Uh Oh! Not Good...

It is a rumor but it is a scary rumor and will not be good for us if it is true...

[provideocoalition.com]

Dan

I saw this yesterday but will wait to buy an umbrella to fend off the falling sky until there is more than a tweet to go by.


-Andrew

Although one layoff is not good I'm not sure this means the end of the pro apps team or even they are slowing down. Hope not. Would be nice if there was official word, but given the culture of Apple, that ain't going to happen. If any of you are good reporters you might want to track this story down and get the truth. As of now it looks like 40 independent contractors were let go and that might of just meant their contract was up.

Michael Horton
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None of the wire services have any mention of Apple layoffs. In this economy, it'd be headline news.

No idea who Pete Warden is, but as of this moment, I see no reason to believe him on this one. If it turns out he's somebody totally well known and I'm just ignorant, I may change that opinion.

Did Apple ever announce that development of Shake had stopped? Or did it just never happen? How long after the last Shake update before it was officially spiked? Or has it ever been officially spiked?

Apple announced that Shake was no longer under development at NAB in 2006. That's when they opened up the source-code-licensing program, so yeah, it was a very official announcement.

Shake's in a really weird place, because lots of big houses did opt to license the source code. It was incredibly cheap to do so, and consequently Shake remains one of the two most popular compositing packages among professional VFX houses. So it's dead as far as Apple is concerned, but still alive as far as those houses that now own their own in-house versions are concerned. It's weird.

As I have been using FCP since V1.0, training with Steve Martin at the Apple FCP Bootcamp back in the day, I definitely have an emotional attachment to FCS, it has been a companion to me in all of my media adventures over the past decade and change.

I hope that this rumor isn't true but it does seem to go with the trend over the past few years at Apple that Pro Apps and Pro computers are slowly withering away. It just seems that Pro Apps at Apple have gone from halo products that showered glory and prestige onto the brand to an afterthought. We all know that FCP needs a ground up re-write that would cost tens of millions of dollars to code and that the surrounding apps all need some serious updates as well.

I hope that Michael is correct, that would make sense but it would be nice to receive some sort of validation/confirmation from Apple that Pro Apps and pro level computers will continue and hopefully prosper. At least we always have AVID as a fallback position. I can't say that I blame Apple totally, iPhones, Imacs and the App and iTunes store make serious money in comparison to our pro apps. It is a business. But it also seems to be a good strategy that Apple should continue to cultivate the pro apps and pro level computers.

Dan

Should have just gone to wiki

In April 2005 Apple Computer announced Shake 4 at a pre-NAB event. New features included 3D multi-plane compositing, 32-bit Keylight and Primatte keying, Optical Flow image processing (time-remapping and image stabilisation), Final Cut Pro 5 integration and extensions to their open, extensible scripting language and SDK. Shake 4 had no IRIX version.
At the NAB event in April 2006, Apple announced that Shake 4.1 would be a Universal Binary version and would ship in May that year. It was actually released on 20 June 2006 and was rebranded as a companion for Final Cut Studio[8]; as such, its price was dropped from $2999 to $499 for Mac OS X (but remained the same for Linux). At the same time, Apple also announced that they would end support for Shake. Rumor web sites claimed that Apple is working on a next-generation compositing application codenamed Phenomenon.[9] Existing maintenance program subscribers had the option to license the Shake source code for $50,000 USD.
On July 30, 2009, Apple removed Shake from its online store and website. Shake had been officially EOL 3 years ago but was still being sold in the Apple Store for $499 till now[10]. The Shake website now redirects to Apple's Final Cut Studio website.

Interesting it was still in the Apple store until July of last year.

>I see no reason to believe him on this one. If it turns out he's somebody totally well known..

He is well known Jeff, and there's no reason to disbelieve this one. It's sad news for the guys, girls and their families for sure, but perhaps not the end-of-the-world news for Apple's pro video apps that many seem to infer as it notes 40 offsite layoffs but not core team layoffs.

