TOPIC:

owen35 wrote:

I think Alex hit it right on the nose...

Alex said some interesting things. If he's right about the Resolve development team being 3x the size of Adobe Premiere's dev team, and 10x (!!!) the size of Apple's FCP team, that might explain part of the situation.

OTOH Blackmagic's total worldwide headcount is supposedly only 1,500 people, and total revenue is only $576 million: ymcinema.com/2022/04/17/blackmagic-desig...e-ambitious-founder/

By contrast, some sources have stated Apple has over 1,000 people just working on the iPhone camera. Apple's revenue from adapters and watch bands might be several hundred million $, IOW in the same ballpark as Blackmagic total corporate revenue for all hardware and software products.

Except for Resolve, the vast majority of Blackmagic's products are hardware. They are a hardware company even more than Apple is. So how can they aggressively develop Resolve when Apple cannot do likewise for FCP? Blackmagic is also burdened with a cross-platform product, whereas Apple need only target Apple platforms for FCP.

Another issue is video editing is both a heritage and a "halo" product for Apple. It brings people "into the showroom". Do Corvette sales recoup all development and manufacturing costs for Chevrolet? Who cares, it's a "halo" product. You could likewise argue that FCP profits are no more necessary to Apple, hence could justify a larger development budget than 1/10th of Blackmagic's Resolve development budget.

It's possible Apple has a large development effort underway now for an FCP follow on, but we just don't know that due to Apple's secrecy.

Turns out that Apple’s NAB event wasn't in Las Vegas at NAB.

Heading off shiny new features from Adobe and Blackmagic, Apple are directly courting Instagram and TikTok video creators.

Tyler Stalman on Instagram today: “Apple hosted an event for video creators this week and I gave a Mac workshop on Final Cut Pro workflows for creators.”



Shows that Apple do care about NAB and announcements from what they must see as competitors.

They could have picked any week of the last year or more to do this event for Instagrammers and TikTokers.

Before you start whining that that event wasn’t launching an Final Cut update with all the features you want, it shows…

- Final Cut Pro isn’t dead
- Apple is spending money promoting it
- Apple is allowing someone to share the fact that they are promoting it
- If Apple is doing similar training events for Final Cut for people in film and TV, maybe they’ll allow people involved to make that public

Playlist of Tyler’s Final Cut tutorials:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvepvlE2F9QvPYYKnQ9ewEKem4tEv0AcR

cool! this is what we deserve))))

alex4D wrote:

… Apple are directly courting Instagram and TikTok video creators. …

Final Cut/express anyone?
The FinalCut for the net-citizen, e.g. no collaboration, lots of 'smart' features (keying, audio), 'less is more'?
Just an idea…

I appreciate all the responses. There’s some decent info in some of these threads. The TikTok extravaganza does say a lot, actually. I really really don’t want to switch as Fcp’s organization and timeline is unparalleled. But, while we might create content that ends up on TikTok, TikTok creations are not where we need more capability for our workflows, and I feel like fcp is more than capable in that arena already. It’s sure to sell tons of phones and laptops though.
Pretty disappointed, not entirely surprised.

I love FCP, I use it all the time and I have done since the launch but it clearly is not going to be developed much further in it's current iteration. Whether there is a new product on the way remains to be seen

Concerning the silence.
What I am most concerned about is Apple's silence and its clear negative impact on the perception of the ProApps.

When Apple announced the move to ARM they indicated a roadmap and created buzz as people anticipated the new Macs. While a company may not want to reveal specifics to competitors, general statements are encouraging.

With FCP Apple avoids talking about features that their competitors already have. They avoid announcing a great change even if they need to withhold the details. They are far more willing to do the above for Macs which ProApps supposedly encourages the purchase of, than of the ProApps themselves.

I am completely lost by this marketing and PR approach to the ProApps. Keeping in mind that users switching to any other NLE or creative software opens the door to a future move to Windows.

