Final Cut Rumor......2013 :(

[Chris Kenny]

I don't know ANY editor who would cut a feature film in FCP rather than Avid because it costs $1300 less to own.

It's not that an editor is going to choose Final Cut to cut a feature because it's $1300 cheaper. An editor is going to cut in the app they're most comfortable with -- and there are more editors out there who primarily use Final Cut than Media Composer because of Final Cut's greater accessibility over the last 10 years.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Avids penetration amongst those who cuts features, is not to be underestimated.

For many years it was an argument that this was actually acomplishable with FCP, too.
And THAT still holds true.

But Avids hold on the feature/long-form market is not accidential.

Gunleik
FCP-user... -

 

[Chris Kenny]

I think use of Avid vs. Final Cut for feature work really depends on the exact market segment. Virtually every under-$500K feature we've booked dailies and/or post on (which is a fair number at this point) seems to be cutting on Final Cut.

 

[Frank Glencairn]

But Avids hold on the feature/long-form market is not accidential.

No, it´s a question of "return of investment" - that Avid stuff was so expensive, they have to work on it for years or the bean counters gonna fry their arses.

They also spend time and money in learning/training of the editors.
That comes not for free. The bigger a post house is, the more they are like a big petroleum-supertanker. Even if the captain decides to spin the wheel it takes almost for ever to turn that beast around and head in a new direction.

Frank

 

[Gunleik Groven]

I was told it had a bit to do with uniform mediahandling and specific tools for longform...

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

Huh? Apple moving a consumer appliance to an OS designed for consumer appliances is evidence that they're going to abandon making real computers? Please. This is comical FUD. Final Cut Pro has something like 50% of the video editing market -- more than any other NLE. Apple is not simply going to walk away from that, and with the exception of one rumor that Jobs personally shot down, every indication is that Apple is well into the major QT/FCP rewrite that would be consistent with their continued interest in putting their pro products on solid technical ground for the future.

I completely agree with Palmer's evaluation of the direction Apple is taking. I don't think this is "comical FUD" - he is spot-on. His comments are quite sensible.

This isn't just a question of their commitment to Pro Apps or not. They are re-writing their entire business model to mimic the "cloud" or "crowd" sourcing of the future. Why pay a bunch of skilled engineers to write complex programs, when they can skim 30% for free from the cloud/crowd without paying anyone? It's genius, really, and Apple is far ahead in the exploitation of the model, without even using the buzzwords du jour, like cloud/crowd.

What is actually a little depressing about this, is that they feel no push to use some of that $46 billion generated from the cloud/crowd to service the future of imaging. As long as the money continues to pour in, why should they be motivated to make any significant strides in pushing older technologies forward? It's time-consuming and expensive and inefficient.

Do you really think, Chris, that with the resources that Apple has, that they are behind because they are secretly doing something "better" than the competition? Really? - with THAT kind of money in the bank?? It's ludicrous.

If Apple really wanted to lead in the NLE space, it would be done already. They have had the time (an original RED partner, an opportunity squandered...) and they have the money and the ingenuity. They can buy any engineer they want with $46 billion in the bank - shoot, they could have bought Adobe and tweaked a few things.

The only thing Apple lacks is the will and the resolve to push FCP into the future, ahead of its competitors. Period.

And it makes total sense, because it doesn't fit their business paradigm anymore. It's not efficient and not congruent with Apple's future business structure, for all the reasons Palmer delineated.

This is bad for Apple's current user base, but the vacuum has created and will continue to create opportunities for new competition in the space.

RIP FCP.

 

[Ian Laurie]

Anyone else tired of this argument yet? Seriously?

Look the rumour clearly suggests a couple of things. Apple is not done with FCP. They hoped to output a version before December 31, missed it, but trying none the less. This new version was supposed to have an entirely new user interface which combined all the applications into one room. Not an easy task. whats the last piece of software you used that was a Professional grade post everything tool? Oh, thats right, they don't exist. So the fact Apple is even trying says something about their commitment.

