Why Apple built Final Cut Pro X(sachin.posterous.com) |
Why Apple built Final Cut Pro X(sachin.posterous.com) |
But it'd be tough on a number of levels to outright cancel such a successful product as Final Cut Pro. And it's beneficial for them to have a stable of very capable media app developers that help drive design of and exercise system frameworks like AVFoundation and GCD and provide code/expertise that trickles down into media apps that are more aligned with the company's focus and main customers.
And I think they do think there's more profit to be made from a much larger audience of prosumer/pro-but-non-top-10-blockbuster-movie-editors. Bet they're right, too.
Avid probably couldn't make a radically different Media Composer even if they wanted. The risk of alienating current customers is too great, and the resources required to maintain multiple products targeted to the same market are too many.
Reminds me of what Apple did to the smartphone market. While everyone was busy chasing the enterprise market, Apple built a smartphone for the consumer market. Enterprise customers are consumers too and they brought their "consumer" phone to work. Yada yada... Apple disrupts the enterprise smartphone market.
I see FCPX in a similar light. It may not be as capable as the other video editors out there in terms of format support / workflow support (and I include FCP7 in the list of competitors), but what it does do, it does really well. FCPX is blazingly fast compared to the other video editors out there, and that is a killer feature. Over time we can expect Apple to provide better workflow support - they've already indicated that they are adding xml support and a few other things that will go towards addressing many criticisms of workflow changes. Format support, and in particular tape support, may get left behind, but in this brave new world, tape is less and less relevant.
There are two types of people: People who pay for video editing software and those that don't. I actually paid for Adobe Elements a few years back. It was painful, but I needed it for a specific reason. But I seriously doubt I will ever pay again (unless it's $2.99 or something). Most people will be fine with iMovie or Windows Live Movie Maker. It does 99% of what you need and braindead simple.
My wife (and her friends) regularly record GBs of video each week. The problem is that nothing in FCPX fixes their core issues -- most revolve around video management, and not actual editing.
There are amateur video editors out there, but I don't think its a growing market. It's not small, but I think Apple is making a poor bet if they think the millions of ppl creating video with their phones and cameras is going to buy this product.
Apple's really pushing a premium consumer biz model, leaving professionals in the uncomfortable position of not having a professional platform.
The way in/out points and compound clips work in FCPX is simply ridiculously awesome -- it's kind of what After Effects tries to do with compound clips implemented in a realtime modeless manner.
Was Apple insensitive (e.g. by halting FC Studio sales the moment it released FCPX)? You bet. Did it bungle the PR? No question. Is FCPX a non-pro tool? Pro tools are tools pros use. I have no doubt some pros will use FCPX and some FCPX users will turn pro. Will a lot of FCP7 users cling to the old ways or switch to Premiere or Avid or whatever? Probably.
You mean, the way it forgets the in/out points you set on a clip? Yeah, I LOVE that. So much more fun to re-trim each and every clip every time you click on it. Huge timesaver. /sarc
You don't.
I can't speak for feature film editors, but virtually all of the commercial film editors I know still, to this day, use Avid for most of their projects. Editors are a finicky bunch, and I can certainly see Apple realizing that to truly compete in that market, it's all or nothing. The problem with FCP was always the uncertainty of it, hence the reason Avid is still in use at most shops, despite the fact that editors love to bash it.
As time marches on, I can see where FCP might, yet again, be at the forefront of innovation. The problem is, busy editors don't REALLY want innovation. They want proven systems that work. I think Apple made the right choice.
What I think the article did miss is the recent FAQ announcement by Apple detailing where they intend to take the software from here. I'm not a video editor, nor do I play one on TV, so I can't speak to how that addresses the wants of the pro audience, but they are at least making an attempt to explain how they will be incorporating pro needs into future patches. How that turns out, is a completely different question.
With Adobe you can work in any of Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere. With FCP it's just that little bit harder. So if you can't match the features of your competitors, make one that will outperform everyone.
Essentially: Speed, simplicity, beauty, and most importantly the illusion that the software is doing your work for you.
The geeks, that is, the mavens and influencers, folks whom others when to for advice about what computer to buy, were buying Macs because it really was such a nice environment. It still is.
Their strategy for ipod too reflects this as well: target the well-heeled, early adopters, people who like to chatter about their toys. Make the brand desirable through organic PR -- that is, build a truly desirable product even if it's not quite at a mass-consumer price point, and let the pent up desire sell the lower end, targeting various price points with well-vetted technology and UI.
I don't use Final Cut Pro, but it sounds like they're taking a different tack than usual. I don't understand it. This article didn't help.
At the end of the read all i know is it doesn't have features, it doesn't support any format... but it does it well so because of that I should buy apple.
I don't buy it.
This is quite possibly the most wrong comment I've ever read on hacker news. every kid on earth with a skateboard or snowboard or BMX bike will be buying this software as soon as they can afford it.
