Steve Jobs response to the future of fcp

[Cüneyt Kaya]

I would like to take this moment to say that 50% of the people that post on this forum are idiots. . .

are you inside the 50%, if not, why?

 

[Michael Hastings]

AVID will have at least 3 revisions out before even an FCP announcement.

Adobe is patching and updating fairly regularly.

FCP better be damn good to catch up.

Not a platform specific statement just seems logical.

Even though I'm an fcs studio owner I haven't used it much. My understanding is it is a fairly mature product with something like a million licensees. Other than Red 4k support, what is fcs lacking compared to the others?

Lack of full red support only affects a couple thousand red owners - 2 tenths of a percent, true?

 

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Nice words!
But we need more than that.

I don't, I haven't even upgraded to the most recent version yet I'm still on final cut pro 6

 

[David Battistella]

My little hunch.

FCP/FCS lead the field in creating a SUITE of applications for working professionals with useful tools. The suite was a unique and original idea and it made A LOT of people (outside of the hollywood holdouts) move away from AVID and the very boxed in approach they take to editing.

FCS was open source in a sense, cheap and available and when built properly a professional solution.

Now, just as ABOBE and the gang are finally catching up to what APPLE could forsee a long time ago I am going to guess that APPLE will use their OS and their HARDWARE to create a super APP.

No more send to commands, but more like workspaces in the same APP.
THings we will see
-SAME media all the time
-switch to graphics mode to leverage MOTION and the GPU
-Switch to COLOR mode.
-Switch to SOUND mode

all within the same application and elegantly as well.

I think that you will see them set the bar much higher than it is now for non liniar editing.

I would not count APPLE out of this arena at all. The one thing they have is a fresh start and an innovative approach and designers who think from the user experience outward.

There is a new version of media professional and APPLE will build the app for that person.

Folks can be open and receptive to this or they can (and will) resist it with the excuse that it signals their own obsolescence.

Just look out. If they have made the full commitment I think we will all be amazed.

This will all be tied to HUGE hardware breakthroughs that leverage their technology and will leave things like CS5 behind.

my public 2 cents. Maybe I will eat these words, but I am not going to give up on the BIG APPLE.

David

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I predict:

OpenCL (Obviously. It's a must have feature almost already.)
Integration (Like David said).
Less Features. Because I imagine they're doing a full rewrite and rewrites always result in a period where they only have time to port the most critical features.

Any time you see a product disappear for a long time it's either in re-write hell or it's dead.

I don't agree with everything in this Blog but I think he has some good points:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I've seen a lot of good software descend in to the rewrite hell never to be seen again. By the time they get back to feature parity the market has moved off. Adobe seems to be doing a full rewrite as well--they're just doing it piece by piece.

I think everyone is heading towards the same goal: Edit, Basic Composite and Finish in a single timeline (aka Autodesk Smoke).

 

[David Battistella]

I predict:
I think everyone is heading towards the same goal: Edit, Basic Composite and Finish in a single timeline (aka Autodesk Smoke).

YES. and then think of what you have not thought of yet. Think about what is next. Think about what would advance editing and post production. That will also be there.

David

 

[Jeff Coatney]

My little hunch.

FCP/FCS lead the field in creating a SUITE of applications for working professionals with useful tools. The suite was a unique and original idea and it made A LOT of people (outside of the hollywood holdouts) move away from AVID and the very boxed in approach they take to editing.

FCS was open source in a sense, cheap and available and when built properly a professional solution.

Now, just as ABOBE and the gang are finally catching up to what APPLE could forsee a long time ago I am going to guess that APPLE will use their OS and their HARDWARE to create a super APP.

No more send to commands, but more like workspaces in the same APP.
THings we will see
-SAME media all the time
-switch to graphics mode to leverage MOTION and the GPU
-Switch to COLOR mode.
-Switch to SOUND mode

all within the same application and elegantly as well.

I think that you will see them set the bar much higher than it is now for non liniar editing.

I would not count APPLE out of this arena at all. The one thing they have is a fresh start and an innovative approach and designers who think from the user experience outward.

