Jonathan Dortch
Forum Replies Created
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The text inspector or heavy use of any text feature crashes the app totally out on both a i5 Macbook Pro and our 8-core. Only stability issue I’ve had other than some lag with other programs open.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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[Chris Kenny] “Apple should have been able to support MMS in the first version of iOS, right? It’s a pretty simple feature. You can play this game all day.”
You’re comparing a professional software platform to a phone? This is the software I use to run my business. A healthy functioning platform is a critical necessity. Cell phones are totally optional. I’m sorry, but it is painfully clear that you do not run a business from FCP. I have no idea why you’re chipping in to these discussions with erroneous analogies blindly defending FCPX when you clearly have very little invested in the platform professionally. And doing so snidely without a modicum of professional empathy for those of us affected.
All of us who run a business based on this software are trying to communicate with one another and get our bearings, both on new software function (or lack thereof) and guessing at Apple’s market strategy. Because a guess is all any of us have at this point, yourself included. Few imagined Quark would ever be obsolete until major OSX missteps resulted in Adobe cannibalizing their entire market. History is riddled with such examples.
And wasn’t MMS disabled as an appeasement to the AT&T for their already nervous bandwidth concerns? That’s the rumor I heard anyway.
[Chris Kenny] “You’re saying Apple should have held the app off the market until more pro features were implemented just to signal loyalty to pros, essentially.”
I do expect loyalty from a professional platform because we use this software to run our businesses, and have invested in the platform for 10 years. And yes, releasing the software in its current state with no communication or road map has caused great disturbance in our market. The FAQ this morning is a start, though it smells of damage control.
[Chris Kenny] “Again, this is extremely reminiscent of early OS X criticism. OS X also got bashed for having a UI that was supposedly oversimplified.”
Yes OSX was bare in it’s first incarnation, but an OS will always become robust over time, it mandatory by function as the hub for interacting with the system and delegating processes.
There is no mandate for FCPX to return to the functionality of legacy FCP. It is at the discretion of the maker. Apple could be content with an entirely different type, and broader base, of user. Additionally, a point already well hammered, Apple also allowed OS9 support for years afterwards, and held our hand with Rosetta. FCS3 was pulled last Tuesday and our 600 former projects are obsolete in the new platform.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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[Jamal Watts] “I’ve been thinking about this since FCPX was released last week. Wouldn’t it have been nice if FCPX was modular so that the user can pick the features that they need for their particular workflow? That way the app can be as simple or complex as the user needs.”
I’ve been thinking about that, too. I’m totally not opposed to that structure, if indeed that’s the plan. I’d pay willingly for anything that can return functionality to the platform for those of us who need it. It would really require a flexible API to accommodate this type of structure.
It would also allow a pretty cool system to allow growth for all of the new people to NLE’s in general. Pay for what you need today at a crazy low price for a NLE, install the additional paid features when you’re ready.
If this was the plan all along though, Apple gains nothing by hiding their cards on it.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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[Chris Kenny] “They’ve essentially told us as much, just not (yet) first-hand. And if this is Apple’s strategy, it’s hard to find much fault with it.”
I just have to majorly disagree here as, both as a business owner and daily FCP editor. Fault is pretty much what this whole discussion is about.
I find great fault in the software not being capable after numerous years of development. I find great fault in Apple *not* telling us anything first hand, releasing a substantially lacking piece of software while yanking our entire platform from the market. I find great fault in the prosumer-first strategy when so many of us have based our businesses around the previous software that clearly catered to the high end user. Apple drove FCP hard to compete with AVID for the last ten years, and we listened.
I place great fault on Apple for the frenzied storm they’ve sent our user base into. I REALLY don’t like clients reading on CNN about our software and calling to ask what’s wrong and if their projects are OK.
Adobe managed to rewrite Premiere into 64-bit without losing a single feature. By adding a lot of awesome features.
Look for Avid to do the same thing with MC6. As a user I expect to gain features, not lose hundreds, even in a 64-bit re-write.
This 1.0 argument holds little weight for those of us who base our livelihood on the powerfulness of platform. This isn’t 1.0. We don’t want 1.0. It’s the 8th full generation of an editing platform and it feels like a slightly more robust iMovie. FCP7 is so outdated horsepower wise it’s getting hard to stay on board, especially if we are expected to use FCP7 for another year or two while X plays catchup to the mock of our industry.
