Final Cut Pro X Released

[Chris Kenny]

Chris these two statements taken together are not confusing at all. They seem to be as clear an indication as we can have, given Apple's communication style, that Apple is EOLing its involvement with the high end of the editing business. There's way more money for them in a less-demanding edit market.

There's even more money for them in both markets, and the pro market has lead to a fair bit of prestige that Apple appears to value. I simply don't think Apple's actions provide nearly as much support for these sorts of conclusions about their motivations as people are pretending they do. The truth is, in a world where Apple actually didn't care about pro editors, it's very unlikely FCP X would exist at all. Apple didn't go and implement a GPU-accellerated 32-bit float rendering engine for soccer moms.

My interpretation: this is Apple shipping a first release with an incomplete feature set. Which Apple does all the time. If this means Apple doesn't care about this market, then Apple also doesn't care about phones and tablets, where they also shipped first-generation products missing a lot of features people thought should be there.

It's nothing new or surprising, really. It is a common theme for Apple to play around in a pro market for a while and then just abandon it. Shake. X-serve. FCP Studio. FCP Server. What could be clearer? (Well, a clear statement from Apple could be clearer, but that's really not likely.)

Err... you can't use what you believe is happening in this case as an example of Apple having done this before, so that knocks out FCS and FCP Server. The other shoe hasn't dropped yet on Xserve (see rumors about rack-mountable Mac Pros.) And Shake was far more of a niche application than Final Cut Studio, and was also an external acquisition that Apple may have wanted more for the talent than because Apple really wanted to be in that market.

 

[George Butterfield]

Im about to help make decisions to install very many more suites some with in high end Educational establishments. At the moment FCP X isn't on the list,

Sounds like hiring you is going to cost these institutions a lot more than someone else might, and their students will not be cutting edge to boot. The idea is to help the students make better movies, and go direct to DVD and festivals/screenings. That's what FCPX is all about. Get with the program. Film is dead.

 

[shashbugu]

Sounds like hiring you is going to cost these institutions a lot more than someone else might, and their students will not be cutting edge to boot. The idea is to help the students make better movies, and go direct to DVD and festivals/screenings. That's what FCPX is all about. Get with the program. Film is dead.

You are so off base its not even funny. You want students in a higher institution to learn FCPX instead of say Avid, PPro or Smoke?

 

[Chris Kenny]

You are so off base its not even funny. You want students in a higher institution to learn FCPX instead of say Avid, PPro or Smoke?

Um... the notion that this is an obviously bad idea (a clear implication of your post) seems predicated on the notion that we know, five days after its release, that FCP X will never be a serious professional tool. We don't know that. The initial release of FCP X is missing some important features, but it also seems to have a fair bit of potential.

 

[Jim Collins]

Sounds like hiring you is going to cost these institutions a lot more than someone else might, and their students will not be cutting edge to boot. The idea is to help the students make better movies, and go direct to DVD and festivals/screenings. That's what FCPX is all about. Get with the program. Film is dead.

Am I wrong? I was under the impression Final Cut X won't even do Chapter Markers any more. That makes it pretty useless for doing DVDs. It's pretty much just for doing YouTube videos.

 

[George Butterfield]

You are so off base its not even funny. You want students in a higher institution to learn FCPX instead of say Avid, PPro or Smoke?

You're the one who doesn't know which way the wind is blowing. The purpose of the whole exercise is to teach students how to make movies, commercials and music videos. Not to get proficient in your, "yesterday's methods"!

 

[Joe Carney]

You're the one who doesn't know which way the wind is blowing. The purpose of the whole exercise is to teach students how to make movies, commercials and music videos. Not to get proficient in your, "yesterday's methods"!

No George, schools are supposed to enable their students to get jobs in the realworld. No one needs to go to college just to make a youtube video. If the industry ends up not using FCPX (studios, networks) then they won't teach it. Has nothing to do with film. Apple sees a much larger market with less support costs in prosumer and streaming, not theatrical release, digital or film.

None of this will happen over night. Most Schools already have their curiculum established for the 2011/12 year. So Apple has a short tiime period to create something Studios and Networks will integrate into their pipelines. And just like Shake, their will be plenty of FCP7 related projects for the time being. But when decisions are made for mid season replacements and new production pipelines established...
that will get interesting. Nothing to do with film or digital.
The tough part will be schools convincing students to spend money toward classes on an orphaned product. Might be a hard sell.

