Chris Kenny
Well-known member
In all honesty are we really surprised? The Pro-Video apps have been effectively ignored by Apple for a few years now.
They're working on a major rewrite. Even this latest largely pessimistic rumor confirms that. Final Cut Studio has traditionally been on a two year release cycle. Expecting a major rewrite to take at least twice that long is not remotely unreasonable, and they're not at that mark yet (even measuring from FCS2, the last full-scale upgrade).
And I really don't think they'll lose all that many customers if it takes them another year to ship something. Avid Media Composer is significantly more expensive and while it has native R3D support, it's missing many other things Final Cut Studio has (motion graphics, serious color correction, etc.) and is much more limited in terms of what video I/O hardware it supports. Meanwhile, Premiere Pro has some flashier features, but still isn't as mature as a professional editing platform. One big issue is that Adobe currently lacks an answer to ProRes/DNxHD, which in my experience are used very widely for file-based workflows, and would be even if Final Cut had native R3D support -- most editors don't have a Rocket, and native R3D playback tends to bog things down without one.
This industry is pretty conservative; not many shops are really going to switch just Apple takes a year longer than would have been desirable. We run into editors who run a year or two behind on NLE upgrades anyway. Speaking from personal experience, after two and a half years of Red workflows we weren't really happy with, we're finally settling in on something we like with RCX transcodes, FCP 7 editing, Resolve color grading (off trimmed R3Ds), and round-tripping from Resolve to Final Cut (via some custom in-house scripts). We're not looking to totally shake things up again right now.