Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[John Chay] “You can’t run a business on uncertainty. At my facility we were ready to purchase 3 brand new mac based editing suites running FCP. After the release of FCPx we have decided to go another direction.”
You can’t run a business on uncertainly, but if there’s no pressing need to make a decision immediately, you can wait for the uncertainty to recede before doing so.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[james carey] “I watched as they bought Shake and Color and then abandoned them”
External products are not a good guide.
[james carey] “They also dropped xserve, xsan. It seems they are abandoning the high end pro market, good for them and their stockholders, bad for those of us who depend on continuity in our purchase decisions.”
Xsan is still for sale (and integrated into Lion Server, i.e. about to get a hell of a lot cheaper to deploy). As far as Xserve goes, based on the rumors of rack-mountable Mac Pros, it’s not clear we’ve seen the end of Apple in that market. And in any event, Xserve was always a fairly marginal product for Apple, much more so than Final Cut Pro.
I don’t see what any of this has to do with FCP anyway. I’ll say if again: if Apple really weren’t interested in the pro video market, FCP X wouldn’t exist. They’d have EOL’d FCP, not done a rewrite, and added some more features to iMovie to go after the prosumer market if that was the intent. The prosumer market doesn’t need many of the things already in FCP X.
[james carey] “As for XML and OMF, if it’s so easy to fix, why not ship with it.”
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I suspect Apple’s approach with FCP X is going to be to provide an API for third-parties, not directly implement export features for every format. An API is something you really don’t want to rush, because if you need to make changes later it breaks other vendors’ code.
[james carey] “I will continue to use FCP7 but am in the process of upgrading to CS5.5 for PPro, and that looks amazingly promising. AE is of course one of my workhorse tools, and its integration with PPro and PS is just gravy. Maybe i should thank Apple, what do you think?”
I think it’s silly to make a long-term decision during a short-term information gap, unless doing so is entirely unavoidable.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Seeman] “Apple’s mistake, IMHO, is mismanaging the transition. I think, over time, the transition could have been a major boon to Apple. This is a company that managed the move from OS9 to OSX and PPC to Intel. In each case they designed a reasonably long transition period and had features such as “classic” and “rosetta.” Had they allowed for a year long transition, keeping EOLd FCS2009 available, they could have had another major shift in their favor as FCPX matured.”
While I agree that Apple should have left FCS3 on sale for the time being, I just can’t bring myself to take this notion that FCS3 will be literally unavailable to people who need it very seriously. There are millions of copies of this app kicking around in the world. The number of multi-seat facilities that might need to add seats while waiting for FCP X to mature is effectively trivial in comparison. Like, as in, I would be very surprised if we were talking about more than a couple of thousand seats that such facilities might need to add, globally, over the next couple of years. Maybe some will have trouble routing around internal corporate bullshit to be allowed to purchase used software, but that number is even smaller.
[Craig Seeman] “Instead, facilities who made purchases of FCS2009 are already at the end of that 18-24 month period and some started the clock earlier when FCS2009 was still missing features that competitors were bringing to market.”
If there is a compelling reason to upgrade now, then sure, they should pick the best option now. And as of today, it’s probably not FCP X. But we basically knew that was going to be true since we knew Apple was going to do a rewrite… and a rewrite has been inevitable to people who understood the technical limitations of the old architecture for… four or five years now, I guess.
Anyone choosing to make a major investment in Avid/Adobe now, however, should do so with the knowledge that they may be making a long-term choice different from the one they might choose to make six months or a year from now, once FCP X has had more time to mature. The benefits of switching now have to be weighed against the possibility that you might be using Media Composer for the next decade when FCP X would have been a better choice, because you made a decision during the specific window of time when FCP X wasn’t yet a viable option.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[james carey] “Really? EDL. OMF, XML depended on QT?”
No, that’s a different issue. There are a whole bunch of features that, realistically, 80% of FCP X’s user base never uses, and you’ve just listed several of them. Some people who do use those features seem to have wanted Apple to hold the entire app off of the market until these features were implemented (or hooks were added for third-parties to take over or whatever). But that makes no sense. Basically, these users are saying Apple should have denied this application to users who don’t need these features for a few extra months just to signal that FCP X was a still a pro app by shipping the initial version with them. But that’s, frankly, an unreasonably expensive signal to demand from Apple.
[james carey] “FCP X is not a replacement for FCP7, and it may be years before it is, it’s that simple.”
I think you need to make a list of the critical missing pro features (note: the critical missing features, not everything you’d like to have work differently) and see how long it is. Because my list came down to:
1. A way to export sequence data.
2. More audio exporting features.
3. Support for third-party I/O hardware.
4. Multicam.That does not sound like it will take “years” to fix.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[John Chay] “Your logic is flawed. Facilities had no intentions of transitioning towards Avid or Premiere until they released Final Cut X. Apple could have bought themselves some time by doing nothing at all or releasing FCPx as a Beta version first. But to scrap FCS3 all together is ludicrous and a clear signal that the Pro Editing App from Apple is dead.
