Steve Jobs response to the future of fcp

[PatrickW]

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

Because:
* they want you to buy thousands of dollars worth of Shiney Apple Dongle to get into the ecosystem
* because they want it to be easy for content producers to put their creations from Pro Audio and Pro Video Apps onto the iTunes marketplace (they take a cut of the retail price)
* because they want to make it easy for you to identify and target your market with iAds
* because they want consumers to buy into the marketplace with their iPad to watch, listen, read and play the content you make

 

[Gunleik Groven]

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??

LOL, you are closing in... -
Except for you obviously not being very updated on FCP stability and useability - and why would you, when you are so happy where you are - I think there's different issues that might serve the FCP userbase to... Adobe if the next couple of CS upgrades brings THAT into a useable app... -

Most annoying thing with Apple, is lack of communication. That's sort of ok for the iPhone, not so on larger environment applications like Shake, Xserve, and FCS...

And remember, on the two first of this Apple pretty much HAD the market, and still decided to let it go...

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Because:
* they want you to buy thousands of dollars worth of Shiney Apple Dongle to get into the ecosystem
* because they want it to be easy for content producers to put their creations from Pro Audio and Pro Video Apps onto the iTunes marketplace (they take a cut of the retail price)
* because they want to make it easy for you to identify and target your market with iAds
* because they want consumers to buy into the marketplace with their iPad to watch, listen, read and play the content you make

Hm...

This is sort of the default answer. After they let Shake go, I really am not that convinced by anything but the stability of their conputers and sexyness of the iPad anymore...

 

[Michael Hastings]

Hm...

This is sort of the default answer. After they let Shake go, I really am not that convinced by anything but the stability of their conputers and sexyness of the iPad anymore...

Did they let shake go? Or are they incorporating into FCS?

Truth is nobody that knows is talking...

 

[Peter Moretti]

Because:
* they want you to buy thousands of dollars worth of Shiney Apple Dongle to get into the ecosystem
* because they want it to be easy for content producers to put their creations from Pro Audio and Pro Video Apps onto the iTunes marketplace (they take a cut of the retail price)
* because they want to make it easy for you to identify and target your market with iAds
* because they want consumers to buy into the marketplace with their iPad to watch, listen, read and play the content you make

The better ?, allbeit off topic, is why does Adobe give a shit about pro apps? They don't have any hardware to sell.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Because:
* they want you to buy thousands of dollars worth of Shiney Apple Dongle to get into the ecosystem

Like Shake? Oh right they killed that.

* because they want it to be easy for content producers to put their creations from Pro Audio and Pro Video Apps onto the iTunes marketplace (they take a cut of the retail price)

iTunes makes the VAST MAJORITY of its money from professionally mastered music. There is no such thing as an "easy path" from any Apple product to the iTunes store. The mastering is going to be done where it's done by the engineer that the artists want to do it. At no point are they going to stop and go. "Oh hey we should really edit Pirates of the Carribean 4 on FCP since it'll be super duper easy to encode the DCI master into an H264."

* because they want to make it easy for you to identify and target your market with iAds

?? More details please, I don't follow. I can't possibly see what that has to do with what professional content creation tools you use.

Is someone supposed to be editing a film and have FCP analyze your film and display ads as you edit. "Your character just mentioned Coca-Cola! If you add that clip to your timeline you'll increase your target demographic with pop up ads during your movie!"

* because they want consumers to buy into the marketplace with their iPad to watch, listen, read and play the content you make

Again.

Editing Star Trek (if it were edited on FCP) 10 copies of FCP: $40k
Selling Star Trek and an iPad to customers @ $800 per customer and you only need to sell the movie to 50 people and you've made the same amount of money.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Did they let shake go? Or are they incorporating into FCS?

Truth is nobody that knows is talking...

Truth is that pretty much everybody from the Shake team has left Apple.

Most importantly Shake's Product Designer left to join The Foundry way back in 2007.
http://news.creativecow.net/story/857635

It's been years since Apple put any development into pro-compositing. Any developer who actually cared about advancing the state of the art in compositing would have jumped ship years ago to work for Autodesk, Eyeon or The Foundry.

Shake is dead. Phenomenon is dead. Apple won't get anywhere running up against The Foundry.

The truth is Shake is/was good enough for what Apple bought it to do: integrate into FCP Studio package. It's still very competent--far more functional than any FCP user is ever going to learn. If Apple wants to offer super easy compositing then they're going to get smoked by Adobe and their enormous R&D budget. Again. Apple has no R&D as far as I'm aware. When you see those cool siggraph papers with automatic camera tracking or painting on someone's face--they're often Microsoft and Adobe papers; they're also Microsoft and Adobe patents.

