Final Cut Pro X Released

[Brad Webb]

If anything avid will raise their prices now that it looks like there will be a mass exodus from Final Cut.

 

[Paul Lee]

I'm out of town so cannot test the app to see if it is still activated. I got my refund by calmly and rationally explaining/inquiring that 'basic' functionality was no longer included (XML, etc.) that was in version 7. They do give refunds if software sold through the App Store is defective or does not meet the expectations of the user (HINT HINT).

 

[paulherrin]

Im using all Adobe... It's nice to have Photoshop, After Effects, Premier and other Adobe apps all playing nice together... specially when you are doing Stills AND Motion workflows with the same source file. The plugins from 3rd parties are great. I am really impressed with 5.5. Couldn't be happier.

I still use all APPLE hardware though.. that will never change unless they take the towers away....

can we put r3d's through camera raw yet? or have we heard any progress about that? that would be huge.

 

[Jim Collins]

I dropped by the Apple store this afternoon to take a look at FCX and didn't find it on any of their machines. Every system I looked at still had FCP7. The salesman I talked to said they wouldn't have it for a few more days. He got very defensive very quickly when I suggested that this program was not being received very well.

 

[Rob Castiglione]

This whole episode with FCP X has lead to a rather unexpected and delightful result for me. I have absolutely been a FCP fan boy - it would NEVER have occurred to me to use any other NLE until FCPX came along. Because I loathe FCPX so much I was kind of forced to try Premiere Pro C5.5 and low and behold - it is an absolute delight to use!! I am hooked. In many respects it is far superior to FCP. So sometimes being pushed out of your comfort zone is a very very good thing. Thanks Apple!

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

This whole episode with FCP X has lead to a rather unexpected and delightful result for me. I have absolutely been a FCP fan boy - it would NEVER have occurred to me to use any other NLE until FCPX came along. Because I loathe FCPX so much I was kind of forced to try Premiere Pro C5.5 and low and behold - it is an absolute delight to use!! I am hooked. In many respects it is far superior to FCP. So sometimes being pushed out of your comfort zone is a very very good thing. Thanks Apple!

AND PP 5.5 opens your FCP7 projects, unlike FCPX:

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

 

[Chris Kenny]

It really doesn't strike me as a great idea to switch from the vendor that now has the newest architecture (Apple) to the vendor that has the oldest architecture (Avid) because of half a dozen missing features that Apple has mostly already told various parties are being worked on. Kind of equivalent to deciding to switch to Windows back in 2001 a couple of days after Mac OS X 10.0 shipped.

There is Adobe, but while the Mercury playback engine is a nice piece of technology the fact that it's CUDA is seriously problematic, especially if you're a Mac user (Apple sometimes has entire model generations where practically nothing has NVIDA graphics), and frankly the quality of Adobe's software is all over the place lately.

The most sensible thing for current FCP users to do is... nothing. Apple had to rewrite FCP. They rewrote FCP. Even if FCP X had every (reasonable) feature everyone would have liked out of gate, as a rewrite there's just no way it could have possibly ever been a drop-in replacement for FCP 7 immediately. So, yes, you can't use FCP X yet because it can't export XML yet. But you probably couldn't switch to is this soon even if it did. So why get worked up? If there's still no way to export sequence data, send video to an external monitor, etc. in six months, or any announcement about an update resolving these issues, then maybe it's time to start seriously considering alternatives.

 

[Uli Plank]

The only thing I really dislike about Apple's policy is dropping support for FCP7 on the day they published FPCX. If they would only have announced support and availability for another year or so, I would have patiently waited (and tested FCPX) while it's maturing.

But for someone who has to think about the future of a pretty large facility it would be irresponsible NOT to look for alternatives right away as things are now!

 

[George Butterfield]

But for someone who has to think about the future of a pretty large facility it would be irresponsible NOT to look for alternatives right away as things are now!

But obviously it would be foolish to switch a large facility as things are now ... i.e. Epic-X is not yet shipping, FCP7 is great, where's the panic?

 

[Bruce Allen]

But obviously it would be foolish to switch a large facility as things are now ... i.e. Epic-X is not yet shipping, FCP7 is great, where's the panic?

