[Chris Kenny]

[Nate Weaver] “Final Cut has always created export outputs by re-rendering from the original media (I.e. not by reusing already rendered media), so I think it’s a safe bet FCPX is using NOT using proxy media to create your outputs.

I don’t know for a fact, just that that’s always the way it’s been and I think the FCP team is smart enough to get this one right.”

Yeah, the user manual doesn’t explicitly say that it uses original footage when exporting, but nearly everywhere that proxies/optimized media are mentioned, it mentions that these are used for playback, e.g.

Use original or optimized media: Click this button to use the optimized media for playback. If optimized media is not available, Final Cut Pro uses the original media for playback. In that case, use the Playback Quality pop-up menu to choose whether to always use the highest-quality video for playback or downsized video for better playback performance. In Final Cut Pro, optimized media is in the Apple ProRes 422 format.

If it used the optimized media for exporting as well, they probably wouldn’t say “for playback” so many times.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Lance Bachelder] “Whatever they did with the Colorsync etc it’s just so pristine and much like Resolve in the purity of how color and masks are applied – you can really finesse DSLR footage like nothing I’ve ever used and I’ve timed 2 features in Color.”

FCP X and Resolve both process everything in a 32-bit float color space. Like Resolve, FCP X even stays in that space between stacked corrections. So, for instance, you can blow a clip out to full white with the exposure control in one correction, and then bring it back down in a different correction — the engine’s color space is so large that nothing ever clips in its internal numerical representation.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Lance Bachelder] “Couldn’t get it to single out one effect – but it worked well copying color timing from clip to another. The new color tool by the way, blows away the 3-Way corrector and we were able to stack multiple color effects, masks, vignettes etc – which are far better in quality than Color’s, and run them in realtime!”

The Color Board is just begging for an iPad companion app that shows color/saturation/exposure controls at the same time and lets you make multitouch adjustments.

By the way, there are tons of otherwise undocumented keyboard shortcuts — and even commands that have no shortcut by default and aren’t in the menus anywhere (but that can be assigned a shortcut) — hidden away in the keyboard customization window.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “If your argument is that Apple releases products that they think are good without targeting them at a specific market, then I think it follows logically that Apple is not focused on the professional (or any other) market.”

My argument is more that Apple has very unconventional opinions about what things really matter in various markets, and despite people constantly criticizing Apple for these opinions, or accusing Apple of simply being clueless because they can’t understand Apple’s (rarely articulated) opinions even are based on Apple’s actions, Apple rarely turns out to be wrong.

[Walter Soyka] “Consumers and professionals have totally different needs and merit totally different approaches. Secrecy and cool product launches are great with consumers, where hype and “it” factor sell. Not so with professionals who are buying tools to do work and get paid.”

Most of the arguments along these lines with respect to this market have also historically been made against iPhone/iPad/Mac enterprise adoption. But those products are now doing quite well in enterprise markets. Yes, even the Mac, which is growing ~60% a year in the US enterprise market. Apple’s “take no prisoners” approach to the market does require flexibility, and it’s true that businesses tend to be less flexible. But this approach allows Apple to make more compelling products than its competitors do, so there are competitive advantages for businesses that can be flexible enough to to adopt products from Apple and similarly aggressive vendors, and more and more business are finding ways to accommodate them.

[Walter Soyka] “There are also plenty of professionals and current FCP users that Apple has apparently chosen to exclude from the target market of the new product, because it doesn’t currently address their needs. For example, people who preview their work on broadcast monitors or post specialists who rely on interchange in post.”

Apple has almost certainly not chosen to exclude those users from their long-term (or even relatively short-term) plans for FCP X. They simply didn’t wait on those features for the initial release. People are up in arms because they don’t like the signal that supposedly sends, but I suspect Apple shares my opinion that a year from now, nobody will much care about what signals Apple was believed to be sending with the initial release, if the product meets their needs at that time.

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[Chris Kenny]

I’m at a bit of a loss responding to this. I’ve gotten into a lot of Internet debates over the years, and I don’t think I’ve ever been thanked by anyone… sort of the opposite, usually. So, thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who has given my views fair consideration.

Anyway, it has been a fun way to kill some time between major projects, and all the debate has helped me clarify my position a lot, I think. It’s going to be pretty interesting to see how this all unfolds over the coming months and years.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “My main point is Apple’s decisions, taken as a whole, can be reasonably interpreted as inconsistent with a professional market orientation.”

And my point is that Apple is an unusual company in many respects, and commonly does things competitors would never even consider doing in all market segments. You can say this these are inconsistent with the needs of pro customers, but many of Apple’s detractors have argued Apple’s practices are inconsistent with the needs of customers in general, so this doesn’t make a compelling case that Apple treats pro customers unusually poorly. Maybe in this instance Apple’s supposedly poor treatment of customers will actually translate into a negative outcome in the marketplace, but historically that’s not the way to bet.

