Former Shake Product Designer: Apple Doesn't Care About Pro Market

[akac]

You sure about that?

Shouldn't "it just works" = "it just works obviously"?

Not unless you've been trained for 10-15 years to do it "one way". That's why its called training. And FCP required training. Nearly nothing about FCP was obvious. At the very least you had to train yourself.

Because that's what characterizes Apple's other products.

Yup, and FCPX I believe does that too. Except to people who are trained to do something else.

If it's a better way, I'm sure the Pros would happily learn to adjust. But if these critical features are somehow hidden or function completely unintuitively, then we've got a problem.

No, but if I am used to having to do things manually and to do something manually I had to set a keyframe, and this option and that option and now none of that exists because to do the same thing I select my clip and pick the action - then yes, I'm sure the pros will adjust but in the meantime they are going to b***** and moan.

 

[slrandall]

And can we at least wait until the next MacPro update before we label it "dead"? One "under-the-hood-only" update doesn't mean a line is dead. Look at the iMac, MacbookPro, and the Air.

I do concede though, that if the MacPro isn't significantly updated with the next refresh, things aren't looking too good.

 

[JDW]

File Sizes Larger Than 2GB

The pros should just use iMovie '08.

I see you said that rather tongue in cheek, but even non-Pros would prefer FCP X over iMovie 8 insofar as iMovie 8 is still brain-dead about file sizes larger than 2GB. Try it. You cannot import and edit anything over 2GB in iMovie. It's pathetic. And I am not even a Pro. I simply shoot HD video with my Lumix GF-1 and often need to edit a single file larger than 2GB. And no, I shouldn't be forced to break the file into multiple pieces or transcode it so it will fit within iMovies foolish 2GB filesize restriction.

Then again, I am speaking of the previous version FCP when it comes to file sizes. Has anyone tried opening a file larger than 2GB in FCP X?

Thanks.

 

[nostaws]

I think we are missing an important part of this FCP X debacle.

For what they do, Apple is a relatively small company. They have groups of programmers that finish one product then shift their focus onto another.

I don't think they have the resources (by choice?) to focus on a mature piece of software and make it better over time. Apple is consistently "re-inventing".

Think about their software. Very few applications are "mature."

Filemaker was spun off into their own semi-company. Microsoft has their Mac BU which essentially is the Office for Mac team. Consider how adobe takes their applications and develops them over time.

Final Cut Pro needs a group of programmers/engineers to focus in it and each update.

 

[soLoredd]

He was working at Apple 5 years ago.

arn

Granted, but it was pretty much in a lame duck capacity.

This whole "Apple isn't focusing on the pro market" discussion has been going on for years.

 

[rhuber]

I think the whole "pro" thing has gotten out of hand, really. Apple clearly is all about targeting the consumer/pro-sumer market and, in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with that. I can understand the frustration because folks have entrenched themselves into the Apple world and have built entire workflows based on their software. But, I think the folks complaining are being naive into thinking Apple will always support them or remain committed to them.

I'd also take this guy's opinion with a grain of salt. It's easy to come out now and make comments like this because that is the overlying sentiment. But why didn't he come forth a year, two years, or five years ago?

You also have to keep in mind that those pro's, in no small part, were somewhat responsible for the resurgence of apple computers. When mac was the go-to platform for professional video editors and graphic designers, colleges had row upon row of high-end macs to support them. Those students went on to use macs in their work and everyday lives. This also directly attributed to the reputation apple gained as a high level system for serious work. Now their philosophy is looking dangerously similar to the Walmart business model... high volume, mass market, fully outsourced. Yes, it does make me rethink apple as a serious system for work, which is a complete reverse of the campaign that brought them back to prime-time in the first place. I have to admit, when I look back to 1984 and see the room full of clones in white, it's not the PC market that comes to mind anymore... it's apple. And they do appear to be racing even faster down that track.

