I enjoyed reading some of your comments regarding the current state of professional video editing. I followed several of the references and learned a lot about the high end solutions. I have only done prosumer level editing. I used FCP 7 and 'upgraded' to FCP X however in the mean time I tend to use Premier now.
After reading your comments it occurred to me that Apple also realizes that during their long absence with the transition, the pro environment has raised the bar so high that they can't possibly compete. Therefore, it makes sense for Apple to focus on the YouTube, prosumer market because the pro market has moved on.
While of course Apple can't compete in everything, it'll never gain any traction in enterprise, with or without IBM, if it has a reputation of luring people away into platforms they're half-hearted about, and abandoning them when a solo in-house product champion moves on. I've heard many arguments that Apple needed to move to 64-bit from 32-bit FCP 7, and that a new code base gave them the OPPORTUNITY to re-invent editing! No tracks! Magnetism! Nothing you can lock when you're done! Think again klutzes - you really want iMovie but BIGGER don't you? No thanks.
No one, repeat, no one who used FCP 7 for a living wanted this. They wanted FCP 8, and don't tell me Henry Ford said we all wanted a faster horse. Where exactly has been FCP X's Great Leap Forward that we're all really glad we stayed for, now we've done as Larry Jordan proposed and given them time to make it not only AMAZING, but better than what we had? We'd be working faster even with slower renders because we could throw out a reference movie and chuck it at Compressor, not have to render out the whole sequence, and carry on cutting. We'd be at FCP 9 by now, 64-bit and all, and would still be happily buying Mac Pro towers, not toys, and doing with hardware what you propose we should do with software - making it suit our world.
But the great crime was not the coronation of the prince, FCP X. It was the execution of his uncle, the king, Final Cut Studio, with all the clemency of Kim Jong Un. Suddenly we couldn't buy it, it wasn't supported and our business was scrambling for alternatives. We've all found different, worthy combinations, but only companies that go under generally leave their customers in that lurch. Apple was just insensitive to the consequences for its users, and that casts a long shadow over enterprise aspirations - one I see every day as my iPad 2 crumbles under the cancer of involuntary iOS updates.
The transition was done badly but there needed to be more than just a minor FCP 8 refresh. I think people are willing to overlook a lot of problems when it comes to tools and static workflows they've relied on for a while. FCP 7 had poor support of modern formats (even just MP4), parts of the timeline would be unusable until a clip was converted into the exact format of the timeline. The magnetic timeline was to fix the common problem of inserting a clip somewhere and finding out later that something off-screen in the timeline had gotten messed up like audio sync. They have GPU rendering now. With the Mac Pro having the dual GPUs, it can process things more efficiently e.g 4K RED without special hardware:
People weren't buying the old tower Mac Pro just like they weren't buying the XServe. A modern redesign is better than it being discontinued.
Randy Ubillos designed all of these apps - he did FCP, Premiere and FCPX. He obviously knew he planned to leave Apple and FCP 7 would probably have been hard to maintain being originally developed so long ago and outside of Apple:
That mentions Quicktime being integral to FCP, which stalled at version 7 around 2005, just 3 years after the lead developers left and then turned into Quicktime X. Some of this change involves dealing with color management, which has to work throughout the entire processing pipeline. Again, a redesigned FCP X is better than FCP 7 just being discontinued. It had been abandoned for a long time before FCP X.
There is a tendency to focus on deal-breaker problems without checking whether they are actually problems. Being able to send something off to Compressor and continue editing is something you can do in FCPX too but there are certainly limitations. There's no traditional project file so workflows like saving project versions and sharing files have to be worked around.
It's clearly not at a stage that major productions want to be using it, partly to do with the lack of confidence in the future of the product but Apple needs to know specifically what the problems with it are before they can fix them so casual dismissal of it doesn't fix anything.