“The logic you’re describing is flawed. The mere release of FCP X creates no additional material reason to transition to another editing platform. Uncertainly surrounding Apple’s future intentions seems to be the primary driver behind the folks saying they’re going to switch, but that uncertainty will be gone in 12-18 months (probably much less), so if you weren’t going to upgrade until then there’s no reason why some short-term uncertainty before then should cause to to move your upgrade date ahead and switch editing platforms in the process.
That’s just a fundamentally irrational knee-jerk response, essentially an attempt to remove the phycological unpleasantness of uncertainty by making a decision immediately, which it makes no sense to do when there’s no pressing need and it will be possible to make a more informed choice later.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Ted Beke] “I don’t know. Part of me thinks the reason they’re not fixing it is it takes the mystery out of their magnetic timeline. Its still all linear video and audio layers in particular time sequence. I feel like this could be translated with some work. The video is still basically stacked like any other timeline”
It’s not quite that simple. For instance, you can’t have transitions between two connected clips on “V2”, because those clips don’t have absolute positions relative to each other, but only to the primary storyline clips they’re attached to. So when importing a multitrack edit, any clips that transitioned into each other would need to be grouped as a compound clip or a secondary storyline.
The problem is FCP X editors will be using those groupings to mean something. That is, in FCP X you don’t just say “I want to put a transition between these clips, so I have to put them into a secondary storyline”. You say “These clips are like a little logically self-contained sequence, so I’m going to group them into a secondary storyline”. Clearly that kind of conceptual grouping would be impossible to do when automatically importing. This is what Ubillos means when he says there’s not enough information in an FCP 7 timeline. In FCP 7, tracks are just generic, stacked linear containers; there’s no way to tell the software about these kinds of relationships.
The other thing to keep in mind is that with a totally different rendering engine, importing old sequences is never going to be more than approximate. There aren’t direct equivalents to some effects, and even where there are, the new versions will often have different parameters or different scales. Text is now presumably being rendered though Cocoa text APIs rather than Carbon text APIs; output won’t match at the pixel level. The new engine is color managed, resulting in differences both in display and, possibly, in output. There are a lot of factors like this.
So… Apple could probably implement sort of approximate sequence importing, that produced FCP X sequences that would have to be manually organized before they looked like natively created FCP X sequences. Maybe they will… but they might just think the quality of the results wouldn’t be worth the effort.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[John Chay] “Actually the real question is why is there a platform change to begin with? To me the answer is obvious.”
Virtually everything people where asking for required abandoning the 32-bit QuickTime/Carbon codebase. And the FCP UI was also clearly something from the classic Mac OS era; that was always going to get a major overhaul.
The only big ‘optional’ change, really, was the decision to try to improve on traditional muli-track editing and bin-based clip organization. If they hand’t done that, nobody would have to learn anything new, really, and backwards compatibility would have been easier to implement. But forgoing the implementation of an improved approach because some people will initially be uncomfortable with it is not a recipe for long-term growth, and even if Apple had tried really hard, importing sequences from FCP 7 was never going to be more than approximate, with an entirely different rendering engine, a different library of effects/transitions, different clip parameters, etc.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Seeman] “Most are adverse to moving to new tools. They may eventually but movement is slow. “
This works in favor of FCP X, though. A lot of facilities weren’t going to upgrade to a new version of FCP for 12 or 18 months even if it had just been an incremental, backwards compatible update. This gives Apple a little time to continue adding pro features to FCP X, to try to get facilities to choose that, rather than Premiere Pro or Avid, when they are ready to update. None of this is nearly as time sensitive as the “It’s been five days and Apple hasn’t responded yet! They’re running out of time!” crowd is implying.
It’s true that by making a transition to FCP X as big a step as a transition to an alternative editing platform, Apple has opened the door for customers to switch. But Apple must have realized this. I think they’re just not very worried about opening the door, because in the long run they’re confident in the quality of the product that they’ll deliver and don’t feel like they need to rely on platform inertia to keep customers.
Indeed, as I’ve noted elsewhere, a huge part of the reason FCP is so successful it pro markets today is because its approachability made it the most common choice for students and new editors, who then moved out into the industry. FCP X, in terms of user interface and particularly price, is even more approachable. Once the initial launch hiccups have passed, I see no particular reason to believe this long-term trend won’t resume and even accelerate.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[John Chay] “Nothing abstract about it. There are companies like Avid and Adobe that have treated the professional community well. Avid has been around longer than FCP and they have never treated their customers like this. Avid is the same platform when I started using it 10 years ago.”
“The vendor treats the professional community well during rare platform transitions” is a lot more abstract than “This software does what I want right now”.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[John Chay] “https://www.onerivermedia.com/blog/?p=322
Best article I’ve read coming from a professional user of FCP and the impact on business.”
The idea that people make purchases on the basis of these sorts of abstract issues is, frankly, not well supported in general. My prediction is that customers who decide FCP X is, on the technical merits, the best choice for them (say) a year from now will very rarely go on to say “But we’re not going to buy it because Apple really didn’t communicate well about the introduction last year”.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.