There is a new version of media professional and APPLE will build the app for that person.

Folks can be open and receptive to this or they can (and will) resist it with the excuse that it signals their own obsolescence.

Just look out. If they have made the full commitment I think we will all be amazed.

This will all be tied to HUGE hardware breakthroughs that leverage their technology and will leave things like CS5 behind.

my public 2 cents. Maybe I will eat these words, but I am not going to give up on the BIG APPLE.

David

Agree completely. FCP should launch within the Lion launch window and it will/should exceed expectations.

Nearly all the comments on this thread indicate an expectation of incremental change. After all, isn't that what we've come to expect from Avid and Adobe? The problem with this strategy is that as Moore's law creates hardware and processing potentialities for expanded capabilities, the software is sometimes hamstrung by either the unwillingness on the part of the User base to adapt to more efficient ways of doing things or by not rebuilding the native code from the ground up to avoid operating in an emulation environment( a huge job, I know).

So we get Versions of software or Updates which are just the old entrenched business model rearing its ugly head and extracting more cash from the user while holding back the hardware muscle that comes online every 18 months. Oh, and I'd like to install and learn my software for free and be charged based on how much I use it.

I expect FCP to break new ground in any number of areas, but primarily in User experience. I'd like to see it become a true creative canvas and not simply a means to create the type of content we are familiar with now.

The current NLE architecture and working paradigm are fine for Pros, but we are overdue for a new way of visualizing temporal and experiential content creation. We are locked in a linear model when we should be approaching the visualization in three dimensions representing four dimensions.

If we're to truly innovate the process of creation, we should first look at how we as authors interact with the blank canvas upon which we create. I'd like to see some movement in that direction.

 

[Dave Blackham]

Nothing would please me more if and when Apple release a new version of FCS. We tend to use FCP and compressor from FCS, Adobe from creative graphic work and Protools for Audio which I guess is what most others are doing. As a back up plan Adobe's edit tools are very interesting to us but no question we would stick with Apple OS or a unix based OS.

I think David and Jeff are right. What we are looking for is a framework in which to use plugins and creative tools which is where I think and hope future development might be going.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

YES. and then think of what you have not thought of yet. Think about what is next. Think about what would advance editing and post production. That will also be there.

David

I doubt it. Besides performance I think Adobe is already doing everything (except for slowly bringing integration) that could be done.

Speech to text etc...

The problem with Apple is I just don't think this is a nut they can crack for one reason: Apple doesn't do R&D. They have no innovation. They polish like it's nobody's business but they don't bring anything new to the table. Adobe, Microsoft, The Foundry, Autodesk--all invest billions in image research. Apple...?

If you want to imagine beyond performance what the future of editing and post production is they might innovate on UI (How much more innovation is there to be made though?) but they don't have the computer science backing to really revolutionize post production.

As much as I despise Adobe--they're the ones who are putting in the cash and time that's going to generate the tools we take for granted. It's a pitty they don't have Apple's UI sense or The Foundry's real-world usability.

 

[Bruce Allen]

Nothing would please me more if and when Apple release a new version of FCS. We tend to use FCP and compressor from FCS, Adobe from creative graphic work and Protools for Audio which I guess is what most others are doing. As a back up plan Adobe's edit tools are very interesting to us but no question we would stick with Apple OS or a unix based OS.

I think David and Jeff are right. What we are looking for is a framework in which to use plugins and creative tools which is where I think and hope future development might be going.

On that theme, this week...

1) Steve Jobs sent off a nifty email.
2) Avid announced Pro Tools v9 and it's ready for download already.

I like Avid's announcements better.

BTW, I'm really liking the direction Avid is going:
- opening up and suddenly supporting all 3rd-party interfaces, everyone now has good OMF/AAF support, etc (duh)
- they started a forum asking people to just created ideas and voted on what they wanted fixed in Pro Tools. #1 was Automatic Delay Compensation. Guess what got added?
- convergence between Media Composer & Pro Tools

By the time Final Cut Studio finally gets re-released, it'll be interesting to see how much ground has been lost.