Maybe they need to open up a special communications channel like the radar system they have for developers. It can just be a site to login and report a feature request and other users can vote up a request and perhaps add suggestions. They would be better listed anonymously so that the best ideas get done first rather than adding a UI element just because someone well-recognized wants it. This applies to all their software products. It can even be a little desktop app that doesn't require a login or uses the iTunes login to avoid having it spammed online. Someone made a list of FCPX requests here so it would be something like that:
People wouldn't necessarily just list all the features from before but think about how features should work. Like track locking was very limited, why not have clip locking, allow tagging and selecting clips by tag to batch lock clips no matter where they are positioned and it can optionally lock the space between locked clips or allow clips to be inserted only if they fit the space so that the magnetic timeline won't expand. You could export clips by tag and it will export just those clips.
If they are committed to it and any other enterprise venture then they do have to build a certain level of trust. I don't think people should expect them to go to the same level that Adobe, Microsoft or Avid would go though because it weighs those companies down with legacy support. Sticking to the old FCP 7 and old computer hardware designs permanently is exactly that way of working and it just ends in EOL or uncompetitive products.
The transition was done badly but there needed to be more than just a minor FCP 8 refresh. I think people are willing to overlook a lot of problems when it comes to tools and static workflows they've relied on for a while. FCP 7 had poor support of modern formats (even just MP4), parts of the timeline would be unusable until a clip was converted into the exact format of the timeline. The magnetic timeline was to fix the common problem of inserting a clip somewhere and finding out later that something off-screen in the timeline had gotten messed up like audio sync. They have GPU rendering now. With the Mac Pro having the dual GPUs, it can process things more efficiently e.g 4K RED without special hardware:
People weren't buying the old tower Mac Pro just like they weren't buying the XServe. A modern redesign is better than it being discontinued. People wouldn't necessarily just list all the features from before but think about how features should work. Like track locking was very limited, why not have clip locking, allow tagging and selecting clips by tag to batch lock clips no matter where they are positioned and it can optionally lock the space between locked clips or allow clips to be inserted only if they fit the space so that the magnetic timeline won't expand. You could export clips by tag and it will export just those clips.
If they are committed to it and any other enterprise venture then they do have to build a certain level of trust. I don't think people should expect them to go to the same level that Adobe, Microsoft or Avid would go though because it weighs those companies down with legacy support. Sticking to the old FCP 7 and old computer hardware designs permanently is exactly that way of working and it just ends in EOL or uncompetitive products.
I completely agree with all of this - but these are moves that could have been made without the ritual execution of FCP 7. FWIW, a 12-core Mac Pro 5,1 with 3 x GTX 680s or Titans in a Cubix box, as we have, is significantly quicker than the fastest Mac Pro 2013 running Resolve. PCIe bandwidth is greater than Thunderbolt - but lack of native USB3 and TB are obviously a pain. And one of those cards just got pulled - Mavericks and later support a maximum of 2 GFX cards, including GUI. Quite why they did that I really can't say - seems arbitrary to me, but plays into the "upgrade" cycle from the towers.
A test of whether FCP X really did "reinvent editing" is whether we see a bunch of students emerging from film schools to work with us, happy in FCP X and wanting to move forward in that. Truth is, we don't - they're itching to get onto Avid and deal with real projects and established workflows. The reinvented wheel may have turned into a sphere, but they don't want space balls. They want to roll like an editor.
As a colourist I see Avid projects, Premiere projects and an unsettling number of FCP 7 projects still coming through for a DaVinci grade. And absolutely no FCP X projects despite the fact that FCP X's XMLs are very well supported in Resolve - far better than any other XML/AAF/EDL translation. Is it because FCP X's colour tools are so awesome, on an iMac? I doubt it. Is it because FCP X is mostly used on projects where the finer points of sound mixing and colour grading are just not worth paying for? Probably.
I completely agree with all of this - but these are moves that could have been made without the ritual execution of FCP 7. FWIW, a 12-core Mac Pro 5,1 with 3 x GTX 680s or Titans in a Cubix box, as we have, is significantly quicker than the fastest Mac Pro 2013 running Resolve. PCIe bandwidth is greater than Thunderbolt - but lack of native USB3 and TB are obviously a pain. And one of those cards just got pulled - Mavericks and later support a maximum of 2 GFX cards, including GUI. Quite why they did that I really can't say - seems arbitrary to me, but plays into the "upgrade" cycle from the towers.