Rewriting QuickTime is no small feat. Your talking nearly 2 decades worth of compatibility to deal with. Not to mention putting out a new FCP with half a new QuickTime would essentially kill everything. Avid and Adobe, don't have this problem. They merely need to support Avid and Adobe. Apple has a huge amount of compatibility to deal with. Thats alot of code to rewrite for...

64bit Prores. Think about this for a second, for the last few years, Pro Res has been the best codec for realtime playback of 1080P footage.... in a 32 bit world. on a single core. Once these are rewritten for 64bit multithreading how much more will we be able to get out of them? 4k? higher? who knows.

One last thing to consider when it comes to FCP and QuickTime. Everyone knows QuickTime is huge. Everyone knows Apple Loves their video codecs. These make Apple money. They prevent mass migration to flash or, heaven forbid, Windows Media. They get mass adoption outside the production world. and guess where these codecs get started... thats right FCP. would Adobe or Avid even bother adding H.264 if Apple hadn't pushed its developement along... Instead we would need bigger and faster CPU's just to play back flash files off the web. Assuming of course that your browser didn't crash because of a plugin. When it comes down to it, Apples got much bigger fish to fry than the Video Editing Market, fortunately for us, They NEED us to help them do that. And that is why FCP is not going to dissappear anytime soon.

 

[Jason Diamond]

I think everyone needs to bet on AVID, you really have no idea what their up to, but trust me when I say they will be delivering some incredible things by NAB...

I don't think at least software $$ wise at this point there's a huge issue, however when/if they add broader 3rd party HW support and some RT Rocket Timeline integration its game over.

We have been a 100% AVID house since 1996, we've drank the Kool-Aid but we like it, it's our favorite flavor.

 

[Chris Kenny]

Do you really think, Chris, that with the resources that Apple has, that they are behind because they are secretly doing something "better" than the competition? Really? - with THAT kind of money in the bank?? It's ludicrous.

They're behind (in some respects) because of the timing of product development cycles. The same reason Premiere was badly behind in the couple of years leading up to the release of Premiere Pro (another rewrite). The same reason Adobe was slow to support OS X and, later, Intel Macs. Sometimes you can't just push out a quick update this year to add some feature that has recently become important, because you're in the middle of a multi-year development cycle that needs to run its course.

More generally... money doesn't write software. Ask the Windows Vista team. There is a certain minimum amount of time that something like a rewrite of Final Cut Studio would be expected to take regardless of how much money was thrown at it. And assuming they started on the rewrite in 2007 after shipping Final Cut Studio 2, we are only now starting to reach the beginning of earliest time frame you might reasonably expect to see something. Meanwhile, people have already been freaking out for about two years. Not to be harsh, but these freak-outs are essentially a consequence of ignorance about how software development works (and the fact that Apple is in perpetual stealth mode) more than they're about the existence of any significant warning signs. Realistically, given the scope of the project, they've got another year or so before anyone should get too concerned.

I suppose Apple could be faulted for not starting on a major Final Cut rewrite in, say, 2005 rather than 2007, but remember, most of the things people want to see form a Final Cut rewrite were irrelevant or non-existant in 2005 -- there was no OpenCL, no Grand Central Dispatch, GPUs were much less powerful, there were no compressed raw footage formats to support, OS X wasn't 64-bit, there was no practical camera that could shoot 4K, etc. A lot of those things had to happen before a major Final Cut rewrite became both necessary and possible.

 

[Chris Kenny]

I think everyone needs to bet on AVID, you really have no idea what their up to, but trust me when I say they will be delivering some incredible things by NAB...

Hmm... OK, now I'm getting really curious.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

More generally... money doesn't write software. Ask the Windows Vista team.

LOL!

 

[Philip Hodgetts]

Slightly misleading. The rumour suggests that it will be pushed back to 2011... you know a whole 4 months from now... and that the enhanced single UI is what was pushed back to 2013. I don't care about a new interface. I care about 64bit support.

