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.
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.
"Nice try. This smacks of P.R.." -- We included the uproar. We spent a lot of time on it. FYI this Substack is upfront that what we do is look at and celebrate the movers and shakers of our industry.
The point of the article is to relook at this event with a fresh lens, such as the lens of where video creation headed in a world of iPhones, TikToks, and YouTube. It is to try to remove oneself and one's personal experience and look at it in the greater context of the explosion of video creation. I may have felt _____ but my bigger motivation in life is still more people to tell their stories using the most evocative and powerful (and difficult) medium there is, video.
I understand where you're coming from. I myself was on FCP7, moved to Adobe Premiere.
I understand what you're saying. The article aims to "walk us through what really happened", then romanticizes the inception of FPX with a tale of brave mavericks bucking trends, following bold new vision in the face of stagnant headwinds. IMHO there's a fine line between a "fresh look" and "revisionism". History matters. The inception of FCPX was a mess, there's no rose colored view of it.
And it wasn't particularly innovativeother than the "magnetic timeline", which needed to be reigned in and updated to allow for more traditional tried-and-true editing. Other than that it was far more limited in features -- including innovative ones -- than either its predecessors or competitors. For many years.
I believe the account above is 20-20 hindsight, which is an honest way to go.
The Eddie product seems amazing, thought -- nice job, looking forward to digging in - b
What I am saying is there is more than one lens in which to look at this story. We know the lens from the YT link; that lens is a well understood one.
But there is another lens too and we wanted to examine the story from another perspective with the benefit of hindsight and where the world moved to - the explosion and the accessibility of video creation by billions of people - something unfathomable at the time of the x launch.
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.
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.
Thank you for your comment.
"Nice try. This smacks of P.R.." -- We included the uproar. We spent a lot of time on it. FYI this Substack is upfront that what we do is look at and celebrate the movers and shakers of our industry.
The point of the article is to relook at this event with a fresh lens, such as the lens of where video creation headed in a world of iPhones, TikToks, and YouTube. It is to try to remove oneself and one's personal experience and look at it in the greater context of the explosion of video creation. I may have felt _____ but my bigger motivation in life is still more people to tell their stories using the most evocative and powerful (and difficult) medium there is, video.
I understand where you're coming from. I myself was on FCP7, moved to Adobe Premiere.
I understand what you're saying. The article aims to "walk us through what really happened", then romanticizes the inception of FPX with a tale of brave mavericks bucking trends, following bold new vision in the face of stagnant headwinds. IMHO there's a fine line between a "fresh look" and "revisionism". History matters. The inception of FCPX was a mess, there's no rose colored view of it.
And it wasn't particularly innovativeother than the "magnetic timeline", which needed to be reigned in and updated to allow for more traditional tried-and-true editing. Other than that it was far more limited in features -- including innovative ones -- than either its predecessors or competitors. For many years.
I believe the account above is 20-20 hindsight, which is an honest way to go.
The Eddie product seems amazing, thought -- nice job, looking forward to digging in - b
There's an entire film about this topic: Here is an interview with the producer New Film Shows Impact of FCPX on Industry https://youtu.be/ZIO3hQTD_ak
Thanks for sharing.
What I am saying is there is more than one lens in which to look at this story. We know the lens from the YT link; that lens is a well understood one.
But there is another lens too and we wanted to examine the story from another perspective with the benefit of hindsight and where the world moved to - the explosion and the accessibility of video creation by billions of people - something unfathomable at the time of the x launch.