TOPIC:

Darren wrote:

Then the filmmakers were asked which app they wanted to use, each could choose either. When hands went up, nobody wanted to use FCP X.

The sad thing is that if they could experience cutting narrative with FCPX magnetic timeline compared to a track based system they would be blow away at the efficiencies of FCPX. Trying to rearrange shots and try iterations is laughably difficult on Avid, Premier and Legacy FCP.

cseeman wrote:

Complex is pro, simple is amateur, boggles my mind how most people can't see how untrue that is.

If you take that to a logical conclusion one could argue that a "pro" should code their own NLEs rather than buy a "pre packaged" one.

Ease of use with the flexibility to customization for specific purpose is "pro" IMHO. If an NLE does something for you exactly as you need it, in fewer steps, that's "pro."

The same reasoning can extend to plugins as well. How often I hear someone say, "but I can build that myself." That's fine but if the plugin gets you there in 10 minutes compared to building it yourself in an hour, the former may be more professionally effective. This is especially so given the low price of some plugins.

The implication is that one can't be a professional unless one uses visibly complex tools. I'm sure many of us have seen excellent videos edited on so-called amateur software and mediocre products created with "professional" software. In fields I've been involved with (professionally) true professionals produced high quality despite their tools. Discussions of this type seem to avoid mention of the years of study and practice needed to gain the knowledge and experience required of those I'd recognize as true professionals.

Possibly as we become increasingly familiar with FCPX and also because the approach used is so different from other NLEs we tend to think of it as a less complex program. Is it really though? Judging by the number of FCPX questions and discussions a lot of users seem to benefit from help from fellow aficionados. This is hardly what I'd expect when pros use amateur software!

So where's my update???

Do you know I'm agreeing with you? I must be crap at writing today..

The first and most absurd complaints about FCPX were how the interface looked too 'fun and colorful'. This is as opposed to the prison grey aesthetic of FCP7 that my High School was decked out in.

Because of how simple FCPX is to learn the basics to get started cutting video, people assume there aren't a ton of features that could take years to master even half of them well.

Back on topic. HULK NO LIKE WAIT FOR UPDATE!!! (that sounded more like Cookie Monster)

tpayton wrote:

According to the chart that Apple presented at NAB 2011, FCP legacy had approx 2 million users then.

And it took until 2008 to get 1 million users. Hence the comment about FCPX "continues to grow at a pace never before seen in professional post production". This make sense because as of the 2013 SCRI report, FCPX has over 1mil seats in a little over 2 years. It took 8 years for FCP legacy to get to one million.

To compute the ration of FCPX to FCP7 users you would need to assume that some of those are switchers from FCP7, so lets guess and say there are 2.5 million FCP users total. So then 1 mil / 2.5 mil, or almost of Apples market share would be FCPX.

Philip Hodgets also talked about the the SCRI report from a couple of years ago here:

www.philiphodgetts.com/2012/04/some-fina...t-pro-x-data-points/

I guess it really comes down to what you consider to be a success. Bums on seats or doing top notch creative work.
I'm still yet to come across ONE major company in my city who is making Film and Television programs with FCP X.

Eventually the early adopters will bubble to the surface but Apple needs to put more effort in if they want another Cold Mountain moment sooner rather than later.

I believe the COLD MOUNTAIN moment is already underway. Larry Jordan, Sam Mestman, and others have spoken about several projects that are already cutting, though specifics haven't been given.

Disproportionate wrote:

I believe the COLD MOUNTAIN moment is already underway. Larry Jordan, Sam Mestman, and others have spoken about several projects that are already cutting, though specifics haven't been given.

Like this one? Focus 2014

To be a fly on the wall in the edit bay, finished shooting 2013, released 2015, takes a full year to edit, gosh, I would love to be the editor paid by the hour on this project...

MsJustine, you must surely be aware that the process for a feature film isn't "get the footage, edit it, export it" right?
It doesn't revolve solely around the editor. There's VFX, cleanup, colour, sfx etc. There's a tsunami of delays just waiting to happen. Many of which will cause the editor more work. And of course there'll be endless dailies and screenings with artists and directors etc. Cutting a feature that actually has a budget behind it is a thoroughly complex process. One that I can't pretend to be familiar with myself. But it's not as simple as 'getting paid by the hour to edit for a year'. I'd hazard a guess that a huge amount of the editor's time will be spent taking notes and in meetings about early cuts, and subsequently pulling their hair out over a constant barrage of re-edits and last minute screenings.

Seanus wrote:

I guess it really comes down to what you consider to be a success. Bums on seats or doing top notch creative work.
I'm still yet to come across ONE major company in my city who is making Film and Television programs with FCP X.

in that same presentation at NAB, Apple said that the number of users wasn't what made them "wake up in the morning" but rather they wanted to create a great user experience. Hence they were willing to ditch FCP legacy in order to do something new.

I would add to that one of the overall goals of Apple, as Simon Sinek puts it, "Challenging the status quo." (you can see that here www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action)

From my perspective FCPX has absolutely upped my game because the technical hoops I used to jump through are mostly gone. And the user experience is much better than in was in 7.

As far as challenging the status quo, if nothing else FCPX is just that.

If you think about it Apple doesn't need to make Pro Apps. They want to. Their goals as communicated throughout the "In Action" section of FCPX, are clearly to be used in professional environments, not consumer ones.

