[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “That we are left scrabbling in the dark trying to figure out if it is still a professional product is a disgrace.”

There was nothing wrong with Apple previewing a few new features ahead of the undoubtedly planned release of more comprehensive information. The freelance fear-mongering (which has been going on for a couple of years now, I should note) is a disgrace, but it’s not Apple’s disgrace.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Sohrab Sandhu] “After Larry Jordan had already told us that he had seen the new version and it was a ‘Jaw Dropper’, do you think ‘sneak peek’ was a good idea? More so in light of last minute takeover of the supermeet kicking everyone else out.”

Yes. I’d rather have more information than less. Even the “more questions than answers” thing sort of illustrates the point — before the sneak peek, nobody even knew what questions to ask about the next version of Final Cut. And it’s not like the skeptics weren’t already out in force.

The whole “Apple is mean for kicking everyone out” thing seems silly. It was a meeting of a Final Cut Pro user group. The biggest Final Cut Pro news in a decade takes precedence over other announcements. And the organizers could have always refused, if they hadn’t agreed with that.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Tom Wolsky] “Anybody notice there was no Tools menu in the interface? I think there are going to be a lot of things missing in this first version of the application. Maybe it just wasn’t in the early version. The demoed version was reportedly the same version shown in February.”

Mac user interface has gotten a fair bit less menu-centric in the days since the original Final Cut Pro interface was designed, so I wouldn’t read too much into sparse menu bar items.

And the Tools menu in particular is an odd grab bag of three different largely unrelated sorts of commands. I can trivially think of more sensible places for almost every function in there. The commands that display things like the video scopes and the audio mixer should be in the Window menu with the commands that show/hide the viewer, timeline, etc. Keyboard layout and so forth should be in Preferences. And all the clip analysis/conversion items would be much more at home in a ‘Clip’ menu, which FCP 7 hasn’t got, but:

FCP X does.

Apple got rid of another such ‘miscellaneous’ menu in the transition from OS 9 to OS X: the Special menu. It didn’t mean OS X provided no way to shut down your Mac or eject a disk 😉

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “Re-writing the codebase is one thing, coming up with an entirely new NLE is another. “

The product is the codebase.

I mean, I suppose they could have set out to deliberately replicate the existing application, feature for feature and UI element for UI element, with entirely new code. But they’d have been passing up a really, really big opportunity, I think. UI has come a long way since the original FCP as well.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “Being an old discreet *edit’or myself, you raise the point that hasn’t been made clear before. What we are seeing is an EOL for FCP. The fact that the same company is coming out with a new product, FCPX, that might or might not be an acceptable replacement for a given shop is not the point – the EOL for FCP is. And I fear it will be just as painful and costly as moving from any other dead NLE. For myself, after dismissing as “silly” all the rumors of Apple wanting to sell FCP, I’m now wishing they had.”

I think it has been pretty widely understood for some years now that the old Final Cut Pro codebase was going to have to go. Adobe did the same with Premiere a few years back (moving to Premiere Pro).

There seem to be a bunch of people (not necessarily you) who last year were using the fact that Apple hand’t yet rewritten FCP as a 64-bit Cocoa app to argue Apple want neglecting the product, and who, now that Apple has done precisely that, are spooked about it.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

10GbE is starting to get cheap. I mean, not cheap by consumer standards, but crazy cheap compared with the SAN gear marketed to pro video customers.

It probably won’t be too much longer before you can set up a 10GbE network between a bunch of Mac Pros (maybe even MacBook Pros if someone releases a 10GbE Thunderbolt adaptor or you put a 10GbE card in a Thunderbolt-based external PCIe expansion box) for less than $1200/port (to cover both both NIC and switch), and sling even DPX around your LAN with nothing but standard built-in file sharing.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Alexander Higgins] “So how about this, I will eat that Cow Poop if Final Cut Studio is still alive come June.”

