“It’s been an interesting ride editing with Final Cut Pro over the last dozen or so years. The excitement of non-linear video editing on a Mac that you owned with affordable software that actually worked was a milestone for many,” Richard Taylor writes for FCPX.TV.
“The launch of FCPX 10.0 certainly was interesting, as have been the 2+ years since. Now we are on the dawn of a new version of FCPX and a new Mac Pro as well,” Taylor writes. “I expect Final Cut Pro X 10.1 to arrive in October and to be a major version upgrade. I expect it to not only add jaw-dropping new original features, but also add back some of the requested features that have been missing from Final Cut Pro X in its first 2+ years. According to Apple, there have been no major FCPX feature updates for a year. The last one was 10.0.6 in Oct 2012. It looks like they’ve been saving the new features for 10.1. Will 10.1 be a paid upgrade? Probably. Will there be a discount for current FCPX users? Probably not.”
Taylor writes, “‘Is Final Cut Pro X professional’ is a headline-seeking question, with its variations, that I’ve seen lingering from FCPX’s original release. The answer to that question is ‘yes’ and that has been documented many, many times by professional filmmakers, TV producers, news groups, event videographers, post production houses, pro editors and more. Most Final Cut Pro X users really don’t need anyone to tell them whether FCPX is professional. They already know it is… Final Cut Pro X 10.1 will attract even more pros to its growing roster of professionals. If you bet against FCPX initially, you should reconsider it when FCPX 10.1 arrives… Whatever the Final Cut Pro X team has up their sleeves, these are the features that will justify a full point paid upgrade to V 10.1.”
Much more in the full article here.
Weird… and wildly poor business sense. Why is Microsoft advertising their Surface tablets on mdn? What a colossal waste of money.
Sorry Apple, but all the pros have left FCP X a long time ago. As a pro tv editor that has used FCP extensively for many years.. and working at a big national tv production firm with 30+ editing suites, it is very sad to see that no pro firms (4 editing suites and UP), have chosen FCP X.. and there is a very good reason for this. Some people have chosen Avid.. alot have gone down the Premiere route. People that don’t use FCP X in a pro environment, and think that FCP X is just as good, it takes just a little time to make it work, should remember that Apple CHOSE to make FCP X into a semi pro version of FCP.. and that by choosing not to include OMF Export for about a year, gave a clear signal to pro users that this is not for them.
I totally agree in regards to FCP, not one of Apple’s best moves. I hope Apple will also provide a new Mac Pro with the same form factor as the current Pro, but with specs of the new Trash Can Pro. The could call them Mac Pro, and Mac Pro Extreme. Apple has to provide a model with the expandability of the current Pro. Don’t get me wrong, I love the new Oro’s design. It’s probably perfect for the vast majority of Pro users. But we’ll also need something like the current Pro because some users will want and need the expandability options it offers.
I was asked once by a representative for the Energizer battery company if I was a professional photographer as she admired my work. I asked her back, “Define professional?” Her answer was that a professional makes their primary income from that work. By that definition I am neither a professional photographer nor a professional videographer. However, I do get paid for my work in both areas and carry a rather positive reputation for my work. I expect there are many folks who’s primary source of income involves working with Final Cut Pro X. Are those people professionals? Professionals in your definition? Your definition might have more to do with size of audience, frequency of publication, or other attributes along those lines. But a videographer who produces a film that goes viral on YouTube will enjoy an enormous audience and get paid for their work.
…. distinction without difference, and I don’t completely agree with her definition.
The boundaries are often fuzzy, but there are hard lines: business registration or licensing; tax filing, notarized contracts, advertising one’s services for hire, etc. How much money one makes, if at all, is often irrelevant. It is a fallacy that one has to make money to stay in business. Millions of businesses have made small fortunes out of large ones or were operated over the years at a net zero financial gain to accomplish other motives.
From a computer users’ point of view, perhaps the most accepted interpretation is this: if one purchases ANY equipment with the intention to earning money exceeding the cost of that equipment, then one stops being an amateur. It doesn’t matter if you have other business ventures or sources of income, or you think of yourself as “primarily” playing another job role.
Regardless, Apple’s disastrous FCP X is analogous to Microsoft’s famously horrid “ribbon” for Office, which took a predictable control interface and turned it into an unpredictable, hard-to-navigate mess.
Worse, Apple has started to get into the habit of removing features and pushing its server service (iCloud) ad nauseum. Who asked for the “save as” command to be deleted? Why can’t a user permanently delete the “iCloud” crap from his machine?
Reality is, many pros breathed a sigh of relief when Mavericks turned out to be a relatively minor refresh rather than a jarring Windows 8 disaster. After FCP X, the professional Apple community was so marginalized, they wouldn’t have been surprised with Apple taking another dump on them. They have not been very happy with the dumbing-down of their machines with the bloated “features” added to OS X.
