Apple rumored to update Final Cut applications in March or April - Page 2

Yeah, I understand the differences, though the Air is after the crowd looking for extremely lightweight, portable computing. My point is more along the lines that Apple has a tendency to downplay existing ideas, then eventually find a way to make them work, minus the originally perceived sacrifices.

If you note what Jobs says about the other ideas, I don’t think he can been as wrong or as a hypocrite. Surely there is marketing speak in his words, but that is what his job entails and he tends to do it well.

He’s mentioned how bad netbooks were and the 11” MBA doesn’t contradict that. It has a fast CPU (compared to netbook Atom CPUs), it has a fast GPU (that can run a 30” ACD and it’s own display at the same time), and it has a full-sized notebook keyboard (whose only fault is the lack of a backlight).

edit: The closest I can find of Jobs saying one thing and doing another is with the iPad after he said that Apple doesn’t know how to make a $500 PC. But if we consider that the iPad can’t be used until first tethered to a PC and that it’s not counted in with PC sales the statement isn’t necessarily false. I expect this year’s CES will have plenty of tablets that are designed to be primary use devices that also use tailored OSes and UIs. Perhaps we’ll see a mass change in the way we define a PC as these devices become more common among users.

Blender isn't intuitive and easy to use. Modo is already 64 bit Cocoa as of the 501 release and as for Houdini nothing can touch its node based interface. Plus Apple would pick up lots of engineering talent from either that can not only support the current apps but help build new features and integrate further.

Blender does have a lot of promise. It can do 3D, compositing and NLE in one package but the interface and workflow both need a major overhaul.

I most definitely do not want to see Final Cut Studio become "dumbed down". It does un-nerve me a bit that Apple seems to be leaving their 'Pro' users behind.

Of course tho~ new UI improvements and better performance (switching to 64bit as well as better CPU management) are all welcome.


As for the people saying Final Cut Studio is going the way of the dodo, I still know many editors for smaller production houses and studios that still use Final Cut Studio. Sure the Big Boy's down at Hollywood maybe using new cutting edge editing suites and what not, but Hollywood isn't the ONLY place where video professionals exist. It just so happens that MANY of them are there.


So  let's see what you've got in store for us this time :]

Personally I'll be royally ticked off if Apple wastes development resources adding 3D support to FCP either delaying its release or making us wait another year for the Cocoa, GCD, OpenCL, 64-Bit version.

Yes, I'm in total agreement with that. I'm not trying to pinpoint Apple as hypocrites (I drink [and sell] the juice). I'm trying to illustrate that just because Apple says "touch screen computers don't work because of arm extension issue" doesn't mean Apple doesn't fully intend to release a touch screen desktop and/or laptop. They'll just have figured a clever way to eliminate the perceived issues with touch computing.

Gotcha. I agree with that. What Ive envisioned is what Jobs said recently about expanding the touchpad capabilities. That is where theyve put the touch on their notebooks and now as an option for their Ma desktops.

Lets consider what they have going for them. A huge trackpad compared to the rest of the industry and a multi-touch trackpad that still hasnt caught on despite Synaptic adding it sometime ago. Two other considerations are the integrated button into the trackpad panel and the glass covering. You make it a simply AMOLED display for video out using the USB its connected to and you have a touchscreen Mac just not the primary main display.

I say AMOLED because most of the time it could simply show black which means no power use compared to an LCD. Even a small menu bar at the top where your fingers typically dont touch, or stock, weather, time or system stats could display info without having to switch views on the main display. If you open up Calc or an app that uses an EQ these could be displayed on the trackpad display which are considerably easier to use with your fingers than with a mouse.

If Mac OS X Lion focuses on more fullscreen apps this could become very useful as you wont have much collateral info on the main display as youve traditionally had with desktop OSes.

Personally, I see this is as an inevitable occurrence, like the removable of the FW400 port interface, the HDD or the optical disc drive.

I'm really looking forward to this update. I have been waiting since 2006! Apple really hasn't upgraded this suite drastically since '06/'07. I really hope they plan on making the suite better. I still think they are catering to Pro's and not losing focus like some are worried. It seems Apple has too much on their hands right now with iOS and switching to 64-bit, Intel-only, SL, now Lion in the summer. They might finally get back on track with the Mac. I think they lost focus though too because the iPhone and iPad, obviously. Those are both very worthy products and I think it was the right move, but now 2011 I think they have everything settled where they can once again focus on their original products, what got them started.

btw, been reading/appreciating your posts for years before ever posting on these forums.

Thanks. I appreciate that.

It has a new interface in v2.5 but GPL software probably couldn't be sold with commercial products - at the very least, any changes would have to remain open source. Most 3D apps are unintuitive anyway. ZBrush is one of the worst and to make matters worse, for portability, they write the UIs in OpenGL like Shake.

I think Apple did put 3D support into Shake but you need a solid 3D rendering engine for it be useful. Apple could obviously commit to PRMan just like Next did but it's not fast enough for motion graphics and it's too powerful that it would be wasted in a motion graphics app.

Apple would really need an app capable of sculpting, dynamics sims, advanced lighting, rigging and more combined with a compositor like Nuke. The amount of resources needed to pull that together would be staggering. Those types of apps have millions of lines of code and they wouldn't compete with Maya.


I'd say that 3D support in the sense of stereoscopic editing is probably quite an important feature now. You do get 3rd party support for it though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-rw6Y7hFbg

But FCS definitely needs a big performance overhaul.

