[Chris Kenny]

[Erik Lindahl] “They should offer a download > disc image scheme I’d say.”

There’s an image file hidden in the installer package. It can be restored onto a drive (or, I suppose, burned to an actual disc) at which point you have a bootable installer like you’d have had for any other version of OS X.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Julian Bowman] “I’m not a post house. I’m an indie making a living from the not for profit sector. I work on my own, and from everything I’ve read about X I won’t touch it with a barge pole at the moment.”

This sounds a lot like you haven’t actually used it.

[Julian Bowman] “In a couple of years, when all the apologists suggest X will be ready for me, i’ll be long gone over to premier.”

Specifically what features do you need that you believe will take “a couple of years” to show up in FCP X?

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[Chris Kenny]

[Scott Sheriff] “If you ask me, auto color correction on ingest is an example of an X ‘dumb-down’ feature. Don’t most normal people wait until the picture is locked to do the grade? Who is this feature targeted at? So at the expense of including something like backward compatibility, or XML in and out, the developers wasted time on that. This is one of many dumbed-down ‘features’.”

Auto-color isn’t generally the most useful feature in a pro app, but it does have its occasional uses and is widely implemented. Photoshop has it. Even Resolve has it.

Once you have this implemented, adding a checkbox to apply it on ingest requires virtually no developer resources.

In any event, FCP X does not actually have an option to automatically color correct on ingest. What it has is an option to automatically analyze shots for color correction on ingest. You use the video inspector, on a shot-specific basis, to actually apply the results of that analysis. This approach makes a lot of sense. Importing footage is often I/O-bound, so there are free CPU cycles available while it’s occurring — you can analyze shots preemptively, just in case the results of that analysis might be useful later, without even slowing down the import.

Nothing about this sounds remotely “dumbed down” to me.

As far as waiting for picture lock before grading, it really depends on the project. But, for instance, with feature films, it’s not uncommon to screen rough cuts for test audiences or investors or to submit them to festivals. So having the tools to let the editor clean up picture (and audio) a bit during the edit process is not without value.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “The iPhone and iPad are poor analogies for FCPX. They were brand new products, but FCP has a decade’s legacy and a large existing user base. FCPX is not just a new product, it’s a reboot of the FCP franchise.

An iPhone analogy for FCPX would be a hypothetical iPhone X, with cool technologies and a brand new interface, but which couldn’t import your existing contacts (legacy projects), didn’t sync with your computer (bidirectional interchange), required all apps to be re-written in order to run (FXPlug 2), and didn’t work with your Bluetooth headset (external monitoring).”

I get this. And I get why it bothers people. What I don’t get is why people (not necessarily you) are predicting the product will fail because of it.

Look at it like this: if FCP X were a new product that had just been shipped by an established, credible software vendor that was only now entering the NLE market, would people be predicting failure for it? Would they be insisting it was a ‘consumer’ app? Or would people look at what it was, look at what features its vendor was promising the release over the coming months and saying “Hmm, this is pretty interesting, and if these guys play their cards right they’ll be a major player in a year or two”?

I think you’d be seeing something much closer to the latter. What’s happening with FCP X is that people have negative feelings about the fact that Apple ditched backwards compatibility, and went into this whole thing with a certain amount of paranoia about Apple’s commitment to the high-end market. As a consequence they’re not really seeing the product for what it is and what it’s likely to become. Instead, they’re looking for reasons to validate their negative feelings toward it.

[Walter Soyka] “Many people are looking at the same facts as you and arriving at a different, but reasonable, conclusion, which is supported by the evidence as they see it.”

Many people are claiming (or just implicitly accepting) that the evidence supports the conclusion that FCP X is not intended for the same market as FCP, but is instead intended for ‘consumers’, and that Apple has abandoned the ‘pro’ market. I do not believe this is a reasonable conclusion based on the evidence, or even especially coherent. I think the implied definitions of ‘pro’ and ‘consumer’ here make no sense, and this is causing a serious misunderstanding of who bought FCP, which leads to a misunderstanding of who FCP X is targeted at and of Apple’s motivations for making certain decisions around the initial release.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Joe Moya] “Where is the assumption that dumbing down an editing applications suddenly becomes a new paradyne… or, an innovation? “

I’m not sure what’s supposed to ‘dumbed down’ about metadata and arranging the timeline via clip relationships, vs. bins and arranging the timeline by placing clips into generic tracks.

[Joe Moya] “Does changing the UI and file management structure represent innovation or simply change? Perhaps the best way to answer that is too look at through the eyes of Apple’s competition.”

Through the eyes of Apple’s competition, the iPhone was going to be a dud product. Apple regularly makes bold moves that competitors would never make. They are the world’s most valuable technology company (and the third-largest company in the world overall, after a couple of oil companies) as a consequence. “Apple must be doing something wrong because if this is the right move why aren’t Apple’s competitors doing it?” is not really a great argument.

Especially when one of those competitors is Avid.

Frankly, it might make more sense to look at what Avid has done over the last 10 years and do the opposite.

