[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “Windows going from 6.1 to 7 was an actual upgrade to a product. The higher version number actually represented something. “

You’re misunderstanding. The product Microsoft markets under the name “Windows 7” is Windows 6.1. “Windows 7” is just the marketing name.

[Herb Sevush] “As for OS9 – “versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.5 include a compatibility layer called Classic, enabling users to run applications and hardware requiring Mac OS 9 from within Mac OS X.” Jeez, that sounds like an upgrade to me, all this programming to make sure previous legacy software can still work in a new environment. I wonder what company could have thought of that?”

Apple just stuck the old OS in a virtual machine. The rough equivalent with FCP 7 and FCP X is that you can have both installed on the same system.

[Herb Sevush] “Can’t you even admit this – it doesn’t weaken your argument for FCPX’s future to at least acknowledge that the marketing behind this was totally out of line.
“

What are we talking about here? Some web site copy? Apple hasn’t done a done of marketing around this product.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Roth Weiss] “Yet another non-sequitur – who said you’re hiding anything. What you are doing is cherry-picking those words from the article that suit you and discarding others that don’t.”

What am I discarding? Are there other words in the same articles that say Apple won’t add these features? Are there other articles from people who claim to have had direct contact with FCP product managers, that say Apple told them something different?

[David Roth Weiss] “If you don’t even desire the appearance of integrity, that’s sad. “

Just to remind everyone of the context here: apparently I “don’t even desire the appearance of integrity” because I introduced information about what Apple is telling various media outlets into a debate where a bunch of people are spinning theories about Apple’s intent and motivations in an almost complete information vacuum.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “Finally you got it. They made a “choice.” Thank you. We are finally on the same page. I’ve never argued that they made a good or bad choice, I’ve only argued that they made a choice, and that choice tells you a lot about their values. We can infer what we want about what their highest values are, but we know that protecting the investment of long term FCP users wasn’t one of them”

What it tells you is that Apple is willing to sacrifice backwards compatibility in favor of innovation, which is not news. It’s Apple being Apple.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’m trying to get a sense of this in general – do you like the gapless timeline behaviour? Or do you sort of just not mind it? I can be a bit of a slob, I’ll often keep whole versions of my edit lying around down the timeline and then scavenge them as I go, having every clip glued to the clip next to it is sort of giving me the heebee jeebies.. I know there are slugs you can squeeze in-between the clips, but in my mind that’s not really the same thing?”

In FCP 7 gaps behaved… sort of like clips, but not in all respects, and this wasn’t obvious because they looked nothing like clips. Basically, the new behavior is just cleaning up this UI inconsistency. Gaps now behave almost exactly like clips, and look like selectable objects.

I’m also a fan of the fact that you can now add named placeholder clips (and even customize the placeholder image with all sorts of customizable parameters.

This beats the hell out of using gaps labeled with markers as placeholders in FCP 7.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Hmm, I dunno Chris, it’s not about what FCPX might become, it’s what apple have done to FCS3.”

I’m severely skeptical about this notion of vendor mistrust translating into long-term losses. It’s very easy to make this kind of point hypothetically, with respect to future decisions. If FCP X is the best option in a year or two, it will be a lot harder to actually reject it because of what Apple did last week to FCS3.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Cherniack] “Just curious…what doesn’t play back just fine so far?”

I couldn’t give you a list off the top of my head, and the machine I’m using now is a 2007 MacBook Pro that runs FCP X… barely. (It has half as much VRAM as Apple’s specs call for.) My impressions were based on using it on a 2008 8-core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro with a GT120; it was pretty decent. If I end up heading into the office tomorrow I’ll switch the monitors over to the GTX285 in that machine (normally just used for CUDA in Resolve) and try that. The 285 has 7.5x as many CUDA cores, so I’m imagining that’s going to be kind of crazy.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “You keep on explaining FCPX’s limitations by saying it’s an “initial release” or it’s a “1.0 release.”

But it’s not. It’s a version TEN release and I know it’s so because Apple says so on all their packaging. Final Cut Pro Ten ( X = 10 in Roman numbers, in case you didn’t get that.) And for a version TEN release, this product has some problems.

Of course if it truly were an initial release, then Apple is marketing their product fraudulently, wouldn’t you say.”

Come on, don’t play dumb here. It’s the first version of a newly written app. This is not really disputable. Companies mess with version numbers all the time. UNIX folks may remember how Solaris 2.7 became Solaris 7. The product sold as “Windows 7” has an internal version number of 6.1. OS X is not actually the same operating system as OS 9. It’s not ‘fraud’ because version numbers are not required to have any particular meaning.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “I didn’t say it would be easy and I didn’t say it would be fast. What I didn’t say is that if a project manager at Apple had said that one of the “have to’s” for the new software was that it read old legacy projects, then it would have been part of the software. Period. To say other wise is to ignore the entire history of programming. “

That’s probably true of that particular feature, but I think making that happen would have required Apple to make sacrifices with respect to implementing the new timeline they way they wanted to. There was a judgement call to make, they made it, and it’s not as obvious as you seem to think it is that they made the wrong long-term choice.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] ” they’ll none of them forget what apple did here – they’ll lable apple as a batshit unreliable software vendor for all time”

Having seen a lot of these blow-ups over the years, I really doubt it. If FCP X is the best choice in 12 months, very few people are actually going to say “But we can’t buy that, because it had a really rocky introduction last year”.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Roth Weiss] “That’s your misinterpretation complete mischaracterization of my point of view. I never said anyone was lying about anything. “

You have rejected my use of the word “lying”, but as far as I can tell this is born of the common journalistic refusal to ever use that word. What you’ve said, as far as I can tell, is that the information FCP product managers are conveying to folks like Pogue about Apple’s intent may not represent Apple’s actual intent. That would have to involve something, somewhere, that I would call “lying”, either on the part of product managers, or on the part of whoever within Apple is giving product managers their information.

[David Roth Weiss] “All I ask is that, if you’re going to debate others here, or anywhere for that matter, by repeating a professional reporter’s story who quotes anonymous sources, you need to say just that.”

I have linked to the relevant articles multiple times. I am not making any attempt to hide any information about my sources.

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