The strategy of re-inventing the wheel, releasing sub-par software and playing major pro catchup doesn’t work when there’s a 10 year vestige, expected features, and 2 million customers who rely on the platform. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s arrogant and dangerous. It’s regressive. The improvements in FCPX aren’t mind blowing, they’re on par with the work Adobe has already done to Premiere in CS5. I just started using Premiere for the first time since about 1999 given this fiasco, and I’m even less impressed with FCPX now. I kind of feel silly for not checking it out sooner. Amazing Photoshop/After Effects integration and render free timelines without background transcoding. This is what we needed in the FCP platform.
If the strategy is to force us to wait in 32-bit FCP for an undetermined amount of time as Apple plays catchup to get back the platform back to functionality, I don’t have the time to wait. It’s not good business. Silence doesn’t work for me when business is at stake.
If you don’t see it, you don’t see it. But if you relied on FCP’s robust feature set for your daily work instead if Resolve, you might see things from a different perspective. If Resolve didn’t exist you’d be pretty much hosed with the death/MIA of Color — alternatives even a few years ago would have set you back 25K+. The industry will always shift and adapt. What would you do if Blackmagic pulled Resolve and replaced it with a far inferior product and met your questions with silence? It’s unnerving to have your platform be in an unknown state of flux.
I still think it’s entirely possible, Apple’s vague comments through Mr. Pogue notwithstanding, that even with some restored features like Multicam and third parties supplying plugins, we’re dealing with an entirely different direction with FCPX. Do you not get that impression from the software? From running FCPX side by side with iMovie? There’s just too much missing from legacy FCP. And no serial, price point too low, no volume license, no educational license. It bucks all trends of professional software.
No one hopes I’m wrong more than myself. Final Cut Pro is like family to me. Just seems like the writing is on the wall, despite a silent Apple.
Maybe I’ll see you around the neighborhood. Thought your site and work were nice.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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[Chris Kenny] “To be honest, some of the items on your list are things that aren’t really all that critical for pro-level software. As far as I know, Avid Media Composer, the supposed gold standard for “serious professional editing”, also doesn’t support arbitrary frame sizes”
Chris, these features were absolutely critical to my workflow with FCP, and to many others. If you don’t need them in yours, that’s cool. I’ve seen your many posts with very pointed and vocal support of FCPX, and if it works for you, that’s fantastic, but can you appreciate where any of the rest of us are coming from? I checked out your work to try and get a better idea of where you’re coming from. We’re relatively neighbors, our studio is off the Bedford L stop in Williamsburg.
As a colorist, how do you feel about FCPX color grading tools and auto-match color correction? What about the absence of Color? I would wager most of your work is done in Resolve these days? Are you an offline editor as well? If not, how can you vehemently defend the editing capabilities/lack thereof in FCPX for high-end or even similar legacy workflow?
Features definitely don’t need custom frame sizes 🙂 We do a lot of interactive work for web delivery, installations, video walls, etc where custom frame sizes are paramount. I find their absence especially odd given FCPX’s strong commitment to web delivery and the general death of tape-based broadcast.
If you envision you can accommodate all of your clients with FCPX software, that is a real game changer! To me the missing tools and feature sets are somber deal breakers, and diametrically opposed to the expansive feature set of FCP, and with Apple totally mum it’s a bit unnerving. I think that’s why we’re all posting in this forum in the first place.
To you, what is a “critical feature” beyond the ability to sequence and sync video and audio in a timeline and export?
I can’t speak to custom frame sizes in Media Composer… I haven’t used it in about 7 years. Maybe someone else can speak to this. I’ve never been a fan of the AVID ecosystem and have based my career the last 8 years upon FCP without ever looking back. Also to me, and to the dominant 52% of the market, Final Cut Pro had become the “gold standard” for serious professional editing.
Again, most of all, whether the bells and whistles work for you or they don’t, it seems impossible to defend that FCPX looks and feels, from design and included feature set alone, to be aimed at a different market. Until we hear definitively from Apple, all of the back and forth is just pissing in the wind.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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[Andrew Richards] ” I’m thinking back to Win2000 and XP…”
OK this might require Win98 or before, but I’ve dug through some old boxes and I think I’ve found your new platform! Don’t worry about the 4GB file size limit, it will be addressed via plugin 🙂 Check out the sweet “firewire” cord.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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[Andrew Richards] “Apple is in the business of selling hardware. Nothing new there. Revenue from Pro Apps is a rounding error for them.”