Perhaps the question is not whether FCP is dead but is Apple's ProApps marketing dead or even destructive.

It's an interesting point Alex made about the amount of engineers for Resolve vs. FCP, but it's also a bit over simplified. Resolve is basically 5 separate apps all rolled into one, Color, Editing, Fusion, Fairlight & the Delivery page. On top of that Resolve is cross-platform, Mac, PC & Linux. But the bread and butter of Resolve is still Color, and I'm sure most of the engineers are needed to keep Resolve dominant in that area (not to mention the hardware integration that is needed as well). Fusion and Fairlight are also very deep applications and most likely have some pretty heavy engineering needs as well.
All I'm really saying is the comparison of engineering staff needs some caveats.

smojo wrote:

amount of engineers for Resolve vs. FCP, but it's also a bit over simplified. Resolve is basically 5 separate apps all rolled into one...

The FCP team has to do FCP, Motion and Compressor. Even though they are separate apps, the same team does all of those. I'm not saying those are equal to all the Resolve apps but it's a lot more than just FCP. Resolve is cross-platform, albeit using the Qt framework which handles much of the hard work for them.

it's funny to read when they write that apple has a small development team and some problems. do they really have something with finances or something else. Apple seems to be the richest company in the World and if it wants, it can buy any other company without any problems) And what prevents Apple from recruiting more cool specialists for this? There are a lot of people who love FCPX and live by it, who could easily improve their staff, the same Chris Hocking author of commandpost, Brawtoolbox, I would like to see such people in the FCPX team.

This question was first asked the day FCPX was released. LOL!!

I imagine this will start impacting third-party plugin developers that are specific to FCP.

On the one hand they invest a lot of work in adding a needed feature to FCP with a growing risk Apple will add a similar feature. On the other hand Apple continues to keep FCP in a dormant state and as users abandon FCP they abandon the plugins.


Saw an interesting post by a prominent FCP YouTuber on Color Finale. Some users point out they no longer need it as they've moved to Resolve. Others point out that FCP plus the Color Finale is expensive compared to Resolve which has this built-in for free. Even the paid version of Resolve (assuming you don't buy a BMD camera) costs less.

The YouTuber acknowledges that time is running out for Apple to advance FCP.

Imagine the cost of the BRAW plugin vs built-in support in Resolve.

Apple's silence is not only hurting their product but they're hurting the third-party developers.

My hunch is we have a few more weeks at best because if Apple features Resolve at WWDC and has no hints on FCP there's going to be an acceleration of the exodus.

Said that the magnetic timeline, networking, and trackless nature were a brilliant direction followed by a collapse in innovative features.

Truly sad that Apple is clearly NOT listening to the user base in any meaningful response way.

cseeman wrote:

I imagine this will start impacting third-party plugin developers that are specific to FCP.

I think there's probably more FCP users out there than people realize.

narimangafurov wrote:

...what prevents Apple from recruiting more cool specialists for this? There are a lot of people who love FCPX and live by it....

Rewriting the core of a heavily multithreaded NLE requires rare skills. In addition to prior experience with NLE core development, those people would have to know XCode, Instruments, Grand Central Dispatch, and Swift Concurrency like the back of their hand. They must be highly skilled at debugging race conditions and thread synchronization. They would have to be willing to work 16 hrs a day seven days a week, for several years. Plus, they need excellent communication skills and a personality amenable to collaborative teamwork. No matter what a company pays, very few people are available at that rarified level. This was discussed in the 1993 book "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell.

FCP needs more than grafting on new features. There are some issues with the current software architecture and object model. This impacts scalability and reliability on certain complex timelines - no matter what hardware. You won't see this mentioned on top feature requests for FCP or the "Tim Cook Letter" because those consider superficial, user-facing items. There are deeper issues in FCP that need attention.

