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Steve Jobs: Next release of Final Cut Studio will be awesome

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http://macsoda.com/2010/04/13/steve-jobs-next-final-cut-studio-will-be-awesome/

Steve Jobs: Next release of Final Cut Studio will be awesome
Wednesday, April 14, 2010

"Mac Soda reader Alex J. decided to let Steve Jobs know personally how he feels about [Final Cut Studio and his concerns about Apple's commitment to the product], and as though he were talking to the Lord God himself, simply asked for a sign," Mike Contaxis reports for Mac Soda.

Steve,

Getting worried about Apple’s interest in Final Cut. Last updates were not stellar. I heard a bunch of engineers were dropped too – give us a sign you still care about Pro Video, not just the iPad.

Thanks,

Alex

Contaxis reports, "These days Mr. Jobs seems to be responding to everyone (he’s responded to all three of mine), with rather blunt answers. I guess he must’ve been in a good mood, because Alex got a whole three sentences worth..."

We certainly do. Folks who left were in support, not engineering. Next release will be awesome.
 
Hmm

Believe it when I see it. I have seen no reason to spend the money to upgrade past FCS 5.0.4, so unless they can really tighten it up with some compelling upgrades...

It is nice to see him addressing direct questions like this though!

Personally, I would rather they drop their software lines altogether and focus on making their hardware (computers, not toys ;) ) more affordable and expandable :D

I can dream...
 
I know nothing is perfect but the next release needs to dang close to it as far as software updates are concerned, IMO. Adobe and Avid have been turning heads a lot for the past few years and Media Composer 5, which Avid unveiled at NAB, looks awesome. The biggest bomb though might have been Blackmagic releasing DaVinci Resolve software for only $995 which not only fires a huge shot across the bow of ever other grading application out there but also gives Color it's first real competitor in terms of bang-for-your-buck and what a competitor it is. Resolve is the crème de la crème of color grading apps and, prior to NAB, you were looking at a minimum $200k investment to get one.

MattSepeta said:
Believe it when I see it. I have seen no reason to spend the money to upgrade past FCS 5.0.4, so unless they can really tighten it up with some compelling upgrades...
Click to expand...
Really? Off the top of my head I can think of a number of reasons to upgrade from 5.0.4 such as native intel support, ProRes, Color, more codec support, a better Media Manager, etc.,.


Lethal
 
Clear it up

I should have been more clear, I use it for importing minidv SD footage. I don't need much oomph at all, and there is only one bug that really bothers me, the one that disconnects media if you update a file and re import it, something like that.

If I was trying to edit prores or do serious HD color grading or anything, I would have probably upgraded by now. But for my light uses, this crusty old fcp works just fine :)

although I would love to tryout FCP 7 or compare motion4 to AEcs4 sometime!
 
I really liked what FCS3 did in expanding the ProRes family, but it was a let down in almost every other respect, and only seems more so as Avid and Adobe release MC5 and CS5. They make FCS3 look three years old.

If I was in charge of Final Cut development, I'd reposition Final Cut Express somewhere between its current status and that of Studio. I'd improve its audio and colour grading tools and add a mini, template-based Motion, making it an all-in-one app. I think this would suit those without the time or patience to be roundtripping and learning different apps. And I'd probably drop the "Express" bit.

I'd focus development of Studio around media management. I'd separate the Media Manager from Final Cut Pro and expand its function. It'd be where you go to capture, transcode, edit metadata and link audio, and where you manage the relationships between different media and applications.

And I'd bring in an app called 'Online', where you piece together all of your graded video, mixed audio, graphics and closed caption into the final product. You'd be able to render everything here, enabling you to go off (high quality) GPU previews up to this point.

This release is all about workflow folks.
 
I hate to bring up a beaten horse, but Blu-ray needs to be more integrated. I just burned 4 Blu-rays for clients, and while I was able to make one of the Compressor templates work, it didn't have my nice animated menu which I made in HD although I knew I would only be able to use it on the SD DVDs. With all the speed our machines have now a days, both with the multicore processors and the extremely fast GPUs, all that needs to be Much better utilized in Final Cut Studio. Grand Central Dispatch was still unreleased when FCS3 was released, but now there should be no excuses. Media formats are a dime a dozen as well, and Final Cut is still pretty uppity about transcoding. The other day I was given some greenscreen footage shot on a Canon 7D, and the H.264 files would n't play smoothly At All until I transcoded them to Pro Res and brought them back in to FCP. Avid Media Architecture seems really fast and powerful being able to support tapeless files immediately.

Let's see what we're in for, hopefully sooner rather than later.

-Brian
 
That's cool but...this is the guy who said "not to worry" about the new macbook pros, and plenty of people are pissed off about those too (ancient graphics, among other things).

I guess the problem is that "awesome" in Steve's world doesn't always mean that in the real world.
 
i just hope they fix compressor so using clusters isn't such a cluster f*ck.
that's been the biggest let down for me. I'd like to use 2 mac pros to process mpeg2s, but it crashes with more than 1 file. I have tickets from the fcp team and they basically said compressor works better without the cluster b/c most people want to keep some resources to continue working while compressor works.

