Since Apple launched Final Cut Pro X last Tuesday, I’ve had more than 3,500 emails that range from “I’m enjoying FCP X and creating useful projects,” to “FCP X will destroy my ability to make a living.” (And, ah, far worse, I’m sad to say.)
When I first saw Final Cut X, I was excited by its potential, but warned Apple that this release would be intensely polarizing to the editing community. It does not give me pleasure to see that I was right.
Worse, Apple has alienated the very people who can make a very visible statement as to the inadequacy of the program. No clearer example can be found than the public ridicule of FCP X on the Conan O’Brien show.
Or, as David Pogue wrote in his New York Times blog: “…let me be clear on this point — I think Apple blew it.”
With the possible exception of the launch of MobileMe, I can’t think of an Apple product launch which has spun more wildly out of control than this one. Apple did not just blow this launch, they went out of their way to alienate their key customer base.
Which is a shame, because FCP X has such great potential — but now, Apple has to concentrate on damage control, rather than getting people excited about the new program.
After the launch, Apple compounded their problems with three extremely poorly timed moves:
1. Canceling Final Cut Studio (3) and pulling all existing product from the market. This is devastating to shops that can’t use Final Cut Pro X. The two applications can co-exist on the same system — killing FCP 7 will not boost sales of FCP X to those shops that can’t run it. All it does is set up a black market for FCP 7.
2. Not providing – then publicly stating (thru David Pogue’s New York Times blog) that they do not plan to provide – a conversion utility from FCP 7 to FCP X. Not only does this render a HUGE number of past projects inaccessible, it sets up the obvious conclusion that if Apple is willing to discontinue support for legacy applications with no warning, what’s to prevent them from doing so again in the future? Every time you watch a movie that is more than 6 months old, you are dealing with legacy assets. Not providing a conversion utility is completely inexcusable.
3. Leaving the support for interchange formats – XML, EDL, OMF and others – to third-parties; or not supporting them at all. Yes, the video and film industry needs to move into the current century. However, Hollywood is very reluctant to change what works. Meeting deadlines is far more important than adopting new technology. Apple’s walled garden approach is totally at odds with the nature of post-production, where the editing system is the hub around which a wide variety of other applications revolve. On any editing project I routinely run 5-10 other programs simultaneously — only three of which are from Apple. I am constantly moving data between programs. This, combined with a lack of support for network-based storage, highlight grave development decisions in determining what features to include in the program.
NOTE: Apple told Pogue that they are working on providing the specs for their XML API. This is essential for any third-party developer to access conversion “hooks” in the program. David didn’t report that they mentioned when this would be available, however.
When I was talking with Apple prior to the launch, they told me that they extensively researched the market to determine what needed to be in the new program. In retrospect, I wonder what people they were talking with.
As I was working with the program, developing my FCP X training series, I often felt that the program was developed for two different audiences. Some features, effects for instance, are clearly geared for the iMovie crowd, while others, like trimming or 4K support, are geared for pros. The program sometimes felt like it wasn’t sure what it wanted to be when it grew up.
In FCP X, Apple got some things amazingly right. But they also got key features amazingly wrong. And if they don’t change course, this software, which has significant potential, is going to spin further and further out of control. At which point, its feature set is irrelevant, its reputation will be set. We’ll be looking at another Mac Cube.
Apple does not normally ever comment on future products – though they did this year, prior to WWDC, because they needed to reset expectations. Because of the visibility of this product into an audience that can cause extensive PR damage to Apple, I suggest that Apple break its usual vow of silence and do three things:
1. Immediately return Final Cut Studio (3) to the market. If it is not compatible with Lion (and I don’t know whether it is or not) label it so. But put it back on store shelves so consumers have the ability to work with the existing version until FCP X is ready for prime time.
2. Fund the development of a conversion utility – either at Apple or thru a 3rd-party – and announce the development with a tentative release date.
3. Publicly announce a road-map for FCP X that just covers the next 3-4 months. Apple needs to be in damage control mode and the best way to defuse the situation is to communicate. Answering the question: “What features will Apple add to FCP X, and when?” will go a long way to calming people down.
I have written in my earlier blog (read it here) that FCP X has a lot of potential, and, for some, it meets their needs very nicely. I still believe that.
I was also pleased to provide training on FCP X so that new and existing users can get up to speed on it quickly.
I don’t mind helping a product develop into its full potential. I enjoy providing feedback and helping people to learn new software. I don’t even mind that FCP X is missing some features; this is to be expected in any new software.