In addition, Cook & Co stagnated many long-overdue improvements to OS X and its Mac platform while it concentrates on the consumer market with iOS. By now, everyone would have predicted a ZFS file system. Nope, Apple apparently feels that flat icon development for iOS was more important. It’s not just investors who are disappointed that a company with this many resources couldn’t do two things at the same time?
The last 3+ years have been rather disappointing for Mac software releases in both quality and quantity. The last decades’ dramatic leaps DID come to a sudden crawl under Cook. Want proof? iWork ’09 is on sale 4 years later. And we all know that it has neither the features nor the marketing nor the consistent improvement to be considered professional-level enough to displace MS Office. To make matters worse, it appears Apple leadership is chasing Google Docs instead of improving iWork into a professional desktop suite. No surprise, actually. After all, this is the next obvious step on the way toward subscription-based computing.
If that’s the software direction Cook is pushing, then Mac pro users would continue to leave the fold, just as FCP X pushed many out. And that’s a shame, because OS X can and should be the best platform for professionals, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large organizations. How and why Apple continues to ignore this market opportunity defies all objective business logic.
You offer great points to what apple is doing software wise…but your leaving stuff out i feel. On one boat they are not pushing their software when they should (e.g. iwork), but there are other programs they are pushing which i think the professional industry does enjoy….FCPX and LOGIC PRO X. LOGIC had a lot of great features added for pro users, such as track stacks and flex timing and drummer. Great features that help someone make money in a more easy fashion. FCPX has the same money-saving features as well: background rendering, multi-cam improvements, and a whole new way to manage media that is extremely better organization than before. You see it as Apple abandoning the market, they probably see it as lets get this product into as many hands as possible. Does that mean its less professional? Well, if a majority of the kids are growing up already knowing how to use a video editing program, it would make for a lot more video editors in the market. You might see established program as Warner Bros., MSNBC, FOX, Universal. Apple sees the future in those and also YouTube and probably a marketplace for features in their itunes store. Could they have made FCP 8 in this direction and kept with the same layout. Sure, why not. But, Apple likes to move things around…because moving an inch each day doesn’t get you to the future, it just means your slow to the game.
I would like to see an update to Motion…that is what upsets me. Pages still works as good as Office as it did the day it was released, but After Effects is kicking major butt and Motion is not as strong as it was. Here is to hoping….
What a relief to have conversation without name calling or political thread-jacking!
So your first paragraph, to me, depicts what differentiates a business from a hobby, and doesn’t say much about a professional. I would contend that professionals work for businesses, unless they are self-employed consultants, which is just part of as you said, the blurred lines.
Your second paragraph I have difficulty with: I couldn’t agree that *intentions* elevate one from amateur status to professional, and I suspect you don’t either. I’ve known many an amateur who strives harder to perfect his art than those who (in their mind) have perfected their art and are back to viewing it as a job rather than an avocation.
“Apple’s disastrous” remains an opinion: it may be shared by many, but the forums of the Internet are full of plenty others for whom FCPX has been a godsend for their productivity and profitability. I, of course, don’t have survey information to back up my suspicion, but I will nonetheless argue that many of the amateurs who aspired to professional status have been able to achieve that with the advances FCPX brought to their table. I know that although I didn’t use FCS the way “ahaavie” appears to have, my work is far more successful both in time saved and money earned because of the rapidity with which I have been able to make FCPX sing. I have painful scars from FCS 6 projects that got corrupted about an hour into the master sequence.
That iCloud crap you can’t stand is actually becoming incredibly useful — but with your attitude towards it you will likely never open up to it and embrace it for what it can do for you. iCloud Keychain is the latest addition to that arena and is a huge boon for me moving from home to office to client sites, working interdependently with both iOS and OS X. And the Family calendar my family shares on iCloud means a busy household has one less major headache overcome.
You mention delight that Mavericks is a minor update and then fault Apple for stagnating the platform. Why is that? I’m sensing you have an axe to grind, but am willing to hold off settling in on that opinion since you’ve been willing to write and maintain decorum.
I have seen Office used to run major corporations and it’s crystal clear that Numbers can not be used for the same kinds of things. I wish that weren’t true, that Apple could find the guts to take on data pivot functionality, document API integration, build in version control features for enterprise concerns, etc. I don’t see them going there because they are a consumer-oriented business. Maybe with the demise of Microsoft some third party can rise and carry the challenge there. Most of your angst seems to be related to products and services Apple has created that aren’t, dare we say, central to the focus of building the greatest devices they can. FCPX, iWork, etc. are all product categories that third parties could and do build solutions for. Perhaps the end-result of our conversation will be an agreement that Apple ought to fish or cut bait — my view of Numbers is that, because of it’s support by Apple, third-parties won’t tackle that solution space. So Apple is effectively harming competition within their own platform by offering their own software solutions.