I think it would be foolish to keep a large facility on software that had been discontinued without evaluating other options. FCP 7 as it stands has fallen behind Avid and Premiere in many ways. Now it turns out that the successor, FCP X, is behind Avid and Premiere in basic features. So it's obvious Apple is out of the game for the time being.

Before FCP X was released:
- FCP 7 was a bit behind
- FCP X was an unknown quantity (potentially, it could have been a more evolutionary update that would make for an easier transition)

The point was: people were planning to dump FCP 7 anyway. The only question was whether they would dump it for FCP X or not. Now that they see the state that FCP X is in, it's not obviously not an option. Both FCP 7 and FCP X are not competitive at present, hence the impetus to switch.

And yes, the fact that Apple won't sell anyone any copies of FCP 7 pretty much has accelerated the decision.

It really doesn't strike me as a great idea to switch from the vendor that now has the newest architecture (Apple) to the vendor that has the oldest architecture (Avid) because of half a dozen missing features that Apple has mostly already told various parties are being worked on. Kind of equivalent to deciding to switch to Windows back in 2001 a couple of days after Mac OS X 10.0 shipped.

Most people don't base what they use on whether it is the newest architecture or not.

Many pro apps are definitely not the newest architecture, but people switch to them every day based on the overall value proposition:
eg Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Pro Tools, DaVinci Resolve, Maya, 3DS MAX, AutoCAD, Quantel, Flame, Smoke

Also, a lot of people don't really care whether you can render 3 layers or 5 layers realtime.

We want to be able to cut RED files using the best craft editing and collaboration tools in the business. That's an argument for Avid.

Or they're more of a one-stop-shop and want amazing R3D performance, plus integration with After Effects, for an amazing price. That's a good argument for Premiere.

By the time Apple has added the basic features back in to FCP X, both Media Composer and Premiere will be on their next version.

The most sensible thing for current FCP users to do is... nothing. Apple had to rewrite FCP. They rewrote FCP. Even if FCP X had every (reasonable) feature everyone would have liked out of gate, as a rewrite there's just no way it could have possibly ever been a drop-in replacement for FCP 7 immediately. So, yes, you can't use FCP X yet because it can't export XML yet. But you probably couldn't switch to is this soon even if it did. So why get worked up? If there's still no way to export sequence data, send video to an external monitor, etc. in six months, or any announcement about an update resolving these issues, then maybe it's time to start seriously considering alternatives.

Or you could just make your best guess as to where the software will be a bit further down the line. I think Apple will only have *fully* sorted out their troubles by version 2 of FCP X - maybe this time next year?

By that time, you could have switched to Premiere or Avid, made a ton more cash than you would have on FCP 7... and be ready to re-evaluate everything next year.

We're quite conservative at work - very seldom use the new features until they've been in the software for a while. Except for Resolve, which is just stupidly stable.

There is Adobe, but while the Mercury playback engine is a nice piece of technology the fact that it's CUDA is seriously problematic, especially if you're a Mac user (Apple sometimes has entire model generations where practically nothing has NVIDA graphics), and frankly the quality of Adobe's software is all over the place lately.

DaVinci Resolve 7.0 was CUDA. Resolve 8.0 supports OpenCL as well. An example Adobe might follow in the future. Frankly, I think that the quality of Adobe's stuff is pretty damn good now.

And for all of the awesomeness of FCP X... I still haven't seen anything as impressive as the Avid system we have at work where you have teams of editors, working in the same project, seeing each others bins... all updating at the same time. Reliably. As in "we are about to go on fiber-optic connection with Warner Bros and want to play everyones' cuts out from one edit bay but folks are still editing stuff, so we're gonna rely on Avid to just frikkin' handle things while we get on with talking to our client and worrying about making our edits awesome". Day in, day out this happens. That's impressive to me. As are bells and whistles like automatic speech recognition, matching to scripts, voice search. And amazing backwards compatibility. If these features were in FCP X you know Apple would go nuts touting them.

Personally, I think it'll be easier for Avid to copy the features of FCP X than it will be for Apple and 3rd parties to reliably implement the things Avid is already doing. But let's see.