But again, for him its usually management (I actually recommended something I saw called Project Odessa to him -- not sure if he's using it though). He does super simple titling, and on occassion a soundtrack. But he doesn't need something like FCPX. And if he did use it, he wouldn't buy it. Give him a copy, and I'm sure he'd use it (if he had a Mac), but free does everything he needs.
This isn't to say that some won't buy it (clearly the singular of anecdote isn't data), but I think its like non-free and non-pro music mixing software. Sure there is a market for it, but its just not huge.
More than that, they tarnish the Apple brand.
That brand is one of the most valuable in the industry today. Apple can execute well but a lot of their success comes from their brand.
Apple’s video software people may be in serious trouble, the rest of Apple is not.
It also doesn't support a few pro workflows I don't understand (multiple camera editing, etc)... seemingly because the new interface is a radical departure. It uses a single, treelike track instead of multiple tracks, and doesn't easily map to these workflows. This to me feels like an "Innovator's Dilemma" situation: the new interface does many things overwhelmingly better, but has important regressions.
The regressions will be fixed or outweighed in time. For now (perhaps not for long) other software, including the previous version of Final Cut, compares favorably.
They needed to rebuild for 64-bit. This is what you get when you start over. I expect that patches and new plugins will turn it around by next year.
Lost in all this is the incredible Motion 5 at $50. Learning that and selling some templates (with decent Parameter Rigs) for Final Cut Pro X users would seem to be a nice way to make some extra cash.
I actually don't think this is quite right. I'll quote Gary Adcock's Macworld review:
"Most of the features introduced in FCP X are welcome and badly needed. Some are long overdue. Still, others are positively jarring and require a change in mindset to appreciate."
There is no doubt that Apple made it unusable for high-end pros (for the time being, at least) but I feel they also added many things that high-end pros would have really appreciated, had they been able to use it seriously. So it's not quite as simple as "amatueurs only" (even if you're talking about advanced amateurs.)
The transition is just too rough.
QTX / QTKit don't provide a way to:
- save in formats other than H.264 for iPhone or computer
- select datarates other than 2x for iPhone or 1x computer
- export just the audio
- export a still / image from your video
- do simple in/out copy/paste editing
They liked the new features and interface changes they saw, they liked the complete rewrite (64 bit, much faster, background rendering) and, most importantly, they didn't know which features would be missing.
> Apple can execute well but a lot of their success comes
> from their brand.
I think you may be proving my point for me though. Apple has always relied heavily on their brand, but while Jobs was away their brand took some major hits, even while they had many sound examples of solid execution. It wasn't until Jobs returned and began reinvigorating Apple (with iMac, OSX, MacBooks, iPod, iTunes, etc.) that the damage began to be repaired and the modern Apple brand began to take hold. Even so, it's taken a long time for that brand to translate into the degree of customer loyalty and trust that exists today. Apple could quite easily tarnish their brand with a few key missteps (such as foisting low-quality software on the top tier professionals in a high visibility industry) and thus reduce their profits by far more than what they would gain in sales on a shoddy product.
Instead, Apple killed Shake and let big studios buy the source code from them so they could continue to use it.
Except, apparently, you can't buy FCP7 any more (at least that's what I've heard from one guy I know in the industry). Which means that if you're a Final Cut Pro house and need to hire more staff, I guess you're kind of stuck going the pirate route for getting editing software for your new employees.
The thing is, every climber wanted to have cool videos of themselves, with great soundtracks and innovative photography and cut scenes and everything else ... but nobody -- really, seriously, almost nobody -- ever did it. Instead, they'd get to the crags and start having a good time and the camera bag wouldn't get unpacked, or the videographer would start climbing too, or, even if they did shoot for day, they never got around to any of the post-processing afterward.
I've also been to skate parks and motocross events and BMX and ... I think I could count on one hand the number of serious video recording I've seen at all of those combined.
On the other hand, I live in a surfing town and a lot of the kids recently have been moving towards OSX and FCP for their movies (the ones that are doing it seriously anyway). Haven't seen a lot of stuff that the skaters do, since most of the skater kids I interact with at work are more into photography rather than film making.
$300 is a lot of money to spend on any piece of SW, much less something as niche as video editing. Especially if you were to ask people what feature they want -- all of them are available in free programs.
There is a massive difference to Motion and the highend compositing apps like Shake, Nuke, Fusion, Softimage(Illusion+Matador=FXTree), Houdini(COPS), Flame, Toxik(Autodesk Composite). After Effects and Combustion are time-line based like Motion, but Motion doesn't begin to compare to them. Even Blender has fantastic compositing tools.
Shake was serious business. It's last well known big project was 'The Dark Knight' which Framestore CFC mangled a 64bit wrapper around it to better manage the 8k-frame workload. Shake was ported to Intel, then killed off, with no intention to take it to 64bit. I don't think you can buy the source code anymore.
They've done it with Digital Domain and Nuke (compositing), Weta and Mari (3d paint), and now Sony and Katana (lighting).