This is a great little article from Studio Daily yesterday about some TV news switching to FCPX from 7.

www.studiodaily.com/2014/06/why-detroits...-to-final-cut-pro-x/

This is humorous around our shop because we just hired an editor who was working in TV news and editing on Avid. Almost every edit session he will make a comment about 'It is crazy that more new stations don't use X, it is so much faster."

I think you will find more Mac's in a professional or business environment then in the home consumer environment.
With the iToys (iPad, iPhone and co) is a different story.
But don't forget Apple makes a nice $ with content which also flows over to hardware. Why wouldn't they over the tools to create the content?

What other reason would they have to sale FCP X for under 300 bucks?

Scrubelicious wrote:

What other reason would they have to sale FCP X for under 300 bucks?

Because in order to run it, you need a mac. If you want to run it to it's fullest potential, you need a maxed out mac pro, and those suckers can get pricy.

When you don't just sell software, you can fiddle with pricing more.

Darren wrote:

Scrubelicious wrote:

What other reason would they have to sale FCP X for under 300 bucks?

Because in order to run it, you need a mac. If you want to run it to it's fullest potential, you need a maxed out mac pro, and those suckers can get pricy.

When you don't just sell software, you can fiddle with pricing more.

exactly... thats why they need ProApps

In the 90's, when Apple's % of the market was at it's lowest [1.5%] and Windows was at it's biggest, I think Apple had legitimate fears of what would happen if key developers walked away from the Mac platform.

While I think the chances of that happening these days are slim (even though the Mac is still only about 12% of PC sales), maybe in the back of their minds they're still nervous to completely ceed key creative applications entirely to 3rd parties like Adobe and AVID. What would happen if tomorrow Adobe decided to say, "We're going PC only!". Again, I don't think that would happen, but it's an interesting mental experiment. While a small percentage of total PC sales, I think in creative workplaces Apple % would be much higher. So Adobe walking away is pretty impossible to imagine.

There was a time when Avid MC was Mac only.
I'm not sure in ancient history if at one point the original Premiere (in the days of Randy Ubilos) was Mac only for a time?

In any case, Creative Cloud and MC/Symphony are cross platform so they provide an exit strategy for users which, in some ways, is even more dangerous than becoming Windows only. Basically, with those NLEs (now add Lightworks and Resolve) one can dump Apple hardware at any point.

Apple has no reason to trust any of them to sell to Apple's hardware strengths.

I remember very clearly in the late 90s when Avid announced that they were dropping support for the Mac and focusing solely on Windows moving forward. It sent shockwaves through the creative industry- here's an article from 1999 that details the split:

www.independent-magazine.org/node/416

The official line from Avid was that the Mac lacked the technical specs they needed- Macs were only shipping with 3 PCI slots, and that was not enough to house all those massively expensive proprietary cards necessary to push video through Avid's pipeline. Fast forward just a year or so and FCP 1.0 turned that argument on its ear with software-only realtime performance.

The real story with Avid and Apple was more complicated, thanks to none other than Microsoft. Microsoft partnered up with Avid and by 1998 owned about 9% of the company. They used this ownership stake to pressure Avid to break with Apple in an attempt to kill QuickTime. If you want to read the details on this, Roughly Drafted has an excellent 2007 article:

www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07...19-FE5842A41BD1.html

Long story short: there were too many outside forces that were out of Apple's control, and that had a huge negative impact on Apple's ability to sell high end systems. This is one big reason that the Pro Apps are here to stay.

Bill

And let's not forget that Adobe stopped developing Premier for the Mac for several years. Like Word, it lagged well behind it's PC counterpart.

Not that it mattered much, as mid-00's Premier Pro wasn't much to be envious of.

It really amazing how far Adobe has brought the product over about the last 5 years. Which makes the people touting Premier and telling people that Final Cut will never be relevant again sound insanely short-sighted.

And then there's BlackMagic, slowly building out an NLE within a world-class colour tool. A FREE NLE, mind you.

Interesting times.

Those articles are great. The year Avid declared they may no longer develop a mac version was at the NAB where Apple introduced FCP v1 at NAB that same year. It has been said it was in retaliation to Apple releasing an NLE.

There were 50,000 Avid users in 1999, boggles the mind how much has changed.

Disproportionate wrote:

And let's not forget that Adobe stopped developing Premier for the Mac for several years. Like Word, it lagged well behind it's PC counterpart.

Not that it mattered much, as mid-00's Premier Pro wasn't much to be envious of.

It really amazing how far Adobe has brought the product over about the last 5 years. Which makes the people touting Premier and telling people that Final Cut will never be relevant again sound insanely short-sighted.

And then there's BlackMagic, slowly building out an NLE within a world-class colour tool. A FREE NLE, mind you.

Interesting times.

But don't forget free software promotes priority hardware, which we can clearly see development stages at this time.

It's interesting. DaVinci Resolve is building a NLE inside the color grading application. Everybody says that it is so similar to FCPX. The inspector, the track colors, many things look like FCPX, except the most important editing feature of FCPX: the trackless, magnetic timeline. Blackmagic is slowly building FCP8: not premiere, not Avid, no FCPX: FCP8

No multicam in Resolve though yet.