One possibility is the FCP object model and frameworks were originally designed to achieve low latency on simpler timelines. It was super fast when first released, and it's still fast today. However, on some complex and long timelines, the code path becomes very recursive as it fetches and processes all the attributes required. OTOH, on one complex timeline I examined, Resolve was slower than FCP. See below performance traces I did with the XCode Instruments tool.

Another problem is FCP (and I think Resolve) is doing too much work on the main "run thread." A key issue in GUI design is the run thread or UI thread is just supposed to handle user actions, system events, and refresh the UI. The UI thread of a well-designed app should delegate tasks to other worker threads. However FCP (and to a lesser extent Resolve) do a tremendous amount of work on the main UI thread. That is often why you see sluggish response, beachballs, etc. The entire software architecture and related software frameworks should probably be redesigned with a heavier emphasis on multithreading.

As part of that redesign, they can consider how to properly handle distributed collaboration, mobile devices, new UI approaches, etc. It is likely difficult to add major elements to the current codebase. It should probably be rewritten in Swift and use Swift Concurrency instead of Grand Central Dispatch. If new cloud-based software frameworks are under development, it would make sense to leverage those, not try to "roll your own" distributed collaboration. I have no idea if any of that is underway; this is only speculation. But the FCP developmental landscape is a lot bigger than user features.

 joema.smugmug.com/XCode-Instruments-trac...erformance/n-tBwgCJ/

Thank you Joema! this is very useful

Using FCP daily for small information videos, my needs are minimal.
Features to speed up audio processing would be a plus: ducking, audio levels. Without requiring the perfection of manual adjustments.
Motion remains unrivaled for program graphics libraries, especially menus.
If 10 years after its creation the code is rewritten to remove Intel compatibility, no problem.
Finally, if Randy Ubillo is willing to interrupt his world tour to enjoy life for 4 months a year to participate in the development of FCP that would be great news! Thanks for his vision, great tool in my case. Compared to FCP 3 to 7, no more errors in the checkboxes, fluidity, simplicity, always focused on the content. This is fine for me, if I like other software, I hope I won't be forced to switch. I hope Apple will keep its commitment to consult professionals who have different needs. While every new feature is welcome, I enjoy fcp on a daily basis.


Translated

This interview with Grant Petty on Resolve really highlights why they're ahead of Apple in many ways.
nofilmschool.com/philosophy-grant-petty-...re-blackmagic-design

First, they're willing to talk about Resolve while Apple does zero PR.
Petty explains the philosophy and the practical nature of their AI implementation. There's a healthy example of what Resolve does with AI... and therefore what we know FCP lacks. It's clear that saving time is important, a claim that people make about FCP's features. Without listing the roadmap, you clearly understand where they might go with features and improvements.

BTW while Apple supposedly sends people to NAB one wonders if they actually learn anything about the market or even about how to PR their ProAps. Apple doesn't seem to listen and certainly doesn't communicate.

As the interview notes, it's about trust. People trust Blackmagic and they do not trust Apple. Apparently, Apple doesn't see the lack of trust as an issue to be addressed.

joema wrote:

some sources have stated Apple has over 1,000 people just working on the iPhone camera.

If that's even anywhere close to being true, then it just gives credence to the phrase "too many cooks spoil the broth". The iPhone camera isn't anything special or unique to phones. The wide angle camera even on the top end model is a mushy, soft mess. Must be easy to get a job in that department as qualifications clearly don't matter much... if the quote is true.

Even the most recent Vegas update includes auto-captions speech-to-text and smart masking.

While it may sound like we're beating a dead horse (and perhaps the FCP horse is genuinely dead) FCP is really dead last amongst major NLEs. Even a significant catch-up update is no more than that. A late-stage catch-up.

Either Apple needs to make an innovative feature update or courtesy announce the EOL of FCP. Apple's silence is a major problem.

Appleinsider.com is reporting that a leaker states that Apple is developing FCP for the iPad to be released in 2024. If true, and that is a big IF, that would also explain the near absence of any updates.