Apple Response to “Final Cut Pro in TV and Film” Open Letter

Yeah, very slow to change, but that won't matter when TV and cinema are less than a fraction of the content that's being produced.  TV and film are already so small a segment of what I see my students consume in terms of content that the landscape itself will ultimately dictate how post is completed.

DaveM wrote:

Not trying to morph this into a features-bug discussion, but there is no real need to "flatten" multicam clips.

With the angle viewer closed, only the curreent angle shown in the timeline is being played, just like any other clip. No extra resources are being used. You _can_ still edit things, as needed. Way better than "classic" FCP.

If you have several multicam clips in a timeline and you want to simplify things, you could always make one or more compound clips.

What else about being able to "flatten" multicam clips do you need?


Cheers.

they are many reasons making flatten multicam clips would be way better.
( Resources allocation aside ... and yes an extended multicam project is "heavier" )

and what a  bummer to dive in the multicam for any stab, etc. You need to "recut" the clip inside the Multiclip, bummer and waste of time.

Less control on the Roles for the sound. Same Role for every clip in the Multicam clip. So you lose control on what you send to mix in term of "tracks" , because out of Fcp tracks are back.

"We will attempt to save..." Oh goodness! FCP never has to attempt after a crash.  My students are great at smashing FCP into a crashed submission, and they never lose the progress they've made.

To people who are talking about the changing media landscape or kids learning FCP and they will bring it into the future; that is not as big a part of the story as you think. If you are doing personal projects where you are the lead, or if you are a one man band, then that is fine. I'm sure a bunch of people are making decent money like that doing web videos for clients or producing their own content for YouTube or whatever. But if you are trying to really make a living in the established media environment (I'm not just talking about feature films, everything from corporate videos to Marvel blockbusters, online advertising to prestige documentary series) you do not get to decide for yourself what software you will use. If you are working for a big company, they have invested tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment, support, and infrastructure. If you are a freelancer (even working remotely on your own gear) they will require you to conform to their workflow. They need to be able to transfer your project to another editor (whether it is because you died, quit, got fired, or they want to switch you to a different project). They go for the lowest common denominator. In broadcast and theatrical, the infrastructure drives everyone to Avid. In lowers end corporate and commercial work, everyone is on Adobe. The only thing that will change either of these is if Apple creates a product that delivers what the industries want or need, and if it is clearly an improvement over what they already have.

Oliver Peters wrote:

SW: "- Motion Roundtrip ! c'mon !
- Internal AFF export !!! (the existing external has limits)
- A updated and better stabilisation
- An usable Noise reduction
- a mixing panel
- a real "Consolidate" ala Avid (exporting rushes as used in Sequence with handle)
- a way to "flatten" edited multicam like legacy Fcp
- collaborative process"

LOL. Not joking at all. I'm all for features if they enhance the workflow. But, let me offer some mild push-back.

- Motion roundtrip? Why? There's no Avid roundtrip to anything and presumably those editors would be the target audience to convert.
- No NLE has great video noise reduction when you compare that to Neat.
- Mixing panel. I would agree, however, I do find the audio roles quite versatile. I do find mixing in Premiere easier, but mastering with stems and export variations are superior in FCP to any other NLE because of roles.
- Agreed on consolidate, but it's not that easy with all media types. Premiere's function is terrible. Avid's is based on Avid media, not linked, native files.
- AAF export. I would agree, although AAF out of Avid is problematic. FWIW, you can export AAF out of Logic. OTOH, most of my Pro Tools mixers still prefer OMF. That's an ancient format that Avid barely supports anymore.
- Flatten Mcam. I know the arguments why this isn't needed, but I'd like to see that, too.
- Collaboration. I'm not sure whether or not that's really needed. What is needed is proper Library or Event locking so that I can open a Library in read-only mode if another editor has it open.
- Better stabilization. Why? FCP currently is equal to what you have in the other NLEs. They are all a crapshoot and success varies with the type of shot.

- Motion roundtrip. Avid doesn't present it so... we don't need it ? What argument is this ? Have it would be great, period. And that would be so easy to implement. Why did they hire Wes Plate anyway ?

- "No NLE has great video noise reduction when you compare that to Neat. ?" hum, I thought Resolve was also a NLE

- yes mixing panel is for pre-mix or what you don't send to mix, great in both cases

- Consolidate ? If Marquee can do it with noreal control (and flaws) Apple can do it ... (from within the app I guess it would be great)

- Flatten : audio Roles ! better control on clips ... bummer to dive in the multicam for any stab, etc

- Collaboration multi-editors is the basis of Avid predominance for some kind of work.