Ab-so-lutely. Also raises the question of a potentially neutered consumer-centric FCP in relation to the high end computer purchase. The marketing even shows FCP on a Macbook Pro. FCPX in no way seems directed towards the ~10K system by feature set alone.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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[Chris Kenny] “The UI “limitations” are mostly subjective. There is very little that can be done in FCP 7 that fundamentally cannot be done in FCP X as a consequence of UI changes.”
Well I can expand. By limitation baked into the interface I would note
– lack of custom window layout
– lack of custom frame size
– lack of custom frame rate
– lack of preference panel
– lack of overall clip duration when trimming in timeline
– lack of Countdown Generator
– no custom scratch directory
– inability to patch together a blade slice within a clip
– inability to establish track based output for audio export
– inability to set in/out points for timeline exportI could go on… nothing is subjective about missing ability. You can do all of these things on the FCP platform since v2.0. You cannot on FCPX by choice of design. Some of these features should have been easy to include in a X1.0 if intention was to match FCP in depth and ability. I’m sure we can add OMF/XML/EDL/tapping support via pluging, but fixing most of the “missing” features requires core level re-writes to the software.
[Chris Kenny] “The company that I think it’s safe to say after the iPhone and iPad, is better at matching products to markets than any other technology company in the world at the moment.”
No argument that this the iPhone/Pad/iOs are brilliant hardware/OS and world changing things. I own both and waited in line. This is a discussion about high-end software however, and Apple hasn’t designed a significant pro-software release in a long time. Most of the current/legacy products were either purchased and re-appropriated (Shake, Color), or neutered (Aperture). There’s Motion, a very odd piece of software, but it is hardly a viable After Effects competitor and hasn’t dented the motion graphics market. I am not a heavy Logic user so I cannot speak to that platform, though I believe FCS and Logic were the only two professional products left under Apple’s wing.
[Chris Kenny] “I don’t quite understand how you’ve managed to construct an elaborate argument that FCP X not being intended as a pro app makes no financial sense, but instead of causing you to switch to the position that FCP X is a pro app”
No intention of switching position, I merely tried to indicate both sides to the argument or hypotheses floating around. My position, uniformed like all of the rest of us, is that after using the software extensively, it feels like a consumer-centric program. Beautifully designed for a very different market on many levels, at a very different price point.
[Chris Kenny] .. And the only stupidity this explanation requires one to attribute attribute to the generally pretty well-run Apple is stupidity about communicating this approach to customers, which is fairly believable given Apple’s extreme culture of secrecy.”
Like the assumption that all “missing” pro features will be added, this is an assumption that Apple intends FCPX to match FCS3’s place in the market. I was just saying to my eyes, and by looking at what was included from a design decision, that’s not clear. And that the financial implications of that decision seem strange.
100% agreement on the secrecy. To me that’s the biggest tragedy of the week so far. What has Apple gained by staying silent on FCPX and it’s intention? Professional software needs service and support, not secrecy.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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Bravo to this post, Joe. Words of wisdom in uncertain times. I still hope our storm of complaints can return some functionality to the our platform of choice, but there is no gain to be found in fighting progress.
JONATHAN DORTCH
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[Mike Molenda] “Why did you make a $299 investment without doing your homework first? Even if the software was $99, that would warrant at least reading a couple of reviews on the web before handing over your credit card.”
I’ve been using FCP for over a decade. We buy the newest version to begin testing ASAP, and frankly I was really excited to see what a 64-bit FCP could do, despite the interface changes.
What I didn’t expect, what none of us could have fully expected was how castrated this software is. There were no reviews when I made the purchase, the reviews from us seasoned professionals who made the plunge over the last few days are what has started this storm. Have you purchased the software? Or have you been actively reading all of our feedback and concerns benefiting on our knowledge and reports but holding out on purchase? I hope it’s the latter.
Frankly, as a business purchase $299 for software is nothing, and the refund I requested wasn’t even about the money. It’s the principle. Apple is advertising and selling this software as Final Cut Pro, noting none of it’s changes or shortcomings compared to the previous product. In reality, FCPX has almost nothing in common with the legacy and capability of FCP, the platform upon which I’ve based my entire career and company around.
The full refund is well deserved, and even if the software keeps functioning, it’s little more than a beefed up iMovie Pro beta at this point. It’s not “Final Cut Pro.”
JONATHAN DORTCH
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