I wonder how they'll do 64 bit support with a 32 bit QuickTime? That's right folks, most of QuickTime is not 64 bit and has to be before FCP can go to 64 bit. And there's no QT development being done at least not in OS X...

http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2010/09/what-should-apple-do-with-final-cut-pro/

Philip

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

I think use of Avid vs. Final Cut for feature work really depends on the exact market segment. Virtually every under-$500K feature we've booked dailies and/or post on (which is a fair number at this point) seems to be cutting on Final Cut.

LOL! And virtually ever film over $501K cuts on Avid.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

I think everyone needs to bet on AVID, you really have no idea what their up to, but trust me when I say they will be delivering some incredible things by NAB...

Yup. Anyone that thinks Avid is asleep doesn't know what's up.

 

[Michael Hastings]

LOL! And virtually ever film over $501K cuts on Avid.

And how many are there of those per year?

Seems like people forget that there are only 6 or 7 thousand .r3D generating cameras in the whole world and probably less than 2000 of them are used all that regularly (and again, how many on over $500K budgets), so this is just a miniscule part of the overall production/editing market.

Yup. Anyone that thinks Avid is asleep doesn't know what's up.

Why are we to assume that AVID isn't asleep but apple is?

If I start a rumor that my inside source told me that there will be major improvements in a new release (64 bit, 5K+, GPU support, native .r3d, 3D functions, etc.) within six months, and a completely rewritten, Shake integrated, 9K consolidated UI version will ship in October 2011 - is it any more or less credible than all of the noise in this thread?

Sorry, I just don't get why one b.s. rumor warrants all of this.

And btw, you won't believe what I saw at Area 51 last weekend.

PS I like AVID, (sold my Media Composer software when I got my RED and stopped using my Ikegami editcam, because the early story was that RED and Apple were working together) and may buy it again - but not based on any of these rumors.

 

[Craig Parkes]

I do agree - if they would just work with the new AJA Kona card and drop their price a bit - they would most likely see more market penetration.

QFT.

Final Cut at the moment does have the advantage of being a jack of all trades and master of none. We are still on FCS2 on our work stations, because for our needs the FCS3 upgrade wasn't worth the project disruption, and now even though the upgrade price is a pitance we still haven't moved on because the advantages (mainly to do with Color) aren't something we use often enough to make it worth even that cost (if a project comes along where an upgrade seemed sensible we will.

We work mostly in HD and SD for broadcast, we do some quick turn around stuff coming from outside broadcast and studio type jobs and some long form series. What Final Cut offers is cheap, reliable third party hardware (Even the AJA IO Express offers ridiculous functionality, reliability and versatility for it's price in our experience), manageable format support, some pretty stellar third party plug ins, and a suite of tools that is really powerful and flexible.

I don't actually care that much about software integration, I don't even bother to xml round trip things from Color, preferring to work based of self contained quicktime and EDL to create a cutlist - this make the workflow as robust as possible at the moment without having to dick around endlessly getting the timeline 'just so' so that roundtrip conforms don't throw up any oddities.

We'd be totally happy to move to a competitor that offered anywhere near the price performance, flexibility and stability of FCP (when you include third party hardware choices) but I don't quite currently see one.

I have great hopes for Avid though, the fact that they have let in some third party hardware indicates to me that their model is changing. Sure they haven't opened the flood gates yet, but it's going to get very interesting.

Apple could easily hit the ball out of the park with the next iteration of FCP, or drop the ball completely - If they offered everything in the suite they have now, and the same third party hardware integration, with a backend that supported modern computer hardware in the editing program then at the current price point, and made file based workflow integration and media management feel less tacked on it'd continue to be a truly amazing suite for quite some time.

If the rewrite creates conflicts with existing hardware suppliers on release, changes GUI so much that people feel like they have to relearn everything and doesn't offer some amazing 'must have feature' that for some reason the rest of the NLE's can't implement then the entire user base will disappear.