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the trend over the past few years at Apple that Pro Apps and Pro computers are slowly withering away

What? Final Cut Studio got a major release last summer, and we've continued to get new Mac Pros about once a year since 2006, when they replaced the Power Mac. That equalled or bettered the pace of Power Mac G4/G5 releases during the first half of the last decade. If anything, high-end workstations are coming more frequently from Apple, and the jump in overall capabilities between subsequent releases is getting wider.

Is the Mac Pro the core of Apple's business? Of course not. Nor should it be. High-end deskside workstations haven't been a growth industry for nearly a decade now, and I don't believe they ever will be again. They are, by definition, high-end. They're for the customers with the greatest need. There were two growth industries in the increasingly ill-defined "computer" business in the 2000s: the corporate desktop (truly staggering growth) and the laptop. Apple never tried to compete for the corporate desktop in the last decade ? at least not very hard. But they competed their asses off in the laptop space, and became a dominant player with what I'd imagine to be one of the top two or three brands. Companies that chased the deskside market, on the other hand, ended up like SGI or Sun: Bankrupt, restructured or otherwise no longer significant players in the industry.

What I suspect is bothering you about Apple in general is the fact that they're not thinking about the last decade. If the deskside (and corporate supercomputer) was the sexy market segment of the 90s, and the laptop was the sexy market segment of the 2000s, Apple wants to get out in front of the sexy market segment of the 2010s. That's phones and handheld devices, in their estimation. Are they right? Who the heck knows. But that's the thinking.

Let's be honest here. The Mac Pro is basically done. I don't mean extinct; I mean it's basically finished. It's not really an evolving product any more. Sure, the ones that inevitably come out this year will have faster microchips, and probably more of them. But I promise you, there's nobody at Apple who's getting paid to sit around all day and try to figure out how to make Mac Pros not suck so bad. Because they don't suck. They're actually very good, which means there's no drive to radically improve them. They're going to continue to steadily improve in that raugh-raugh-more-power sense, but it'll be evolution and not revolution.

The MacBook? I love mine. Seriously, I'd marry it but they won't let me ? at least not until Prop. 31 passes, and we all pray it will. But it still needs to be lighter. It needs more battery life. It needs to be faster, and have better and more wireless options. The MacBook Pro isn't done yet; there's more work to be done on the MacBook Pro before a reasonable person can look at it and declare it to be basically perfected. So expect to see new, lighter, more energy-efficient, more capable MacBooks this year or next.

Apple is what, one of the 60 or 70 biggest companies on the planet right now. They haven't been successful over the last 15 years because they kept selling stuff people wanted to buy last year. They've been successful because they've had quite a solid track record of anticipating things that people will want to buy. How many times since the mid-90s have you seen a new Apple product and gone "I have never imagined such a thing until this moment, but now I must own it." Seriously, that's their business model: Giving people things they didn't know they wanted. Because that's their business model, they're always looking for the next big thing. It doesn't mean the previous big thing (or really in this case, the previous previous big thing) is "withering away." It just means that those older things are basically perfected, and no longer comprise an area in which Apple can innovate in an exciting (and insanely profitable) way.

Will Apple ever stop selling deskside workstations altogether? I dunno, maybe. Right now I can't imagine another device or facility that would let people accomplish all the tasks they currently do with desksides like the Mac Pro. I'm sure in ten years whatever they're selling that's reminiscent of a Mac Pro will be radically different in some ways, but just like Pratt & Whitney still makes turboprop engines more than half a century into the Jet Age, I'm sure something like a Mac Pro will remain on the menu as long as people have things to do that can't be done with a better class of tool.

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Pro Apps at Apple have gone from halo products that showered glory and prestige onto the brand

I'm sorry, I really don't mean to be argumentative. But at what point exactly was Final Cut related in any way to glory or prestige? It's a popular software package in a very niche market, making it a big fish in a very tiny pond. It's been generally well respected since version 3, but it's never, as far as I know, been either glorious or prestigious, neither in the post industry nor as part of Apple's varied and various businesses.