Also, remember that when apple started slacking off in the motion graphics department, and Adobe was not offering support for After Effects on Mac, editors flocked back to PC's, only to return once adobe began supporting Mac for AE. Why did they return? Because they loved working with FCP. People who use macs for serious work are in danger of running out of reasons to turn to apple. Schools, where apple successfully marketed HARD to put a mac at the hands of every students and turn the market around, are becoming hard pressed to justify the cost without the software that made the mac essential to that environment.

I think there is an overall picture here that is much bigger than it appears at first glance.

 

[soLoredd]

I'm sorry, I was under the impression the software was called Final Cut "Pro."

I'm on a 13" MacBook "Pro" that no professional in their right mind would be caught doing work on. Apple + Pro = not what you think.

 

[SirHaakon]

Go think different yourself....some of us have a living to earn and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in our businesses.

If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in a business, it's pretty easy to not feel too badly for you.

 

[ProVideo]

I'm a long time reader of the site. I registered just to say I hope iDisk is either drunk, high, or has some sort of brain damage. Otherwise his ignorance of anything professional and complete lack of reading comprehension is truly an embarrassment and reflects poorly on all of humanity.

 

[daylight28]

Fcpx should be called next gen

So I checked out final Cut pro X, pretty cool, If I was a fresh young editor just out of school who had all the time in the world to learn how to use the thing.
You have more control with the older FINAL CUT 7, Tell you what, Add 64 bit to FCP 8 and fix the importing for the canon 60D SD CARDS and I will be happy. I like how it works. I worked with AVID it is ok. But I don't want to switch. Bring BAck FCS, Call FCPX "Next GEN" Editing for the next Generation and we will forget this ever happen.

 

[Pentad]

Former "Shake" guy.. who is probably bitter that Apple never made a viable replacement for that product when they axed it.... Apple isn't interested in the "pro" market but they're interested in developing more users of FCE and iMovie into pro's by introducing FCPX....

The "Pro" market complainers need to THINK DIFFERENT, not Apple, cause FCPX is different..


I'm tired of the 10% nascent market of "Pro" whiners.... Apple has people who use their products, that can create a great video with the tools they have.. thats called innovation and creativity.

The "Pro" market relies or (relied) on Apple, Apple doesn't rely on them... And if the complaining "Pros" will be patient then they're version of what they think FCPX should be, will return soon... but Apple nor Myself will wait for the "Pros" to give there said blessing on the product...

Quite complaining and just Innovate, remember the guy who edited entire Hollywood blockbuster film on something equivalent to iMovie (but was really final cut) thats called innovation people!!

There is so much wrong with this comment I'm not sure where to begin. Ah, lets start with your logic and this little gem:

"The "Pro" market complainers need to THINK DIFFERENT, not Apple, cause FCPX is different.."

Having read everything from the 'complainers', I believe they have a right to complain because FCPX isn't just 'different' it is missing core features they many of these professionals use in their jobs. I also believe that this is a key issues when we boil it all down. The product is missing features that many people used in their jobs. This is how they make money.

Instead of FCPX, what if Apple just stopped updating JAVA for OS X. We all know it's being deprecated and that Oracle is supposed to take over. However, let's pretend Apple just stops supporting the current version so while it works it's missing the latest security patches and updates.

Many people with Macs (and right here on MRs) depend on Java Programming in some form. I guarantee you people would howl because we make money on using a Mac and OS X as a tool to accomplish a goal for clients/businesses/employers/whatever.

I would probably sell my MBP and move to Windows. I would complain all the way, I would be twice as vocal as the FCPX folks, and I would sure tell Apple what a mistake they would be making.

I really do love my MBP as it's the best tool I've ever owned. That being said, I do enough development work in Java that I could not stay with Java programming if my tools does not support the features I need.

If you don't care about Java, what if Apple decided to dump Intel and move to A4 CPUs. This isn't such a far fetched idea. Apple would have vertical integration, they have other products on the A4 and it would give Apple better control and integration of applications.

However, it would kill off Intel compatibility and really hurt the VM market, for example. This would be another "See Ya, Apple' moment for me...

"but Apple nor Myself will wait for the "Pros" to give there said blessing on the product..."

