Speaking of Ron Howard... I shot this interview as part of a documentary I'm doing. The kid looks and sounds like Ritchie Cunningham on Happy Days.

Here's a Podcast that explains FCPX shortfalls. "Why We Can't Use Final Cut Pro X at Our Companies "
It's long, but very entertaining.

http://podcasts2.creativecow.net/episodes/ipod/1030.mp3

What I heard....
The biggest hurdle is that every PC with FCPx will need an iTunes account for each computer. (Turner Broadcasting has over 200 seats of FCP. CNN over 1,000 seats.)
That you can't open projects from prior versions of FCP is a deal killer for most TV stations.
You can't export a part of a project to give to another editor. You can't just save a project on a network drive and let another workstation open it - it saves everything in the iMovie folder on the local drive. You just can't hand off a project to another workstation on the local network.

Everything from every project goes into the local iApps folders. You can't do government work. We need to keep everything isolated - what are we supposed to do, put a different boot drive for each client?


No tape-based capture.
No export capability.
No multicamera editing.
You can have two monitors or an external pro display, but not both.
No layered PSD support. If you bring in a layered PSD file, you get a flattened image.
Why have terrabytes of network storage if every project is locked to a specific computer? If a client needs a quick edit on his project, and that workstation is busy with another project, you can't go to another workstation on the network.

If you are a single-computer, one-man shop editing wedding videos, or you are a user of iMovie, then FCPx is an upgrade.

This is the Garage Band UI.
iMovie Pro.

Wow, that podcast listed more than a few short comings of FCPX. That is literally amazing that Apple would screw their professional users to that degree. Dozens of issues.

Makes me wonder if Apple is working on a FCPX server plugin along with corporate licensing that fills most of the voids these guys listed for multi-user facilities.

Podcast - Wow! What a broad range of issues.

I wonder what the future will be for FCP. Will the famed Apple culture of fanboyism win out over professional disdain, or will the pros put the nails in FCP's coffin?

And what about fanboy vendors, AJA, Red Giant?

If I was to name anyone Apple would be looking over their shoulder at it'd be Adobe, just look at the graph near the beginning of the presentataion. Vegas has such a small market share it doesn't even rate a mention but Ppro's share is increasing. Add into that the fact that Apple employs a few ex Adobe people. Some of the tech in FCP X feels like something out of Adobe's research labs to me.

Bob you are WRONG. I did a search on most of the top video forums. Vegas is always first on second on hits. The YOU Tube hits are over 1 million. Search Avid,Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. Vegas hits combine all three. I was shock there is more Vegas user than you think. The forums don't lie! More people asking questions about Vegas than any other software.

Walter Biscardi (from the podcast) also posted a written list of the features they mentioned in the audio.

http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/final-cut-pro-x-whats-missing-for-some-pros

What Apple needs to do is come out in a day or two and say "Ooops. We meant to name this version Final Cut Express. The branding got mixed up due to the sound of the X in both names. Sorry. The flagship version will be out next year."

It's a shame SCS doesn't port port Vegas Pro to the Mac
I'm not sure this is a good idea. Apple simply doesn't put as much resources into supporting developers as Microsoft does.

When OS X became 64-bit, it stopped supported Carbon. Many older applications use Carbon and all that Carbon-related code has to be completely rewritten to make a 64-bit version (e.g. the entire GUI must be rewritten). Adobe Photoshop is a great example because it has 1-2 million lines of code (from what I've heard). This is why Adobe isn't happy with Apple and it's also why Windows Photoshop CS4 was 64-bit first before the Mac CS5 version came out.

This might also partially explain why Apple decide to rewrite Final Cut from the ground up. They had to rewrite the user interface anyways. But... rewriting an entire application is probably a bad idea. Netscape was rewritten and now nobody uses it.

---
My take on FCP X:
What a gift to all of Apple's competitors. Final Cut is missing a lot of its old features and is completely unusable for some professional users.

I think Apple will abandon the high-end professional market (like they did with Shake). For them to re-capture it, they have to ditch the FCP X code and go back to the FCP9 code. Plus, they have already burned their users and many of them will avoid Apple because they can't afford to have Apple abandon them again. But who knows. Maybe they will stop buying other software (e.g. Shake, Color) only to later on kill it.

Apple is just paving the way to eventually move all it's FCP business to iOS-base devices. Adobe and the rest can have the "high end" Mac market to themselves, but that's not where the money is in video editing these days.

The real question is whether Adobe will drop the price of Premiere Pro and it's CS Production Suite to keep pace with Apple. SCS saw the light and cut the upgrade prices on Sony Vegas Pro. What was the V9 ---> V10 upgrade special offer price again?

What was the V9 ---> V10 upgrade special offer price again?

$139.95 US.

Mike

ya but by the time FCP users are done buying there way back to what they had before, they'll be in it for a whole lot more than $300-$400

Glenn said Plus, they have already burned their users and many of them will avoid Apple because they can't afford to have Apple abandon them again.