But I mind a great deal being forced to adopt a product because other options are removed, forced to lose access to my legacy projects, and forced to work in the dark concerning when critically needed features will be forthcoming.
This launch has been compared to Coca-Cola launching New Coke – resulting in a humiliating loss of market share.
With Final Cut Pro X, however, the situation is worse — with New Coke, only our ability to sip soda was affected. With Final Cut Pro X, we are talking losing livelihoods.
Let me know what you think,
Larry
253 Responses to Apple's Challenges
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Kurt Griffith says:
June 27, 2011 at 3:09 pm
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AlRobi says:
June 27, 2011 at 3:18 pm
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Larry says:
June 27, 2011 at 3:35 pm
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Magix says:
June 27, 2011 at 3:58 pm
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TravisWears says:
June 27, 2011 at 4:46 pm
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Lachlan says:
June 27, 2011 at 5:07 pm
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David Stacy says:
June 27, 2011 at 5:44 pm
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Don B says:
June 27, 2011 at 5:51 pm
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Serena Herr says:
June 27, 2011 at 6:31 pm
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Vidano says:
June 27, 2011 at 6:43 pm
← Older Comments Newer Comments →I’m not a video pro, I’m a Graphic and Web Designer. I have from time to time needed to do some video work, and found iMovie too limiting for the imagery my clients needed and muddled through with Final Cut Express.
But on the other hand, I hardly ever OPEN the iApps on my machine, as getting the files in and out of the iEcosystem, especially iPhoto is a pain in the ass- I need to work in PhotoShop. I spend 90% of my working day some Adobe app or another On the Design side I literally live and die by Adobe’s Design apps, without them I am literally irrelevant in the publishing world.
I say the launch and said, “Spiffy”… then I saw the ‘Net EXPLODE and said… “Whoops.” I read with interest Jeffery Harrell’s and David Pogues items. Had this to say:
Over the years, I have generally preferred the Mac as a platform. It’s a more elegant and less maintenance-intensive user experience and (for the most part) gets out of my way and lets me work. With Apple’s current relentless pursuit of the “consumer computing” market, they seem to have lost interest in the professional market. But who’s creating the apps and content for users to “consume?”
The Mac Pro is now the last in the upgrade cycle, I recall when Mac towers were first to get the shiny. The last Mac Pro update was largely recived with a resounding “meh” last year. They’re certainly heavy metal, and priced to match, but they’re hardly pure awesome any more. And unlike the G4 and G5 towers, you CAN put together comparable workstation systems now on the PC side for less cash.
I certainly can’t do pre-press or serious web design on an iPad, appealing little slab of electric crack it may be. I may *want* one, but I *need* a proper working machine.
“Final Cut Pro X review: Apple will happily piss off 5,000 professionals to please 5,000,000 amateurs.” – Daniel Jalkut, on Twitter (via Daring Fireball)
Pretty much sums up where Apple’s seems to be. It’s not the specific problems of FCP X that worries me, and they are not trivial, they’re crippling, it’s Apple’s ATTITUDE. And illuminates why at times I feel Apple doesn’t always have my interests as a Creative Pro at heart. We have become such a small percentage of their market now that Apple doesn’t need or heed us any more. I might remind the old-timers that Apple essentially INVENTED Desktop Publishing with the Mac SE, Pagemaker, Postscript and the LaserWriter II. But the’ve long since lost interest in the industry they spawned.
At one time we were Apple’s core and most loyal market, but I increasingly feel dismissed by Apple. They’ve long since kicked up to the curb. I honestly don’t think that Apple will restore the high end pro features to Final Cut, they’ve thrown in with their/Steve’s vision of the future. Apparently we dinosaurs, with our sad obsession with meeting deadlines and feeding our kids, can either get on board or get out of the way.
But if we decide defect, Apple won’t even wave goodbye.
Hi Larry, because you have work with this FCP X is it woking with DVD Studio Pro, i do not know why all this shibang if Apple just give us a 64bit engine and some new codec and some better performance in Compressor at $299 upgrade everybody where be happy, no their some people tried to reinvented the wheel, let the mass kid stuff for the kid, wow what a marvelous option for a Pro – send to you tube- is that a joke, send to iPhone wow wow wow can wait to upgrade and Lion if you read good this update is for look and fun for Kid. Mr Steve Bosniak where are you the real Genious in Apple debut the other one was a salesman and the other a business man with money. Sorry if my English not to Good i am French speaking
I haven’t heard anything about Final Cut Studio (3) and Lion.