A test of whether FCP X really did "reinvent editing" is whether we see a bunch of students emerging from film schools to work with us, happy in FCP X and wanting to move forward in that. Truth is, we don't - they're itching to get onto Avid and deal with real projects and established workflows. The reinvented wheel may have turned into a sphere, but they don't want space balls. They want to roll like an editor.
As a colourist I see Avid projects, Premiere projects and an unsettling number of FCP 7 projects still coming through for a DaVinci grade. And absolutely no FCP X projects despite the fact that FCP X's XMLs are very well supported in Resolve - far better than any other XML/AAF/EDL translation. Is it because FCP X's colour tools are so awesome, on an iMac? I doubt it. Is it because FCP X is mostly used on projects where the finer points of sound mixing and colour grading are just not worth paying for? Probably.
There's a test of 980s vs D700s here in Resolve and another vs dual R9:
Obviously the longer the time since release, newer GPUs will exceed the performance. There are options for external GPUs and there's not much of a performance hit vs PCIe:
Thunderbolt 3 will double the bandwidth again. The Razer Core box uses TB3. AMD and NVidia GPUs this year are looking to double performance per watt so the next Mac Pro could rival or exceed dual 980ti cards, they could even offer dual 980ti as an option. But of course people will still say that it's not as much as 3x or 4x 980ti cards. A Cubix box costs about $3.5k, if you drop in 2x 980ti cards ($1300), you're at $4800. You'd have a giant Mac Pro box plus a giant Cubix box behind it, combined sucking up 2kW of electricity and this little silent G4 Cube sized box updated this year would match or exceed it. There's always going to be something faster that can be hacked together, Apple's solutions just have to be competitive and they are. I could see custom multi-GPU processing boxes made in future to connect to Thunderbolt because they have a bigger audience being accessible to laptop owners.
What you've been seeing with the projects is a clear indicator that people don't want to use FCPX, they maybe don't even want to try it. If their peers all tell them there's nothing to be gained then there's no reason to make the move but eventually FCP 7 won't work at all. Those people have to be the ones to tell Apple what they want before they'll consider it. I think the worst thing Apple did was to leave out the migration because people are working away in FCP 7 and they can't just switch to FCP X and work on the same project just to experiment with it. It puts up an immediate barrier. I don't buy their excuse for doing this, which is that it wouldn't translate properly. It's just a timeline of clips and effects, it doesn't matter if it has minor flaws and they are in the best position to be able to match the data. Just let people open their FCP 7 projects and see what an edit that they've done looks like in the new software, perhaps by adding FCPX's XML as an export to FCP 7. There's a video here where they do a migration using 3rd party software around 21:00:
They say it has the same flaws in migrating to Avid or Premiere. When people are faced with that choice, FCPX has to be better than the alternatives if it's the same process they are going through and between the future confidence they have, the cost, what peers are saying, the feature set, it's persuading people to move to Avid and Premiere. If they could say that all FCP 7 projects would translate almost exactly then that removes a barrier to entry. If they had a scriptable UI, someone could make parts of FCPX behave the way it used to. That video above mentions behavioural changes putting people off.
One of Apple's main goals with the products they make has always been to empower individuals to do great things so they tend to focus on trying to making the products self-contained. They celebrate individual artists, photographers, software developers, inventors in their marketing. In business, even their own, they can see that it takes a team of people and they need to make their products work in that environment too. FCPX fell down to begin with because they hadn't even considered volume licensing or how to have editors collaborate and they had no options for external workflows like grading, which showed their focus was on the individual. This applies to products like Pages, Numbers etc too. It's all very well having individuals do something on their own but it's pointless if it falls down when they need to work in a diverse team if that's their target audience.
FCPX will always be a suitable option for individuals like people who film events or marketing videos. People are becoming millionaires from Youtube videos. Some use Premiere:
He says exports are much faster and there's nothing missing in FCPX since Apple added in the features he needed. Over time, the more that people use the software and recommend it then the more confident others will be in trying it themselves. It might never suit every workflow but Apple seems to be indicating they want it to, so people need to tell them what they want for that to happen. People do tend to feel more comfortable with software that works without having to ask though because it demonstrates that the people developing it knew what they needed already and designed it for their use case. I think that really scared people with FCPX because it was a sign that the people who made software they relied on for a living were either out of touch with their workflows or didn't care enough about them.
