[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Stone] “I have spelled this out at least once a day for the past week or so and so have many of the long time pros and so has even Apple/FCP apologists like Larry Jordan. Look deeper into this. It is about the industry’s needs and continuity with licensing requirements and not the immaturity of FCP X.”

And I have addressed this at least once a day or so for the past week. You believe temporal discounting will prove to be a relatively weak effect in this instance, while I believe it will be a relatively strong one. That, essentially, the vast majority of people will be evaluating FCP X one year from today in terms of the capability of the product, not the mess Apple made of its introduction, or what that might imply if the product undergoes another major transition in another decade.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Mike Parfit] “From all the evidence — Apple’s efforts to court the pros, its touting of FCPX as a professional tool, the new FAQs — Apple is not actively trying to abandon us. It’s more likely the FCP team believed FCPX was a daring, glorious risk. But it seems clear now that it is a failure.”

I agree with you about Apple’s view of FCP X, but I strongly disagree that it’s is ‘clear’ at this point that they have failed. The truth is, most of the backlash has not been a direct consequence of people reacting negatively to the product’s substance. It has been a consequence of people erroneously believing, as a consequence of a handful of missing features, some superficial similarities with iMovie, and a whole lot of preexisting paranoia, that FCP X signals Apple’s departure from the pro market.

Many people who have actually sat down to edit something with the app, giving it a fair shot on its own terms instead of merely being frustrated that it works differently, have said positive things about it. My experience has been that the new timeline is really just a lot of fun to edit with (the importance of this should not be underestimated), there are some great new organizational features, and in terms of speed and quality, the new engine is a home run.

Six months from now, you will be able to take a sequence out of FCP X an bring it into Resolve. There will probably be a way to export OMF that doesn’t cost $500. You will have more control over audio track exports. You will almost certainly be able to hook up a real video monitor. While some people will still grasp at straws, and while there will still be a few gaps and limitations here and there, the claims that FCP X is not a pro app will have been pretty thoroughly undermined. Pros will start doing interesting things with it. A little later someone will cut an indie feature with it, and Apple will run a profile on them where they rave about the importance of metadata and the freedom of the magnetic timeline, and talk about how they did assembly edits on location using MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt RAIDs.

Word will get around that rumors of Final Cut’s demise were greatly exaggerated.

Nobody has to believe me about this today. We’ll all have to wait and see. But, not to toot my own horn too much here, I am the guy who predicted this whole present blowup, in broad strokes, over a year ago:

We’re going to get the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch goodness that everyone wants. But we’re not going to get an app with a strict superset of Final Cut Pro’s functionality. Instead, we’re going to get an app that Apple believes is better overall for the tasks video editors perform, even if some features are cut. And we might also get a significantly overhauled UI; something that results from a process of sitting down and questioning every assumption about how editing interfaces currently work.

In short, I think they’ll come up with something really interesting… that will probably cause a bunch of people to totally freak out about how Apple has ruined everything and make forceful public declarations about how they’re leaving the platform. Meanwhile, people actually willing to embrace the thing might discover it has a bit of that iPad ‘magic’.

I think I have a pretty good feel for these things.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Just been testing out my theory cutting an instant music promo and boy is it a fast way to work – and so much fun. The way that clips “get out of each other’s way” means you can really play around pretty much without thinking about the editing process.”

Shh. The new timeline features were designed to make the application easier for 13 year-olds and soccer moms to learn (because both groups buy so much $300 software). They’re useless to professional editors. The Internet told me so.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Looks its me – the ranting banshee of a thousand ranting posts. But simon, isn’t that kind of surprising? that the default, the main, primary storyline location for edited video is completely inappropriate for edits timed to music?”

This is your track-oriented brain talking. Simon’s suggested approach of putting the music in the primary storyline isn’t some crazy workaround; it actually makes sense conceptually for a music video, once you wrap your head around the storyline concept. And it’s not an accident that the program lets you do this.

This is actually a rather neat example of how comprehensive the new timeline paradigm is. If you’d added the automatic rippling features but kept traditional separated audio/video tracks, you’d be screwed in this situation. Apple realized this, and didn’t do that. The folks claiming Apple never thought through real world editing tasks when designing this new paradigm are just hilariously wrong. The more I use FCP X, the more I realize just how meticulously the new approach has been thought out.

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[Chris Kenny]

[John Chay] “What’s the difference of moving to Premiere or FCPX? He’s moving to a whole new platform either way.”

Yes, but if people who wait a little while will be able to choose which new platform they like best, instead of being forced to pick Premiere because Apple is still working on filling in feature gaps.

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[Chris Kenny]

[John Chay] “I think it depends on what kind of work you do. If you have no need to import/export XML, EDL, or OMF, multicam, output to tape I would consider FCPX.

If you need any of these features I would switch to Premiere or Avid.”

XML export is coming in a few weeks. Third-party OMF export is here now, and there will certainly be cheaper options later. Third-party EDL export is virtually guarantied to emerge shortly after XML export.

Apple hasn’t explicitly mentioned XML importing, but there are hints of it already in the FCP X code, and it’s hard to imagine it will take too much longer after they deliver exporting. XML import will allow third parties to implement EDL import. (Which, it’s worth noting, is required by a small fraction of people who need EDL export.)

