ProCutX App to Streamline Final Cut Pro X Editing From Your iPad

mw360 said:

Good post, but I think Apple ultimately did the right thing. FCP X is a long term project and Apple know that the professional transition to FCP X would also be slow, just because of corporate inertia. They figured Pros would be sensible enough to dabble in FCP X for minor projects, and get the feel of it before doing any real work in it. So in that light certain legacy features weren't worth implementing right away. EDLs for example. Apple might be guessing that by the time FCP X was widely taken up, EDLs would be obsolete anyway. What would be the point of rewriting all that EDL code?

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That is the benefit of rewriting a program, you can get rid of legacy code.

LaDirection said:

You are surely joking. A "solid foundation"??? Apple did not write a new app from scratch. Apple took the iMovie application and modified it into FCPX. It has NO professional foundation. Even as of now, it's far from having what we had in Final Cut Pro two years ago, let alone what Premiere has today.

The fanboys who bought the apps gave it 4 starts ? Awesome, good for them. NOT A SINGLE PRO USER IS OR WILL BE USING THAT SOFTWARE. Period. Apple took over the entire market with FCP. It bought Shake, FinalTouch HD (Color), only to kill them off with absolutely no valid reason. The professional market is extremely hard to win and Apple had it. They have now lost it forever. They just showed them "buy software and hardware from us, then we'll cancel everything and ******* you over on a whim."

As for this iPad app it's utterly ridiculous. The entire point of a control surface is to allow you to work with TACTILE controls while keeping your eyes on the screen. Having to look at the iPad to find the button's location makes this a gadget for non-professional geeks, much like FCPX itself now is.

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You clearly have little idea of what you are talking about or are just trying to mess with people's feathers. Apple did rewrite the program from scratch as it had to do with a lot of programs. Do an internet search on Final Cut Pro X, several sources will validate that claim.

Apple likely killed Shake for the same reason it rewrote Final Cut Pro. Namely, to support Shake it would have had to rewrite it as well because it was a carbon app. When Apple dropped support for carbon, Shake had to be rewritten to work. Apple likely wasn't making enough money off of Shake to support the rewrite. To bad, as quite a few professionals liked the program.

As far as fanboys go, the App had a one out of five star rating until Apple started rapidly updating the apps. Many so called fans boys who gave the app a one star started raising the stars with the updates. I doubt anybody is going to pay $299 for an app and rate it highly if it stinks, regardless of your feelings towards Apple's products.

As far as professionals not using the app goes, I guess time will tell. As far as Premiere goes, it's biggest problem is it is made by Adobe.

Professional editors do not use Final Cut Pro X.

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There's so much arrogance in this post I think it has a slight odor.


So if I switch from Premiere or Avid to X for a project (because I think it fits it) that suddenly rips me of my editor street cred? This is ridiculous.

When the iPad first came out, controllers like this were one of the things I was most excited for.

LaDirection said:

You are surely joking. A "solid foundation"??? Apple did not write a new app from scratch. Apple took the iMovie application and modified it into FCPX. It has NO professional foundation. Even as of now, it's far from having what we had in Final Cut Pro two years ago, let alone what Premiere has today.

The fanboys who bought the apps gave it 4 starts ? Awesome, good for them. NOT A SINGLE PRO USER IS OR WILL BE USING THAT SOFTWARE. Period. Apple took over the entire market with FCP. It bought Shake, FinalTouch HD (Color), only to kill them off with absolutely no valid reason. The professional market is extremely hard to win and Apple had it. They have now lost it forever. They just showed them "buy software and hardware from us, then we'll cancel everything and ******* you over on a whim."

As for this iPad app it's utterly ridiculous. The entire point of a control surface is to allow you to work with TACTILE controls while keeping your eyes on the screen. Having to look at the iPad to find the button's location makes this a gadget for non-professional geeks, much like FCPX itself now is.

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I've been an editor for 17 years and love FCPX. I also use FCP7, Avid Symphony. Always depends on the project. Is FCPX perfect? No but it's my go to software at the moment...

DesterWallaboo said:

Hate to break the news to you, but pros aren't waiting around for Apple to finally deliver the product they need. At my studio we waited a full year to see what Apple was going to do with the product. We decided to make the full move to Premiere on all of our workstations and edit bays. It's not very unlikely we will move back to FCP in the future unless something really spectacular shows up on the Apple front.

Our studio has 3 edit bays and dozen+ workstations.

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You don't need to break anything about 'pros' to me. Other than perhaps how its possible to write a full featured professional NLE system from the ground up and have it support all the legacy workflows AND be better than Premiere and Avid at version 1.0. FCPX won't be mature until v2 or 3 by which time you'll be on CS9 or so and possibly wondering if the app isn't a little bloaty and in need of a rewrite.

Who knows but I'm sure you'll be happy with Premiere. It's a fine app.

This is why I never got sucked into buying an iPad mini. Big screens are great for stuff like this.