[Joe Moya] “Much of what you see in FCPX already exists in AVID and/or ADOBE.”

User experience matters. A lot. The argument you’re making is the video-industry equivalent of “What’s the big deal about the iPhone? There are lots of other phones with e-mail, web browsers and touch screens”. Skip ahead for years… the mobile platforms that powered those “lots of other phones” are basically dead.

I get that editors who’ve spent the last 15 years working with a traditional multitrack timeline are on the fence about the changes in FCP X (though I’ve yet to see anyone simultaneously demonstrate they’ve really gotten their head around the magnetic timeline, and still hate it), but I am absolutely sure that new editors will understand FCP X much more quickly than other NLEs, and that factor combined with its price is could very well make it the Next Big Thing in the long run.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Sacci] “There is no way early FCPer can be thought of as Youtubers. Even though it was a fraction of the cost of AVIDs or Discreet Edits, it was a serious outlay of cash. A FCP was still 5-10K. We were also doing work we where getting paid for. (Which is the definition of being a pro). Our goal was also to use the tools to put out work that looked as good as people using an AVID and BetaSP or DigiBeta cameras.”

An FCP setup with serious video I/O, a broadcast monitor, etc. was expensive, and of course the software was way too pricey for the ‘kids’… so they, um, ‘borrowed’ the app and didn’t worry about serious video I/O — you could always print to tape via your FireWire camcorder. FCP ran pretty well on the Blue & White G3, Apple’s first FireWire-enabled tower, and Mac towers were still mainstream systems then, not the high-end monsters they’ve since turned into (the B&W G3 started at $1600).

Of course it was a little awkward that you couldn’t actually capture a full 60 minute MiniDV tape to your 12 GB hard drive, but… a whole bunch of people in their mid to late 20s now got their start with video and editing like this, and a lot of us (I’m 28, I was there) have tossed tens of thousands of dollars at Apple since then, and have brought their products into all sorts of new market segments, including the high-end, as we’ve gone on to do more serious things.

The long-term impact of winning “Youtubers” is not to be underestimated.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Roth Weiss] “”The non-pros who are clearly Apple’s targets, don’t aspire to remain as permanent “Youtubers” all their lives. That’s the mistake Apple has made.

Without the tools to learn and to collaborate and to work and to exchange like professionals do (now and in the past), Youtubers will remain Youtubers.””

There are a couple of problems with that argument. First off, “non-pros” are not Apple’s target market with FCP X. Actual consumers effectively never buy buy $300 software. Apple’s primary target market with FCP X is the majority of the FCP user base that does not cut features or deliver material for broadcast, but is nonetheless ‘professional’ because it consists of being getting paid to edit video.

This was also Apple’s primary target market with previous versions of FCP. The only real difference is that by FCP 7, Apple had had a chance to implement more niche functions for the broadcast/feature market. They haven’t had that chance yet with FCP X, because it’s brand new.

Secondly, FCP got into the high-end market in the first place largely because it was adopted by the “Youtubers” of its day (back then the enabling technologies where MiniDV and Firewire), and some of them brought it along when they later moved upmarket. You’re basically arguing that the tools chosen at the high-end dictate what tools people lower down use, but in reality the big trend of the last decade (or more) has been bottom-up adoption, whether you’re talking about Final Cut Pro vs. Avid, the rise of digital cinematography, the replacement of SGI workstations with Mac/Windows machines, etc.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Scott Sheriff] “Shane Ross busted his ass for years trying to get people in LA to accept FCP as suitable for professional use. This was not an easy thing to accomplish, and then this debacle happens, and now we are back to square one.”

“Square one” was “Noting is acceptable except for Avid”. We’re not back to that. The industry is more open to alternatives now. Adobe will probably benefit more than Avid from short-term issues with FCP X, and once those issues have passed FCP X will probably have little trouble establishing itself.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Richards] “To wit: John Gruber back when the iPad was brand new and being widely panned for its missing features and supposedly directionless marketing.”

Wow, that’s a great find. It’s freakishly applicable to Final Cut Pro X.

Apple has released many new products over the last decade. Only a handful have been the start of a new platform. The rest were iterations. The designers and engineers at Apple aren’t magicians; they’re artisans. They achieve spectacular results one year at a time. Rather than expanding the scope of a new product, hoping to impress, they pare it back, leaving a solid foundation upon which to build. In 2001, you couldn’t look at Mac OS X or the original iPod and foresee what they’d become in 2010. But you can look at Snow Leopard and the iPod nanos of today and see what they once were. Apple got the fundamentals right.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Norman Lang] “Thanks Brendan, but I don’t have Motion 5. I have always used Adobe AE for animation etc. Most titles I would do in FCP or Premiere directly. I would be happy to find an easier way to do it. If not, maybe the next release will have it. I would love to know if anyone has found a solution.”

FCP X actually uses the Motion engine as its tilting engine. All the built-in titles (and most built in effects, generators and transitions as well) are actually Motion documents that just expose some parameters you can change in FCP. So it makes sense that you need Motion to create new title presets, and I suspect this won’t change in future versions.

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