Let's put things in a little perspective. Apple introduced the iPod in late 2001. At that time, the big story in Final Cut land was The Rules of Attraction, right? Do I remember that correctly? Somebody offlined a feature on a consumer editing platform, and it was big news. Since then Final Cut has continued to improve steadily, but not revolutionarily. (Is "revolutionarily" a word? You know what I mean.) In recent years it's evolved into an odd little product, neither the best offline system nor the best finishing system but more-or-less capable of either, within certain reasonable limits. It's popular because it's both cheap (less than half the price of Media Composer Soft, and even cheaper when you compare Final Cut/Blackmagic to MC/Mojo) and good enough. It's never been a flagship anything, nor has it ever really tried to be, far as I can tell.

As for the "Pro apps," I'm gonna assume you're talking about Final Cut Studio, Logic and Aperture. Apple could drop all of those tomorrow, and the shareholders wouldn't blink. The profit Apple makes on iPhone sales in a single quarter dwarfs what they take in from the sales of those applications in a whole year. It's just not a significant part of Apple's bottom line.

So why do they continue selling them? Two reasons that sort of act as a positive feedback loop. One is because those applications sell Macs. If you want to use Final Cut, you're going to buy a Mac Pro to run it. That's just how it is. Final Cut is exclusive; exclusive things are good. The same is true (to a much lesser extent) of Aperture and Logic.

But the other reason is arguably the more important one: The existence of these high-end professional creative applications stands in mute testimony to the seriousness of the Mac as a tool for creativity and artistry. The Mac is a great tool; applications like Final Cut and Logic should exist, because the Mac is the tool creative people should want to use. That's Apple's thinking on the subject, I believe. They've always ? this goes back to 1986, believe it or not ? positioned the Mac as a sort of creative place, a place to do creative things. With the iMac and the evolution of home computing in the Internet era, that definition evolved a bit, but in clunky and inelegant ways that formed a stepping-stone path all the way to the iPad. At its heart, the Mac is and always will be, as long as it continues to exist as a product, "the computer for the rest of us." Not "the rest of us" in the inclusive everybody sense, but in the right-brain, artsy-fartsy, intuitive, creative sense. The Mac has always been the computer for people who wear flip-flops and board shorts, be they students or scientists or artists or musicians or (hello) editors. The existence of the "Pro Apps" (I've always effin' hated that term; accountants are professionals) helps to define the Mac's market position, as distinct from the rest of the (as I said before) ill-defined "computer" market.

But that's fundamentally 20th-century thinking. In the 20th century, computers were things. Like cars, or chickens. There was this sort of platonic ideal of a "computer" that we all had in our heads. It evolved over time ? from refrigerator-sized white boxes with high-speed reel-to-reel tape recorders stuck to the front to beige boxes with rounded corners and TVs with faintly glowing green type ? but it was a thing apart, distinct and unique. You could plop any person in 1990 down in front of any computer of its day and they'd instantly say, "Ah yes, this is a computer."

No more. Your Tivo is a computer. Literally; it's got a PowerPC microchip in it and it runs Linux. Your phone is a computer; this was actually true long before the iPhone. Your iPod is a computer. Hell, if you've got a relatively recent one, your freakin' DVD player might well have a Web browser in it! Computers aren't things any more. Now the Internet is a thing, and the computer is the bridge that lets us reach the Internet. Which is why the iPad is so exciting. It's the first general-purpose computer that's specifically designed to be invisible to the user. When you're using one, you're not supposed to be aware of the fact that you're using a computer. You're supposed to be interacting directly with ? well, whatever. A Web page, a movie, a book, Twitter, a game, whatever. If you put somebody from 1990 in front of an iPad, they wouldn't instantly recognize it as a computer. It's something new. And I think it's just the first of what'll ultimately be a great many similar devices, devices designed to be (whether they're successful or not) invisible.