- is absolutly true that success varies for stab between NLE. But stab in Fcp could be way better, so why stay frozen in development ?


Anyway ... main subject : that answer from Apple is a bucket of lukewarm watter

This article and the writer's reaction video about After Effects are both worth the time to review.

www.provideocoalition.com/reaction-re-wr...ffects-from-scratch/

There are a lot of parallels to this conversation.

My guess is that Apple will move FCP forward at a faster pace now that the Mac is on Apple Silicon and optimized for video production.

Plesse Apple don't make excuses. Final Cut Pro is too lazy, too slow to update, and not as functional or professional as Davinci.

Oliver Peters wrote:

This article and the writer's reaction video about After Effects are both worth the time to review.

www.provideocoalition.com/reaction-re-wr...ffects-from-scratch/

There are a lot of parallels to this conversation.

I think this is a great observation, but Apple has already shown a willingness to do exactly this. In a way, since FCP has reached a wall for the kinds of user it can reach widely, there is nothing holding Apple back. With AE, Adobe has everything to lose. Everyone saw what happened to Apple with the FCPX release debacle. I currently don't edit much anymore. I actually work in VFX and motion graphics, almost entirely in AE. And if Adobe pulled a FCPX style rebuild (especially one that killed all our plugins and scripts), it would be a huge blow. It would definitely open up the possibility of my employer switching to something else entirely, which is not in the cards right now. FCP can do whatever they want and probably not lose most of the users they have, as long as it improves things for their current users (who are sort of a self selected open minded group if they are using FCP to begin with). They only have bigger fish and prestige to gain. Just my thoughts.

Just wanted to throw some love Motion's way, and I wish Apple does the same. As a long-time graphic designer who's gotten more into motion graphics, I highly appreciate the free flow creative processes Motion allows me to play with. But there are long-standing bugs (ex: keyframing PDFs pages getting ignored with time, bugled retiming on videos if relinked, the inability to keyframe Dynamic stroke parameters over time, and--in the latest release--filters which don't show up in the timeline but do in the Layers panel) I wish the dev team sorts out. More fundamentally, though, having Motion take full advantage of available hardware while working with Particles and Emitters would be a huge boon, and probably something which would draw more users. Very often, working on complex 3d particles taxes only 1 or 2 CPUs and very little of my GPU, leaving these kids of projects slow and difficult to iterate, even on decent 2 year old hardware.

Nice, let's throw some training videos at those pesky bugs, that'll show them!

credits

My guess is that Apple will move FCP forward at a faster pace now that the Mac is on Apple Silicon and optimized for video production.

Ha ha ha.

Maybe the fallacy in thinking here is that FCP should be something different than what it is. Apple has created a broad-spectrum "platform" designed to work with third-party add-ons. Would more features be nice? Sure. Is that in Apple's interest? Probably not.

Oliver Peters wrote:

Maybe the fallacy in thinking here is that FCP should be something different than what it is. Apple has created a broad-spectrum "platform" designed to work with third-party add-ons. Would more features be nice? Sure. Is that in Apple's interest? Probably not.

The fallacy is to think that new features or the lack of new features correlates to change in mindshare in TV, film, business or education.

But let’s say features matter. Apple hasn’t created a ‘broad-spectrum platform’ in Final Cut or Motion.

They’ve done the minimum they can get away with. Partially implemented FCP XML is the only way in or out of the app for third parties. Why ‘partially implemented’? Because FCP XML still can’t accurately express everything in a Final Cut library. After over 10 years of hard(?) work from the Pro Apps team.

Workflow Extensions remind me of QuicKeys. Seems Apple is just too scared to let third parties (or even other Pro Apps) connect deeply with Final Cut Pro.

I suspect the true history of Final Cut is a bunch of idiots in power in other parts of Apple have screwed over and held the Pro Apps team back. A team who seem to have had little power - even over their own destiny.

The question is how to change that power imbalance.

Love,

Alex4D

That's pretty damning, don't you think?

Worse option: The Pro Apps team are no longer any good. I prefer my better option, unless you have a better theory.

alex4D wrote:

...Apple hasn’t created a ‘broad-spectrum platform’ in Final Cut or Motion....They’ve done the minimum they can get away with...I suspect the true history of Final Cut is a bunch of idiots in power in other parts of Apple have screwed over and held the Pro Apps team back. A team who seem to have had little power - even over their own destiny..