They’re absolutely going to break up the bundle. We know this because Apple doesn’t do bundles in the App Store. Twice before, with iWork and iLife, they’ve broken up bundles and simply sold the individual apps when moving to App Store distribution. Plus, of course, they’ve already announced a price for a stand-alone Final Cut Pro.

Because the bundle is being broken up, there’s no reason to expect the various apps to have synchronized release cycles anymore. And because there’s no reason to expect the apps to have synchronized release cycles anymore, the fact that they announced the next version of Final Cut Pro without announcing the next versions of other former Final Cut Studio apps implies nothing about Apple’s plans for those apps.

Mind you, one could make an argument that it might make sense from Apple’s perspective for other apps to go away:

• DVD Studio Pro because Apple doesn’t see much future for discs.
• Soundtrack Pro because it might be a better idea to integrate its unique features into Logic or Final Cut Pro itself.
• Color if FCP as of X has better built-in color correction tools than it used to (which it looks like it might). For more serious work there are great third-party offerings on the platform now in the form of Resolve and the coming Baselight plugin.
• Compressor because FCP X probably supports background exporting, which if implemented properly could make Compressor redundant in most use cases.

Of those, if Apple did things right, I think the only app that would be missed much would be DVD Studio Pro. Even even then… the current version is a perfectly serviceable app for SD DVD creation. We’d really only be losing out on a Blu-ray authoring tool. Now, I don’t like Encore much (it’s buggy as hell), so it would be nice if Apple released a solid Blu-ray authoring tool, but it’s hardly the end of the world if they don’t.

Motion, I think, pretty much has to hang around, as far as I can see, unless FCP X has a whole built-in motion graphics toolset Apple hasn’t mentioned yet.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “if, if it is default behaviour for the timeline, should it be?”

I would say yes. It’s generally a good idea when designing an interface to have your software work in the most user-friendly, least destructive way by default, and then, if necessary, give the user the option to activate less intuitive or more dangerous functionality.

With respect to the general usefulness of this feature, I wonder if it might not enable new editing styles. As far as I can can see you’ve mostly been discussing it with respect to just swapping clips around in an already largely edited sequence. But what if you just pick out the media you want to use in a very rough way, dump it all on the timeline only roughly organized (perhaps just by scene), and do your editing on the timeline? The non-destructiveness of the Magnetic Timeline seems like it would make this much more convenient.

Not an approach for every editor, and certainly not on every project, but it might have some value.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[walter biscardi] “The “real world” is anyone who is currently using Final Cut Pro to earn a living. What they are able to accomplish today is exactly what they should be able to accomplish with the new software with much greater efficiency.”

Yes. But I suspect Apple wasn’t interested in making sure they could accomplish it in exactly the same way. People need to quit interpreting every implementation difference as evidence of reduced capability.

[walter biscardi] “Does the shiny replacement allow the user to assign tracks?”

The answer is that we don’t know how this works, but it’s not especially reasonable to believe that Apple has neglected basic, essential features, as you have repeatedly speculated they may have. What you’re doing with respect to FCP X is virtually the definition of FUD.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[walter biscardi] “So in my case, I’m looking for all the current features in FCP 7, but with the efficiency of being able to work with more codecs natively which is what I expected from a new FCP 8.”

“All the current features” is the wrong mindset, and not at all how Apple thinks in general. “Better overall for the things people are doing in the real world” is the right mindset, and almost certainly what Apple is aiming for.

[walter biscardi] “So no, we don’t have to upgrade, nor do we have to celebrate Apple taking a product for which many of us earn our living and instead of giving us a solid, robust platform, building on 10 years of development and telling us to “remember when FCP 1.0 came out, this is sort of like that again.” Actually it’s not like that at all. More on that shortly.”

A year ago the fact that Final Cut Pro was an aging, 32-bit Carbon app was evidence that Apple didn’t care about pro users. Today, somehow, that aging 32-bit Carbon app is a “solid, robust platform”, and its shiny new 64-bit, OpenCL and GCD-enabled, 4K-supporting, float-processing, Cocoa-based replacement is taken as evidence that Apple doesn’t care about pro users.

Go figure.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.