Larry
For every real Pro-Cutter, there are 1000 Free-time Consumers. Okaaaay, but while Apple should let them have their cheap shots at editing:
Give us Professionals back our features and settings… and exact Keyframes, Color Correction, the clear and unspectacular interface etc. etc.
And then these rounded Edges and the animated Playhead…. why??? (To lose time in the edit?!?!)
FCPX is indeed of no use and destructive for Professionals, sadly…
“Even though it’s been on my Mac Pro Tower at my post house as well as on my MacBook Pro I carry with me everywhere, yesterday I clicked on an icon I had never clicked before. The purple Pr button that has been sitting in my dock for over a year. It has just been sitting there all this time.
I’d heard good things about Premiere Pro the last year or so. I’ll admit I’ve been curious about it’s tight integration with AfterEffects. But until now, I really never had a reason to click on that purple square.”
This is exactly what happened to me. I was beyond excited for the new FCP but decided to wait a couple of days to read feedback before I purchased it. Now, I have no interest in doing so, even though I’m only running FCP2 on my iMac and would love to upgrade. That little purple box that says Pr on my iMac is starting to look more and more tempting to me as well.
Next project I have enough time to mess with, I’m going to edit in Pr Pro. I normally have nothing but great things to say about Apple but FCPX has really steamed my collar. Who were they talking to when they developed this app? I would gladly pay twice the price (or more) for something that really delivered what I thought FCPX was going to.
Shameful.
Larry thanks for your post. I feel that we are no longer the target audience for Final Cut. Apple has used us and now abandoned us for the more lucrative consumer market. Why else would the interface be so dumbed down? I don’t know any professional editor who has problems with gaps on the timeline or keeping audio in sync. This is editing 101.
Apple knows what it takes to make a Pro app. They know what features Pro Editors need. They left them out. It’s not personal, it’s a business decision targeting a different market. Pro editors don’t need to be protected from themselves or corralled into a particular way of doing things. Flexibility is key. FCP X removes that for a reason.
I joined the dots when I saw it. On the positive side Larry, you’ll have a much larger market for your tutorials – it’s just not the pro market that you’ve served so well over the years.
Best wishes,
Lachlan.
Exclusive Interview: Michael Wohl (One of FCP’s Original Designers) Speaks About Final Cut Pro X, from an interview with Rounik Sethi.
Michael Wohl:
“Well, it’s important to say that Final Cut Pro X is not a new version of Final Cut. To call it that is to misunderstand everything about it. It is a brand new piece of software. ”
“Make no doubt about it, Final Cut Pro X is an amazing piece of software. There are tons of really cool features, and I’ll tell you a about a couple of specific ones in a second. I think that there is an expectation problem where people want to pick up right where Final Cut 7 left off and you’ve got to realize that was a 10-year-old piece of software that was never going to survive another 10 years. It needed to be reinvented. And I think they did a bold and difficult thing to do this complete reinvention. Inevitably there’s going to be a lot of disappointment along with a lot of excitement. ”
“That being said, I think there are quite a few really nice, new features in Final Cut Pro X. I’m not referring to the obvious, flashy ones, like the Magnetic Timeline—the way things move out of the way when you drag them around—I’m not really impressed with that. I mean it’s cool and it looks good and for some editors it’ll prevent a certain number of mistakes. But one feature I love to use in reality is Auditions, where you can skip through multiple versions of a single shot or multiple effects on a single shot and you can very easily swap those out right in the middle of an edit. Some of the audio effects that have been adopted from Logic and that are integrated into Final Cut Pro X are a big improvement.”
“I also think the overall metadata architecture is great. I do have mixed feelings about it because there are certain aspects that are incredibly powerful and easy and will really improve the user experience. At the same time there are other aspects of it that are going to force users to do more work upfront. You know if you don’t enter a lot of metadata: notes, scene information and descriptions then it’s going to be a lot harder to work with your media in Final Cut Pro X, especially on large projects. But if you do enter all that data, things are going to be really nice and smooth.”
“There’s certainly a lot of work that Apple’s going to need to do to bring this up to the feature list and user experience level of FCP 7. That really took up to 15 years (including development time) of refinement, tweaking and getting all the little nuances right and making the user experience unparalleled. FCP X doesn’t have all that yet, and it’s going to need some time to grow into that level. ”
“FCP X is going to be incredibly useful and is going to be everything you would want for a good 70% of the users out there. For people doing more serious ‘professional’ projects, it’s still pretty close. You know, it’s not far away. But there are some real obstacles to it being up to the level of Final Cut Pro 7. ”
“There’s big and there’s little (features missing). There’re huge features like multicam, audio mixing, being able to see the viewer and canvas at the same time, which provides all sorts of benefits to a professional editor. There’re also lots of tiny things that have a big impact. For example, the simple way In and Out points are marked. The fact that they abandoned the term ‘In’ and ‘Out’ point. I think it just fundamentally needs to be fixed. We need to be able to see the marks on the clip and keep those marks when you switch from one clip to another. Another oversight is with organization. Right now, you can’t just make a simple folder of clips. It’s something fundamental. You can make a folder if you use all the keywords and the really nice smart collections and these automatic tools. Those all work really well. But something as simple as making a folder and sticking a bunch of clips in it, you can’t do that.”