I think a lot of people really never needed the more arcane features of Final Cut. They are moving to Premiere Pro in droves since it offers better performance and a better bundled package with more ESSENTIAL pieces of software (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects).

Final Cut Studio offers a lot of stuff which is "great for the price and almost good enough but not quite" - Soundtrack, Motion, DVD Studio (lacking Blu-Ray support etc) - but you're still going to need to get Photoshop at the very least, probably Illustrator - and for many people After Effects is a must since Motion just doesn't cut it. Color seemed almost cool... until you see Resolve doing things properly. Anyway, they go for the Adobe Suite... and heck, why not try out Premiere?

Avid has the same problem - most people sophisticated enough to be using Avid also will want Photoshop... and Illustrator and After Effects. At that point, Premiere is almost free.

To be clear, I think that if Apple can have the new Final Cut Studio announced by NAB they can stay in the game easily. They can win if their product has features that sound very cool or are very cool and somehow shakes off its bugs (or at least appears to have done so when people demo it). Their marketing and brand loyalty is second to none. They still have tremendous goodwill in the industry thanks to them being the only affordable choice, the standard bearer of the DV generation, back when Avid was way too expensive and Premiere lacked too many features and was too unstable.

Whatever Avid does, it still has half the post world hating it for its high prices and bad behavior back in the 90s. If they can keep up being awesome for the next 5 years without going bankrupt I think they can win back peoples' trust... hope so because their editor is still the best. Even if they did go under I'll probably stick with it for narrative cutting just because of its trimming performance.

Personally I think all 3 are here to stay and compete happily for the next 5 years at least. Let's see! And maybe The Foundry can mix things up - would be fun.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Sebastian Gross]

well put, bruce.

one could guess that apple simply waits for it's "opponents" to see what they come up with. then sit in a basement with their top developers and do a complete makeover that makes eyes water and proves ones more that steve is the guy who comes up with stuff we did not necessarily expect.

the most frequent request imho is to have a bit more than a tool.
what we need is a suite that is coded for real life demands and that is, simply put, a suite that can handle the whole workflow from ingest to deliverable -
may it be with tabs or modes.
abolish cmd+tab.

furthermore it should be sort of open source (*duck*), so if a certain percentage of users notice a bug or a lack of functionality...
or maybe an SDK to make this thing a real good choice.

especially with the mac-disciples at red who are changing the perception
of what we call film at this very day with the epic release.. you need very good tyres to put this unknown power on the road.

it's like the "social network" - we basically know what we want (winkelvoss brothers) but there's gotta be someone (mar...) who actually does it.

i can literally imagine what i'd love to be sitting in front of -
it's just not here yet.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

I'd like to have a chat with the genius who thought that play controls and play bar inside the frame of new Quicktime player are a smart idea.

Things like this and multitouch on a mouse (laggy mouse), which by definition needs to easily slide over the table surface to be functional, are one of many examples of Apple's innovative trips to nonsense land.


I don't have too much hope for a developer which is incompetent to write drivers while not allowing component manufacturers to write their own, even if that means reduced graphic performance and inconsistency on a platform which should be a professional tool for visual work...


...while offering mediocre GPU solutions to achieve greater profit margin...

...with most profit gathered from making phones.

 

[David Battistella]

We are locked in a linear model when we should be approaching the visualization in three dimensions representing four dimensions.

If we're to truly innovate the process of creation, we should first look at how we as authors interact with the blank canvas upon which we create. I'd like to see some movement in that direction.

This is the CRUX of it. We can not assume that working pros are the folks most likely to want change. They can tend to be more "set in their ways" and resistant to change. I've found that it is split. about half want radical innovation and about half want to preserve some sort of secret with an existing workflow.

I am in the "break the model and rebuild it correctly" group.

David

 

[jake blackstone]

The main reason, why people stay with FCP is Color. Now, imagine, if Adobe or Avid and not BM bought Resolve. How cool would it be? Adobe and Avid needs world class finishing software to be a true contender. Colorista or Avid DS doesn't cut it. Adobe or Avid should just buy FilmLight or Assimilate and now we're talking

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

We can not assume that working pros are the folks most likely to want change.