I think Apple bought Shake thinking they could buy it and make little tweaks to keep it relevant--not foreseeing the huge changes in the high end compositing market. Compositing is becoming a 3D lighting and scene management task now. The push is to integrate the 3D department and the compositing department--not to mention the challenges of offering stereo toolsets. Apple just wasn't ready to make that kind of investment to stay competitive so they made the smart decision and pulled the plug. They already have overkill for a more casual compositor so why try to capture the high end market?

 

[Gunleik Groven]

The better ?, allbeit off topic, is why does Adobe give a shit about pro apps? They don't have any hardware to sell.

I think this is a much overlooked point.

That is if Apple doesn't suddenly decide just to buy Adobe...
I would have been less surprised with such a move...

 

[Michael Hastings]

Truth is that pretty much everybody from the Shake team has left Apple.

Is that code base then worthless. Were there any patents or other ip?

As far as the foundry - why does apple want or need to compete on that level - hardcore colorists, sound engineers, compositors, etc are always going to gravitate to the high end, high price low volume dedicated solutions aren't they? So what relevance does that have to the product manager making decisions on a $1000 software suite that has a million licensees so is by definition more of a mass market midlevel product? A big part of why companies and individuals still buy fcs is because it does more than enough quite well and there are LOTS of people that already know it, either to hire or simply to network with.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

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

Because they are selling tools for it ?

Bragging about 1M users they are selling those tools to ?

 

[Eisen Feuer]

As a tiny business, I have neither the privilege or the curse of having to look at my equipment as a $ - $ = $ equation for buying in bulk, etc. I do what I do because I love doing it. Part of what I love doing is working in FCP and making magic happen. AVID, while I'm certain everyone here can drill me on to the ground about it's feature X and usability Y and price Z, my editing machine is also my personal machine, and that just so happens to be a Mac Pro Octo.

I love FCP until my left hand hurts from holding the editing wheel, I used Shake YESTERDAY for a beautiful piece of image genesis, OS X continues to be my nice little time machine where I get to use today what Windows will have in 2 years, and I can listen to music all I want while I edit because my boss isn't a jerk- because I don't have a boss.

That said, I'm not an Apple Lemming, I'm still living in FCS2-land because FCS3 was a bad joke, (it should have been a X.5 release like they did back with FCP 4.5) but I eagerly await what's been brewing for so long in Cupertino regarding FCS4. Multithreading support, 64bit, QTX (for whose unknowing, the main thing tying down FCP in every way is it's reliance on the decades-old 32-bit QuickTime, rather than the next-gen optimized QTX) etc would be much appreciated among some simple things, like a complete GUI overhaul to get out of their turn-of-the-century brushed steel fetish (I was honestly going to re-skin the whole thing myself until I found out how difficult that would wind up being)

My personal message to Apple would be: unite Shake and Motion in one package with a stronger particle system to blow After Effects out of the water (nodessss noooodes please!... and yes I've tried Nuke; Foundry I don't understand how you can make such great software and have the viewer system fail so utterly hard)

Don't be afraid to push updates often like RED does with Cine-X (Sorry RED, I still much prefer Color)

And most of all, fix Qmaster, I beg of you. If I had a firstborn, I would give him to you to fix Qmaster forever. I swear when that software is working you feel like you own the universe but it breaks easier than eggshells.

 

[Sebastian Gross]

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.

This is simply not true.
We just finished a job on 5 fcp-machines, doing 10 projects simultaneously on a DVS-SAN,
graphic-, audio- and editing-wise.

The only hickup we had was that we had to subdivide the projects when the .fcp got too large.

not to defend fcp here but if it's not true it just isn't true.

 

[Liam Hall]

You all may call me a wanker but AVID is rock solid and is very reliable.

You're a wanker.

No really, you're wanker.

Okay, only kidding, I agree with some of what you say, Avid is indeed rock solid, but for me the workflow is too rigid - and whilst I see it as a greatly improved product it still has a foot in the past in that you need other pieces of software and hardware to get even the most basic job done.

I need flexibitlty as much as possible as I work across a number of platforms. An integrated suite of tools is what I demand, not much to ask...

 

[Sebastian Gross]

If I had a firstborn, I would give him to you to fix Qmaster forever

nope you wouldn't.
pinched a nerve here. even if it was "just a saying". :thumbdown:

 

[Mark Collins]

They could fix the Gamma bug for a start. Then add native support for RED, DSLRs etc. 64 bit is a must and they should integrate FCP, Color, Motion and Soundtrack into one app. I could go on, but my render's finished...

Isn't there already native support for red? Or at the very least, the Red plugin works wonderfully.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Well I also think there is the significance of the 'short term buy'.

When Microsoft bought Softimage/XSI they wanted to do one thing: prove that a top-end 3D package didn't need Solaris/Unix to run and could run on Windows. After they ported XSI Maya also offered a Windows NT option.