I do agree that you can't let the market dictate features but ignoring your customers can be disastrous as well. New Coke, Apple Pippin, Apple Cube, are just a few examples where consulting your customers might have avoided problems.

"Quite complaining and just Innovate, remember the guy who edited entire Hollywood blockbuster film on something equivalent to iMovie (but was really final cut) thats called innovation people!!"

I'm not sure innovate is the issue here. If FCPX doesn't do something you need it to do, I'm not sure what innovation you can do with the product. For example, if Apple stopped updating their Java and a major security hole was discovered but not patched by Apple, what innovation do you suggestion?

I could try to patch it myself, enlist others, beg, but in the end my time is valuable and I'm just going to move to another platform that is updated.

In the end, I think Apple is focusing on the market that has made them rich. I mean, really, rich...not paying your taxes rich. Consumers love the brand and the products.

Pros are a niche group and how much money do they really spend anyway in the long run? I think you can see a pattern of Apple moving away from the Pro stature in many examples:

-The MBP line used to be very 'Pro' with some cutting edge features. How 'Pro' is it really? I mean, they sell a Pro based 17" Notebook for over $2k and it comes stock with a whopping 4 GB of memory! My cup runneth over!

-The XServer product line getting the axe is another example of a market Apple is dropping

-OS X Server -by way of XServe- is also becoming much less emphasized

-FCPX is just another example of more consumer based ideology

In the end, it's not a bad decision for Apple but those who used Apple products as professional tools might have to find a new tool maker.


Cheers!
-P

 

[deconstruct60]

What are you supposed to do if you have multiple clients? FCPX shows you every event from everything you've worked on. What if you have a client in a room? You don't want other people (especially competitors) looking at someone else's assets. Short of pulling a hard drive for every client, FCPX just isn't useable.

1. tag each client's footage with their id own unqiue ID and when client is in the room just show smart folder/collection with that search tag.
Likewise, if searching for clips with certain keywords just "and" with the client tag.

2. events can be nested into folders. Again the top level folders can be client ID numbers and/or codes.

Surely, you are not talking about letting the client "drive" the computer and look anywhere on the mounted drives they want to. If it is keeping a limited amount of information in the even "browse" window. a. it isn't that large. b. it is hierarchical so it just takes some organization. (http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0/#ver26ccfda0 can't really see anything in the 2005 folder. Obviously, in this context you probably do not want to organize by date. )


3. but yeah another option it is to mount/unmout the clients stuff onto different external volumes. If it takes a password to mount the volume then you just might protect it even if you leave the mac unattended.

And not importing old projects? That was the nail in the coffin for a lot of people.

this is much more likely to get folks to look at the application for what it does do rather than trying to make it do exactly what it did before. There are aspects of file management which are now inside the app. I have seen several mistakes and folks shoot themselves in the foot by not approaching events/projects with a mental model aligned with what the app does as opposed to their preconceived notion and/or believing the default settings are the only way to do things.

iOS didn't have 3rd party apps or cut/paste for a couple of iterations. that didn't mean it wasn't useful. Nor did it mean it wasn't in the rollout plan. there are good reasons not to put it into the 1.0 release, but rather the 1.1 or 1.2 which shouldn't take all that long to show up.

 

[grue]

Well Nuke would would be just a souped up After Effects using the same logic. The complaints about FCPX mainly surround importing older projects from FCP7 and earlier, Multicam (which is coming) and being able to export OMF/AAF, XML and EDL for finishing.

Most Final Cut editors don't need all of these features. Steve was right...they're going to deliver features that most people need...not a small subset of Hollywood producers.

Wrooooooooong.

The complaints surround the stuff you mention, and having a source and record viewer, and having a non-terrible way to organize your media, along with being able to have a proper track-based interface such as we NEED, having timecode support, layered photoshop files, etc etc. It'd also be nice if they realized more than one person will work on a job, and it might be nice to store it on a SAN.

Apple didn't just screw the pooch, they knocked it out and raped it in the parking lot.