They didn't have a good enough answer when I said, "I'm not one of those people"

doh!
 
I agree with Keith. Apple needs to focus on streamlining workflow in the next release of Final Cut Studio. Aside from the addition of features, we've largely been dealing with the same Final Cut for a decade. To me, I think a "room" based approach like Color has would be awesome. Something like this:

1. A "media management room," where you capture/ingest/transcode and organize/log media.

2. A "cutting room," where you do your off-line editing.

3. An "export room," where you send the various elements of your edit to other FCS apps and third-party apps (for things like color correction, effects, sound design, etc.).

4. A "finishing room," where you perform the on-line aspect of your project and prep the final output of your masters.

But there's other quirks that need to be addressed in my eyes:

1. 64-bit native binaries!

2. Make FCP resolution independent. No more 2K frame size limitation. Why they were able to do 4K in Color 1.5 but not in FCP 7 is beyond me.

3. Fix QMaster. One should be able to send a project to Compressor straight from FCP AND be able to render using a virtual cluster without the job hanging. Physical QMaster clusters with multiple Macs shouldn't take a rocket scientist and prayers to the almighty computer gods to set up and function correctly. Apple has had two versions to fix this.

4. Overhaul DVD Studio Pro to include Blu-ray authoring. I can understand SJ's obsession with streaming media, but the "big bag of hurt" is going to be around for a while. Pros need to be able to author Blu-ray discs with menu layouts and interactive content and you're forcing them into third-party software. DVDSP has been untouched for years (since FCS1, I think) and a lot of us can't help but to think that we're paying for the same DVDSP over and over again with every FCS release.
 
A problem w/one app containing a number of unrelated 'rooms' (which are all basically stand alone apps) is you get a massive, bloated application. Seamless round tripping between apps is a better way to go, IMO, unfortunately Apple hasn't been doing very well when it comes to this (maybe they need to start paying closer attention to Adobe ;)).

Part of Apple's problem is that FCS is largely a hodgepodge of apps from other companies that have been complied under one roof. FCP being locked at 2K while Color is not is an example of this. The 2K limit is probably from some 10yr legacy code inside FCP where as Color is a much newer app from another company and it operates fundamentally differently than FCP (which is a big reason the round tripping between FCP and Color is such a PITA).

I think having a Media Management app is a great idea, and it's what Apple was going for when they purchased Artbox and rebranded it as Final Cut Server but, again, Apple is faced w/trying to get two dissimilar apps to talk to each other behind the scenes. When I tested out FC Server I was surprised to see that when I added annotations to a clip in FC Server those notes did not show up in FCP and when I added notes to a clip in FCP they did not show up in FC Server. So much for our plan to have producers annotate clips for the editors. Final Cut Server also needs an overhaul so you don't need a programmer to do all the back-end coding to make the program useful (Apple, feel free to rip off Avid's Interplay).

Hopefully Apple is doing a huge rewrite to FCP and hopefully that rewrite will include laying the base work for FCS apps to better mesh together under the hood. No more grafting and bolting on functionality in an attempt to strong-arm two apps to communicate with each other please.


Lethal
 
LethalWolfe said:
A problem w/one app containing a number of unrelated 'rooms' (which are all basically stand alone apps) is you get a massive, bloated application. Seamless round tripping between apps is a better way to go, IMO, unfortunately Apple hasn't been doing very well when it comes to this (maybe they need to start paying closer attention to Adobe ;)).

Part of Apple's problem is that FCS is largely a hodgepodge of apps from other companies that have been complied under one roof. FCP being locked at 2K while Color is not is an example of this. The 2K limit is probably from some 10yr legacy code inside FCP where as Color is a much newer app from another company and it operates fundamentally differently than FCP (which is a big reason the round tripping between FCP and Color is such a PITA).

I think having a Media Management app is a great idea, and it's what Apple was going for when they purchased Artbox and rebranded it as Final Cut Server but, again, Apple is faced w/trying to get two dissimilar apps to talk to each other behind the scenes. When I tested out FC Server I was surprised to see that when I added annotations to a clip in FC Server those notes did not show up in FCP and when I added notes to a clip in FCP they did not show up in FC Server. So much for our plan to have producers annotate clips for the editors. Final Cut Server also needs an overhaul so you don't need a programmer to do all the back-end coding to make the program useful (Apple, feel free to rip off Avid's Interplay).

Hopefully Apple is doing a huge rewrite to FCP and hopefully that rewrite will include laying the base work for FCS apps to better mesh together under the hood. No more grafting and bolting on functionality in an attempt to strong-arm two apps to communicate with each other please.


Lethal
Click to expand...

Agree with all of this, but I think "room"-based apps don't necessarily need to be bloated. Lightroom 3, for example, may have a little extra baggage, but nothing too bad and it's very intuitive. A "room"-based FCS could be a huge improvement over the current system if it were properly executed... throw in some pre-production utilities (e.g scriptwriting, storyboarding, budget planning), integrate motion and color better, and it'd be one-stop solution for video production.
 
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