BTW, ZFS file system support has many tentacles, most of them legal licensing oriented that are the real stumbling block to incorporation into OS X. Since I’m not an authority on the big licenses used by the open source community I have to rely on a few individuals whose business it is to know and understand the ramifications of a lot of that small type. Some of the licenses say things like (translated from legalese to something they knew I could understand) “if you use this software in your product you agree to open-source all of your software that links against this library.” Apple will not, out of sheer paranoia or thoughtful consideration, make that kind of mistake where the crown jewels are concerned.
Finally, because I’m not sure I’m really adding much to the conversation anymore, I will counter your final and rhetorical question: “How and why Apple continues to ignore this mart opportunity defies all business logic.” You can’t really believe that. They just *sold* 9M iPhones in three days. A shipping delay that caused them to miss out on 700K iMacs tanked their stock. So just how many Mac Pro (and I’ll go there: Mac Pro Extreme) devices do you project they are missing out on? Just unit sales. Don’t muddy the discussion by skipping over a losing point and try to claim “market impact” or some other impossible to asses metric used to justify something — for it was you who made Apple business acumen look rhetorically absurd. My stance would be: Please, Apple, focus on selling 12M iPhones in the next launch weekend and leave the app development to those who are hungry.
FCP X is already an excellent application, and I look forward to seeing what Apple will add to it.
Real Pros are the guys who don’t have time to wait for Apple to get FCP EX right. This “who’s a pro” argument is a waste of time. Apple FCP X needs to be THE BEST NLE EDITOR IN ALL APPLICATIONS ESPECIALLY broadcast, Hollywood, newsrooms, gaming, web, presentation. any pro environment. With support to the best audio, photo, gaming, web, film, color, motion, sfx, third party programs. The best. NOW. Not ok for college, cheap, wait to see, hope its compatible… Apple games and Mystery. Real pros where the guys who didn’t have time to wait. Pros where the guys who where forced to jump to a platform that works NOW. Fcpx cannot be used by a team. This had better be the improvement we are looking for. Btw. The garbage can Mac Pro is a retarded design. The literal round peg in a square hole. Design masturbation to be different for the sake of different. It will flop. Apple losing the BEST title is why the stock is down. And all the waiting. Christ, a kid that wanted to go back to school with a new MBP had to get one from Back to school sept 2012. What a joke considering the price. And not a girlie Air. A PRO.
Pro Editors now work on: Avid Media Composer 7, Adobe Premiere CC (or 6) and still FCP 7 (up to 1080 HD format). Apple does not want to support pro user, it’s uneffective but understandable, looking at company evolution direction. If I can I still work on FCP 7, how much longer? 1-2 years I think.
1st off, We have all the editing apps in our 4 room suites. When freelance editors come in we like to cater to their needs. By far the least used app is FCPX-it was dead on arrival and is still dead. It has been used 3 times in 2 years. Mostly for very small jobs.
FCP 7 is still used by many editors, even though it’s dying a slow and ugly death. Many of us here will miss it and are trying to hold on to it!
Avid still seems to have the best Multi-Cam. It is used for most of our Multi-Cam shows but it lacks any technological advances in the last 20 years. Avid is basically the same program it was in 1995 :)–but it works well on big multi-cam jobs!
Premier used to be the ugly duckling that no one wanted to use. But now with CC and it’s audio synch capabilities it’s beginning to win out over all the other programs. It’s codecs and file reading capabilities run rings around Avid and it’s user interface is far superior to that of FCPX. If fact, it’s the program that is most like FCP7 than any of the other programs. It even allows you to use FCP7 Keyboard settings. About 50% of the jobs we do are now done on Adobe CC. Watch out AVID and FCPX, you are about to become extinct!
I’m not sure how out of date these comments may be, but I’ve certainly been able to make my living as an editor using FCPX. To the point where I won’t go back to 7 without a fight. Where it really wins, (IMHO) is helping me break down and select from 30-40 hours of dailies on a big TV commercial 15 spot campaign, under a punishing schedule, without going overtime, which obviously hurts my bottom line, and without missing any special moments, which hurts my reputation.
I won’t say it’s not without it’s challenges, but what NLE is? Lightworks used to crash all the time, and had sketchy support (20 years ago), AVID has an irritating 3 mode editing paradigm (edit/trim/fx), FCP7 is all about the user hacks (tttt anyone?). So FCPX is still a bit graunchy with the OMF’s. It’s a problem, and I’d like XtoPro to do a much better job of AAF’s, and a load of other things. It’s doesn’t share nicely, but it can be done if you know what you’re doing.
Not good enough for pro’s?
Just not true. I’ve been doing this since I used a Steenbeck and a splicer, since SONY RM440, since Lightworks 1.0. It’s good enough. If you want it. If you don’t, that’s cool too.
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