[Chris Kenny]

[Clayton Burkhart] “If this was actually true then of course you would have no need for expensive i/o cards. You could simply hook up your expensive grading screen by way of thunderbolt and off you go with Colorsync.

In which case Apple would be entirely justified in not having to provide that i/o connectivity which everyone is complaining is missing.”

There are two issues with that currently. First, OS X doesn’t provide 10-bit output from GPUs. Secondly, many GPUs can’t natively sync at some of the refresh rates required for video.

But there are potential solutions to for both of these problems visible in the future. The requirement to use special hardware just to perform video monitoring is something that could very well go away in the next five years. FCP X’s ColorSync support could probably eliminate it for a significant fraction of users today. Mind you, I haven’t done tests yet, but theoretically a video I/O interface and an external broadcast monitor should no longer be necessary just to get generally accurate color in FCP X, assuming you have a good quality computer display that has been profiled for ColorSync.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Eugene Lehnert] “Why didn’t they just call it Final Cut Pro Express?”

Because that would imply a separate product with high-end features, but assuming my interpretation is correct, the missing high-end workflow features will simply be added to this product over time.

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[Chris Kenny]

I think Apple shipped when they had a product that would be useful to a decent number of number of users, but one shouldn’t read into this a lack of interest on Apple’s part in making the product useful to more users in the future.

It’s really that simple.

And yes, Apple cares if high-end users jump ship. They bragged about post house and broadcast market share as part of the FCP X announcement.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Clayton Burkhart] “No, what makes no sense is Colorsync for video output, because Colorsync is an RGB system which an I/O system bypasses.

So if you expect to actually USE Colorsync for video, that by it’s very nature precludes YUV.

This does not mean of course that you cannot HAVE video output at the same time, it only means that Colorsync in reality will have little or no relation to your true YUV video image.

The reason that I have pointed this out is to show that Apple has almost exclusively concerned itself with the individual who creates WEB content which is RGB, not the video professional who creates for television, film, etc.
“

Anything that can be represented in YUV can be represented in RGB. There’s no quality penalty for conversion if you do so in a sufficiently precise color space… and FCP X’s engine uses high-precision floating-point processing. You know what other app processes everything in a linear floating-point RGB color space? DaVinci Resolve. Would you like to argue that’s also not capable of accurate color output? Because my experience screening stuff I’ve graded with it in DI theaters says otherwise.

YUV, in the modern world, is best thought of as an internal implementation detail of some deliverable formats. With the precision of floating point, there’s no reason it needs to have anything in particular to do with how processing actually occurs.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Ron Pestes] “Some of you have been saying “just wait a couple years for this to mature as a product”. Well, stop and think for a second where Adobe and Avid will be in two years. Way ahead of where they are now which is a lot farther along than Apple. That still puts FCP behind.”

What would you have had them do? Anyone with an understanding of the technical issues has spent the last three or four years yelling that Apple needed to rewrite FCP on top of more modern foundations. They did. Now a bunch of people seem to be complaining because they didn’t understand what the implications of such a rewrite would be.

Final Cut Pro now has the most modern architecture and user interface of any of the three major NLEs. They had to make some sacrifices to get there, but my guess is it will pay off in the long run.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “It is not enough to know I can still use my current FCP7 – I need to know for a certainty that I can add new licenses when my business needs them, and they will be updated to run on current hardware and operating systems until X is ready for my use.”

We’re arguing in circles here. Again, it hasn’t been uncommon in the past for certain customers to stick with old, discontinued versions for a couple of years. That’s no harder this time than it has been previously.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “The key point is that a degree of backward compatibility is necessary. FCPX is not just a product — it’s a de facto part of the FCP platform. This “clean break” disrupts the platform and the users that helped to build it.”

But given these fundamentally different approaches, in my opinion the way to provide backwards compatibility is to simply have people keep using FCP 7 with old projects. The way OS X allowed people to keep using OS 9 apps, but didn’t try to make them ‘native’.

[Walter Soyka] “You see apparently see that as a positive here, but I see that as a negative.”

I see it as something that has certain costs, but fundamentally enables Apple to do more interesting things, sooner.

[Walter Soyka] “Do you want to wait three years for FCPX to get back to where FCP7 was in some respects when it was EOLed?”

I don’t think most missing features will take that long.

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[Chris Kenny]

Nobody you got on the phone over at Apple knows anything about Apple’s future plans.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Clayton Burkhart] “Colorsync for FCPX precludes any notion of i/o or independent monitoring.

It is an RGB based application of the software and would not take into account that i/o solutions are meant to completely bypass the very same graphics card which implements that calibrated workflow.”

This makes no sense. There is no technical reason why using ColorSync for on-screen display precludes raw output through a video interface.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “Over and over you have stated that this is a new 1.0 release and should be judged that way. It is most emphatically NOT a “new version” but rather a new application using an old name. “

You’re misrepresenting my argument here. It wasn’t that this transition is precisely equivalent to previous version upgrades. It was merely that Apple has pulled old versions in the past and some users have managed to keep using those old versions for a year or two without issue, so there’s no reason to believe that won’t be possible this time around as well.

As I’ve said several times, I agree that Apple should have left FCS 3 on sale, I just don’t agree that the implications pulling it are quite as… apocalyptic as some are making them out to be.

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