Yeah, I know what you mean. For those who are getting in on 3D, it's very important. But I don't think, in the grand scheme of FCP use, 3D is quite big enough to slip the upgrade. If it's going to delay matters, it should ship in the next reference release.

I'll have to check out version 2.5. I think Houdini and Modo both have an intuitive interface. Houdini needs work on modeling, but has the right idea with nodes. Modo is probably the best modeler out there its also great for sculpting.

I can see Houdini and Nuke in a suite. It would be interesting to see how both could be developed to have more integrated workflows similar to how apps adobe creative suite interact with each other and allow you to easily jump between another. I can see Mari taking the market over ZBrush.

I'll take Houdini over Maya any day of the week. The Maya interface is bloated.

Houdini is a well-regarded app regarding dynamics and Renderman integration and has a node compositor too but app developers have difficulty balancing number of features with quality of features and if you try to bundle great apps together, you can end up with monolithic apps that have no room to grow. If you make too many small apps, the workflow becomes too complex and having to jump between intermediate files all the time.

I think the best idea is to have a centralised application that is extremely modular. This allows developers to push forward parts of the application while keeping the workflow tight. If the modular components are controlled by 3rd parties though like you get with Maya plugins, the costs go up and can lead to compatibility problems when the core app gets updated. It doesn't seem like anyone has figured out the right way to build a pro app if there is one, least of all a suite of cross-platform apps (and they often need to be cross-platformt to get the level of refinement).


Mudbox is probably a closer rival to it. I'd see Mari competing more with Bodypaint. Again though they all have a lot of common features now. Modo even does animation and rigging. It's always the same. They start out small and they get artists who want to streamline workflows with feature requests. Eventually, we will have about 10-15 3D apps that all have similar feature sets.


But would you get a job with it? I don't support this reality but it is a sad reality that employers will ask for 3DS or Maya experience. No doubt there will be Houdini jobs but far fewer than the main two and that's what Apple would have to consider too. With NLEs like Final Cut, you can jump between them no problem, Premiere, Vegas, Avid whatever it's all just insert clip, scrub, mark, scrub, mark, cut, fade to black. It's slightly more than that before any editors get annoyed but it's pretty easy to go between them. Someone that has only used Maya could sit in front of Houdini with a blank expression on their face for an hour and not do anything.

I think some things like 3D modelling/rendering etc are best left up to the people who know what they are doing. That's a totally alien world to Apple. I don't mean in the sense that Apple don't know what they are doing - they do but in their area of expertise. Pixar would know what was needed, The Foundry would know. I don't think Apple would know what a BRDF was if it bit them in their anisotropic aluminum ass. For that reason they wouldn't be able to offer any improvement over the competition. Until you understand what is needed to improve an industry and how to improve it then you can't. The fact that they dropped Shake and stuck with Motion shows they don't understand the industry enough. Nor do they have to, they just need to know how to make good hardware and the software to run it. Pro apps are best done by the people who rely on them and refine them daily in their workflows.

Final Cut in its present state is not what I'd call an Apple application, it's still an application Apple bought from someone else. It doesn't feel right when you use it and you get bizarre error messages or UI glitches or it runs really slow or any number of things really. When the editing works it's great, when it's not, it's infuriatingly bad. Final Cut for example shouldn't hang up when you export the timeline to compressor. That's the dumbest thing ever. Here you have a multi-tasking OS running one of the most popular NLEs feeding into a batch video compressor and when you hit export, you have to wait until that one task is done before you can do any more editing?? Why can't it process the timeline in a sub-process and just protect the source files the process is using?

It's things like Compressor taking hours to compress minutes worth of HD footage on a quad-core that says they must not be using this app regularly or they would do something about it and do it pronto. I think they will make improvements to their Pro Apps but they don't do it with the passion they have for their other apps e.g the iApps. Would it be so hard for Steve to walk out at WWDC and say 'look here's the new Final Cut and we made it 64-bit, with full Python scripting, Cocoa, new UI, faster Compressor optimised for Sandy Bridge'. Even in the 'one more thing' section is all that's needed.

Well the only app that I've seen that pretty much has an NLE, Compositor, Color Grading, and 3D is Blender. Only problem with an all in one approach is bloat and a complex interface. Houdini needs work on its modeler and sculpting capabilities but I absolutely love the node based workflow. Modo has it right except I wish it was node based, in that you model in modo and it create the nodes for you and allows you to go back and work in a non-destructive manner.


Mari definitely has the potential to head into Zbrush/mudbox territory. It already can scales higher then both. Modo is shaping up nicely, it just needs to ditch the shader tree and embrace nodes all over like Houdini. Its 100% cocoa 64bit based with the 501 release, so its a really clean foundation for growth.



Houdini Artists and TD's are highly sought after, just look at Digital Domains explosive growth. Its all mainly Houdini and Nuke in their pipeline.

I can see The Foundry taking over development of Final Cut Studio, Aperture, along with Final Cut Server (BTW nodes need to be added for creating workflows; look at Telestream Vantage - amazing!). Compressor needs a major overhaul (compare its performance to Episode Engine). A collaboration between The Foundry and Side Effects Software (a merger would be better) could prove unstoppable and give AutoDesk a run for its money.


An integrated suite made up of Houdini, Nuke, Mari, Final Cut Pro, Color (or perhaps Assimilate Scratch?), and Soundtrack Pro (overhauled to take on ProTools), would be the killer pipeline.
Final Cut Server, Compressor and an H264 Streaming Server (Quicktime) would complete the backend. To finish it off server and storage could also be provided for the complete film/production package.

Maybe its just a dream?