 

[jdesign]

So I checked out final Cut pro X, pretty cool, If I was a fresh young editor just out of school who had all the time in the world to learn how to use the thing.
You have more control with the older FINAL CUT 7, Tell you what, Add 64 bit to FCP 8 and fix the importing for the canon 60D SD CARDS and I will be happy. I like how it works. I worked with AVID it is ok. But I don't want to switch. Bring BAck FCS, Call FCPX "Next GEN" Editing for the next Generation and we will forget this ever happen.

Yay finally, someone who really understand!
Tried fcp x .. mmmmm more like imovie!

 

[RebootD]

There is so much wrong with this comment I'm not sure where to begin. Ah, lets start with your logic and this little gem:
Cheers!
-P

Wasting your time trust me. Just add to your ignore list like I did. I don't mind differences of opinion but a troll is a troll.

 

[stevemiller]

ideas should always be bigger then your tools... imagine if the person who invented the wheel gave up, because he didn't have the right "tool" or how about the first airplane with the wright brothers, ideas trump all that my friend......

you're totally right, ideas are bigger than tools, and as a result, people will use what works to make stuff happen. and thats exactly why people who have demands beyond the casual consumer are going to migrate away from fcp. other solutions have the tools and they work.

i know you like saying "think different" but honestly, that statement doesn't mean anything. i'd like to sell you a car without brakes. feel free to "think different" and try to figure out some other way to stop yourself. i hear brick walls are a pretty good stopgap solution.

 

[nuckinfutz]

This guy saw the writing on the wall well over a year ago. Great blogpost and should be read by everyone who continues to believe Apple is somehow in love with the pro market.

Do you guys really understand computing. This blog was pedantic.

for instance

ake a look at the same lineup today. Apple dropped the replaceable battery, dropped the user-upgradeable hard drive, started charging for matte screens and replaced the immensely useful ExpressCard slot with a consumer-oriented SD card slot. Hell, the entry-level MacBook Pro dropped below $2,000 to make it appeal to consumers more.

http://www.apple.com/environment/

the built-in battery in our MacBook lineup is a perfect example. Other notebook batteries can be charged only 200 to 300 times. The MacBook Pro battery can be charged up to 1000 times.6 And because this battery lasts up to five years, MacBook Pro uses just one battery in about the same time a typical notebook uses three.

The reasoning for Apple is why put in upgradable battery when you've employed a new technology that triples battery life meaning people are far more likely to upgrade their Mac before their battery dies. Matte does not equal professional any more than glossy. A display hood can get rid of any lighting issues and Expresscard with Mac drivers were rare beyond the eSATA cards and audio stuff like UAudio and a small handful of others.

But look at what happened to QuickTime in the process. With a rewrite of the Mac OS as a whole, I expected Apple to clean up all the messes that QuickTime had been creating over the past seven versions. QuickTime is indispensable, yes, but it’s also been plagued with prevalent gamma issues and inconsistencies for years. Those in the professional video community have found workarounds, but it was only logical that Apple clean up this mess while they were cleaning up the rest of the OS.

LOL. That's like playing Jenga with code. If you go mucking around in the basement you're likely going to cause problems that lead to app instability. Quicktime was developed at a time where getting video at a quarter of Standard Def was a feat. There was no way to easily take Quicktime and make it 64-bit. A common fallacy made by people who don't quite understand how legacy API work at even a basic level.

In short, the system architecture of the Mac Pro just isn’t up to what true professional users need in 2010. It may have the bleeding-edge processors [introduced several months ago] but it lacks the back-end support to make it all useful. We’re still limited to 40 PCI lanes across 4 slots. There’s still no SAS backplane. There is still one FireWire bus. There is no USB 3.0. There is no BluRay. The machine will not fit in a rack mount.

Brook couldn't have known that Thunderbolt was coming but now it should be clear to him why there was no effort to add USB 3.0 or a faster FW. Thunderbolt obviates the need for most of those other connection technologies in speed and flexibility.

In short I disagree with the assertion.

Quicktime X is the front end to a new Audio/Video architecture that is light years beyond Quicktime 32-bit and while it's growing in features you can see the power in FCPX with Colorsync support throughout and the ability to do background rendering and more.