Comments
I enjoyed reading some of your comments regarding the current state of professional video editing. I followed several of the references and learned a lot about the high end solutions. I have only done prosumer level editing. I used FCP 7 and 'upgraded' to FCP X however in the mean time I tend to use Premier now.
After reading your comments it occurred to me that Apple also realizes that during their long absence with the transition, the pro environment has raised the bar so high that they can't possibly compete. Therefore, it makes sense for Apple to focus on the YouTube, prosumer market because the pro market has moved on.
People weren't buying the old tower Mac Pro just like they weren't buying the XServe. A modern redesign is better than it being discontinued.
Randy Ubillos designed all of these apps - he did FCP, Premiere and FCPX. He obviously knew he planned to leave Apple and FCP 7 would probably have been hard to maintain being originally developed so long ago and outside of Apple:
http://nofilmschool.com/2011/12/avid-apple-excerpt-timeline-history
That mentions Quicktime being integral to FCP, which stalled at version 7 around 2005, just 3 years after the lead developers left and then turned into Quicktime X. Some of this change involves dealing with color management, which has to work throughout the entire processing pipeline. Again, a redesigned FCP X is better than FCP 7 just being discontinued. It had been abandoned for a long time before FCP X.
There is a tendency to focus on deal-breaker problems without checking whether they are actually problems. Being able to send something off to Compressor and continue editing is something you can do in FCPX too but there are certainly limitations. There's no traditional project file so workflows like saving project versions and sharing files have to be worked around.
It's clearly not at a stage that major productions want to be using it, partly to do with the lack of confidence in the future of the product but Apple needs to know specifically what the problems with it are before they can fix them so casual dismissal of it doesn't fix anything.
Maybe they need to open up a special communications channel like the radar system they have for developers. It can just be a site to login and report a feature request and other users can vote up a request and perhaps add suggestions. They would be better listed anonymously so that the best ideas get done first rather than adding a UI element just because someone well-recognized wants it. This applies to all their software products. It can even be a little desktop app that doesn't require a login or uses the iTunes login to avoid having it spammed online. Someone made a list of FCPX requests here so it would be something like that:
http://fcpx.tv/top.html
People wouldn't necessarily just list all the features from before but think about how features should work. Like track locking was very limited, why not have clip locking, allow tagging and selecting clips by tag to batch lock clips no matter where they are positioned and it can optionally lock the space between locked clips or allow clips to be inserted only if they fit the space so that the magnetic timeline won't expand. You could export clips by tag and it will export just those clips.
If they are committed to it and any other enterprise venture then they do have to build a certain level of trust. I don't think people should expect them to go to the same level that Adobe, Microsoft or Avid would go though because it weighs those companies down with legacy support. Sticking to the old FCP 7 and old computer hardware designs permanently is exactly that way of working and it just ends in EOL or uncompetitive products.
I completely agree with all of this - but these are moves that could have been made without the ritual execution of FCP 7. FWIW, a 12-core Mac Pro 5,1 with 3 x GTX 680s or Titans in a Cubix box, as we have, is significantly quicker than the fastest Mac Pro 2013 running Resolve. PCIe bandwidth is greater than Thunderbolt - but lack of native USB3 and TB are obviously a pain. And one of those cards just got pulled - Mavericks and later support a maximum of 2 GFX cards, including GUI. Quite why they did that I really can't say - seems arbitrary to me, but plays into the "upgrade" cycle from the towers.
A test of whether FCP X really did "reinvent editing" is whether we see a bunch of students emerging from film schools to work with us, happy in FCP X and wanting to move forward in that. Truth is, we don't - they're itching to get onto Avid and deal with real projects and established workflows. The reinvented wheel may have turned into a sphere, but they don't want space balls. They want to roll like an editor.