 

[Dave Blackham]

Sounds like hiring you is going to cost these institutions a lot more than someone else might, and their students will not be cutting edge to boot. The idea is to help the students make better movies, and go direct to DVD and festivals/screenings. That's what FCPX is all about. Get with the program. Film is dead.

Perhaps I didn't explain the concern well. The idea is to train students on high end media courses to be able to get jobs in to the professional industry. This entails working on near commercial or commercial grade systems and using professional workflow and best industry practices. Currently FCP X is not professional grade for what is needed in industry IMHO. Whats needed is word from Apple to tell us what the road map is and if it will ever be an app for professional work, many of us feel it is no where near. And yes we do go direct to file based media, we dont like DVD's much and prefer media online, I think we were were one of the first to do so on our island, We were also first in with FCP when it launched and had the first install of Final Touch here too. And yes I have a copy of FCP X and wish it offered the tools we need. I don't recall the exact words but its along the lines of new isn't necessarily good and old isn't necessarily bad, its no good throwing out the good stuff with the bad which is one thing that seems to have happened. After Jim Im Apple's biggest fan and have been for very many years, I just want to see this debarcle be sorted out real soon. And no Films not dead yet, I was told it was going to be dead 'soon' in 1978 when I started work, I don't use much of it granted, but it's still here.

And on cost, on our Island the system is now to charge relatively high fees to University education, lets say £27,000 which is about $42,000 USD, not to mention 3 years of the life of the student learning the process. If they leave University having learnt bad practice they most likely wont get a job which would be tragic and if they are fortunate to be employed will need still need retraining, both scenarios are very expensive and avoidable.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

I agree with you Dave.

jay

 

[Joe Carney]

Sounds like it's time for Mr Jobs to recall Guy Kawasaki, hehehehe.

 

[Dave Blackham]

Thats an excellent idea.

 

[Erik Franzén]

Okay, so whose head(s) will roll over this fiasco?

 

[Jim Collins]

Okay, so whose head(s) will roll over this fiasco?

I hope it's not Randy Ubillos. He did reportedly create both Premiere and Final Cut. Of course guys who have good ideas also have bad ideas. And guys who have really good ideas tend to have reallly bad ones too. It's probably an inevitable law of nature. So in addition to the ideas guys you also need to have people who can tell the good ideas from the bad ones. And it does sound like there are some really good ideas in this in addition to the bad ones. My guess is it was a fairly high level manager who drove this one into the ditch. Probably a marketing type rather than an Engineering type. Or a failed engineer who migrated up into management. It would be interesting to look at the rosters of the people involved in the iMovie fiasco a few years ago and the MobileMe fiasco and look for common elements with this one. All three cases are very similar with early warning signs ignored and an arrogant refusal to even consider that they might be going off track. It is almost inevitable that when blame is assigned they will look too low and too high. Some business school should do a case study.

 

[Michael McLaughlin]

I am to tired to even look right now....

BUT, didn't Apple last year or beginning of this year let go the FCP marketing department and sales, like
wasn't 40 something people (that everybody was saying was engineers).

: - ) maybe not such a good idea.

 

[Joe Taylor]

As a FCP user since 2001, I can officially say I am done. Made a hard decision to order Avid Media Composer 5.5 in the morrow. Goodbye FCP. We had a good run till about 2008 then you forgot about your users.

 

[Erich Ocean]

It would be interesting to look at the rosters of the people involved in the iMovie fiasco a few years ago and the MobileMe fiasco and look for common elements with this one. All three cases are very similar with early warning signs ignored and an arrogant refusal to even consider that they might be going off track.

Well, I can't name any names, but I can tell you what happened with MobileMe, as it was relayed to me by people at Apple who were in a position to know:

The engineers (or their surrogates in management) literally lied when the project was pitched to Steve Jobs as 'ready'. Reportedly, they was a long list of issues that had to be there for the launch, and the server team went down the list -- check, check, check, a-okay, etc. -- while the client team was the opposite -- this isn't ready, that isn't ready, etc. Steve looked at the two lists, decide the client issues were acceptable, and launched.

