Defending Final Cut Pro X

Things always end badly, or they don't end. 
- Tom Cruise, "Cocktail."

Don't fall in love with technology. It will never love you back. 

- J.D.W.

Breakups are hard, and they can reveal a lot of unhappy truths, which the forbearance of an ongoing relationship would make difficult to express,  such as: 

"You snore at night," or 

"You spend too much time fussing in the mirror," or worst of all, 

"You don't really love me anymore."

Final Cut Pro X Unhappy Truths:

Apple Inc. does not value it's ProApps as much as it does it's iApps.

To Apple Inc. we are all consumers, weather we make money using our nifty Apple gizmos or not.

And worst of all:

Apple Inc. does not love the "Professional" market as much as Apple Computer once did. 

Man, the truth sure hurts sometimes.

The New Kid

Most of the anger directed at Final Cut Pro X is not about what the software does or does not do, it's about how Apple has treated it's professional users. Those of us who have been a part of the Apple revolution for a long time have seen the signs for many years. 

My own history with the company included a very potent lesson on how Apple viewed the Professional DVD Authoring Market, and an installed base of loyal Apple/Astarte users. <link>

And there have been several more times since then that Apple has marginalized or abandoned a motivated, loyal group of professional users.

Shake and Final Cut Server users know the feeling, as do those IT people who were brave enough to install an Xserve, or Xraid in their rack room. Now we can add DVD Studio Pro, Color and some would say Final Cut Pro, to the list of programs that Apple has purchased, strip-mined  and abandoned. (After harvesting the core technology to make their "less technical" programs better.)

There are reasons for this. Some of these reasons are business reasons, some are just the philosophy of Mr. Steve Jobs, and  although their validity may be open to debate, their existence isn't.

Reason #1: Ease of use.

Smells Like UNIX

Final Touch/Color was an awesome program but the interface was decidedly UN-Apple like. It even smelled like UNIX. The number of FCP users who actually took the time to learn it was small, and the number of actual users who became professional Colorists with it was almost nill. But there it was, a program that used to cost $25,000 now bundled in for free with FCP.

Now it's gone, but the technology lives on the the great new AUTOMATED color correction in FCP X. And lets face it, the things that the average professional editor used Color for (fixing bad white balance, matching skin-tones from shot to shot, or creating a color look.) can be done much more easily in FCP X.

This makes sense from the point of view of the editor who never bothered to learn Apple's Color, because it gives him additional functions without additional effort, but it's going to piss off the Colorist, and the Editor who made the considerable effort, to learn the software.

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, there will always be more people who never learn a complex piece of software, but would enjoy having some of the features given to them for free.

I call this "Digital Pan-Handling."

This is why DVD Studio Pro users could never author a Blu-Ray disc, but you could burn one (without menus or advanced features) directly from Compressor.

So they screw some of their pro users, to help others -- Not a problem as long as they help more than they screw.

Reason #2 Diminishing Returns:

Apple is making their flagship editing program more accessable to a wider group of editors (some professionals, some not) but they are pissing off the high-end editors who actually used things like Multi-cam and OMF export. (Me)

My Edit Suite

Let's call this group of users "Broadcast," to distinguish them from "professionals," who may earn their living editing video, but do not need some of the more advanced features (EDL export, RED, 2K capture, etc.)

If you think that REF-IN is something that happens at the start of a hockey game, and you get a puzzled look on your face when you hear the term "Scratch Disk" (you'd be surprised how many broadcast professionals still fit this description) then you will probably get along just fine in FCP X

But if you are like me, and the last person you got paid to edit for has an academy award sitting on his mantle, then you will probably see the new Final Cut Pro as a mixed bag, or an outright downgrade.

So, the only thing that is really up for debate is: Did Apple do this on purpose, or did they misjudge their market.

This is where my brief experience "inside the fruit" helps.

Apple, perhaps more than any other big corporation, is is led by the vision of it's CEO (Or is he still the iCEO?)

And Steve Jobs wants to create markets, and lead revolutions.

