it hasn’t put you out of business yet, it’s probably not going to anytime soon.

[Robert Brown] “But there is a thread above that states Apple is doing some serious back peddling. “

I think the enterprise FCP 7 availability might be Apple responding to criticism. I strongly suspect all these feature enhancements have always been part of the plan. As I’ve been trying to tell people for a couple of weeks now, this kind of aggressively early shipment (before all the important features are implemented) is a common Apple pattern.

[Robert Brown] “I guess all of the never fixed things in FCP and the way they handled the FCPX debacle really turned me off from Apple and I wish they’d get out of broadcast like they promised.”

I know people around here have been treating the idea that Apple was getting out of broadcast as a fact on the basis of flimsy evidence for the last couple of weeks, but saying they “promised” it is even a little sillier than that.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “I believe somewhere in there it was said Multicam would be free but it’s possible some would be paid.
Given the App Store upgrade policy (the lack thereof), it may be some of the addition features are plugins otherwise there’s going to be another upheaval if it’s going to be another $299 purchase.”

Well, the App Store is Apple’s. If they want to offer upgrade pricing, they’ll add upgrading pricing support to the App Store.

But it also seems inevitable that the Mac App Store will get in-app purchasing features similar to the iOS App Store — that could be a really interesting way for Apple to offer high-end/specialty functionality in FCP X.

Note that if it’s true that multicam will be free, that implies the next major release will be free, because the FAQ says multicam isn’t coming until the next major release. This wouldn’t be too surprising — Apple gave away the first major update after Mac OS X 10.0 as well. They don’t like to punish users for the fact that they ship software aggressively early.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aharon Rothschild] “Star tech writer David Pogue has been publicly admonished by his editors at New York Times on ethics again, for charging flacks $159 each to learn how to get into his column. How many times must this happen, David?

Pogue’s “Pitch Me, Baby” presentation explained, by example, just how to get on the good side of David Pogue. “I’m one of the guys public-relations people work with,” Pogue wrote on his website. “This talk, geared for PR professionals, also offers a few of the most hilariously bad, and impressively good, pitches I’ve seen in my days at the Times.””

What is the purpose of posting this? All the info from Pogue’s column that’s relevant to the FCP X discussion was also given to other outlets such as Studio Daily, and has now been confirmed by Apple in the FAQ and via reports out of tonight’s London event.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Kevin Zimmerman] “Another parallel I thought of today was that Apple has developed a “session” based NLE. Sort of a video equivalent to ProTools. Again, there’s something completely tone-deaf in regards to the idea of a professional editing job being primarily a singular act. The fact that when one duplicates a Project, you need to click through a dialog box asking if you’d like to duplicate the associated Events, or just reference them, speaks volumes.”

Lion adds system-level versioning features. I don’t know if we’ll see FCP X adopt these immediately, but they’re probably not unrelated to Apple’s long-term approach to this issue.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Sam Krauser] “Someone has apparently figured it out…”

No, they haven’t.

This video is basically an elaborate troll. FCP X has the same behavior (creating a blank new project) when importing an empty file that has been named as if were an iMovie project. He’s not even right about the format of iMovie projects — they’re not XML files, they’re packages containing (among other things) project data stored as serialized Core Data objects. Third parties can’t (sensibly) create these files. This guy’s ‘discovery’ is entirely useless as a route to getting FCP 7 sequences into FCP X.

Once FCP X has the ability to import XML files, it will be possible for some third-party to write a script that translates (as much as possible) between the FCP 7 and FCP X XML formats. That’s probably how the project import issue will be solved — sort of. With all the differences in timeline behavior, keyframing, the rendering engine, the included filters and generators, the available compositing modes, etc. people shouldn’t expect such translation to work all that well, which is probably why Apple doesn’t want to build it in — they don’t feel they can deliver something they can stand behind.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Geert van den Berg] “AV Foundation is just a framework at the moment, part of what in combination with other frameworks makes FCPX. It’s not a container format like Quicktime or MXF, or is it?
“

QuickTime was both a framework and a container format. AV Foundation is just a framework. It works with multiple container formats, including the QuickTime container format.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Greg Burke] “I know, the program has some neat ideas, but at its core its a joke…”

At its core it’s extremely powerful. It’s missing some workflow features and some relatively trivial (in terms of implementation) features in the interface.

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