Still no, mainly because the information I have on that event comes from somebody who was actually there, who says it was very different from what that rumor site alleges.
But first and foremost, FCP X dropped three weeks ago. That's an eternity. Everybody's already got their FCP-to-something-else transition plans well underway. For Apple to try to side-channel some incomplete and unhelpful info-drops that should have, at the very least, been printed on billboards on day one is just insulting. It smacks of "Oh, we've got it under control, and you never should've doubted us." Well no, you don't, Apple, and what's become blindingly obvious is that we should've doubted you long before this.
The thing about volume license sales? Yeah, no. What they said is that they are investigating the possibility of maybe allowing existing volume license holders to get additional keys on the licenses they've already bought. Which matters to virtually no one. As Mark Raudonis of Bunim-Murray said on Twitter last night, that doesn't mean a damn thing when you've got 125 individual licenses. The larger point, though, should not be lost: If you need an additional license for Final Cut Pro 7, tough. Apple will not sell you one. Period, end of discussion on that point.
The EDL thing seems to be an error. One person claimed to have heard it mentioned; I've not found anyone else who can confirm that.
The Xsan thing also appears to be erroneous. I think the person who reported that got confused by the fact that Lion is shipping in a few weeks with Xsan built into it, but FCP X ignores Xsan volumes even when running on Lion.
The XML thing is supposedly happening through third parties … but no third parties have announced any such thing. What Apple was saying there was apparently "We assume third parties will plug this gaping hole, probably. Whatever."
The broadcast monitoring thing appears to be a flat-out lie again. According to some people I've heard from at Aja, FCP X simply has no facility for third-party I/O boards. That function is not built in to the program. In order to get a preview, you have to reach into the graphics buffer and pull out a chunk of the program's main window, which is what Aja is doing right now with their recommended workaround. Rumor has it this is because FCP X does a lot of work in the graphics board itself … but in a profoundly stupid way. Rather than sending directives to the GPU and then reading rendered frames back into main memory for caching on disk (where they can be grabbed by third-party I/O drivers) it's just having the GPU pipe the output straight to the graphics monitor. This also goes to explain some of the rendering problems people have been reporting: Yes, FCP X is fast because it works this way, but you also never actually see any of your frames at any point while you work. Instead you just get a real-time preview which approximates what your final frames will look like. Which is, you know, kind of a problem if you're color-correcting!
The bottom line is still this: At best, Apple shipped an unfinished product. But that best-case scenario is becoming increasingly elusive, as more and more information comes out suggesting that FCP X is literally broken by design. Media management is a catastrophe, the trackless timeline means doing anything requires clumsy workarounds that oh by the way aren't actually figured out yet, and now we're hearing noise that FCP X can't even give you an accurate real-time preview because fidelity was sacrificed in the name of apparent speed.
So no, man. Not happy. Just increasingly indifferent. I've got Premiere here and it's meh whatever, Avid's on my to-do list and my copy of Smoke 2012 is in the mail. The world's moved on already.