Bite This

What revolution would he lead by giving a small (but outspoken) group of users the ability to edit the footage from five cameras, each costing $50K to $100K, while viewing the video output on a broadcast monitor costing $20K, after their AE (costing $500/day) captured and organized all the footage, and before the Sound Dept. and the Colorist (if you have to ask you can't afford them) do their jobs?

Answer -- None. That is a broadcast workflow looking for incremental changes that save money by decreasing the most expensive element - Skilled Human Labor Time.

On the other hand, if Apple can give a person who spent $500 on a Canon T3, $1k on his iMac and $400 on his software the ability to produce a broadcast quality HD film...

That's a revolution.

Almost as much of a revolution as including a DVD drive in a computer for $1000 back in 2005, when the cheapest DVD-R drive before the Supredrive came along was $10,000. Weather I like it or not, and I sure didn't at the time, Apple created the DVD revolution by democratizing a once expensive technology.

The original FCP did the same thing. 

For Sale Only $60,000 - Cheap!

Back then avid was around $100,000 and FCP 1.0 cost $1000 and came in a box with a t-shirt and a firewire cable. And although I still have the t-shirt, it was the firewire cable that really was valuable because it allowed you to connect FCP to a Sony VX-1000 and get 1st generation DIGITAL input/output.

That started the revolution.

And perhaps more importantly, Apple, as a company, is absolutely not set up to service the broadcast industry. Let's face it, we are a demanding bunch. We expect the best and are willing to pay for it, but when the system crashes, we expect a tech person to show up within the hour, and get to work fixing it.

We can't exactly drag our edit suite to the Apple store for a consult at the Genius Bar.

Hell, most of the software bugs I troubleshoot today could not be duplicated, except on-site. And despite their modest efforts, the Apple Professional Video Certifications and Support never took off the way that AVID's ACSR program has.

Full Disclosure - I am an both and ACSR, as well as an Apple Certified FCP Instructor.

And despite what us broadcast professionals would have you believe, providing the service and support that we need/expect does not necessarily a profitable business make. 

AVID, the company that could benefit most from Apple's new FCP X is not exactly a cash cow anymore, in fact they lost 11% of their value in April 2011 alone, and are now valued somewhere around 700 mIllion.

That was one month before Apple became the most profitable technology company in the world. According to Forbes, Apple Inc. made 14 BILLION dollars PROFIT last year alone.

Gone but not Forgotten

I may not like it (I don't) but discarding Professional applications (Shake, FCP Server) and systems (Xserve, Xraid) has made Apple MUCH more profitable. And I don't see them suddenly changing the company culture that has been so successful. 

To put it in an editor's terms: Apple has a rock-solid post workflow... 

Why would they change?

They wouldn't -- Certainly not just to make a few thousand broadcast professionals happy for a few moments. (We're never really happy anyway, except when we're getting an award.)

So like the spurned lover, we find ourselves, if not broken up, then at least having to deal with the fact that we are not the first love anymore -- If we ever were.

Most of us will look elsewhere, like AVID, Adobe or maybe even Sony Vegas. Some of us will adapt our workflow to the new paradigm, and invest the time to learn the new software. But what Apple is betting that we WON'T do, is to jettison the rest of our Apple products as well.

Sure, we might switch back to Media Composer but that still runs on a Mac, right? Oh, are you going to go out an learn Windows 7, AND a new editing program at the same time? Then why not go the whole 9 yards and put your iPhone and iPad up for sale on Craigslist, throw that Apple TV into a closet and give that Mac Pro to the kids to play with.

Come on, who are we kidding. We might be mad now, but are we REALLY ready to burn our bridge to Cupertino? 

Unlikely. 

Why don't you guys like me?

Are we really going to show up at your next production meeting toting an HP Slate? 

Seriously?

It's a much safer bet that we will accept the insult of our new diminished role, like a married person still in love with our cheating spouse.

Sure, we may flirt with Linux and an Android phone, but damn few of us will actually find the courage to throw the cheating bum out on their ass.