There’s been a lot of vitriol spilled regarding Tuesday’s release by Apple of Final Cut Pro X. Some have wondered why Apple appears to be abandoning the professional editing community, and it certainly seems that Apple has in fact done so – Final Cut 7 / Studio 3 is no longer available for sale and so no new editing stations can be purchased and licensed from Apple; the future compatibility with new versions of the Mac OS/X or OS/XI or whatever are not assured and so on.
Apple has made no statements – as is their norm – regarding these issues and many others that have been raised regarding the feature set of FCP X versus the reality of editing in newsrooms, film studios and so forth.
What has been most galling to the user base is calling the thing FCP X, implying that it is an upgrade to FCP 7. It is not! FCP X won’t even open FCP 7 projects – by design (note that iMovie ‘11 – the current version – provides an option to export Final Cut XML format which is, at present, useless with FCP X).
Clearly FCP X is not aimed at the user base that has been waiting for several years for an upgrade to FCP that would make use of 64-bit multi-core hardware; provide native support for new codecs; use cocoa and so on.
The reputation of FCP over the past ten years has been built on successes in editing highly visible commercial films such as “Social Network“, “True Grit” and so forth (see Major films edited with FCP). This has led lots of others to want to use FCP. Then there’s its widespread availability in colleges and universities in film classes and so forth. There has been considerable caché in using Apple equipment and software in creative industries – it’s hard to watch recent TV episodes or movies with scenes of laptops in them that aren’t Apple laptops and most of these likely not paid product placement spots. It’s simply the case that Apple laptops are the handiest when setting up a scene that needs a computer.
So Apple has successfully built a brand that for many years has been viewed as a boutique brand – out of the mainstream but a center of excellence for the creative arts.
Of late with the iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, iTunes and iCloud; Apple has finally become in many respects a mainstream brand. Podcasts are called podcasts because they were originally pretty much only accessible on early iPods. A really successful construction of a brand.
It seems that Apple has succeeded in getting to a point where it simply doesn’t consider that it is in their corporate interests to continue to provide products that support the professional video / film editing market – even though that’s a significant component of how they have gotten to be successful.
It would appear that Apple has a vision of a future that just doesn’t see much benefit in professionally edited film and video. It’s a future in which many of the creative ideas of film-making will be taken over by heuristics that are embedded in the editing software and that represent some range of aesthetics but that perhaps won’t encourage so much new thinking in how to compose video and audio to make a statement or tell a story – although Motion 5 is quite an amazing app that can be used to create new features that can be injected back into FCP X. How long will it take for the current professional industry to become as obsolete as buggy whip makers isn’t clear but apparently Apple doesn’t particularly care about the likely loss in revenue on that front.
There is a vision of the cloud with its implied unlimited bandwidth (and / or perhaps reduced video quality) being available pretty much everywhere that matters – which leaves out most of the so-called 3rd world for the next decade or so, thinking optimistically. The high-end editing of video from iPhone X and so forth uploaded to iCloud Theatre is one direction that appears to be in Apple’s sight.
So none of what’s happening with FCP X is because Apple doesn’t understand the industry that has been using FCP more or less successfully over the past decade. It’s happening because Apple has a clear vision that doesn’t include catering to that industry.
It would appear that Apple calculated that the likely anger that would be vented over FCP X was worth the benefits in marketing that would accrue by using the Final Cut Pro brand instead of calling the new product iMovie Pro – which is almost certainly a more honest branding. The Final Cut Pro branding will attract new prosumers and that is what Apple will build off of going forward. There will be plenty of business for the third-party training market and so on.
Of course Apple isn’t the only force moving to the cloud – there’s Google, Amazon and Microsoft; and that is a larger issue in so many ways: availability of internet bandwidth and access; and trust in centralized management of individual’s information – to name two; and this is the most disturbing issue of which FCP X is only a symptom.