The modern day professional is changing..the days of 6 PCI slots have been gone a long time ago replaced by highly integrated motherboards.

Prepare to be brought into the future kicking and screaming by Apple....once again.

 

[iDisk]

you're totally right, ideas are bigger than tools, and as a result, people will use what works to make stuff happen. and thats exactly why people who have demands beyond the casual consumer are going to migrate away from fcp. other solutions have the tools and they work.

i know you like saying "think different" but honestly, that statement doesn't mean anything. i'd like to sell you a car without brakes. feel free to "think different" and try to figure out some other way to stop yourself. i hear brick walls are a pretty good stopgap solution.

Lol funny analogy on "Think Different"

 

[grue]

You have more control with the older FINAL CUT 7, Tell you what, Add 64 bit to FCP 8 and fix the importing for the canon 60D SD CARDS and I will be happy.

I'd list 64bit after multicore support and GPGPU, personally. Final Cut 7 is a thousand times more useful than FCX, but at least FCX will use more than 1/12th of my CPU power.

 

[nuckinfutz]

Wrooooooooong.

The complaints surround the stuff you mention, and having a source and record viewer, and having a non-terrible way to organize your media, along with being able to have a proper track-based interface such as we NEED, having timecode support, layered photoshop files, etc etc. It'd also be nice if they realized more than one person will work on a job, and it might be nice to store it on a SAN.

Apple didn't just screw the pooch, they knocked it out and raped it in the parking lot.

I'm not buying the media management complaint. I don't think people are thinking through the new system for managing projects and events in FCPX so they're rejecting without "skating to the puck" and realizing that Apple has made it easier and cheaper to do a SAN based system in Lion. Anything that is a hold over from tape isn't going to get a lot of love in FCPX so the timecode and track based stuff is yesteryear. It's time to move on folks and learn some new techniques.

 

[stevemiller]

Lol funny analogy on "Think Different"

Thanks, at least we share a sense of humour

 

[grue]

If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in a business, it's pretty easy to not feel too badly for you.

Have you always been stupid, or is it a new adventure for you?

Just because someone has X amount invested in a business doesn't mean he had that in a bank account and is making that much every year. There are plenty of people who spend $50k to build an edit suite that might not fully pay for itself in a couple of years… and then it's time to upgrade a bunch of it.

 

[grue]

I'm not buying the media management complaint.

So you don't believe it MIGHT be difficult to deal with a situation where a house that does work for both, say, Arnie's Abortions and Pamela Pro-Life has to do all sorts of stupid workarounds to conceal projects if a client wants to come to a sessions? No post house is going to dedicate one disk array per clients.

 

[iDisk]

Thanks, at least we share a sense of humour

Hey, life's to short to waste on Apple, but it's fun debating and sharing opinions and facts with others on the forum.... If Apple would have marketed this product differently then the issue wouldn't be as big... They had alot of people believing that FCPX was strictly for "pros" at a affordable, magical, revolutionary price... when in reality it's geared at prosumers and pros

 

[macsmurf]

"if you're really a professional you shouldn't want to be reliant on software from a company like Apple." In the end, he says "your heart will be broken. Because they're not reliant on you."

If you use your heart instead of your head in business decisions then you're already in trouble. Apple doesn't, why should you?

Apple is a very flexible, secretive, and unpredictable company. The flip side of that coin is that you cannot trust them to behave a certain way on the long term.

Tomorrow Apple could cancel FCX, remove Java from the platform, cancel the Xserve (oh, wait. They already did that) and do a number of other things that might be detrimental to your business and they probably wouldn't even feel it on the bottom line.

I use OS X for work that I get paid for, but I can switch to Linux in a matter of hours. The only investment I've made was the price of the computer and I'm told it runs Linux just fine so I won't even have to use it as a paper weight in case Apple decides that the terminal really shouldn't be present on the platform or whatever.

If you need roadmaps and that sort of thing, go with companies that have a proven record of supporting businesses. Companies such as, dare I say, Microsoft.