On a wider company philosophy type level, is this the boldest pros-be-damned move Apple's ever made? They've introduced consumer-centric products and stuff, but this is the first time I can think of where they dramatically changed a flagship product at the expense of their high-end customer.

They've drawn a line and said, "Fuck y'all it's like this now". I'm interested in what this means for the pro market. This opens a void in the professional space that will likely be filled primarily by Avid, but I think this is a huge chance for other players to roll in too.

Premiere Pro CS5 is great, 64-bit, does some Kona GPU acceleration with certain cards, and plays real nice with the rest of Adobe's products. I haven't spent a lot of time with Avids, but from what I do know, Premiere Pro is a much shorter cognitive leap away from FCP7. If Adobe added a server-side, Unity style server offering, there's a chance they could become a contender. Until they do, it'll probably just be that 1% that does everything on their own or happened to get it when they picked up Creative Suite (me included).

Autodesk could also step up and make Smoke competitive, maybe as a different product that could do offline editing, the same way Flare can support a Flame. Shrug.

There's also Lightworks, that weird-ass open source thing that I don't know anything about. Apparently it's good enough to cut a feature on. The Kings Speech was cut with it.

Jeffery, the stuff you wrote to that tumblr is really great, anyone with a passing interest in the topic really needs to check it out. You buried the link so I'll post it again here in exclamation:

http://jefferyharrell.tumblr.com/ !!!
Also! High five on the Daring Fireball pickup.

Last edited by paulou (2011-06-26 01:29:11)

There was also quite a bit of it when they discontinued Express34 slots on the MacBook Pros other than the 17". The abandonment of pro users has been happening for a while, it's just that FCPx is the final, definite confirmation.

Because that's one of the shittiest things a company could do, customer relations-wise. "Dear most loyal, long-time users, who kept us solvent through the lean times, and defended our brand fervently when Macs were essentially a joke to everyone but creative professionals: we have iPads now. Please continue buying our expensive hardware to run someone else's solution, but we're not going to concern ourselves with you any more. Fuck you very much."

Maybe it makes economic sense (though I don't imagine it would hurt their bottom line to serve both markets equally well, rather than backsliding on one in favor of the other). But it's hardly surprising that the reaction has been "Fuck us? Fuck you, man."

I mean, me personally, if I'm not using FCP, I'm really not sure I have a reason to stick with Apple when I buy my next workstation.

I'm writing all this stuff down. We're going to check back in two years and see if any of this doomsday stuff happened.

Workstations are used for more than just editing, Mac Pros won't be going anywhere *pats Maya*.

yeah, i got a little carried away there.

I need to watch out for that...  you are correct though, the pro line of products will be around for quite a while.  I'm just wondering if the market share for the pro line, specifically mac pros, is shrinking. 

I also hope we don't see Apple doing away with optical disc drives as the rumors say.

Last edited by switch (2011-06-27 15:59:15)

Hee hee hee.

http://vimeo.com/25645130

Hey! Jeffrey Harrell got a plug on Slashfilm!

Dude. You think your day was weird? I woke up yesterday to find a hundred unread emails and ten new ones a minute, and before the day was over I had a conference call scheduled with Adobe's project managers to talk about why Premiere annoyed me.

Yesterday was just fucking bizarre on every level.

Actually no, since you mention it. Let's go through it point by point.

The "trackless timeline" excuse is weak sauce. Setting aside whether FCP X should ever have had a trackless timeline in the first place — it shouldn't — the program still needed a way to import FCP 7 timelines on day one. It doesn't matter if it's imperfect; imperfect we can live with happily. The fact that there isn't even a fifty-percent solution is just insulting. It says Apple doesn't think old project files are important, which says they don't get commercial post.

The "you can import video directly just like before" thing is downright misleading. You can't, because there's no SDI input. You can import some things in a similar way to what you did in FCP 7, but not all, and not just-like-before.

"Final Cut Pro X does support FireWire import for DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD, and HDV." No, it doesn't, unless you mean crash-recording. There's no way to batch input. Which drops their "Yes, we do tape workflows in a limited way" thing down to "No, we really don't do tape workflows at all, lol."

"Does Final Cut Pro X support multicam editing?" No. It doesn't. "But it will," they say. Don't care. If it doesn't, it doesn't, which means you need a tool that does.

