Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[David Roth Weiss] “The problem is, the methods of argumentation you use are dishonest for the all the reasons I mentioned, just as you’ve been dishonest yet again here, by completely ignoring what I said, and spinning the argument in the direction that you desire. “
Says the guy who essentially never replies to the substance of my posts, instead preferring to make vague insinuations about how I argue.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “This is not a company with a vested interest in satisfying these groups. There is an imbalance of need here and I think many people in the industry are starting to perceive that and to appreciate to what extent it puts their businesses at risk to stay vested in a supplier who has the potential (whether or not it is currently an intention) to walk away from them.”
I’ve actually been meaning to write a blog post on this notion (that seems to have crystalized around Brinkmann’s “X vs. Pro.” blog post) that it’s an unalloyed good for a vendor to be afraid of its customers.
It’s not.
Yes, it results in new versions of software that can open the old versions’ files. That’s pretty convenient. But if you filed off the operating system chrome and showed this screen shot and this one to a couple of reasonably savvy computer users with no knowledge specific to the video editing market, and asked them to guess what year each application was released in… well, personally, ignoring the screen resolution clue, I’d guess about 1997 for the first, and within the last year or two for the second.
Being afraid of your customers also causes stagnation.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “one more time: the guy who engineered FCP for six years at apple and was there for the ramp up to FCPX, has just said the following:
from his piece on his blog: https://sachin.posterous.com/why-apple-built-final-cut-pro-x“Apple doesn’t care about the pro space ”
“The pro market is too small for Apple to care about it.””
The argument he advances is only sufficient to justify a belief that Apple does not care exclusively about the pro market.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “As you already seem to have figured out, he refuses to acknowledge or respond to your salient points no matter how many times you spell them out. And, he is relentless in his use of circular reasoning and non sequiturs, which makes any discussion futile. “
I love that you’re trying to portray me as some kind of zealot for saying it’s too early to call an app that was release ten days ago a “failure”.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Marvin Holdman] “What I’m trying to tell you is that your (and Apple’s) smug indifference to the people that made FCP7 a success is not doing anyone any favors. Basically, they slammed the doors to the bulkheads of the passenger ship before telling anyone the ship was going to sink. It was ethically wrong and frankly unnecessary. You are waving your pom-poms over the corpses of your ancestors. It’s not very becoming. That’s all.”
I’m not arguing that this transition won’t be painful for some people. I’m not arguing that nobody should migrate to another NLE. And I’m not saying you’re wrong that Apple should have left FCS3 on sale during a transitional period.
All I’m doing is pointing out that people writing off FCP X in the pro market are doing so hilariously prematurely.
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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] “Apple’s recent actions around the Pro Apps and in the professional space, going several years back and culminating in last week’s release of FCPX and EOL of FCP7, have caused reasonable people to reasonably question Apple’s role in the professional market.”
Some people have bought into an elaborate narrative of Apple abandoning the pro market, but the actual evidence that supposedly supports this narrative is fairly weak. For instance, this narrative really got its start, as far as I can see, when the FCS3 upgrade wasn’t as ambitious as some had wanted to see. People like me were pointing out that was probably because Apple was working on a major rewrite. That turned out to be correct, but somehow none of the folks skeptical about Apple’s commitment to the pro market changed their opinions… they just transferred their skepticism to the new product, and are now having a field day with the fact that the initial release is missing some features.
There’s this kind of oddly inconsistent logic that I’ve seen several times now that goes “Even if they add the pro features I need, I won’t buy it; I won’t trust them because they don’t care about the pro market”.
But if they add these features back (and they’ve already explicitly said they will, with respect to some of the more important ones), that demonstrates they do care about the pro market.
Now, you can argue that you don’t feel comfortable relying a company willing to do anything as radical as Apple has done with FCP X… but even Apple does this sort of thing only rarely. I doubt they’re going to scrap and rewrite FCP X in the next decade, and predicting any company’s behavior a decade in the future is a fairly pointless exercise. I’m not saying this is very likely or trying to spread FUD here, but one can imagine scenarios in which Avid is out of business in a decade. No vendor is risk-free over those timescales.
[Walter Soyka] “If enough people migrate away now, it may not matter to the pros if FCPX has tape I/O in a year, because another vendor will have picked up many new users who many not be willing to switch back.”
