[Chris Kenny]

[Jonathan Dortch] “You’re comparing a professional software platform to a phone?”

I’m looking at the realities of software development by comparing one software project an other software project.

[Jonathan Dortch] “And wasn’t MMS disabled as an appeasement to the AT&T for their already nervous bandwidth concerns? That’s the rumor I heard anyway.
“

MMS isn’t all that bandwidth-intensive. Less so than e-mail, really, because it sends much lower quality media than you can attach to e-mail.

Anyway, there were probably a dozen missing features in the first version of iOS that conventional wisdom said were absolutely necessary, and that almost any other company would have waited to implement before shipping. Apple is very aggressive about shipping initial releases as soon as they have a minimum viable feature set, and as a consequence I don’t think it’s safe to predict their long-term market goals from their initial releases.

I mean, we’ve seen this already with FCP X, with people reading the fact that FCP X was an ‘island’ (in terms of providing access to sequence data to third-parties) as an indication that it was an exclusively consumer app, when it’s now clear from Apple’s timeline for releasing such support (“the next few weeks”) that they have been working on this and always intended to offer it.

[Jonathan Dortch] “I do expect loyalty from a professional platform because we use this software to run our businesses, and have invested in the platform for 10 years.”

We’re not talking about material loyalty here, though, only loyalty signals.

[Jonathan Dortch] “And yes, releasing the software in its current state with no communication or road map has caused great disturbance in our market.”

I entirely agree that Apple has not communicated effectively here.

[Jonathan Dortch] “Yes OSX was bare in it’s first incarnation, but an OS will always become robust over time, it mandatory by function as the hub for interacting with the system and delegating processes.”

There’s actually a bunch of hysteria in some circles that OS X will lose many of its advanced functions and merge with iOS….

[Jonathan Dortch] “There is no mandate for FCPX to return to the functionality of legacy FCP. It is at the discretion of the maker. Apple could be content with an entirely different type, and broader base, of user.”

The truth is, in terms of code size, the critical unique features that only pros require are not that complicated. XML export is simple compared with, say, the new rendering engine. It makes little market sense for Apple not to add the features this market requires, given the scope of the work.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Lawrence] “Let’s start with something simple – entering time code values to set the head and tail of a source clip. How do you do this in FCPX?”

If I understand what you’re asking: click to select the clip in the browser. Click the timecode display. Enter timecode to jump the playhead to that location, and hit ‘I’ or ‘O’ to set the in or out point.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jonathan Dortch] “I find great fault in the software not being capable after numerous years of development. I find great fault in Apple *not* telling us anything first hand, releasing a substantially lacking piece of software while yanking our entire platform from the market.”

Apple should have been able to support MMS in the first version of iOS, right? It’s a pretty simple feature. You can play this game all day. Apple is not incompetent at software development; the software is what it is after years of development because software development is hard. A huge amount of work probably went into foundational features on this first release. Apple had to build AV Foundation into something that could replace QuickTime, for instance.

[Jonathan Dortch] “I find great fault in the prosumer-first strategy when so many of us have based our businesses around the previous software that clearly catered to the high end user.”

Given that this strategy doesn’t necessarily result in pros getting the features they need any later than they otherwise would have, this is fundamentally irrational. You’re saying Apple should have held the app off the market until more pro features were implemented just to signal loyalty to pros, essentially.

[Jonathan Dortch] “Adobe managed to rewrite Premiere into 64-bit without losing a single feature. By adding a lot of awesome features.”

People keep invoking this, but moving to 64-bit by itself does not require rewriting.

[Jonathan Dortch] “The strategy of re-inventing the wheel, releasing sub-par software and playing major pro catchup doesn’t work when there’s a 10 year vestige, expected features, and 2 million customers who rely on the platform.”

The same thing could have been said about Mac OS X, except with bigger numbers. The same thing was said about Mac OS X. A decade later, Apple sells ~5x as many Macs. Apple plays a long game. If you, for whatever business reasons, need to go somewhere else at the moment, then obviously that’s what you need to do. But Apple probably has a very strong future in this market.

[Jonathan Dortch] “Do you not get that impression from the software? From running FCPX side by side with iMovie?”

Again, this is extremely reminiscent of early OS X criticism. OS X also got bashed for having a UI that was supposedly oversimplified. Even, according to some people, designed for children. The truth is, the FCP X interface looks superficially similar to the iMovie interface, but the former has substantially more depth to it.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Harlan] “Chris, Steve Jobs’ health has been a serious issue for Apple for the last 2.5 years, not just the last six months.”

Well, if you count like that… Apple launched the iPad, basically the most successful new product in the history of the company, within the last 2.5 years.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jonathan Dortch] “As a colorist, how do you feel about FCPX color grading tools and auto-match color correction? What about the absence of Color? I would wager most of your work is done in Resolve these days?”

Yeah, pretty much exclusively Resolve, so the discontinuation of Color, I can’t say I personally care much about.

FCP X’s built-in grading tools are pretty good, in my opinion, by NLE standards, which admittedly isn’t saying a ton. I can see automatic color matching being useful to offline editors (which I’m mostly not) for producing better looking rough cuts, which is not as silly as it might sound, as it’s not unusual in the indie feature world to submit rough cuts to festivals or screen them to try to raise more money for completion.

[Jonathan Dortch]
Are you an offline editor as well? If not, how can you vehemently defend the editing capabilities/lack thereof in FCPX for high-end or even similar legacy workflow?”