"Does Final Cut Pro X support external monitors?" Apple says yes, but that's a flat-out lie, frankly. It doesn't. Yes, Apple interpreted the question as, "Can you have multiple computer monitors hooked up?" and "Can you show an 8-bit RGB preview on a $20,000 10-bit NTSC broadcast monitor?" and said yes to both, but that's not what the question means. It means can you pipe real-time full-resolution full-depth full-quality program feed out an SDI spigot, and the answer to that is a shameless "no."

"Final Cut Pro X automatically saves your project during the editing process, so you never lose your work." Except when it doesn't, and you do, as a great many people trying out the software have discovered. Lol jk.

"Are keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut Pro X different from those in Final Cut Pro 7?" I don't even know why that's a FAQ. Nobody cares.

"You’ll be able to use [third-party plugins] as soon as they are updated." And they'll be updated as soon as Apple ships an SDK, which they didn't do before the software was released and still haven't done now. Stu Maschwitz said it best: "None of our new stuff works with FCP X … because after all, neither do you."

"Can I specify a scratch disk location?" Admittedly, a lot of early testers got this wrong. In their defense, Apple has gone out of their way to obscure how media and cached renders are stored on disk.

"Can I share projects with other editors?" Apple says yes, but the answer is really no … unless they happen to be using FCP X. There's absolutely no way to collaborate with other NLEs or finishing systems.

"Can I store media in locations other than my system drive?" Same as above: A lot of people got this wrong because the software seems deliberately designed to make it unclear.

"Can I hide Events that I am not working on?" Now this one just pisses me the fuck off. Apple says, "You can hide Events in Final Cut Pro X by moving them out of the Final Cut Events folder." Well whoopty shit. Here's this awesome media management infrastructure we've been working on for two years! All you need to do to take advantage of it is drop into the Finder and move shit around every hour or two, which means extra work for you and an increased chance of screwing something up! Yay!

"We will release a set of APIs in the next few weeks so that third-party developers can access the next-generation XML in Final Cut Pro X." No excuse — no excuse — for not shipping that months before FCP X was released to the public.

"Does Final Cut Pro X support OMF, AAF, and EDLs?" Yes, but it'll cost you nearly twice as much as your NLE did, because we just don't give a shit.

"Can I send my project to a sound editing application such as Pro Tools?" Yes. Except really no, because we just don't give a shit. See above.

"An update this summer will allow you to use metadata tags to categorize your audio clips by type and export them directly from Final Cut Pro X." Great! That's completely unrelated to what people actually need to be able to do! Metadata is an unacceptable solution, Apple, when the same bit of audio can show up on the dialogue track here, and later on the ambience track.

"Can I customize my export settings?" Nobody. Gives. A shit. The only thing anybody ever "exports" from FCP is a timeline-format master Quicktime that goes somewhere else for encoding. Every second you spent on this shit, Apple, is a second you didn't spend making the program useful for commercial post.

And finally: "Can I purchase a volume license?" Yes, if you are a crazy person. Or you can just install that copy of Adobe Premiere you already got when you bought the bundle because it was cheaper than buying After Effects and Photoshop separately.

This FAQ is nothing short of insulting. It's just a giant fuck-you to the post industry, brushing off legitimate and catastrophic design flaws in the app with PR-speak spin-language.

Pissed me off, is what it did.

If I may make a distinction without disagreement --

In purely semantical terms, professional just means that whatever you're doing is your primary source of income. There are professional wedding editors, professional corporate editors, and even professional YouTubers (I'm not one of them, for the record). And there are individual freelance editors who make their livings cutting shoestring indie projects out of their bedrooms.

However, when speaking of the professional editing market, that specifically means the environment you're talking about, the one with hard deadlines and serious budgets. The freelancer, however talented or successful, can afford to dick around with uncooperative software, because it's not really critical whether the client gets their DVD tomorrow or the next day. They can wait a couple weeks or a couple months for the functionality that they can fake with workarounds for now. The broadcast professional has got three hours until that shit has to go on the air, and anyone or anything that they so much as suspect is going to stand in the way is going to get served walking papers.

FCPx may be suitable for certain niches of "professional" editing. Broadcast and major studio features that have release dates before they have scripts are not two of them.

To be fair, that article is written to strawmen making arguments I've heard no one make, and was obviously written before Apple's FAQ was posted.

Last edited by Gregory Harbin (2011-06-29 21:38:51)