One would think that developer with 11 figures in the bank might be capable of making an adaptable platform for those wanting change and those with preference to known tools.

 

[Joel Kaye]

I sorta feel the only reason Apple even cares about pro apps at all right now is because they are warring with Adobe. I expect AVID and Adobe to continue to kick Apple's butt. They are actually in the business of ProApps and Apple is in the phone and pad business.

Nuke apparently is going to own compositing.

Apple does have 50 billion in cash on hand though. If they wanted to bring together a mind numbingly good set of apps and sell the whole thing for $500 they could.

 

[Sven Seynaeve]

imho apple has already lost GAME OVER

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

One would think that developer with 11 figures in the bank might be capable of making an adaptable platform for those wanting change and those with preference to known tools.

But why would Apple invest any portion of that on a low margin, low growth business like the pro apps industry?

Apple just isn't a good fit for the professional market. They're too secretive. They don't listen to people who use their software. They don't have a big R&D budget. Like you said they don't support the latest and greatest advancements in hardware.

I don't though agree with the idea that something has to be obtuse to be extremely fast and usable even for professionals. Adobe software is obtuse but it doesn't make it any more usable--it's just poorly designed. Being more 'beginner friendly' would help professionals as well. Beginners aren't the only ones who want to be able to get consistency in working with color and gamma.

 

[Brian Timmons]

Hey Hrvoje that's a pretty funny ad.


I remember about 2-3 years ago people saying similar things about Avid (lack of interest after pulling out of NAB, outdated interface, outdated business model, days numbered) and they did a nice job turning things around after regrouping.

It's nice to see both Avid and Adobe getting things together on the editing/post front.

Having said this, I truly think Apple has bit too much money and ambition to let FCS flounder.

There's an ebb and flow to everything and FCS is apparently in the middle of it's new development cycle.

Some of the stated complaints, however, are based in reality though and I hope Apple listens to make a better FCS for everyone.

We'll see.
Now back to editing.

Brian Timmons
britim-media

 

[Adam Eden]

Can i say that I have a very successful business and this is because I bought AVID about 15years ago. When there used to be D-Vision, Speed Razor and even Media 100.Where are they now?????

You all may call me a wanker but AVID is rock solid and is very reliable. And considering FCP and Avid are almost identical in price. Why would you bother buying FCP??

We cut a lot of TV commercials and online a lot of television shows. Avid's media management is by far the best around. I bought AVID unity about 5 years ago and my business doubled its business overnight. By having the ability to have multiple editors/ Audio engineers/ Graphics all working on the same project at the same time with multiple versions languages etc.. Final cut can't compete.

My first Avid cost me over $100K Australian and took me 5 years to pay the lease.
I got my lease repayment back in the first 4 days of work each month.

People on this forum claim that AVID doesn't cut it for grading? Well I have 2 x Avid Symphony DX's and I am sorry but most television programmes in Australia are finished on AVID Symphony. We have all the colour grading tools you can imagine that I use everyday. I do wish how ever that AVID has POWER WINDOWS like DaVinci. But never the less I can draw a Matt in ANIMATTE and do similar things. ALL IN FULL 1920x1090 UNCOMPRESSED REALTIME.

When a customer comes in for a final grade or output the way AVID conforms from Media composer is unbelievable. There is no comparison.

I know I might sound like a sales person for AVID but I still continue to make good money from their products and other good products from RED/ Sony etc.

At the end of the day if this industry is your life blood like it is for me why risk it with a shit bit of software worth nothing with shit support from a runny nose kids selling Macs.

I just wish RED would set up sales and services offices in Australia! It is very hard to run a serious business when you can't walk into a shop and have your problems solved.

PLEASE START SELLING TO RESELLERS AND START SELLING TO LEMAC IN AUSTRALIA! JOHN BOWRING WHO OWNS THE PLACE IS AWESOME.

Sorry to change the subject but I think this is something that needs to be addressed and is the main reason why I would never use FCP professionally as I don't see it as a professional product.