It's almost worth getting just for it's looks

Amazing Iceman said:

I meant that Apple was forced to release FCP X too soon, when it was an unfinished product. I think it had to do with FPC compatibility when Lion was released.

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No. There are three parts. Apple's policy on discussing future products, Software continuity versus posturing, and expectation management.

1. Apple as standard corporate policy doesn't widely talk about future products. There are a select few that get to see what is being worked in in advance but this is more laying the lanes of communication process and some alpha/beta feedback.

So to talk about next gen FCP or Mac Pro they largely need to release to talk about with a wide group of folks.

Whether it is unfinished or not is a matter of perspective. Software development is a iterative process. No moderately complex system is ever completely done. So the debate is what is the minimal core set of features and when is the transition point.

Releasing a core of FCPX allows Apple to talk about it and gather better feedback as to what are the next pieces to fill in. It is a more incremental development methodology with more smaller focused releases than "big bang, this is it; everything for everybody" releases.

If Apple had squatted on FCP 7 for another 2 years things would be equally bad going forward. ( e.g., the Mac Pro market. There is particularly good sitting sitting comatose on a product for 3 years. )

2. Apple routinely terminates product versions, flushes the remaining software out of the market , and then quietly sells/provides copies to those who need it on a business continuity basis a month or so later who either has continuity agreements with them or establish paid/commercial contracts.

Yeah the standard corporate marketing is "this is best XXX ever. drop everything and buy it now before everyone does".... but frankly that is just standard hyperbole. It is almost comical folks who label themselves professionals take that stuff seriously. Instead usually treated in open forums to rounds of "apple needs to tell me about future products", "it doesn't have feature 546 so it is a FAIL" , etc. In short, an equally unproductive round of hyperbole from the other side.

Apple should improve transparency about the end of lifecycle process but most of the smoke and fire about these new product announcements focus on the wrong issues so the process doesn't improve.


3. What was really poor was Apple's expectation management. Switching to a new development methodology of smaller incremental releases and more of a 3rd and 2nd parties fill-in-the-integrations between FCPX and niche hardware.

Apple was expecting mainly to pick up early adopters. That means cutting loose some folks who mainly have a backwards looking viewpoint. Staunch maintainers of the status quo are never happen with new product versions unless they are simply purely focused on bug fixes. That "fix only" stance makes another subset unhappy. Nobody is going to be 100% happy.

From the customers side some folks seem to be laboring under the misconception that Apple is some sort of software development for hire company. That they feed in wish lists and Apple does exactly what you tell them to on demand. It really doesn't work that way.

How's the latency? I assume it connects via wifi. Scrubbing will need to be realtime, slight latency can be extremely annoying fast.

Terrin said:

I really don't get comments like these. You switched at a drop of a hat, but you have no intention of going back? Then why comment on a third party Final Cut Pro X utility that looks pretty cool and shows the strength of the platform?

What people don't understand, and it is mostly Apple's fault for the confusion, is that when Apple switched from supporting both Cocoa and Carbon developing environments to just supporting Cocoa, Apple had to rewrite Final Cut from the ground up. That is a major undertaking because Final Cut Pro 7 was huge piece of software. Apple took the same approach it did when it released OSX. It brought out a product that contained a solid foundation, but lacked many features the previous version had. Unfortunately, many of these features Pros were relying on. Apple should have foresaw this, but the way it likes secrecy sort of backfired on it.

Since the release though, Apple said it would quickly be adding features, and it temporarily put Final Cut Pro 7 back on the market. True to it's word in the fifteen months it has been out, Apple has released at least 7 significant updates. It even offers a free demo now. To each their own, but in comparison to other options, it also costs a lot less.

On the App Store, it has almost 4 out of 5 stars, which seems pretty good considering all the angry people who reviewed it when it first came out and who gave it one star (which brings the average down).

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You might prefer Premiere, but as I already mentioned, Apple released 7 free significant updates since the first version was released. Many people who dogged the program went back and praised the updates. Lots of people liked what Final Cut Pro X brought to the table in terms of new features, they just hated the lack of relied upon features and the initial lack of backwards compatibility between projects (since addressed).

Apple obviously is serious about the program or it wouldn't be going to town on bringing in free updates adding features so quickly. It also is clearly listening to the pro community in doing so as many of the added back features are the ones pros gripped about.

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Well, I am switching our six FinalCut 7 seats to Premiere later this month because the “7 free significant updates since the first version” have done nothing for us. Adobe makes some crappy bloatware but that still beats iMovie Pro by a long shot.

Oh and by the way: Your OS X development comparison doesn't stand. Apple had a roadmap back then that they also communicated to their customers. They told people that OS 9 would run inside a box and that the machines would be capable of dual boot for a while.

So if I may paraphrase you one more time by saying “What people don't understand”:
People seem to not understand that asset management, collaborative work, integration with 3rd party applications and a general application design, that let's people work in their individual ways, is important in a pro app. None of which iMovie Pro will ever have. How can I be so certain? Because the damage is done in such deep layers, they would have to rewrite the whole thing yet again.