Look, if Apple gave me everything that I already have in Avid for $299, I'd switch tomorrow. I just want the tool that's best for me as a filmmaker. But based on FCP X I have serious doubts if they actually understand what's involved.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Rob Castiglione]

Its not just the missing features I dislike. It is the entire interface and new method of editing. Just not into it at all. I just laughed when I did bit of a trial edit on it.

 

[Uli Plank]

... I still haven't seen anything as impressive as the Avid system we have at work where you have teams of editors, working in the same project, seeing each others bins... all updating at the same time. Reliably. As in "we are about to go on fiber-optic connection with Warner Bros and want to play everyones' cuts out from one edit bay but folks are still editing stuff, so we're gonna rely on Avid to just frikkin' handle things while we get on with talking to our client and worrying about making our edits awesome". Day in, day out this happens. That's impressive to me. [/url]

Well, as much as I share your criticism, this reference is a tad unfair. You are talking Avid Unity, right? Quite a different price range!

 

[Tim Morten]

It really doesn't strike me as a great idea to switch from the vendor that now has the newest architecture (Apple) to the vendor that has the oldest architecture (Avid) because of half a dozen missing features that Apple has mostly already told various parties are being worked on.

Construing this as simply "missing features" is rather glib: http://t.co/5qNC3yX

 

[Chris Kenny]

Personally, I think it'll be easier for Avid to copy the features of FCP X than it will be for Apple and 3rd parties to reliably implement the things Avid is already doing. But let's see.

I think this is precisely the other way around. With FCP X, Apple has done the really hard stuff. They've written an entire new media framework, written a new engine on top of it, and largely reinvented editing UI, reorienting it around tagging and clip connections, rather than bins and tracks. The workflow integration (import/export) features missing from the first release are comparatively trivial in terms of technical implementation, and if Apple really follows through and offers a robust API for accessing sequence/event data, they'll be significantly out ahead on workflow integration as well.

I know this is invisible to long-time Avid editors, but Avid's stuff just looks and feels old these days. Avid fans are having fun crowing about how Apple botched FCP X, but the truth is Apple now has a much more modern product on the market available for one-click purchase at 1/8 of the price of Media Composer. FCP X will only accellerate the trend of students and new editors adopting FCP because it's cheaper and more accessible, and we know what the long term consequences are of that.

And it's almost impossible for Avid to even fix this. If Avid did the kind of overhaul that would probably be required to make Media Composer significantly more appealing to new editors, the reaction from the existing user base would make the FCP X firestorm look like a picnic in the park.

So, sure, if you're willing to switch to Media Composer for a year and then re-evaluate, go ahead. But if a current FCP user is shopping for the platform with the best long-term prospects, my advice would be to wait 6-12 months and then decide at that time if that's FCP X or Premiere Pro.

And for all of the awesomeness of FCP X... I still haven't seen anything as impressive as the Avid system we have at work where you have teams of editors, working in the same project, seeing each others bins... all updating at the same time. Reliably. As in "we are about to go on fiber-optic connection with Warner Bros and want to play everyones' cuts out from one edit bay but folks are still editing stuff, so we're gonna rely on Avid to just frikkin' handle things while we get on with talking to our client and worrying about making our edits awesome". Day in, day out this happens.

I don't know if Apple has an interest in impementing the sort of collaboration features you're interested in, but if they do the new database-driven architecture would seem to lend itself to that sort of thing. But FCP never really had those features; I imagine it's fairly low down on their list of priorities. Then again, FCP managed to capture 50%+ of the NLE market without this stuff. Even among Avid customers Unity isn't exactly the dominant choice. While this all may be a perfectly valid reason for you to choose Avid, it's probably not hugely important to any vendor's overall market prospects.

 

[D Fuller]

Well, as much as I share your criticism, this reference is a tad unfair. You are talking Avid Unity, right? Quite a different price range!

It's not unfair at all. Apple started down this road a couple of years ago with FCP server, and if you bought into that program, you've just been screwed.