Does that mean computers-qua-computers are "withering away?" Of course not! It means that we're starting to recognize, as a culture, that a lot of the time accessing whatever it is you're accessing ? book, movie, Web page, porn, whatevs ? is the end, and the device that gives you that access is the means, and just get out of my way and let me stalk that cute girl on Facebook already! This is not a shift away from computers-as-things. It's a recognition that having to interact with a computer-as-a-thing in order to get to Facebook is often a pain in the ass, and it'd be nice to have the option of skipping that part and getting right to the good stuff. We're still going to need computers-as-things to do things other than access information, so the Mac Pro is in no danger of extinction.

Sure, maybe in ten or twenty years (closer to twenty than ten) somebody will edit a feature film on an iPad the size of a drafting table. Gotta admit, it'd be pretty damn cool to manipulate shots directly with your hands instead of having to fight the keyboard and mouse like you're a clumsy teenager on prom night desperately trying to find your date's happy spot. If that day comes, I will welcome it ? though I honestly don't know that it'll ever come to pass. A "Minority Report"-style means of interaction seems awfully cool ? until your arms get tired and your back starts to twitch and come on, can't I sit down while I do this and you go to scratch your nose and suddenly the all your shots are running backwards and in black-and-white. But give it a couple decades and we'll see.

If deskside-style computer workstations no longer exist in 2030, one of us will owe the other a beer. I'm ? actually not sure which one of us it'll be.

I'm gonna take issue with just a couple more things you said, not with the intent of being a jerk over the Internet, but because I really think there's some important perspective here that too often gets lost.

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We all know that FCP needs a ground up re-write

I don't actually agree at all. Final Cut is really robust. It's not perfect by far, but it's also not a piece of crap that's beyond saving. Version 6 saw massive changes under the hood, with a completely new realtime system and the open-format timeline. Version 7 was a refinement rather than a revolution. Are there features I'd like to see added to Final Cut? A world of yes; some days I'd give both my eye teeth just for a simple splitscreen V1/V2 display for overcutting. And while the media management system is a recipe for frustration to relatively inexperienced users, it's also flexible in ways that Avid's stricter system isn't, so that's more a trade-off than an inherent liability.

The question is, what would be gained from starting from scratch with Final Cut? Sure, you could do absolutely everything differently; you could change ? um ? the font on the timeline. Or something. Whatever. But are there clear and definite improvements that are needed but impossible to add to the current product? While reasonable people can disagree, I certainly don't think the answer is an unequivocal yes.

And finally?

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the surrounding apps all need some serious updates as well

True to form, I kind of take the opposite point of view here. I wonder if Apple wouldn't be better off dumping their bundle idea entirely. Motion is liked well enough by the folks who like it, but it's practically unknown among professional motion graphics artists (in my experience). Soundtrack is okay at best, I think, but I'm not an audio expert; all the actual audio experts I know use ProTools without a second thought. DVD Studio? To the extent that DVD is on the far end of its life cycle as a medium (I think it's closer to the middle than the end, but whatever), professional DVD authoring is done by professional DVD authorists, all of whom apparently use Scenarist. DVD Studio is more product than the vast majority of Final Cut users will ever need, while at the same time being insufficient to challenge the market leader, not to mention the folly of bothering to challenge the market leader at a time when the market is, at best, at peak and due to start shrinking in the foreseeable future.

Color is really the only application, aside from Final Cut and Compressor (which definitely should be a bundle), that has merit on its own, in my opinion. It's a good grading tool. Nobody would ever consider Color and a DiVinci Resolve to be on the same playing field; one is a software-only tool with a full but basic feature set, and the other is a dedicated real-time 4K grading system. They're in the same universe, but different galaxies, and that's valid.