There is a valid issue about FCP's rate of progress vs (say) Resolve over the past few years. However it's not limited to "industry workflow" features, which was the main point of the letter.

Re prioritization of industry workflow features, consider Avid which has a near-total lock on the traditional industry. However their 2021 annual report shows this only yielded $46 million operating income, vs Apple at $118 billion. Apple's 2021 employee headcount is 154,000 vs Avid at 1,500.

By contrast in 2002 when Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain on legacy FCP, Apple's operating income was $17 *million*. I don't know Avid's operating income in 2002 but their net income was $3 million. Apple's employee headcount in 2002 was 10,000 vs Avid at about 1,500 then. Murch detailed some Avid vs FCP issues in his book "Behind the Seen".

In that era, the market segment of professional editing was a much larger share of Apple's revenue than today. It's possible that today's market segment for pro industry NLE workflows does not warrant the large investment to continuously develop and support that.

Even though the letter to Tim Cook mostly emphasized that FCP should better support industry workflows, the problem with FCP is much bigger than that. Its rate of progress for "new media" or non-industry workflows is not rapid, either. What about the argument that "Apple will abandon FCP just like Aperture"? There is a significant and growing market beyond the traditional film industry. This (along with Apple's multimedia video heritage) implies they will not abandon FCP, but I suppose anything is possible.

Another possibility is Apple is actually working on a major new version of FCP but we don't know it. If so what is taking so long? Why doesn't Apple better maintain FCP while the new version is developed? Here is a possibility based on years of work developing a major commercial software product which needed total redesign while the legacy version was maintained:

- FCP is mostly written in Objective-C and is essentially a Cocoa product. The persistent data store is based on SQLite which is a single-user database based on an in-process code library.

- FCP needs to address many areas, including distributed collaboration, UI and scalability, mobile devices, also the underlying Motion engine likely needs redesign, etc.

- A major redesign of FCP using Objective-C, Cocoa and SQLite is likely not feasible. Frameworks and software languages have finite lifetimes. Stack traces from FCP indicate small parts of it have already been re-written in Swift. However I don't think that implies a gradual morphing transition to a new version, rather an interim approach for developers to test some ideas and get familiarity while the underlying frameworks mature. IOW they probably need to re-write the whole thing in Swift and even consider using Swift UI and Swift Concurrency rather than Grand Central Dispatch. Yet those areas are in various states of maturity, esp. Swift UI.

- Mobile: Apple's strategy on this is unknown. How the FCP plugin-oriented approach would work on mobile is unclear. It's true that Resolve for iPadOS was just announced, and Blackmagic claims it uses the same software "code base" as desktop. I tend to doubt that because Resolve is written using the Qt cross-platform framework. Technically Qt exists on mobile but I doubt anyone has ever ported anything like Resolve -- Qt is designed for cross-platform desktop development, not mobile. What method Blackmagic used for their iPadOS version is unknown, but they obviously have a very productive development team. Although Resolve accepts plugins, it is more self-contained and feature complete than the core FCP product is. 

- The previous product I worked on reached a similar crossroad where it either had to be hugely upgraded or re-written in a new software language and using new frameworks. There were three possible directions: (1) Exit the market due to the development expense and differing corporate priorities , (2) Upgrade the current product using the same software language and frameworks, (3) Totally re-write the product using new languages and frameworks. We chose the total rewrite which was a major risk but it was successful. During that period the legacy product received minor upgrades and bug fixes.

- Why not do both -- major feature improvements to the legacy product plus develop the new one? To some degree it's not a matter of corporate expense. At this level it's difficult to obtain the people with the required skill sets to simultaneously develop two major similar products. Beyond development it would generally require separate product managers and separate test teams. For a large distributed product it may take 2:1 developer/test ratio or even a test engineer for every developer.

What a great response, Joema. Detailed and not argumentative. Refreshing.

Read the Resolve for iPad thread. BMD is forthright about the direction they're taking Resolve.

At this point, Apple's silent approach is genuinely self-defeating. Given the difference in approach to the public on development, it really does look like Apple is allowing FCP to die. There's no other reason I can see to justify the silence.

Joema, if Apple indicated as much I'd have more hope. Good sincere speculation but there's no reason we should have to take that route. If all they said was a big update is coming, it'll take time, be patient. That would be more meaningful.