I don’t. I admit FCP X is lacking essential high-end workflow features at this time. If a client asked me if they should cut, say, a Red music video on FCP X to bring in for grading in a weeks, I’d have to tell them not to, because as of this moment there’s no way to get sequence data out of it and into Resolve.

But, I believe Apple is following a deliberate strategy of shipping the app as soon as it’s useful to mainstream users, knowing full well that more features need to be added before it’s useful in high-end workflows… and is now in the process of adding those features. They’ve essentially told us as much, just not (yet) first-hand. And if this is Apple’s strategy, it’s hard to find much fault with it. High-end users will get what they need about when they were always going to. Meanwhile, mainstream users have a shiny new app already.

[Jonathan Dortch] “Features definitely don’t need custom frame sizes 🙂 We do a lot of interactive work for web delivery, installations, video walls, etc where custom frame sizes are paramount. I find their absence especially odd given FCPX’s strong commitment to web delivery and the general death of tape-based broadcast. “

Personally, I’ve also found custom frame sizes useful on occasion. My point was not to try to claim this feature isn’t useful. It was to note that its lack is not an indication that FCP X is consumer-oriented software. As you noted, features don’t require custom frame sizes and neither does broadcast; there’s no real correlation between “seriousness” of market and need for this ability.

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[Chris Kenny]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “I haven’t anything that isn’t Apple PR about the “technical foundations” What can you tell me about them?”

The “Apple PR” in this case goes into more technical detail than normal. In terms of the “overkill for the consumer market” sort of stuff: everything is rendered in a 32-bit float color space. Consumers working with video from 8-bit consumer cameras, authoring to 8-bit consumer media formats, do not need this. The engine is also extensively multithreaded and uses OpenCL (e.g. GPU acceleration) all over the place. Consumers simply aren’t working on projects complicated enough for it to be worth the trouble for Apple to implement this stuff to improve their user experience. And of course there’s the 4K support…

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[Chris Kenny]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “They EOL’d FCP and released a decidedly consumer oriented (in it’s current release) program in it’s place.
Tell me how that’s different then what you outlined above?”

Because while the release may arguably be consumer-oriented, its technical foundations are substantially overbuilt for that purpose. It’s not really a consumer app; it’s a pro app that’s presently missing a bunch of features.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Harlan] “There is a committee feel to the software, where different divisions seem to have won out with different aspects of the software, creating something that is neither this nor that, but a glob of compromise to satisfy internal company needs. “

Meanwhile other detractors are claiming it’s the singularly evil vision of the megalomaniacal Randy Ubillos.

As far as I can tell, there is nothing about the initial release of FCP X which is not explained as follows: Apple was working on a shiny new media architecture and editing paradigm. They wanted to get an app based on it to market as soon as possible. Well, prosumers need X + Y. Pros need X + Y + Z. So, how do you get an app to market as soon as possible? Implement X + Y and ship. Then work on Z for a while. The full set of X + Y + Z will arrive for pros at essentially the same time, but you get to sell a bunch of copies of your app to prosumers in the meantime.

The counter to this is to point to consumer-only features in FCP X and say “They spent time on this instead of that pro feature I wanted”. That could demonstrate that Apple has actually made decisions that required pros to wait longer, so consumers could get functionality sooner. Several people have made this argument. But the features they can point to, as far as I’ve seen, are either trivial, not as exclusively consumer-oriented as they’re claiming, or both.

The “It’s because Jobs wasn’t there” theory makes no sense, because FCP X’s target market, and probably the list of features to implement before initially shipping, would have been established years ago. It’s not like FCP X was written in the last six months.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Ronald Lindeboom] “Chris: Apple is NOT issuing new licenses for either FCP7 or for FCS3. They are giving RMAs to dealers and will not activate new licenses for anyone that were not already activated. What part of that do you not understand?”

The part where it makes it literally impossible for anyone to obtain a copy of FCS3 ever again. First sale doctrine means there are a couple of million users who have a copy they have an absolute right to resell to anyone.

I agree Apple should have left FCS3 on sale. But given that there are all of those copies kicking around, I just don’t see how this is going to have the sort of apocalyptic effects people are claiming it will.

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[Chris Kenny]

[John Chay] “I’m working with Photoshop and After Effects right now. Both are 64 bit CS 5.5. Both can open legacy projects. The platforms are the same as the originals. If Adobe did what Apple did, there would be a full blown riot. I don’t know how anyone can defend Apple. “

Merely moving to 64-bit doesn’t constitute a rewrite. PS and AE also moved from Carbon to Cocoa with CS5, but while that would normally require a rewrite it didn’t really in that case, because Adobe’s apps are mostly implemented on top of Adobe’s own internal cross-platform API, which has as few hooks into the system as Adobe can manage.

Adobe’s last real rewrite, I believe, was Premiere Pro 1.0. I think it could open Premiere projects, but on the other hand Adobe abandoned an entire computing platform for several years during the transition.

[John Chay] “We get it. You like them. I like Apple. But my brand loyalty only goes so far.”

This statement implies that brand loyalty is causing me to defend something I otherwise wouldn’t support, but one of the reasons I like Apple is that they’re willing to do things like this. In my opinion, for instance, Photoshop has badly needed a serious UI overhaul for about the last eight years, but I doubt Adobe will ever have the guts to do one. And Avid… Media Composer’s UI looks like its from 1995, and while the Avid fans can defend that choice until the heat death of the universe, I have no doubt it’s a very large part of the reason Avid has been losing market share for years.

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