[Chris Kenny]

[Douglas K. Dempsey] “Is there a logical way to do that kind of thing with Compound Clips and Secondary Stories, etc? Am I better off sending it to Motion where the layer concept still thrives?”

You can still layer as deeply as you want with connected clips. As an added bonus, if you’ve got, say, six title layers that conceptually make up a single clip, you can collapse them into a compound clip to eliminate visual clutter on your timeline.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “Thanks for the tips. I will definitely follow up with those ideas, especially if I don’t get my way with Apple. But I think I’ll give them tomorrow to fix this, just in case there actually IS an educational strategy, and really just lousy communication with their reps. But if it is true that there is NO educational pricing, and NO ELP licensing, I will definitely report my findings to everyone who will listen.”

Not only is FCP X brand new, but the Mac App Store is pretty new as well, and FCP X is the most expensive Apple app sold exclusively though it to date, and probably the first app where Apple is seeing really significant interest from business and education customers. It’s frankly not all that surprising that things are a little screwy, and I wouldn’t read too much into it.

Apple recently published details about how Lion (also an App Store exclusive) will be handled for business and education customers. I suspect there’s going to be a solution for FCP X, but Apple just hasn’t had a chance to put the pieces together yet.

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[Chris Kenny]

[John Heagy] “If by interpretation you mean evaluating a shipping product… we are reacting to what Apple has done.”

An objective evaluation of the shipping product does not unambiguously support that interpretation. Yes, it’s true that the app has features that are useful to consumers, but many of the ones that people like to toss around, like Vimeo support, are not exclusively useful to consumers. We upload stuff to Vimeo all the time for clients to proof.

And yes, it’s true that there are pro features missing, but there are also a lot of pro features that are there, that would make no sense in an actual consumer-oriented app: 4K, video scopes (well above average for software scopes, too), DPX/OpenEXR exports, audio role metadata, etc.

To me, FCP X looks far more like a pro app with an incomplete feature set than a consumer app.

[John Heagy] “You are banking on what you believe Apple will do. We can’t afford to do that.”

Nobody needs to ‘bank’ on anything here, really. There is no immediate action that shops on FCP 7 need to take at this time.

[John Heagy] “My hope is Apple is releasing this to the “pajama editors” of the world as beta testers to solidify the editing core and then start plugging in real workflow necessities. An admittedly faint hope.”

Apple likes to ship early; often before they’ve had time to implement features that ‘everyone knows’ a product in a given category is supposed to have. Practically every first-generation Apple product announcement results in loud complaints about missing features. This was even true of the iPad, which current management seems to believe is the single most important product the company sells.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Peter Blumenstock] “So why don’t they speak up then, announce what will be added, reassure people, give some sort of a roadmap?
Not Apple’s style? Well, then they deserve the boot. Quite simple. “

I hate to keep repeating myself, but people keep raising the same points…. They have talked to Pogue, Studio Daily, and others. A more formal response, it it comes, can be expected to take them a week or two to put together, based on their reaction time with previous similar Internet blowups.

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[Chris Kenny]

[John Heagy] “What does the clearly consumer approach Apple has taken with FCPX mean for ProRes and companies like Arri, Aja and the more recent Sound Devices and Ninja?

There seems to be two minds at Apple. The smart one that created and expanded ProRes and included Xsan in Lion… and the one responsible for FCPX. For something that “

I know I keep repeating this, but people keep asking questions that assume as background that Apple is actually exiting the pro editing market, which is merely an interpretation some people have chosen to read into certain actions that also have other interpretations.

Your “two minds” problem vanishes if you realize that features like ProRes (including support for 4K ProRes 4:4:4:4) are indicative of FCP X being a professional app that merely hasn’t had its full desired feature set implemented yet. This is a common Apple pattern with initial product releases.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Morten Ranmar] “Has anybody tried to keyframe volume levels on an audio clip (now that the Pen tool is gone)? You will be sure to get your mouse exercised, as you have to go back and forth from timeline to effects window everytime you want to set a keyframe. It is so lame!”

You can create keyframes directly on top of the waveforms in the timeline by option-clicking.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Roth Weiss] “No, that’s been yet another attempt to deflect my message about your inaccuracies, and you’re in such denial that you’re repeating like a broken record.”

Please identify these supposed inaccuracies.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Gregorio Paolini] “This morning I called the Business Apple Store from Italy (800 915 911), asking for an invoice with VAT when I was going to purchase a seat of FCPX from their App Store. Utterly surprised, the Business Store guy replied: “Non è fatturabile” (“We can’t make a proper/fiscal invoice”). Try to imagine how “Pro” this App can be.”

I’d attribute this more to US-centrism and the newness of the App Store, if that makes you feel any better. In the US, the standard e-mail receipt is perfectly fine for tax-related purposes.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Dustin Parsons] “My apprehension to buying and working with FCPX comes not from the interface having been drastically changed (who knows, maybe it’s the future of editing?) but from the fact that there are NO broadcast professionals looking at this as a viable solution for their businesses. Eventually I want to cut broadcast material or work on feature films and if I’m leaving this job knowing only FCP7 and FCPX I feel like I’ll move from cutting every day at a smaller post-house to pushing tapes part-time at a big one. “

It is entirely premature to say that FCP X has no future in the broadcast market.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jamie Franklin] “What possible reason could they have for keeping this in 32…”

Compressor is basically a wrapper around QuickTime’s conversion features, and QuickTime is not 64-bit and never will be. At some point Apple will probably rewrite Compressor around their new AV Foundation framework, but I guess they figured developing that framework and getting FCP X running on top of it was enough work for one release cycle.

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