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Scott Ivers's avatar

I was a beta-tester on FCP X months before NAB, and quoted in a slide during the public announcement. I can add never-before-shared context on the development and launch.

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B Russ's avatar

Feels like P.R..

A whole industry of cinema; editing houses; vocational education; third party software; advanced storage and networking, tech-farm gear and IT implementation and support; university film departments, died a sudden unexpected death. Final Cut Pro X was a completely incompatible, hollowed out buggy toad doopie of an editing specimen that every carcass of the slaughtered masses derisively monikered, "iMovie Pro".

Apple had quietly dumped their development team, many of them known to the community, the production houses and convention goers. Up until this time nervousness had festered for almost two years as the next promised version of Final Cut Studio never came, never came....

Then the ax came down. The next "version" wasn't Final Cut Pro in any way, shape or form. Apple subsequently locked the EOL FCP out of new hardware and OS upgrades, leaving people around the world stranded with old, unfinished and archived projects across a storage landscape, that they cannot open to this day (not without breaking finished and rendered projects, third party integrations and all). Apple never released the source code (not that anyone expected them to -- but to this day it sure would be nice simply for legacy access).

One cannot overstate how destructive that all was. At first the thought was Apple uppers were completely out of touch with what their own product really was. (True.) Then it became clear that, despite the enormity of Final Cut Pro internationally in film and television, for the gargantuan Apple it was dust mote of a pet project compared to iPhones and all things Mac. The professional and technological ecosystem required to keep the world of Final Cut going wasn't worth it to Apple, they just wanted to back out of it and turn it over to, well, a consumer and prosumer Apple fanboy iMovie crowd.

Horribly handled. Cruel even. The blindsided industry went into triage, rebuilding infrastructure from the cement block up. Half the crowd slunk back to Avid, the other half fueled Premiere Pro's rise to become a dominant player. (A few years later Davinci branched out from the industry standard grading system into the professional editing sphere, and has been most successful at pulling people back from the other players to a true Final Cut Pro-like "industry" universe of powerful and accessible tools and attendant international community, that continues to expand and impress to this day. Final Cut never retook it's top spot in film and television.)

Apple was fine with all this. They didn't want to bother with it. To wit, Avid, Blackmagic and even Adobe are itty -bitty outfits compared to Cupertino. iPhone users outnumbered industry professionals twenty to one.

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