Apple has spent the past 10 years undermining Avid's market position by dramatically underpricing them with software that was "good enough." In the beginning, FCP was just bloody awful, but as it progressed to version 6, it improved enough, and kept the price low enough, that a lot of editors and edit shops moved that way. FCP XML even became a bit of an interchange standard. Some bought into Final Cut Server because it offered some of the functions of Avid's Unity for less money. That's over. From al appearances, Apple has just ditched that market.

When you build a business, you choose partners carefully because the growth of your business requires your partners to enable that growth. Apple is proving to be an unreliable partner. That is what all the screaming is about. It's not so much about FCPx as it is about discontinuing FCP7. As a company, Avid has been unwaveringly committed to editors. Apple has not. They developed the FCP platform through v.6 to look like that, then did a half-measure update to v.7, then gave up any commitment to businesses who had bought into that system. They did not make a transition, they eol'd FCP and introduced something which cannot do the job.

None of this is a problem for anyone who works alone, or in a non-collaborative shop. It's only a problem for people who use specialists for sound and color, and for businesses who use teams of editors, and companies who were planning to install another couple of FCP7 seats over the summer. In my view, Apple has screwed the people with the most invested in their system, and therefore, the most to loose.

 

[Chris Kenny]

Construing this as simply "missing features" is rather glib: http://t.co/5qNC3yX

The supposed "crippling design flaws" the author mentions are 1) the fact that it shows all events all the time and 2) the trackless timeline.

He's blowing the event list issue rather hilariously out of proportion. You know what other app shows a list of all your projects by default? DaVinci Resolve. Also not a serious professional app, I guess? If it's really a huge problem for Client A to see the name of an event or project belonging to Client B, just name things a little cryptically.

And the track-related complaints frankly come down to lack of imagination. The idea that NLE environments should remain wedded to ridged track structures for the rest of history because tape still has audio tracks is silly. There are ways that mapping could be handled that don't require this constraint, and I suspect we'll see solutions to this problem as Apple opens up the architecture to third-parties.

 

[Tim Morten]

And the track-related complaints frankly come down to lack of imagination.

And I suppose everyone's lack of faith that all of this will be fixed tomorrow is also a lack of imagination? My suggestion would be to buy yourself a copy of FCPX and let the rest of us get on with voicing our legitimate concerns. The time for fanboyism has passed...

Cheers,
Tim

 

[Chris Kenny]

And I suppose everyone's lack of faith that all of this will be fixed tomorrow is also a lack of imagination?

"All of this"? A lot of it is not broken in any objective sense. With respect to issues like video output and providing third-parties with access to sequence data (the two most significant problems with using FCP X in pro workflows as of today), Apple has already told various media outlets that solutions are in the works; there's no imagination required.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

It really doesn't strike me as a great idea to switch from the vendor that now has the newest architecture (Apple) to the vendor that has the oldest architecture (Avid) because of half a dozen missing features that Apple has mostly already told various parties are being worked on. Kind of equivalent to deciding to switch to Windows back in 2001 a couple of days after Mac OS X 10.0 shipped.

Avid is going to go 64bit in their next release, which would mean a rewrite. If that becomes a rewrite on other parts of the architecture is another question.

And another question is that if you compare Avid structure to a very well-built temple that have lasted this long and is still one of the strongest NLE's on the market and then compare it to a new freshly built house out of cheap wood that FCPX is, then it's not going to last long in a hurricane (large project with tight deadlines and a lot of post production people). It doesn't matter if that house is new.
New and old is not the same thing as good and bad.

There are too many problems and not any date when it's fixed, it's a no go for professionals. If you are on a tight deadline and work a lot with editing, then you would understand that.

Also, the things that Apple supposedly adressed officially turned out to be a bit false... like the "working close with red on r3d support in FCPX", which is by the Red team stated false.
How do we know then for sure that the rest of that list of things to come is true? Rumors spread fast and most of the times rumors are bullshit.

Hope is not the same thing as truth and some vague things about coming updates that will fix everything for professionals... come on, be realistic, it's going to take a long time before FCPX is truly ready.
WE DO NOT HAVE THAT TIME AS THE INDUSTRY IS EVOLVING DURING THAT TIME

But if you want to wait I'm not gonna stop you, no one will.