[Rick Dupea]

I’m pretty sure the mistrust is deserved. I hope they can change course and recover, because I love FCP7, and wish X had feature parity. That would be worth it all.

[Rick Dupea]

[Oliver Peters] “You seem to be asking for a Ferrari of an edit system. That was never the kind of product Apple has ever in its history produced.”

Well, I never expected them to create a Flame system, even after they bought Shake. However, my big beef is that they released as a major upgrade a software which was incompatible with its previous namesake, and had a reduced feature set. If they had taken out Pro from the name, or called it iMovie Pro and continued FCP as its own line, I’d feel different(ly).

I’ve edited on ‘Ferrari’ systems for 25 years. FCP was a better editing experience than most of them (other than render time). They were better than Ferrari for daily driving! And their hardware has always been the Ferrari of computers. Their whole product niche has been built on build quality and user experience.

The big problem with FCPX is that they unnecessarily killed a lot of the pro feature set, while simultaneously rushing to release the software to prevent Premiere and Avid from moving into their pro business. That made no sense, because a pro software missing major pro features drives away pro customers, as has been sen by the mass rejection of FCPX by professional editors like me. (Some like a few features, no one has said it is a business-level replacement for FCP7 yet.)

All I expected of Apple was to make Final Cut PRO X better than FCP7. Better for Pros. They really haven’t done that yet. If they had, we wouldn’t still be having these discussions on the forums.

[Rick Dupea]

I didn’t miss it, I just disagree with it as a strategy. The fame of FCP made Macs cool to Hollywood and thus the world (remember saving the world in Independence Day with a tuxedo powerbook?) A flagship software product sells your most powerful systems, powering R&D for lesser items, and gives you cultural cache.

Apple may be losing the pro business in favor of iphones and imovies. If that is the case, someone will eventually make a better editor. It’s just a shame, because they could have been so good. Like I said: selling sugar water to kids. Coke makes lots of money doing that. I thought Steve had higher goals.

[Rick Dupea]

My feelings on this aren’t so much about what is and isn’t in FCPX yet. (I won’t buy it until it’s ready for pro work.) The greatest tragedy is what we missed and was left undone in all the effort to release a Less-Than-FCP7 product.

Here’s what I REALLY wanted, and how Apple should have spent all that R&D time:

1. 64 bit speed, 100% new code. (Well, they did get this one right.)

2. Backward compatibility. How can you even leave that out??

3. Integrated timeline with modes, so you could switch from a Final Cut view of your tracks to a Motion view of your tracks to a Soundtrack or Logic view of your tracks to a Color view of your tracks. One unified timeline, with modes to call up different tool sets to operate on the media. You have to admit, THAT would be an awesome upgrade to FCP. One Track To Rule Them All And In The Edit Bay Bind Them. THIS is the FCPX that should have been.

4. 3D (or 2.5D) timeline rendering environment with lighting and camera moves. Just take the functionality of After Effects’ 3D look (or Motion’s, more to the point) and let us switch on the 3D camera view when we want to finish compositing in 3D space. (I suppose this is generally what adding a Motion mode to the timeline would do.)

5. Real time playback and intermixing of RED and Canon DSLR footage with other codecs.

6. A real, advanced, scriptable titler.

7. Keep ALL the features of the existing FCP7 active: all the key commands, buttons, menu items, I/O, bins — everything about our existing workflows that we have developed over a decade for efficient work.

8. Make any new ‘prosumer’ toys (magnetic timeline crap, etc.) optional. Even ship it turned on, but give us a ‘Time to put on your big boy undies’ button to turn it off and restore our power tools. You can add an ‘Underoos’ button to turn on the noob mode that Apple seems to care so much for…

You have to admit – that is an application you would spend way more that $299 for, even for just an upgrade. And we missed it all, because Apple wants to dumb down FCPX for skateboarders and Youtubers. The tragedy is that they didn’t need to cripple th epro level features to draw them in.

I also find it hard to believe that Apple rushed the release of FPX to compete with Avid, when the lack of pro features in FCPX is the very thing creating the entire firestorm over switching away from FCP. If their goal was to compete in the big leagues, they would never have foisted off a half-baked collection of glitzy toys and diminished features as a purported upgrade. Steve wanted to do the software equivalent of ‘selling sugar water to kids’: sell millions of fizzy little apps.

I hereby announce my candidacy for head of user interface design for FCPX v2. Please forward this post and my contact info to Apple. Step 1, fire the lead designer of FCPX. And I intend to use REAL FIRE.

Rick Dupea
Cre8tv Media Group
Full time broadcast and corporate editor since 1985.