“There are some keyboard shortcuts that can’t be customised. For example, the F-keys (function keys) are not available any longer. Also there are keys that do multiple things. For example, the “U” key that toggles between the ripple incoming, rippled outgoing and roll tools is gone. That may sound like a small thing but it’s actually a really nice feature to be able to tap a single key and toggle between those 3 shortcuts. In Final Cut X there are 3 separate keys for those functions and so there’s no way to map that to the old way of working. And there are a number of similar things like that.”
“I don’t think professional video editors are going to go away, but I do think that the big bulk of the market is going to be that mid-range space where people are creating high quality (video) but they’re not doing it in a professional environment. As the technology gets simpler and more accessible—literally every iPhone has an HD video camera in it—so everyone is going to be dealing with video which will in turn require a certain amount of editing. You need to organize it and in order to present it there’s work that you need to do. So having a tool which is accessible to this wide range of people, and yet gives enough of the professional tools that can give great results, is a really brilliant idea on Apple’s behalf.”
Editing Truths:
The next time your video software ‘partner’ says, “the next release will be AWESOME,” head for the hills …
Good job, Larry! I gotta admit, I was turned off by your initial glowing sneak-peeks, but thanks for rectifying the situation. This is a spot-on critique, very fair. The most interesting part of this whole debacle is Apple’s uncharacteristic tone-deafness. They are usually so good at knowing their market and managing spin. But they stumbled right into this, and as you say, it was entirely avoidable.
The truth is, FCP X is an impressive single-station prosumer app that shows great promise for the professional setting. In about 18 months, if they rebuild the bridges they had to blow up and thereby reconnect the new app to a pro workflow, it’ll be great. Why on earth didn’t they just call it iMovie Pro, and spend the next 18 months getting great press for it while the pros jealously looked over the fence and begged, please, can you add some of those great features to FCP? Instead, they called it a pro app out the gate, yanked the real pro app off the shelves, insulted the intelligence of the market thought-leaders, and are now defensively dismissing what are bonafide, legitimate criticisms.
Case in point: the utter arrogance of the product manager’s public response to the complaint that you can’t open existing FCP projects in FCPX. He responded by lecturing FCP users that they shouldn’t be switching tools in the middle of a project anyway, thereby COMPLETELY missing the point. Assuming he has even a nodding acquaintance with commercial workflows, he must know that commercial and corporate clients routinely ask editors to tweak projects for re-airing or re-distribution that are months and even years old. And no, they don’t want to pay to have the video or commercial entirely recut, thanks very much. So unless Apple can guarantee that legacy projects can be reworked with FCPX, they are making it impossible to do routine, bread-and-butter work.
The simple fact is, the new app, in current form, lacks the toolset to cut features or long-form TV, and is not capable of being integrated into a post-production facility, a commercial corporate video environment, or a broadcast setting.
Apple isn’t even claiming it can be–you’d have to cobble together some awful mess of expensive plug-ins and as-yet-unreleased AJA cards. An application that can’t open existing projects, can’t handle multicam, doesn’t allow you to check colorspace or interlacing on an external display, has no professional output capabilities (no EDLs/OMF/XML means you can’t hand off audio tracks to a mixing facility or picture to a color or DI facility), and doesn’t allow you to mix audio at all (hello??), is quite patently NOT a professional tool. That’s just the truth.
To add insult to injury, they removed essential, use-it-everyday features and did not replace them with anything (e.g. Attributes and Photoshop layer support). And where the heck is Shared Project, which we’ve been promised for years, and which this ground-up rebuild was supposed to provide? Unity, here we come.
By idiotically claiming that FCPX is ready for primetime now, instead of honestly and proudly announcing a ground-breaking consumer app with features they might add to the Pro space down the road, Apple has polluted the good parts of FCPX and unnecessarily shot itself in the foot. It’s unlike Apple to be so tone-deaf.
Lachlan, I couldn’t agree more. That’s the point. And it’s not personal (from Apple’s point of view).