I’m seeing this all over the various forums, blogs and twitter feeds in one variant or another in regards to the big Final Cut Pro X reveal at the FCPUG SuperMeet in Las Vegas last Tuesday.
“Hey, don’t knock down this product when it was just a SNEAK PEEK people! Sure there’s some questions out there but we should all be happy that Apple has at least shown us something. You know they’re normally super secret so the fact that actually showed Final Cut Pro X is a big change in the company. I’m excited about these new changes! Now we have to wait till June to see what features are still in the application before we start to complain.”
Apple had two freakin’ hours of stage time available and they wasted it on just one hour of a super slick presentation. Of course we’re going to knock the presentation because all it did was leave us with many more questions than answers.
How long would it have taken to mention planned support for third party filters? 30 seconds?
Third party capture cards? 60 seconds?
Log and Capture / Edit to Tape support? (are they still there?) 20 seconds?
Customizable interface to replicate a more traditional editing style? 2 minutes?
Continued support of OMF, XML, EDL, AAF import / export? 30-60 seconds?
Text Tool? 2 minutes?
Track management? (as in allowing us to specify audio tracks for elements for ease of sending to ProTools and other sound editors) 1 minute?
The other ProApps? (as in are they being updated, retained and if so, expected releases?) 2 minutes?
In other words, MANY of the unanswered questions that all of us are asking could have been answered in that additional hour with plenty of time to spare.
Even if they didn’t want to show one of their patented slick slides or video demo, they could have at least told us about the various professional features that many of us use every day. But apparently those questions I’ve asked up above are somehow trade secrets that simply cannot be revealed because what if (gasp) one of the competitors (Avid, Adobe, Quantel, Autodesk, Vegas) finds out that Apple intends to retain standard pro features?
I’m sick and tired of sneak peeks and teases quite honestly. Put the product out there where we can truly test it out and ask questions like the Adobe, Avid, Autodesk, Quantel and all the other demonstrations that were out on the show floor. Put it in the hands of 1,000 beta testers in all sorts of production situations to get real world feedback instead of relying on a couple of post houses and maybe 10 beta testers. I spoke one on one with the CEO of Avid about the product and the future of the product. That was a useful conversation with frank questions and answers.
“I cannot speak about anything except what you just saw in the presentation” is the response one of my colleagues got from the Apple ProApps team after the “sneak peek.” In other words, you have questions, I have no answers. So what was the point in coming at all if you didn’t want to address the Pro Editors’ questions?
For fanboys it was the ultimate Apple dog and pony show last Tuesday.
But in the end, in front of 1700 video editors, on what could have been the night Apple completely re-invented non-linear editing, quite simply, Apple dropped the ball. Next time come prepared to answer very simple, very basic questions from the professionals in the room.
Holy crap! I spent the evening going thru tutorials and trying to cut a mockup 30 sec. music video. I hope to hell that FCP X has more to offer than iMovie 11. The first nightmare was take a 3 min audio track and make it start and end in 30 sec.As a guitarist, cutting around phrases to make the impossible sound good is standard operating procedure. No problem on a normal timeline. Editing audio with the clip editor doesnt allow this process and you dont even see the full duration of the clip on the time line. I got used to marking (rubber banding) and inserting the clips and the precision tool is interesting. But at first blush Premiere Pro/After Effects is looking better and better. I wouldnt consider Media Composer 5.5 because its just to rigid and cumbersome after using FCP 7 and PP (I edited with Avid DS for 12 years so I do have various points of comparison.) I know they are supposed to be different apps, but I saw a lot of the things in iMovie that were present in the Sneak Peek so they seem to share a lot of tool sets. YUCK!
This was a win for Apple and lose for editors/post houses.
Apple got the free publicity and buzz for NAB. Twitter was blazing with #supermeet and #fcpx. They got to showoff what they wanted, tease us (like they always do) and then keep everything secretive until June
Editors got to see that Apple is at least doing something with Final Cut, but were left clueless on additional features and the fate of other ProApps. I’m assuming the people at the event were left with a feeling of “Why is it ending already” “We want MOOOORE!!”
All I want at least is just them updating their damn website under final cut studio. They still have FCS3 on their. No mention of FCPX, no press release. It was almost like they waited till the last second to go to NAB and only had the same presentation they gave larry jordan during the not-so-secret editor reveal (I think you should of got an invite)
Will I buy 10 licenses for out post house? Yes. I am happy about it? Yes. Am I happy they way they are teasing me? No.
Their presentation seemed to be aimed at the general user and your questions about I/O interfacing and EDL, OMF, XML probably weren’t answered due to their target audience. I’m with you on all those questions adding the Aux Timcode and editor checkout questions.
I’ve notice you bringing Avid up more and more, have you thought of switching?
Yes, I’ve gone beyond the thought of switching to Avid and actively planning for that eventuality. I actually got to have a one on one breakfast meeting with the CEO of Avid where I was able to ask questions. A lot of questions and I got a lot of answers. Something the Apple team would never do. Even after the event they would not answer anything other than what was shown. Typical Apple. We’ll show you what we want you to see, not what you need to know to make an informed business decision. This is not just a consumer product, this completely affects our livelihood, but true to form, Apple just plays it out like a game.