Output to tape is already trivial via apps that ship with most video interface hardware. The real place where NLE integration matters with respect to tape is if you want to be able to recapture/relink the media used by a specific sequence from tape. Conceivably third party tools could offer this once Apple’s APIs are available, but in practice I hardly see anyone still doing this. The ratio of the cost of deck time to the cost of hard drive space has shifted so much that the workflows this feature supported don’t make much sense anymore.

Telling someone who’s still on FCP 6 and who seems reasonably happy there for the time being that they should jump to Adobe/Avid now because it might take Apple a little while to get up to speed with FCP X doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Probably everything except multicam will be here in six months, and multicam will be in the next major release.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Marvin Holdman] “Face it, this is an experiment conducted by Apple. They want to see if someone else (third party vendors) can absorb the cost of development and support for the majority of the “pro” features for FCPX.”

You’re overstating the extent to which Apple has left out (or intends to leave out) pro features. Multicam and real video output are missing in the first release, but Apple has to implement these internally for technical reasons, and multicam is already a confirmed future feature. XML export and more control over audio track exporting are also not in the first release, but are coming, respectively “in the next few weeks” and “this summer”.

Basically the only essential things Apple is actually leaving to third-parties are a) deck interaction and b) EDL/OMF/etc. There are already third party apps for tap capture/layback. There’s already an app for exporting OMF (though hopefully someone will do something cheaper once there’s wider API access). So the danger here is… what? FCP X might not sell enough copies for anyone to bother implementing an EDL exporting app? I doubt that. Hell, I like this app, I need EDL exporting, and I can code. if it comes to it, I’ll do it.

Are there workflows that require other things? Sure. But the above constitutes the core set of features that will enable integration into pro workflows to start.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Conlee] “As I said, it’s a chicken and egg scenario. If enough “pros” buy it to stimulate 3rd party development, it’ll grow.”

What are we talking about, that Apple is really relying on third parties for? OMF? Already done. Hopefully someone will do it more cheaply once the APIs go public, but there’s already an option. EDL? The idea that FCP X is going to be so unpopular that nobody will bother to write an EDL export app seems rather hard to believe. Video I/O support? AJA already has a beta. I’m sure once Apple has APIs that allow for real video I/O, AJA and Blackmagic will be there. Deck support? There are already third-party apps for this; they’ll obviously take steps to work with FCP X to the extent that that’s useful.

I really don’t see a huge chicken/egg problem with ecosystem support here.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Keith Rocheck] “3rd party developers … we love you … save us … just be sure you don’t sell your wonderful stuff through the App Store. Keep all of your well-deserved income.”

The App Store has proven to be an extremely attractive sales channel. Even if you assume other sales channels have zero cost, all the App Store has to do is get you ~40% higher sales volume, and you entirely make up Apple’s 30% cut. And through a combination of better exposure, one-click purchasing and increased user trust, it is not difficult for the App Store to do this at all.

And realistically, other sales channels don’t have zero cost. If you sell direct from a web site, you need to set up payment processing and integrate it with an order fulfillment system. You’ll have to deal with chargebacks, processing refunds, and a whole host of other issues that come with this sort of thing.

Copy protection also becomes a huge hassle if you self-distribute. With something fairly simple like a third-party app that does basic EDL exporting, you could easily be looking at writing more code to handle copy protection than for the core function of the app. And you’ll have ongoing support hassles with lost registration codes, having to invalidate codes that start getting passed around, etc.

Especially for individual developers and small shops — probably where most of these workflow tools are going to be coming from — the App Store is by far the best choice for distribution. Apple is providing a lot of value for that 30%. You can argue that this isn’t fair, when they could be providing the same value for a smaller share, but that’s not a sound business reason to avoid selling through the app store.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Greg Burke] “Well At the Post House I work at, as well as 4 other creative houses in the area that we work with have sworn off Apple “Pro” Products altogether so I have a hard time believing that Post houses will depend on such a consumer based program to get he job done. “

It’s very easy to swear something off when it doesn’t do what you need it to anyway. I have serious doubts that it will be so easy once the feature set is a bit more complete, especially if it ends up achieving some mass-market success and it’s the new thing all the kids are teaching themselves in a year or two.

Again, I’d point out that everyone seems to have forgotten how FCP got into the pro market in the first place. It wasn’t owners of high-end post facilities sitting down and saying “We have made a comprehensive study of the feature set of this new application, and officially approve it”. It was people who adopted FCP because they had no money, or because its user interface looked a lot more approachable to new editors than Avid’s did. These folks later moved up the industry food chain, and took along the tools they were comfortable with.

Well, FCP X is even cheaper, its UI is even more approachable, and Apple’s start has risen considerably over the last decade (even ignoring iOS devices; they also sell ~5x as many Macs). Yet everyone seems to be acting as if these factors don’t matter, and it’s the determinations that the High Priests of Post Production are presently making in dark rooms that will ultimately determine which products succeed or fail. Really, they didn’t have that power over the last decade. They certainly won’t have it over the next.

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