[Walter Soyka] “Clearly, you believe Apple is still very pro-focused, and I understand your arguments for saying so — but do you believe it’s unreasonable for anyone to suggest that Apple cares less about pros today than they did 10 years ago?”

I think the model of ‘attention’ that such a statement implies is not directly applicable to corporations. And, interestingly, mostly isn’t applied to other corporations. Nobody freaks out that Sony will neglect its pro cameras because the company is selling too many Playstations.

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[Chris Kenny]

$850 for a bundle that includes After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Encore is worth it right there for anyone who doesn’t already own these apps, even if you hate Premiere, couldn’t care less about Flash, etc.

It’s not like they make you sign a contract saying you’ll never use any version of Final Cut Pro again.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Richard Boyd] “I currently have 55 seats of FCS7 in 2 different editing labs for my students. I was planning on updating this fall to the new version of FCP that we have been anticipating. Aside from all of the other issues, attempting to set up 55 different I-Tunes accounts so that we can individually download 55 different copies of FCX is absurd beyond the ken of mortal man.

So, we are considering our options – best guess we will probably move to Adobe PP. And guess what – our students will train on Adobe, buy Adobe, use Adobe, convince their friends to use Adobe, etc. We train 200 or so students a year. Multiply us by dozens of different schools and a few years, and you know what – you have a pretty wide impact on the future of the NLE market.”

Apple has already announced that volume/education licensing will be addressed. Yes, they may lose some sales this year as a consequence of not having this sorted at launch, but I doubt it’ll be statistically significant in the long run.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “Any one of the things I mentioned may be reasonably explained — but the pattern, taken all together, is alarming to the professionals using these products and may show that Apple is not well-focused on professionals’ needs.”

But you’ll notice I didn’t have to explain your points with ad-hoc one-off explanations. I agree there are systematic explanations. I just disagree about what they are.

[Walter Soyka] “And how can you put important in quotes? Without external video monitoring, FCPX is appropriate for web video only. If you could currently get data out of FCPX, you could make the argument that it’d be a nice offline editor, given its new timeline and audition features, but that’s not an argument you can make today. “

“Important” is in quotes because people treat these features as critical, yet somehow Apple products without them seem to sell just fine.

[Walter Soyka] “Why is Apple discouraging the use of a media format it disfavors? That may benefit them, since they distribute content electronically — but it doesn’t benefit me or my clients who want Blu-ray. A developer builds products that its core audience needs. If pros need Blu-ray, and Apple doesn’t care to provide a serious solution, are they a serious, professional-focused developer?”

Where is Avid’s Blu-ray authoring tool? You can be serious about the NLE market without caring about disc authoring.

[Walter Soyka] “Intel’s Xeon update schedule is beyond Apple’s control — but Apple skipped speed bumps and USB 3.0. Adding some more slots would have been a nice Mac Pro update, too.”

Apple skipped USB 3.0 because they’re trying to push Thunderbolt. More slots? The current Mac Pro has as many as any Mac has had since the PowerMac 9600 had, and it shipped in 1997. This does nothing to demonstrate a recent de-emphesis on the pro market.

[Walter Soyka] “Even when Thunderbolt devices become common, PCIe 4x at 10W won’t help with GPU co-processing.”

Err… ExpressCard is PCIe 1x.

[Walter Soyka] “Apple chose not to include NVIDIA’s drivers in 10.6.7, and 10.6.8 broke existing and otherwise functional CUDA drivers.”

10.6.8 had a bunch of OpenGL changes. Apple makes pre-release software available to developers to test with, and the quick availability of updated CUDA drivers suggests NVIDIA was not caught by surprise upon release. What was Apple supposed to do? Hold the release of an OS update for tens of millions of users for this?

[Walter Soyka] “You say that glossy displays have higher contrast — I’d add that it’s artificially high contrast and an artificial saturation boost. The point of a glossy display is to make images pop. Professionals would largely prefer their images to be accurate.
“

There’s nothing ‘artificial’ about it — you’re just seeing something closer to the native capabilities of the panel, because there’s not a piece of diffusion on front of it as with a matte screen.

[Walter Soyka] “That’s actually exactly my point. Apple may like pro users, but I think that if they were focusing their business on pros, they would change some of these practices which work well in the consumer space and poorly in the professional space.
“

These things have alleged downsides in the consumer space as well. Pundits are always pointing them out. If you ever take a look at Mac vs. Windows forums, many people even present them as major reasons not to choose Apple products. Apple gets accused of neglecting pros and not consumers not because pros are treated any ‘worse’, but merely because accusing Apple of neglecting consumers isn’t credible because they’re such a huge market.