The trouble with Color, as I see it, is that the market for it is inherently small ? compared to the market for dedicated color correctors, obviously ? and the learning curve for using it is steep. It's not an application like Photoshop that's got a zillion individual tools within it but that can be used to create a zillion different types of things by a zillion different types of artists. No, Color is a grading tool for HD and 2K video. That's all it's good for, and because it's a good grading tool, it's tricky to learn and difficult to master. These are not complaints; I'm actually very fond of Color. It's just that these are facts, and one has to wonder just what the over-under is for continuing to invest in Color as a standalone application.

So really it's not a matter of the other applications needing updates. It's a matter of whether the other applications are worth even the minimal effort necessary to keep their current versions compatible with future operating system releases. Honestly ? I just don't know.

I wonder if Apple even knows. With all the Final Cut Studio applications sold as a bundle, I have to assume it's impossible for Apple to know, or even make an educated guess about, their relative strengths in the market. If Apple de-bundled the Studio (except for Final Cut and Compressor), would anyone purchase Soundtrack Pro? It's difficult to guess. Which kinda makes me wonder about the wisdom of Apple's continuing to maintain them as a bundle. If absolutely no one on the entire planet were using DVD Studio for anything (and this is obviously not the case; it's just a for-instance), would Apple have any way of knowing?

Gotta wonder.

Anyway, please bear in mind that all of the above has been pure wankery, pulled out of my bottom and composed entirely of my opinions and virtually no facts at all. This is just what I happen to think, as a guy who considers himself to be of more-or-less average intelligence most of the time, and I only shared it here 'cause I was bored and felt talky. Assume no personal affront was intended by any of it, 'cause it wasn't.

Wow. Umm, well I'm not going to be nearly as articulate as Jeff but I do think a ground up rewrite of FCP is needed. FCP, at it's core, is 10yr code and needs to be updated to a modern code base so it can take advantage of things like being 64-bit, being able to access more RAM (I think 3 or 4 gigs is the limit right now), being able to better leverage all the cores the Mac Pros have, take more advantage of the GPU, etc.,.

Besides purely technical stuff I'd like FCP to have a better multil-user environment (similar to Avid) and really start to push Adobe and Avid like they were doing 5 or 6 years ago. Over the past couple of years I've been more impressed w/the new things that those two companies have done w/their NLEs than w/what Apple has done w/FCP. Color was great to get, but after two years it only gets a .5 upgrade bump which makes me wonder if Color is headed down the same road as Shake.


-Andrew

Thank you, Jeff, for putting things into proper perspective; finally someone who knows the technology explains the quagmire of NLE realities. Ok, well, now we know there is life after Apple...

Holy Crap Jeff:

You weren't on the debate team in college, were you? You are either a really fast typist or just spent your entire dinner hour typing this. I won't be nearly as thorough.

1. I agree, to a point, with what you say about the Mac Pros. But as we know, computing in general is going much more toward small, portable systems like laptops, iPads and iPhone type devices eventually. But I am looking at things today. I really don't have any complaints about the Mac Pros, other than I hope that Apple keeps making them.

Where I see the alarm bells going off are the boneheaded moves that Apple has made in laptops and the OS. Snow Leopard was a waste (as far as compatibility and features gained vs. hassle of dumping hardware and updating software to work correctly with SL) and many of us are still picking up the pieces or contemplating picking up the pieces for the privilege of running Apple's most current OS. I hate it when it costs hundreds of dollars to update your entire editing system just to run a new OS that is really not much better than the version that preceded it.