As a colourist I see Avid projects, Premiere projects and an unsettling number of FCP 7 projects still coming through for a DaVinci grade. And absolutely no FCP X projects despite the fact that FCP X's XMLs are very well supported in Resolve - far better than any other XML/AAF/EDL translation. Is it because FCP X's colour tools are so awesome, on an iMac? I doubt it. Is it because FCP X is mostly used on projects where the finer points of sound mixing and colour grading are just not worth paying for? Probably.
http://barefeats.com/gtx980d.html
http://www.ditworld.com/vs-mac-pro/
Obviously the longer the time since release, newer GPUs will exceed the performance. There are options for external GPUs and there's not much of a performance hit vs PCIe:
http://barefeats.com/tube21.html
Thunderbolt 3 will double the bandwidth again. The Razer Core box uses TB3. AMD and NVidia GPUs this year are looking to double performance per watt so the next Mac Pro could rival or exceed dual 980ti cards, they could even offer dual 980ti as an option. But of course people will still say that it's not as much as 3x or 4x 980ti cards. A Cubix box costs about $3.5k, if you drop in 2x 980ti cards ($1300), you're at $4800. You'd have a giant Mac Pro box plus a giant Cubix box behind it, combined sucking up 2kW of electricity and this little silent G4 Cube sized box updated this year would match or exceed it. There's always going to be something faster that can be hacked together, Apple's solutions just have to be competitive and they are. I could see custom multi-GPU processing boxes made in future to connect to Thunderbolt because they have a bigger audience being accessible to laptop owners.
What you've been seeing with the projects is a clear indicator that people don't want to use FCPX, they maybe don't even want to try it. If their peers all tell them there's nothing to be gained then there's no reason to make the move but eventually FCP 7 won't work at all. Those people have to be the ones to tell Apple what they want before they'll consider it. I think the worst thing Apple did was to leave out the migration because people are working away in FCP 7 and they can't just switch to FCP X and work on the same project just to experiment with it. It puts up an immediate barrier. I don't buy their excuse for doing this, which is that it wouldn't translate properly. It's just a timeline of clips and effects, it doesn't matter if it has minor flaws and they are in the best position to be able to match the data. Just let people open their FCP 7 projects and see what an edit that they've done looks like in the new software, perhaps by adding FCPX's XML as an export to FCP 7. There's a video here where they do a migration using 3rd party software around 21:00:
They say it has the same flaws in migrating to Avid or Premiere. When people are faced with that choice, FCPX has to be better than the alternatives if it's the same process they are going through and between the future confidence they have, the cost, what peers are saying, the feature set, it's persuading people to move to Avid and Premiere. If they could say that all FCP 7 projects would translate almost exactly then that removes a barrier to entry. If they had a scriptable UI, someone could make parts of FCPX behave the way it used to. That video above mentions behavioural changes putting people off.
One of Apple's main goals with the products they make has always been to empower individuals to do great things so they tend to focus on trying to making the products self-contained. They celebrate individual artists, photographers, software developers, inventors in their marketing. In business, even their own, they can see that it takes a team of people and they need to make their products work in that environment too. FCPX fell down to begin with because they hadn't even considered volume licensing or how to have editors collaborate and they had no options for external workflows like grading, which showed their focus was on the individual. This applies to products like Pages, Numbers etc too. It's all very well having individuals do something on their own but it's pointless if it falls down when they need to work in a diverse team if that's their target audience.
FCPX will always be a suitable option for individuals like people who film events or marketing videos. People are becoming millionaires from Youtube videos. Some use Premiere:
Marques Brownlee switched from Premiere to FCPX:
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/01/marques-brownlee-mkbhd-final-cut-pro-switch/
He says exports are much faster and there's nothing missing in FCPX since Apple added in the features he needed. Over time, the more that people use the software and recommend it then the more confident others will be in trying it themselves. It might never suit every workflow but Apple seems to be indicating they want it to, so people need to tell them what they want for that to happen. People do tend to feel more comfortable with software that works without having to ask though because it demonstrates that the people developing it knew what they needed already and designed it for their use case. I think that really scared people with FCPX because it was a sign that the people who made software they relied on for a living were either out of touch with their workflows or didn't care enough about them.