[Chris Kenny]

This is all very familiar to anyone who remembers the OS 9 -> OS X transition.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Messineo] “”FCP7 projects do not have enough information in them to properly translate to FCPX (in FCP7 all of the clip connections live in the editor’s head, not in the timeline). We never expected anyone to switch editing software in the middle of a project, so project migration was not a priority.”

This is a valid point. I think Apple could import FCP 7 projects by converting each track to a storyline, but the resulting FCP X sequences wouldn’t be organized at all the way a competent FCP X editor would organize a sequence. Conceptually, it would be like running your project through Google Translate. You’d get something related out the other end, but not anything a native speaker would ever say….

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[Chris Kenny]

[Sohrab Sandhu] “I don’t know where you get this idea from. In fact major corporation do employ such PR strategies for damage control.”

But they rarely do so quickly, unless something has exploded and killed a bunch of people. Sometimes it takes a while even then. In most cases, it’s much more important to say the right thing than to respond immediately.

Look, I’m not sure why people are being to argumentative with respect to this issue. My only point was that if Apple does respond (which they probably won’t), it’s too early to expect that response yet. The lag time last year with the iPhone 4 antenna issue (which was far more critical to Apple’s bottom line) is essentially conclusive evidence on this point.

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[Chris Kenny]

[J Hussar] “Also, and I forget who mentioned it, but the new quicktime came with many promises, and I still have to use quicktime 7 to generate useful files. No one bitched and nothing got fixed. Silence never works.”

That’s not really a good illustration of your point. The QuickTime X player app has such a limited feature set because Apple didn’t have a fully-featured post-QuickTime media architecture to leverage for it. But Apple has been working on such a thing — FCP X is actually the first significant app that uses it.

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[Chris Kenny]

[J Hussar] “Actually attacking Apple is absolutely the right course if we want to see any decent features anytime soon.”

That only makes sense if Apple is clueless enough to believe that FCP X in its current form is a perfectly viable replacement for FCS3.

I can’t bring myself to believe that for a second. I think it’s far more likely that Apple knows exactly what’s missing from FCP X, and is working on adding it… but saw no reason not to ship as soon as they had something useful to a decent number of users, even if it wasn’t useful to all users yet. This would be consistent with past Apple practice.

By the way, the reviews are back. I suspect they were pulled temporarily just for Apple to have a chance to go through them.

[J Hussar] “Also you mention the iphone antennae blow up – well if we took you advice it never would have been fixed”

It never was fixed. Even the Verizon model has a similar issue. The whole thing was just blown way out of proportion, and once Apple made its case with comparisons to other phones, and tossed people some free bumpers for a while, it fizzled out. It’s a classic illustration of the Internet’s ability to generate huge quantities of smoke around very little fire.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jamie Franklin] “You have me scratching my head here. FCS3 was a pretty soft “update””

Yes, but files weren’t backwards compatible. Which means that facilities that chose to stay on FCS2 — which quite a few did — had to be able to get copies of it despite it not being available direct from Apple anymore. If getting discontinued versions wasn’t a serious problem then, why would it be now?

[Jamie Franklin] “I just feel the pushback is warranted. The pushback to the pushback seems fairly shallow and assumes things none of us know on Apples behalf “

As I’ve noted, there’s evidence of at least some level of implementation of some of the missing features lurking in the FCP X binaries. Apple pretty much told Philip Hodgetts flat out that they’re working on the ‘ecosystem’ thing, which means XML or some other interface mechanism for third-party tools. And the idea that Apple is never going to support video I/O is kind of silly. I mean, what’d they bother with Thunderbolt for, if they’re not going to use it for things like this? My guess with video I/O is that it requires framework features that aren’t quite there yet (remember, FCP X isn’t written on top of QuickTime). I’d say there’s about a 60% chance they are there in Lion.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Corneles] “nicedissolve.com seems to be pretty red-centric, doesn’t the lack of native r3d support give you a little pause for defense?”

Hey, something of substance to discuss.

Well, we’ve done fairly extensive workflow testing, and come to the conclusion that native R3D support in an offline editing application is not all that useful, at least for us. Most of our Red projects are indie features. We handle dailies and online editing/color, but things typically get edited on a system belonging to the editor or the production — usually without a RedRocket, which means performance sucks with native R3D. Plus, the files are much larger than necessary for an offline edit, and even bigger with Epic.

It makes editors’ lives much easier if we just process everything through our Rocket and hand them ProRes or DNxHD transcodes for the offline.

Mind you, we do need OMF export, a few more audio output options, XML (or some replacement), and video I/O to seriously adopt FCP X. But native R3D support? Meh. Not unless FCP X also gains color grading capabilities to rival DaVinci Resolve’s. Then we’d be interested in having full access to raw data there, because we could online in it. (I would consider this rather unlikely, obviously.)

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jamie Franklin] “Like I have said before, your defense is admirable, there *may* be something to this program some day for the 54% market share, but please stop. They yanked off the shelf where their users were 2 days ago on top of this very limited release. “

FCP X isn’t missing that many features (i.e. I think it will be viable for most people sooner than “some day”), and while I agree Apple should have left FCS3 on sale, the way people are acting you’d think Apple had yanked it off their hard drives.

In point of fact, it’s not all that uncommon for more conservative customers like facilities to hold off for 12 or 18 months even on incremental upgrades… and Apple has always, as far as I know, pulled old versions when new ones went on sale. So if those customers managed to remain FCS2 shops for 18 months after FCS3 was the only thing on Apple’s shelves, I don’t see why they won’t be able to do the same with FCS3 and FCP X.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Chris .. I mean ok .. A: how do you really know that?”

For one thing, we saw it in action with Apple last year with the iPhone 4 antenna blowup.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “are you apple’s designated spokesman for this board? Because, well if you were, and no offense, but if you were, you could not work much any harder bud.”

I’m just someone who’s seen enough of these Apple-related Internet firestorms (see above for one example of many) to be really annoyed that some other folks apparently haven’t managed to develop any kind of sense of perspective with respect to this sort of thing. The apocalyptic rhetoric won’t amont to much. It never does.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Scott Sheriff] “Since you’re this hours designated apple apologist, maybe you could explain what those that want or need FCS3 are supposed to do?”

I do think Apple probably should have continued selling FCS3 for a year or whatever to help ease the transition. But realistically, it’s probably not going to be very hard for anyone who wants a copy to get one. As I pointed out in a previous post, for instance, FCP X actually is suitable for a respectable fraction of Apple’s user base even now, and because it’s not sold as an ‘upgrade’, users who migrate to it are free to sell off their copies of FCS3.

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