Laptops - I too heavily rely on my laptop. My previous 15" G4 PB was a gem and served me well through the introduction of P2, laptop editing, interfacing with external devices. I currently am typing this on my Santa Rosa MBP, that frankly, is a lemon. It has Apple Care and has been back to Apple eight times for repairs. I can take it in again (the optical drive now refuses to read discs) and have Apple replace it. But what would they replace it with? The new 15" MBP? No removable battery so I can't do any serious editing or work on overseas long flights away from a power outlet. No FW 400? No ExpressCard 34 slot so I can't use my Duel Adapter, read SxS cards, or hook up more than one FireWire device at a time without daisy chaining. Oh yeah, and since I am running Leopard on this lemon MBP, if I let them replace it. I will, by latest calculation, have to spend almost $1,000.00 to update all of the programs that most use to be compatible with SL or will have to reinstall Leopard over Snow to just use what I have. From a working pro perspective, the new MBPs are just losing it, losing features, losing versatility and based upon my experience with this MBP, losing quality. I have owned 13 Macs over the years and have never had a true lemon like this one. QC is down and repairs and hassle are up. That, to me, spells consumer and a lack of regard for pros.

2. Not sure how long you have been involved with Apple and FCP but at various times in its history, FCP and FCS were definitely considered prestige products for Apple. Perhaps you are forgetting the millions and millions of dollars Apple spent on advertising, huge NAB, IBC and InterBee booths the size of a small city and all of the innovation to take market share from AVID? Apple would not have dropped millions of dollars on FCP if it was NOT considered a prestige product at some point. I understand about the revenue, and agree. All of the pro apps combined don't even hold a flicker to iPhone and iTune sales and that is just the way things are.

3. Once again, FCP code is the remnants of the original code bought from MacroMedia more than a decade and a half ago. This doesn't remind you of some other software that did the same thing, hanging new window dressing and forcing new features on a massively outdated underlying code called DOS? In order to be a viable competitor in the marketplace, Apple will have to eventually do a ground up overhaul of FCP and that will not happen without re-writing all of the code. If they don't, FCP will eventually become irrelevant. If they do, it will cost a ton of money. The interface is very old fashioned and somewhat stodgy. A lot of the weird anomalies in using FCP on a daily basis in a professional environment are also the result of outdated code and unaddressed feature needs and requests. I worked for a prodco from 2004 to 2009 that was mainly AVID but also had a couple bays and an on-line bay with FCS. So I, unlike many FCS users, have used, produced and delivered to the studios and networks using both systems, side by side. FCS has some major issues that make it not as reliable abd bulletproof as AVID in professional workflows in general. Don't get me wrong, I truly like FCS and have been on it for a long time. But as a producer, if I sell my own series, I would seriously contemplate AVID over FCS. Not because you cannot use FCS, but mainly because of that underlying code in AVID is more stable and has been updated many more times than FCS. I, as well as the majority of long time FCS users tend to agree that a from the ground up re-write is needed to keep FCS competitive and relevant. And I am beginning to doubt that Apple will ever do that. How many more .5 versions can they hang on that old code?

4. Not sure which kinds of post environments you edit in Jeff? In the world of corporate, cable and web series though, as you know, the entire post workflow is typically being thrust upon the video editor. You obviously are knowledgable and I am sure, a very good editor but do you work in an environment where you have a post team or do you handle audio post, color correction and motion graphics all yourself? Or do you do "the hand off" and others do that work? If so, your observations about the surrounding apps are understandable.

AE is definitely better and much more capable than Motion. But Motion kicks ass for the average video editor. That is the difference, AE is a deep, deep app and like Photoshop, takes years to truly master. But for the video editor who has motion graphics duty thrust upon them, Motion is a Godsend. I am terrible at graphics and never learned how to use AE myself, despite the fact that I produced a 100 episode all animated series that was done 90% on AE with a team of six animators. So I know AE as far as what it can do, how long and how much effort it takes to do things, I just never learned the finer points because I never wanted to be a motion graphics artist. But with Motion, I was up and running and 30 minutes later, was turning out usable, decent looking video graphics. It makes L3s, basic opens, animating stills and other drudgery that the typical video editor deals with a breeze. I LOVE Motion! I suck at graphics but with Motion, I can at least make logos and existing graphics I am given look pretty good. And that makes me money and make clients who can't give me the budget to hire a real motion graphics artist happy.