It turned out that the client team went without a hitch (the known issues were still issues, but the problems didn't go deeper). The server team, on the other hand, was fucked. All those "check, check, check, everything is A-okay"? Total bullshit. They lost people's mail. Couldn't handle the number of logins (!), which was what the "outage" actually was. Were *severely* under-provisioned on the hardware side.

Bottom line? The VP over both client and server divisions got canned (they were run separately), and Apple switched to a vertical approach where, for each product within MobileMe, client and server were managed together.

Oh, and I'm told the meeting where Steve laid into the Apple staff over MobileMe's failure was epic.

Bottom line, I'd be shocked if someone's head doesn't roll over FCPX. There's just no way Steve Jobs would knowingly allow this kind of fuck up at Apple. None. Ever.

My guess is, like the MobileMe debacle, people told him that Automatic Duck had the backwards compatibility thing handled, and that pros didn't need to open FCP 7 projects in FCP X, because of how the industry works (it would be nice if SJ's bullshit meter was better tuned for this kind of thing). Of course, that's utter bullshit, but whatever. The point is, Steve Jobs bought the team's assertions that FCPX was ready to go to market.

It wasn't, not by a long shot, and Steve Jobs is going to feel misled (and undoubtedly was) and will do his CEO thing and get things fixed. He always does.

 

[Tim Morten]

This will not be a quick fix.

http://vimeo.com/25645130

 

[AnthonyFlores]

Well, I can't name any names, but I can tell you what happened with MobileMe, as it was relayed to me by people at Apple who were in a position to know:

The engineers (or their surrogates in management) literally lied when the project was pitched to Steve Jobs as 'ready'. Reportedly, they was a long list of issues that had to be there for the launch, and the server team went down the list -- check, check, check, a-okay, etc. -- while the client team was the opposite -- this isn't ready, that isn't ready, etc. Steve looked at the two lists, decide the client issues were acceptable, and launched.

It turned out that the client team went without a hitch (the known issues were still issues, but the problems didn't go deeper). The server team, on the other hand, was fucked. All those "check, check, check, everything is A-okay"? Total bullshit. They lost people's mail. Couldn't handle the number of logins (!), which was what the "outage" actually was. Were *severely* under-provisioned on the hardware side.

Bottom line? The VP of both divisions got canned (they were run separately), and Apple switched to a vertical approach where, for each product within MobileMe, client and server were managed together.

I'm told the meeting where Steve laid into the Apple staff was epic. Oh to be a fly on the wall when the shit hit the fan.

Bottom line, I'd be shocked if someone's head doesn't roll over FCPX. There's just no way Steve Jobs would knowingly allow this kind of fuck up at Apple. None. Ever. My guess is people told him that Automatic Duck had the backwards compatibility thing handled, and that pros didn't need to open FCP 7 projects in FCP X, because of how the industry works (it would be nice if SJ's bullshit meter was better tuned for this kind of thing). Of course, that's utter bullshit, but whatever.

Steve Jobs is going to feel misled (and undoubtedly was) and will do his CEO thing and get things fixed. He always does.

Agreed 1,000%. I must admit that Steve is way up on my list of business heros (perhaps that makes me a fanboy) but the bottom line is that he would NOT have knowingly let this happen. Also, for those who say that Apple (and defacto, that Steve) doesn't value the pro market is BS. I believe he and the company take great pride in how many serious professionals use Apple due to it's superior performance, despite higher cost/spec ratio on most items. He would have loved nothing more than a wildly successful FCPX launch ... another big victory for Apple ... and a bunch of happy pros getting more Mac hardware this summer while spreading the word about how amazing Apple/FCPX is.

Now, with them just trying to put out the fire, I'm sure heads will roll -- but I'm also sure this will get fixed. No other company on the planet has the resources that Apple does, and it will only take a teeny tiny % of those resources to fix this. There is simply no way they ignore this and proceed like nothing happen ....

 

[jake blackstone]

If Lion is so important to fix some issues, why release FCPX before Lion? And why put FCS3 EOL now?

Actually, I'd installed FCPx on my Macbook Pro, that's running the developers version of Lion and FCPx will not even launch. FCP works just fine with Lion

 

[Scott Crawley]

Actually, I'd installed FCPx on my Macbook Pro, that's running the developers version of Lion and FCPx will not even launch. FCP works just fine with Lion

There you go, proof that there will be an update when Lion is released. ;-)