YouTube - Conan O'Brien Slams Final Cut Pro X (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRzLP0FJ82I)

That's interesting. The FCPX team at Apple better wake up fast.

FYI, Past Products that short changed established professional editing paradigms/workflows to appeal to non-editors.

1. Amiga
2. Newtek Video Toaster
3. Adobe Premiere before relaunching as Premire Pro
4. Avid Free - (Pretty bad when a free piece of editing software doesn't even catch on)
5. Media 100 - Still around I guess. They actually had an ad campaign in the 90's called "Kill the Editor"
6. Avid Xpress Pro: Started out as a dumbed down Media Composer. But then over time Avid kept adding features to the point it almost was a Media Composer and they had to kill it.
7. Draco Casablanca Editing Appliance - Little known and a complete disaster.
8. Digital FX Editor - Was a hybrid linear/non linear edit system that ran on a MAC. They had a higher end compositing system called Composium that had a short run. But, never understood how developing a compresssion codec was the key.
9. EMC2: Ran only on a PC Avid just beat the crap out of them in marketing. But they couldn't make the jump from off-line to on-line level finishing becuse they refused to listen to video engineers,
10. IMIX Video Cube: Was front ended on a MAC..looked cool,,,but wasn't designed with much thought to media management at all.

I guess my point here is that it seems to me that products that are market positioned as strattling or blurring the lines between professional and prosumer/consumer tend to fail. And FCP X I think may be in the category.

The most successful PC based prosumer consumer edit system is Pinnacle (owned by Avid). They're pretty clearly positioned in their marketing. I think that Avid Studio and Premiere Elements also pretty clear.

Avid Media Composer has been around the longest of all of the non-linear editors (that I'm aware of).
When Avid got arrogant, and started touting "we're the greatest" and stopped listening,,they almost bought the farm. Fortunately, for me, Avid regrouped and for the last three major releases since 2008 has really produced a deep, rich, and super effecient program. Adobe has aslo listened and has the best suite of products for affordable end to end post production.

We're fortunate that both of tose companies run on Apple and PC's.

Cheers.

You forgot D/Vision!

I probably still have a the floppy disc of Avid Free sitting around somewhere. Back in 1995 when Avid gave us Avid Free as a free gift for buying a couple $120,000 MC8000 machines I thought "great, we can use this as an assistant station" and I installed it on my Powermac 7500.
When I launched it and realized how radically different it was from the real thing I basically felt betrayed by marketing. I hadn't felt that way again until I launched FCP X for the first time.

Now that was a funny video! Glad to see that Conan's editors really like FCP X ; )

Even my wife who could care less about the technical details of my biz got the humor and appreciated seeing me smile after how grumpy (mildly put) I was yesterday.
Thank you Conan!

I still have my Amiga/VideoToaster! The PC was still in it's black DOS screen days... No broadband yet, I even ran a BBS waaay before 'the internet" as we know it now. Ahhh the memories... And no, I don't wanna go back!

YouTube - Conan O'Brien Slams Final Cut Pro X (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRzLP0FJ82I)

There seems to be no end to the immature responses to the program. Why the Conan show would bother with a segment like this is questionable. The sad part is that they purposely screwed up the edit and then claimed that it was the program that did it because it's defective. Libel, anyone? Perhaps the editors were making fun of themselves but that isn't clear.

Three days after the software has come out and all hell has broken loose. What other software would create such a response?

I'm not a lawyer but I don't think its libel if its for satire.

I'm sure with all this negative buzz around the software we can expect an update any day now adding at least one feature as a gesture from Apple saying "you know, we're not done yet"... then all the hype will die down.

Why the Conan show would bother with a segment like this is questionable. The sad part is that they purposely screwed up the edit and then claimed that it was the program that did it because it's defective. Libel, anyone? Perhaps the editors were making fun of themselves but that isn't clear.



It's just comedy. Not libel. Just like Jon Stewart isn't Brian Williams,,,.it's comedy not the real news.

But it's okay to take companys and their products to task if you're trying to make a living with those products. A lot of us took Avid to task four years ago and they paid a price for not listening and being arrogant.

The comedy bit to me is a broader refection of how all of the "broadcast" guys view FCPX. If anything it is a big adjustment for them.