Soundtrack Pro - Of course, Pro Tools is better. It is the same thing as the AE vs. Motion situation. Pro Tools is the standard. It's what real sound mixers use. But for the average video editor to learn? Too complicated, too involved. STP is a great toolbox to fix common sound issues and if you learn what you are doing, STP is immensely powerful. it is not a killer app but it is perfect for the average video editor (who really shouldn't be dealing with audio post at all, but that is a separate discussion altogether). I wrote a book on STP for O'Reilly when it was bundled as a separate app and was much less capable than it is today. I seriously doubt that Apple will ever un-bundle the accompanying apps, if anything, I think they will add more to what is there, look at Vegas on the PC and the Adobe CS Suite. The trend is to add more bang for buck, not less.

Compressor - adequate, gets the job done.

Color - I must plead ignorance, I have not learned it, although I have heard such good things about it for mid level projects. I even like the FCP 3 way. For me, it is fine for basic CC chores. Appeals to the average editor, not colorist.

We all have different viewpoints but it is my opinion that Apple may eventually dump pro apps or let them quietly fade into oblivion and that makes me sad. The whole laptop situation doesn't make me sad, it makes me pissed. They really don't have much business calling the MBPs anymore, they should be called "Macbooks that are just a little bit faster than the regular Macbooks but really lack more and more pro features each iteration".

Dan

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Holy Crap Jeff:

You weren't on the debate team in college, were you? You are either a really fast typist or just spent your entire dinner hour typing this. I won't be nearly as thorough

Actually that is a typical Jeff post. We have 12 mods compiling all of Jeff's posts into a 2000 page volume due to go on sale sometime in 2011.

Another 7 mods are compiling Dan Brockett posts due to go on sale sometime in 2013.



Michael Horton
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>We have 12 mods compiling all of Jeff's posts into a 2000 page volume due to go on sale
>sometime in 2011.

Make it 2101. We can't type fast enough to keep up. Unless Derek takes over.



www.strypesinpost.com

Actually it was both, Dan.

I see your point about Snow Leopard, but I disagree with your conclusion. If there was a failing there, it came in three parts.

First, there was a failure of marketing. Though Apple made the point pretty clearly that there would be no (or very few) user-facing additions to the OS, I think end users still rushed off to upgrade expecting some kind of new hotness.

Second, given the scope of the under-the-hood enhancements, Snow Leopard really needed a two- or three-year beta program. Grand Central Dispatch alone basically throws out twenty years of best-practice in multithreaded programming and reentrant software architecture; ISVs aren't gonna adapt to it instantly. Even today, I'm uncertain how many third-party applications are GCD-aware.

On the other side of that coin, though, is the third failing: The effing ISVs need to get off their effing asses and write Mac OS X applications that actually leverage core technologies. ADOBE, I AM LOOKING AT YOU, YOU JERKS.

(Then again, as you pointed out up-thread, Final Cut itself isn't GCD-savvy, which sort of reinforces my second failing, I think: Snow Leopard was released way too soon.)

As for your laptop, I'm not sure what the "Santa Rosa" codename refers to off the top of my head, and I'm just too dang lazy right now to look it up, so I can't speak directly to that. I can throw out a piece of anecdata: both my best friend and I have vintage 2009 MacBook Pros (his slightly older than mine; he might've gotten it in 2008) and neither of us have ever needed service. Lemons do happen, and customers sometimes do get screwed when they're in that terrible place between "your problem is now fixed, sorry for the inconvenience" and "this laptop is not worth repairing, here's a new one." It sucks, but ? sigh. Whaddya gonna do.

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Not sure how long you have been involved with Apple and FCP

If by "involved" you mean I've used the software, I guess it was about 2001 or 2002, somewhere around in there. I've never been any more involved than that; I'm just an end-user-guy-person.

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Apple would not have dropped millions of dollars on FCP if it was NOT considered a prestige product at some point.