People will move on from FCP because of individual needs at the moment, not in some mass exodus because other NLE's are more robust in some areas. The thing that will kill FCP is Apple getting the next release wrong FAR MORE than than other platforms outstripping them, especially in this economy when a lot of the million plus install base will continue to make do rather than invest in new hardware/software because frankly, the money isn't always there to spend.

FCP got it's break when AVID where slow to support new HD codecs in a meaningful way, and had an ungodly cost for HD hardware, while people were already shooting HD (be it Varicam or HDV) and people just needed to edit it, and Final Cut offered solutions that were good enough.

With decent workflows in place, those solutions remain good enough (just) for the present IMHO. The future will allow change, but one of the other players has to start competing point for point on FCS price, feature set AND third party hardware support to warrant mass exodus before the rewrite hits - and I don't think anyone will do that... Though Avid could surprise me.

From a pro division point of view the smartest thing Apple did was buy and integrate Color, and offer it at that price point. It brought them time to rewrite Final Cut - I don't know whether the rewrite will work out, but I wouldn't write off Apple yet. As has been said, Apple don't like to lose.

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

Sorry, I just don't get why one b.s. rumor warrants all of this.

Because the one b.s. rumor is stimulating months, that are now easing into years, of frustration at Apple's inability to keep up with their competition in the NLE space.

Need I repeat that they had the open door on the future as an original partner to RED?

Adobe, Avid, and VEGAS, yes SONY have kept up. You can say whatever you want about money not writing software - it's an easy line -

BUT if Sony's engineers can pull it together - and, mind you, they - Sony - were first to the native R3D NLE party, before Adobe and Avid, and not last....then why not Apple? If it isn't about money, then are their engineers lamer than Adobe, Sony, and Avid engineers. I don't know about Sony, but Avid and Adobe pretty much did re-writes of their software. If it isn't about money. And it isn't about the ability of the engineers, then what is the hold-up?

Will and resolve. Focus and motivation. A business model which supports writing a piece of complex software and selling it to one consumer or business at a time - as already mentioned, their model is exiting this old way of doing business.

If they knock it out of the park, fine, I already own it and will buy the upgrade sometime in the next year or two when they finally pull their thumb out, assuming they can build the better mousetrap...or not, if I have already moved on without looking back.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Such a big discussion for such a small issue. I don't know why people get so worked up about Apple's lack of performance in the past couple years. So what... There are lots of options out there, use the product that fits your needs best and move one. When, or if, Apple finally does release an update, I'll take a look at it.

Final Cut Pro as an NLE is quite long in the tooth, that's for sure. But it still has its strong points. The most underrated and misunderstood application within the Final Cut Suite is Color. Most of us around here know its potential, but the masses out there do not. FCS is worth buying for Color alone, IMO. And FCP integrates with it rather well.

That said, AVID is the best choice at the moment, IMO. Sure, I do think Adobe Premiere is wonderful and they have done good things with their Mercury engine. But moving forward, I think the best software to be looking at right now is MC5, DaVinci Resolve and Storm. The way Mark L. Pederson is hyping up Storm, it gets me all excited -- almost sounds like it could eventually replace Resolve and possibly serve as the primary NLE as well. Which would be fine with me.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

The way Mark L. Pederson is hyping up Storm, it gets me all excited -- almost sounds like it could eventually replace Resolve and possibly serve as the primary NLE as well. Which would be fine with me.

I'm dragging my feet to get around to testing Resolve - it just turns my stomach to buy a board from Blackmagic - but I'll suck it up and test - curious about the 3D support - anyone testing that - please post some stuff. I have three Scratch systems on serious hardware and a Clipster - so - my DI pipeline is pretty solid at the moment - but I'm always looking for new tools to do more on short-form, broadcast & 3D stuff without tying up the DI tools.

I think everyone will get wound up real fast with Storm during the beta release.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

BUT if Sony's engineers can pull it together - and, mind you, they - Sony - were first to the native R3D NLE party, before Adobe and Apple, and not last....then why not Apple?

Yeah - that Sony Vegas team ... they just won't give up. Go figure - Vegas 10 appears to have better 3D features than any other NLE ....