I will not be buying 7 licenses of FCP X when it comes out. I will buy one and put it onto an iMac for testing to see if it’s even a viable workflow for our facility and all the interfacing we have to do with outside production houses.
I’m not even going to waste $299 if it doesn’t do all the things we need the software to do when Avid already does. I’m waiting to see what develops with Avid Media Composer 6 as it sounds like it will further surpass the capabilities of FCP. FCP will have the slicker interface, Avid will have more robust professional features.
I’ve seen some folks saying “well FCP 7 will still work when X comes out” Yes it will and it will still be as inefficient at handling digital camera formats as it is today. Avid is much more efficient in multiformat work so if my choices are FCP 7 or Avid, then that’s an easy choice for me.
Hello,
I agree with you Walter. 100%. This is our bread and butter, and they have the nerve to go and overhaul fcp as a whole. Yes the interface needed some work, yes they had to move to 64 bit, but a whole brand spanking new piece of software. Come on. IT wasn’t that broken.
Do you think Avid would ever be able to get away with pulling that. They would lose all their loyal editors. I don’t know how apple keeps pulling these sorts of things off.
I have a number of concerns. Mainly this new magnetic timeline. I work in the broadcast industry and we have to be very diligent with track assignment. Randy said, there are no tracks in this interface. Tracks just come and go as needed. Hey Randy, do you know workflows, or are you just doing the thinking for us. This is what I think you need. Hopefully there is and advanced timeline setup.
This is a major problem not having any tracks, this probably means a drag and drop timeline. how will you tell fcp where you want to patch a clip from the browser then?
In the supermeet, super tease, we never saw Randy cut anything into the timeline. Didn’t see him mark any in and outs, alot of mouse work. Yes he did say everything can be driven form the keyboard, but, I am not that confident right now. I hope its not the skim this, drag that. This would make for a long edit, and doesn’t seem to be the most efficient way to work.
I am sure the magnetic timeline can be turned off, but the lack of tracks is scary. Especially when he said that they just come and go as needed. What about spitting out an omf. I also didn’t see left and right channels. One channel for each audio, music, ambient. Scary.
As for the whole I/O thing. If this is as they call it Final Cut Pro X and the pro is actually pro, then I am sure we will have both I/O for third party cards.
I really like the new pitch corrected audio, the interface is pretty slick as well as the auditioning. But again that seems scary, Things just moving around. Not good if you are locked to time.
I am keeping my fingers crossed. At 299 the price is great. And I most likely will download it. It would be nice to get a manual before though.
So many questions still. damn you Apple! Not professional at all.
Not to interject more controversy, but this post (among so many others I have read) seems to fall into the same vein of scaremongering that has editors the world over making baseless plans to jump ship. Yes, Apple could have shown their entire product, demoed every feature that ALREADY EXISTS in the product, just to appease the skittish crowd. But anyone who has dealt with Apple for a long time knows that this is the way they do business. Steve and Co. are showmen and entertainers, I think, as much as they are computer geeks. I’m not saying this is right, but this is what they do.
I remember when Apple introduced Mac OS X how many graphic artists pronounced doom on the platform because it was such a huge deviation from OS 9 and before. Many of those artists, after getting over their panic, have become far more productive on the new platform than they ever were on OS 9. The same thing happened when Adobe bought Macromedia and killed Freehand. Professional illustrators were wringing their hands, some even foreswearing their profession, because of how “terrible” Illustrator was (i.e. it didn’t work the same as Freehand). Those same artists are now producing the same high quality work, just as fast, in Illustrator that they did in Freehand. People are so resistant to change that it sometimes makes them unwilling to see actual benefit in doing something a completely different (and possibly better) way than they always have. This is perhaps why commercial software UI paradigms have changed little since the inception of the windowing system, even though usability tests in university computer science labs have shown over and over that there are paradigms that are far more efficient than the way we do things now.
Even recently, I experienced about 24 hours of panic when Apple discontinued the Xserve. Being an Apple Certified sys admin, with Xsan installation and maintenance being a big part of my bread and butter, plans were reeling in my head of Quantum StorNext and Linux, Windows clients, etc. When I calmed down, I realized that the future is not yet here, and panic is unwarranted until Apple’s long-term plans are brought to light. A few months later, I stood at the Promise booth at NAB with my hands on a Thunderbolt – Fibre Channel adapter, and I knew where Xsan was headed.
I am not saying Final Cut Pro X is going to be the end-all, be-all for every professional editor. I’m not even saying that the new features are even going to be any good in a real-world scenario. I’m just saying that none of the speculators and prognosticators have had their actual hands on the product, so they shouldn’t be passing unqualified judgement on it. Let’s get our hands on it, play with it in the real world, and see if it just may be a better way of doing things. Then we can either keep it (and save a tremendous amount of money in the process), or intelligently jump ship based on all of the facts.
In due time we will be able to see what I’ve been hearing about first hand.
Now that it’s out, I think your “scare-mongering” was justified 🙂
I really don’t like to think of it as “scare mongering” I prefer to think of it as an honest opinion which turned out to be true. Unless you have a vested interest in selling something related to FCP X, there’s really not a lot of good being said out there.
Just quoting a previous poster 😉 You’re right though, not much to be excited about.