Satire, which Conans segment definitely is, is not subject to libel

[...] Three days after the software has come out and all hell has broken loose. What other software would create such a response? Many of us Final Cut Pro editors (myself among them) have been drinking a certain flavor of Apple Kool-Aid and it has made us very passionate. I've been sipping it since I saw Final Cut Pro at NAB in 1999 and now there's a new flavor in town and the old flavor is about to be discontinued and the formula tossed away in the dustbin of history. Eventually we'll adjust to the new formula and we'll wonder why we did not do it like this all along, it's the wave of the future, but there's going to be some culture shock along the way, and this video has fun with this and other notions. Pass me the cup, I need another sip, I'm still getting used to formula X, it's got quite a bite to it.

2. Newtek Video Toaster

Video Toaster is alive & well in Newtek's Tricaster line.


Avid Media Composer has been around the longest of all of the non-linear editors (that I'm aware of).

I'm not sure, but I think that Lightworks has been around longer. Now owned by Editshare, who are re-writing it from the ground up, with hopes of porting it to both Mac & Linux. For free.

When Avid got arrogant, and started touting "we're the greatest" and stopped listening,,they almost bought the farm. Fortunately, for me, Avid regrouped and for the last three major releases since 2008 has really produced a deep, rich, and super effecient program. Adobe has aslo listened and has the best suite of products for affordable end to end post production.

I agree completely. Avid has made a lot of progress in the last couple of years, as had Adobe. But I expect both products to crib many of the new features of FCP-X over the next few years.

Ironically, Apple listened to all the whining- err... complaints- about rendering, lack of native support for emerging formats and workflows, sync issues, 64 bit support, etc. As a result, they decided to make a break with the past & take a completely new approach. And upset a few people, in the process!

They have a culture of secrecy that often works well for them, and sometimes not. I think that they have mismanaged the roll out, but that in the end, FCP-X will evolve into a great editing platform.

in the end, FCP-X will evolve into a great editing platform.

That's fine for an amateur app but we've been waiting for years to see 64bit processing in FCP. Instead we got iMovie Pro. Personally I've been holding off on using Premiere Pro or Avid (who as others have pointed out forgot who their customers were) in the hopes that FCP X would be amazing. Computers keep moving forward. My business demands that every 3-4 years I update my hardware and I have no choice but to use the Pro software that keeps up too.

I'd happily spend $1000 on a real FCP with pro features but won't waste $299 on FCP X.

Avid, Adobe give me a crossover deal. For the first time in 10 years I'm interested.

Hi Rick,
You're in luck. There is an FCP to Avid as well as Adobe gross-grade deal currently ongoing. In the case of Avid, it amounts to more than half the price off.

I think Videoguys has a crossover deal on AVID still. Check 'em out.

FYI, Past Products that short changed established professional editing paradigms/workflows to appeal to non-editors.
2. Newtek Video Toaster

Avid Media Composer has been around the longest of all of the non-linear editors (that I'm aware of).

Actually Newtek's Video Toaster lasted 21 yrs which is a pretty good run (1990-2011) and the nonlinear portion of it still carries on with SpeedEdit. While the rest of it became the TriCaster for live events. Avid has been around since 1989 when it first appeared at NAB.

There's a large thread on CML about FCP X and how it's not suitable for the professional user and their apparent withdrawal from that sector. Personal views that it would've been better if FCP had been sold off for independent development etc.

That's fine for an amateur app but we've been waiting for years to see 64bit processing in FCP. Instead we got iMovie Pro. Personally I've been holding off on using Premiere Pro or Avid (who as others have pointed out forgot who their customers were) in the hopes that FCP X would be amazing.

This is exactly my case. I use to edit on Premiere about 10 years ago. Then switched to FCP about 4-5 years ago.

Premiere on a a PC was a nightmare to me (crashing etc. also, encore sucked). So I switched to Apple and FCP and got really happy.

With the problems FCP7 had (lack of native support and no 64bit) I was also banking on FCPX being awesome. The demo at NAB made it look pretty awesome too.

Now it's here... I tried it out on someones computer for a while. Didn't like it at all. Especially Apple's INSANE decision to not make it backwards compatible with FCP7 projects. You know there's a problem when you can import iMovie projects but not FCP projects.... seriously why not just call this iMovie Pro. People wouldn't complain then.

So anyway, now I have Premiere again. I can tell you it's improved a LOT (cut two small projects with it so far...). Encore too. Encore is stable now and easy to use. I really, really like it.

I did get Motion 5 though. That's a good upgrade.

P.S. I love the way (in Premiere) I can just drag my XF300 CF card contents onto my HDD then edit straight from the files. No need to transcode or anything. Ingestion of a card takes seconds. Amazing.

seriously why not just call this iMovie Pro. People wouldn't complain then.