[Walter Soyka] “I salute you for your tenacity, Chris, but I honestly don’t understand how you can’t see that there’s room for reasonable disagreement on some of these points. I don’t care if I sway you on your position about Apple’s focus or lack thereof on the professional market, but I do hope to show that it’s not unreasonable for pros in a niche market to be concerned about a niche product in the hands of an increasingly mass market-focused developer.”

My response to this argument is that I agree FCP X is designed with crossover appeal, and is not as strictly a niche product as, say, Avid Media Composer. I just think that if you look at the history of technology products, this is probably a good thing in the long run.

And I’m also not at all convinced that FCP X is targeted at a different market from FCP 7. Apple has always been primarily targeting the larger market of people who get paid to edit video, not just the broadcast and post production markets whose needs we’re mostly discussing here. FCP 7 had just been around for long enough that Apple had had a chance to add more niche features.

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[Chris Kenny]

I’ve grouped your points by explanation, with any specific comments included afterwards.

Attributable to common Apple practices such as aggressively consolidating product lines, deliberately discouraging the use of media formats Apple disfavors, or shipping initial versions of software and devices with ‘important’ features missing:

Shake, Color, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Cinema Tools, Xserve, Final Cut Server?

The fact that DVDSP never got Blu-ray? — Notice Macs still can’t play Blu-ray either. Apple just doesn’t like Blu-ray. Or discs in general, these days.

The lack of proper video monitoring?

Attributable to Apple’s culture of secrecy:

The fact that Apple didn’t bring more third-party developers on board before the FCPX launch?

The fact that Apple allowed rumors of the vaporware Phenomenon compositing project to persist for years?

Attributable to factors beyond Apple’s control:

The fact that the Mac Pro line has gone for over a year without an update twice since 2008? — Apple updates the Mac Pro whenever Intel releases a new generation of suitable processors. The Xeon doesn’t get updated as fast as Intel’s consumer processors.

Attributable to Apple believing it has a better way:

The fact that Apple removed ExpressCard 34 from the MBP 15″ in place of a memory card reader? — Apple’s better way is Thunderbolt. Yes, I’m aware it didn’t show up at the same time ExpressCard was removed on the 15″. But they left ExpressCard on the 17″, clearly understanding there were some people who really needed it.

The fact that Apple has essentially sidestepped the VARs that supply many pro’s studios? — Apple has been pretty obvious about their better way here.

The sudden EOL of FCP7 — with no new product that can read its project files, and the stated suggestion that there will be no migration tool? — No migration tool because the timeline approach that Apple thinks is superior makes one difficult. EOL of FCP 7 discussed more below.

Not really accurate:

Goofy little things like glossy displays instead of matte? — Glossy displays are sharper and have higher contrast. They’re not obviously worse for professional work. In fact, they’re better if you can control environmental light, which we build suites for in this business. Also, Apple has gone out of its way to continue offering matte displays on the MBP. On towers they don’t really need to, because you can use any screen.

The fact that Apple has basically ended NVIDIA support at exactly the time that Autodesk and DaVinci really began relying on it? — Apple reevaluates this with each generation of machines. Expecting them to put NVIDIA GPUs in every Mac in every generation because of a couple of apps is not really reasonable. Lion actually adds support for additional GPUs, including NVIDIA GPUs. Apple created OpenCL and pushed it as a cross-platform standard to solve this problem long-term.

You may strenuously disagree with Apple about its decisions in some of these cases. That’s not what this discussion is about. This discussion is about Apple’s motivations. And all of these actions are explainable without resorting to the explanation that Apple doesn’t care about the pro market. In fact, they’re all explainable by aspects of Apple’s corporate culture that are pretty widely understood and that we can see operating in other market segments.

Meanwhile, this is all cherry-picking. There are other things that show Apple does care about the pro market, including the fact that they rewrote FCP at all and many of the features FCP contains, Thunderbolt, some seriously high-end laptops, the continued existence of the Mac Pro, etc.

Finally, let’s come back to the issue of Apple no longer selling FCS3: I believe this to be an error on Apple’s part. I think they’re really excited about the whole App Store thing, and they’ve always been obsessive over inventory management and small product lines. They probably figured people who really needed copies of FCS3 could still find them aftermarket, and they think through all of the implications this would have for their institutional customers. Their culture of secrecy, remember, probably means the institutional sales reps where totally out of the loop and couldn’t point these problems out.

Whether Apple will admit this error and backtrack, it’s hard to say. But as an error, one can’t really read much in the way of motivation into it.

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