Man, talk about deja vu. When I first started working for my current employer back in 2001 they were editing on Apple platforms with Media100. This was a hardware dependent system with it's own I/O cards. At that point, and for a few year after, Apple had already changed hardware architecture and even within the same architecture had changed buss power. Both changes required new cards from Media100.

After finishing a doc in early 2005 that had been started on Media100 they decided to completely bail on the Apple platform. One of the reasons was that the platform was a moving target, the other that Media100 was having big troubles (Coincidence?).

Time has passed, we've been through he11 with Premiere Pro (I joke that SSDs would make the crashing and rebooting much faster) and have moved BACK to Apple and FCP.

So, it took about 5 years to come back after being driven away. The 5 years included an investment in PC edit stations and then a gradual reinvestment in Apple edit stations. They would have gone back faster if it hadn't been for the hardware investments and in fact the die was cast after using PPro for two years once it became obvious that it wasn't ever going to be up to the task of a feature length doc.

So, my guess is that it'll only take a couple of years to get Final Cut users back, assuming Apple *tries* to address their needs. I suppose it's possible that they're really abandoning those users, although that's really hard to believe.

Regarding porting Vegas to the Mac...I really think that the people complaining about FCPX won't like Vegas either. Vegas is just a more mature version of something that can't be used by higher end FCP shops.

Rob Mack

The Red Empire strikes back:

http://www.cultofmac.com/capitalizing-on-final-cut-pro-x-debacle-adobe-slashes-premiere-pro-software-by-50/103066

This reminds me of a funny Adobe "crash report" I once read. Looking for it I found that there is even a site dedicated to funny Adobe crash reports. Apparently it happens so often that people are spending some time writing whole essays to Adobe.

The one I were remembering:
[url=http://www.beersteak.com/breaking-news/adobe-after-effects-crash-report-fail/]

The site with crash reports
[url=http://www.beersteak.com/breaking-news/funny-adobe-crash-reports-proof-mac-sucks/]

and another:
[url=http://log.maniacalrage.net/tagged/cscr]

And even more off topic. On the same day Apple released FCPX, a game company, producing an MMO, released their next update. The similarities between the user reactions, the responses from the corporations and their attempts to placate their users only increasing the ire at the company, ultimately leading to a mass exodus towards competitors. Though in the MMO's case, it's probably not more than 5% of the active users that has left so far.
Still, it's kinda eerie that two companies, with no connections, corporate or private, manage to screw up in such similar manner, at the same time.

* Promising great things for years, but delivers a deeply flawed and limited experience.
* Releases what they decide the users want.
* Refuses to listen to their fan base.
* Refuse to address critique.
* Users jumping ship in droves, going to competing products.
* Claims Innovation takes time, users just have to learn to love the changes.

That fits Apples handling of FCPX, as well as it fits the MMO corporation.

@A. Grandt

I hadn't seen the Adobe crash reports. I laughed repeatedly while reading them.

I guess 2011 is turning out to be the year of high profile software reboots that bomb in a massive way..

Duke Nuke Forever
Final Cut Pro X
Unknown MMO?

"Apple is just paving the way to eventually move all it's FCP business to iOS-base devices. Adobe and the rest can have the "high end" Mac market to themselves, but that's not where the money is in video editing these days."

Hmm, rumor has it that OSX is on it's way out altogether in favor of iOS:

http://www.cultofmac.com/apple-will-murder-os-x-and-replace-it-with-ios-on-all-macs-starting-in-2012-report/107445

Interesting:

"As the migration to HTML 5 continues, everything essentially will become an app able to be accessed either wirelessly or offline, the analyst says. Naturally, this will excite app developers who want to write for one huge Apple device market."

Microsoft have already announced they will be going down the same path with the Windows 8 interface being HTML 5.
I wonder how much coding that's going to require to migrate Vegas to Win8. Could be a good thing if it clears out some of the cobwebs.


Bob.

Absolutely stinks from a performance point of view.

There will be a large category of applications where raw efficiency and processing speed far outweigh new OS GUI concerns and i'm sure the Sony Creative suite will be squarely within this category. Microsoft has also grudgingly announced that it will continue to support a legacy GUI and API for this sort of application. Interestingly enough, at the developers conference where their new Windows 8 plans were announced, this legacy support drew more interest than all the new features combined. Basically the assembled developers didn't even care about the new stuff. They wanted to make sure they continue to develop powerful professional level applications regardless of where Microsoft was wandering.

I have to agree with a lot of pundits positions i've been reading lately. Why would anyone want to dumb down their computer with a clunky interface designed solely to make it easier for fat fingers to use a tiny screen? The "small screen OSses" are riding a wave of public hysteria over pocket-sized computing and sadly the big OS designers are making the mistake that this is what people want everywhere.

but will it run crysis? oops, should that be facebook?

The new FCPX will NOT open any projects created with ANY previous versions of FCP. That seems suicidal. (2)
Final Cut x not suport multicam.
was the worst version of final cut I've seen so far.
it will turn a laughingstock among the editors.
They lowered the price, but took lots of tools out.