Sure they would. If, after all this time, Apple had shipped iMovie Pro and not shipped an update to FCP everyone would be screaming about how Apple was neglecting/abandoning the professional market, that it was time to switch to Adobe or Avid, etc. Kind of like they were before Apple announced FCPX. Kind of like they are now.

Apple knew that any way they went people would be unhappy, and when they decide to go in a new direction they don't ease into it - they make a clean break and then forge ahead. I'm sure they know they'll lose a lot of users - but they also know that the mac NLE market has changed quite a bit since the first FCP shipped. There are more viable professional options, and it's fairly easy to switch between them and even run several on the same system, so they know that someone who switches away from FCP now can switch back easily at any point in the future. They know that means they have to do something radically different to differentiate themselves, and they know that while that might alienate some of their users now, they can win them back in the long term if the groundwork they lay now pays off as it matures over the next couple of years.

Seemingly Apple's own publicity says FCP X isn't an update of FCP.

ProVideo Coalition.com: CUT.N.COLOR by Steve Hullfish (http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/shullfish/story/proof_that_fcp_x_is_really_just_imovie_-_directly_from_apple/)

Talk about confusing.

Another titbit on the subject:

AppleInsider | Apple scaling Final Cut Studio apps to fit prosumers (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/18/apple_scaling_final_cut_studio_apps_to_fit_prosumers.html)

All this seems to have some people pondering the longer term future of a non open codec like ProRes for broader uses like acquisition on the Alexa.

Well, couldn't let Conan have *all* the fun...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgXUh1HrYOw

I did get Motion 5 though. That's a good upgrade.


what are your thoughts on Motion 5? does it integrate with FCP 7?
i'm actually on FCP 6 and am limping along in a project with Motion 3 (super complex sequences, even baked down and simplified are: 'click mouse, wait 2 minutes and watch wheel of death. repeat.)... is there any significant improvement in stability/speed?
for $49 i would even feel fine using it as a standalone app and just exporting pro res finals into FCP...

That's fine for an amateur app but we've been waiting for years to see 64bit processing in FCP. Instead we got iMovie Pro. Personally I've been holding off on using Premiere Pro or Avid (who as others have pointed out forgot who their customers were) in the hopes that FCP X would be amazing. Computers keep moving forward. My business demands that every 3-4 years I update my hardware and I have no choice but to use the Pro software that keeps up too.

I'd happily spend $1000 on a real FCP with pro features but won't waste $299 on FCP X.

Avid, Adobe give me a crossover deal. For the first time in 10 years I'm interested.

If you are running on 10.6.7 or later and install MC 5.5, I hope you have Timemachine set up. Installing 5.5 completely screwed up my system, including Bluetooth and loads of other basic features. the uninstall from the installer removed the Application but not the problems. I called the dealer and he told me "of course, the problem is that you are running the current OS... It will not work with 10.6.7, it can only deal with 10.6.6, there is no patch available yet...." The only solution was to restore from Timemachine.

I don't mind using an OS that works for my main application. I really don't care if it is Leopard, Snow Lion or some other cat. as long as it works.
BUT what I really don't like is an application that will let me install on a system on which it cannot operate and as a result of that break main functions of the OS which have nothing to do with the Application and the uninstaller will not really uninstall...not at any point of the installation did I receive a warning...

I lost a bunch of faith in Apple with the launch of FCP X but Avid did nothing to gain it either...
I was going to testdrive Media Composer, but after this experience, I won't.

instead, me too - I launched for the first time, that purple icon that has been sitting in the dock for over a year and took a peek at Premiere...

what are your thoughts on Motion 5? does it integrate with FCP 7?
i'm actually on FCP 6 and am limping along in a project with Motion 3 (super complex sequences, even baked down and simplified are: 'click mouse, wait 2 minutes and watch wheel of death. repeat.)... is there any significant improvement in stability/speed?
for $49 i would even feel fine using it as a standalone app and just exporting pro res finals into FCP...

Actually I'm using it to create title overlays to use in Premiere CS5. I just output to a mov file and keep the alpha. I like the simple yet cool titles it can do and exporting the mov doesn't take that long. Quicker than doing something similar AE at least.

So sorry, can't answer you on how it integrates with FCP7. I guess I could try it out and get back to you.

One feature (though minor) really like that when you open it, it already has the timeline up and ready to go. LOL