It’s not like the next 12 months are a unique “open enrollment” period where users can switch NLEs. Users can switch NLEs at any time. And new users enter the market on a regular basis. If FCP X is fundamentally a solid product for pro editing in 6-12 months, I doubt it will have any trouble gaining pro users.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Marvin Holdman] “Hey Chris, what is it you have to say to the educator who now has to change an entire curriculum in a month for fall semester? Or the facilities manager in mid-tranistion to FCP products? Or the consultant for large scale FCP facility implementation who is a day is having to find another job? “
That it’s unfortunate that Apple has temporarily placed a small number of people in awkward situation, but that it’s unlikely to have the sort of wide impact on the future of the NLE market that people keep claiming it will.
[Marvin Holdman] “In the meantime, all these long time supporters are now scrambling, trying to figure how they are going to make a living in a very tough world.”
Yeah, I know, it’s really been a problem for us that Apple remotely disabled everyone’s copy of FCP 7.
Oh, wait. They didn’t. People are just acting like they did.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Paul Dickin] “Apple have (unilaterally) decided that educational establishments and professional post businesses don’t need any incentive to get this software to fly out of the App Store.
Like iPhone apps, the kids will download (= pay for) it anyway, so there’s no need for ANY long term formal incentives or committments.
Does that seem a good business plan for a college or business – writing that sort of partner in?”It’s kind of silly to make long-term projections about FCP X’s success or failure on the basis of what are pretty clearly short-term issues arising from the fact that Apple is still working through the issues associated with releasing serious software through the App Store.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jerry Vogt] “Then that is when they should have released FCPX, when it is completely ready.”
People keep saying this, but a huge fraction even of FCP’s existing user base (to say nothing of the new users Apple might pull in with the lower price point and new interface) simply does not require the features everyone here has spent the last ten days obsessing over. The vast majority of projects created day in and day out in FCP will never need to be laid out to HDCAM with specific track assignments, never be color graded in an external grading application, never have their audio exported to Pro Tools.
The truth is, the set of features we’ve been calling ‘pro features’ in this forum are really more like “post house and broadcast features”. An initial release without these features was not targeted at “consumers” (who do not buy $300 video editing software), but at the (probably) nine in ten existing Final Cut users who don’t work at a broadcaster or a post house. I’m not entirely sure why so many people consider it so horrible that Apple released the software for these users while continuing to add additional features for the high-end market.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Because Chris, if the app does restore professional features like.. in and out points that sustain, markers on the timeline, and the ability to select clips without having the playhead jump to your location… ahem… it will be, to a certain extent, happy chance, it might work out, but apple is in no way focused on the professional market. That guy just said so. He seems like he would know.”
Final Cut Pro X’s crossover appeal to the prosumer market is certainly no accident. In point of fact, the line between the pro market and the prosumer market is getting pretty hazy these days. I mean, what’s the difference between a random guy with a DSLR, and and indie filmmaker? Maybe nothing but a couple of months involving pointing that DSLR at some actors.
This really reminds me a lot of the arguments that have been all over various Mac forums over the last few years. There, you’ve seen this emerging meme that Apple is a consumer electronics company, and can therefore be expected to increasingly neglect the Mac. There was a lot of paranoia about this when Apple removed the ‘Computer’ from its name. But the key insight here is that Apple itself sees no distinction between these markets. Computers are consumer electronics devices; Apple thought of them that way at least as far back as the original Mac.
Apple sees markets in unusual ways. People who see things differently from Apple have a tendency project motivations onto Apple that make no sense in light of Apple’s own understanding, and then make what turn out to be hilariously inaccurate predictions about Apple’s future behavior on that basis. It’s an old, tired game.
In the video world, pros need a few tools consumers don’t. Scopes. Support for formats larger than 1080p. Organizational features that support long projects. These are already in FCP X. Pros also need some specialized workflow features, which Apple will deal with by publishing an API and allowing third-party vendors to handle specific formats. Probably better than Apple did in FCP 7.
The necessary capabilities will be there. That’s what matters. People are entirely too obsessed with this notion that paying attention to them is the key to Apple’s long-term success in the pro video market. But the idea that tools targeted exclusively at professionals will beat out tools with crossover appeal in professional markets is highly ahistorical… or we wouldn’t all edit video on “personal computers”.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.