When Apple bought Shake there was already an OSX port but it wasn't as popular as the Linux port because of the "Apple Tax". By selling Shake at $2000 off you were getting the hardware for free and pretty much everybody switched to OSX even though the OSX copy in my opinion ran like a dog compared to Linux and even Windows. And now as a result tons of compositors 'like' using Apple instead of using Linux. And as a result of that The Foundry has a huge customer base to serve that prefers OSX.

There is no reason for Apple to do that now. The Foundry is still selling Apple hardware for them to the same customers that used to be Apple Shake customers; they accomplished their goal of moving the user base to OSX.

Similarly I don't know that FCP is as important as it used to be. When Apple bought FCP Avid was deep in bed with Microsoft and Windows NT (and still is to a large degree). Adobe's editing solution was garbage and the company developing FCP couldn't find a buyer to distribute it for Apple. FCP was also locked into a licensing problem with Microsoft which prevented them from adopting Quicktime.

Apple didn't really want FCP. They just needed an editor for Apple and nobody seemed interested in doing it so they bought it themselves and started looking for a buyer while continuing on development. They also wanted to ensure that Quicktime was used at its core before selling it off.

Apple managed to piss off Adobe a few years back once again casting doubt as to whether Adobe would completely pull out of Apple development in frustration.

I don't think Apple likes having FCP in house. If they felt comfortable with Adobe (who is now in talks with Microsoft in how to fight Apple) or Avid they might let it die but even just a couple years ago FCP was necessary for Apple since it was the only high end editing application for OSX that they could depend on to not jump ship at any second.

So the question then becomes: What does Apple need FCP for *now*? Historically it was important. But so was Shake. Updating shake significantly would be a mistake in my opinion except to offer a "Batch" mode like flame's inside of FCP. Is Adobe still in danger of pulling out from the OSX platform? Is Avid in danger of letting the OSX versions languish? I would imagine these are the questions that Apple is asking itself right now. It's offering enough updates to sort of stay up to date while trying to decide if FCP is still necessary to move Mac Pros.

 

[scott william]

CS5 all the way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Jonathan L. Bowen]

Eh

Eh

I'm not an expert on all this I admit, but we edited our feature on Final Cut Pro with absolutely no problems and that is the standard workflow of this production company for all of their RED features. Same with my DP, who shoots on the RED, he always uses FCP. Nobody I know has had any issues, and doesn't care much about an upgrade.

The only thing that bothers me is the functionality of Color, which performs a lot like a beta program not a finished, fully ready program.

Very few professional users in my experience use Premiere, because Adobe just hasn't caught hold of the pro market except with Photoshop and After Effects. Obviously Light Room is great too, but I don't know anyone who uses Premiere, not to say it's bad, it's very good I think, in my experience playing around with it and editing a few shorts on it. I enjoyed it. But it just doesn't seem to have caught on with the high level professionals yet.

As for Avid, I still have no respect for Avid, and never will. It is a lazy company, way lazier than Apple with their pro apps ever could be, and the only reason they've made any progress lately is because they realized how bad their editing system was and that they were about 5x overpriced. I hate Avid, I found it to be completely useless and nobody I know in the indie world actually uses it. It's a legacy system, used mostly by high up professionals who simply don't want to learn another editing bay. Any system where you're not supposed to install anything else on it because "it's running Avid" clearly has problems. Mac has no such issues and it doesn't matter what else you run on your Mac Pro, you can run Final Cut just fine. I wouldn't use anything that doesn't run best on a Mac personally, I don't like owning inferior machines. My PC days are over.

 

[Albert Astorga Zepeda]

It is not about being able to Accomodate.

It is not about being able to Accomodate.

There's no need to fear just because in the future a high end semi-professional and professional will get even less sophisticated.

This is reality of the global economy that want to sell products to the masses.

If you are not able to accommodate to the latest movements than somehow your professional days are already numbered.

It is not being able to accomodate to new ways it is about not wanting to sit with your high profile client and have him/her see you open the same application his son uses to edit his youtube videos. if jobs wants the masses keep iMovie and fix, revamp and innovate with FCS. and about the global economy thing. it has always been Global now it just happens to be more noticeable.

 

[Albert Astorga Zepeda]

I too Jumped ship

I too Jumped ship

I moved to premiere pro cs 5 and I'm a very happy man. Something spectacular needs to happen to fcp before I go back, and I doubt that they can do it, if they can't even manage to have the footage look the same in the viewer and in an exported qt movie. It's a pity though, I was always an apple man, I have 6 apples standing here, but the love started fading when I realized that apps were changing not to make them do more, but to keep you whithin the apple environment. but ofcourse, the main trick was 4k footage working on the timeline:w00t:

it was a lengthy process but worth it. the integration between apps is quite good. oh and did I mention the fact that you can author really nice Blu-Rays I did one crazy project where I put about 6hrs of SD footage into a fully authored Blu-Ray and it looks surprisingly good on a 50" screen. it took awhile though.