OH. I see, I misunderstood you. You mean to say that Apple used to be more visibly "proud" (for lack of a better word) of Final Cut than it is today. I can think of two possible reasons why Apple wouldn't bother spending money to heavily market Final Cut any more. One: They don't need to. Final Cut is the market leader in software-based offline editing systems. It's the big dog now, in terms of total installed seats. And two: If (this is hypothetical) Apple crunched the numbers and determined that they were spending more on marketing than they were getting back in revenue, then it makes perfect sense that they'd stop buying ads and putting up booths and stuff.

The nature of NAB has really changed in the past decade as well. Once upon a time, NAB was a buying show; you showed up there, wrote a million-plus-dollar check, got a million-and-a-half bucks of stuff (god bless show specials) and were done for the year. The trickle-down of broadcast technology to the relatively low end of Mac Pros and $25,000 finishing suites changed the purchasing cycle. People don't show up at NAB to buy Final Cut rooms; if they want a Final Cut room, they call up a VAR and just order one. So Apple probably wouldn't get very much out of showing up at NAB.

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In order to be a viable competitor in the marketplace, Apple will have to eventually do a ground up overhaul of FCP

See, I'm with you, but I'm not.

You're absolutely right that Media Composer is the more robust system. No question. That's why Media Composer is the de facto standard for creative offline editorial ? despite the fact that Final Cut has a much larger total installed base.

But see, that's the answer right there: Final Cut has more installed seats than any other offline editing system in the world, but Media Composer remains the de facto standard. Obviously these two products aren't true competitors. They're not like Coke and Pepsi, pure commodities that have to compete on marketing or logo design or whatever. They're naturally differentiated. They're not going after precisely the same market.

You can see that in the pricing, as I mentioned above. Final Cut Pro is $1,000, while Media Composer Software is $2,500. They're not ? dammit. What's the economics jargon term for two products that are in perfect competition with each other? Whatever it is, they're not that. They're very similar, with a lot of functional overlap, but Final Cut is the lower-end product of the pair, relatively speaking.

So comparing it to Media Composer is inherently tricky, because they're not meant to be equivalent. You can say Apple has to refactor Final Cut to compete with Avid ? but you could also say Apple has to redesign the Macbook Pro to compete with Lexus. Both make about as much sense, because both are based around a false assumption. Apple has never directly competed with Avid.

(Yes, I'm drawing a pretty fine line there. Final Cut and Media Composer are very, very similar when viewed from a great height. But that doesn't change the fact that there are important differences, and that Apple and Avid have slightly different priorities.)

If Avid announced tomorrow morning that the price of Media Composer Software was being dropped to $750, and that they were ditching the Mojo and the Nitris and partnering with Aja to use off-the-shelf Kona I/Os, then Apple would have a very serious problem on its hands. Because suddenly Media Composer would be a very attractive option in environments where, today, it's not optimal. (See above, re: wedding videographers.)

It seems like your unspoken assumption (and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, just making an observation) is that you think Apple should try to compete directly with Avid, and that Final Cut should grow upwards, as a product, to the point where it's on an even playing field with Media Composer. I don't disagree. I'd love it if Final Cut were more robust than it is; some other time we can get into a "Here's what Final Cut would be if I had a magic wand" conversation.

All I'm saying is that I'm not at all convinced that Apple agrees. It seems, from what I've observed in the few years I've been a Final Cut guy, that Apple has carved out a niche for itself, and it's happy with that. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it looks from my chair.

(Besides, there's the political angle as well. If Apple really goes hard after Avid, directly competing with Media Composer, what's to stop Avid from pulling the plug on Mac development again? I certainly don't have the numbers, and I'm not sure there's any way to obtain them, but I wouldn't be surprised if Media Composer is responsible for more direct Mac sales than Final Cut is. That is to say, I suspect more Macs which would not otherwise be sold are bought to run Avid than to run Final Cut. I bet a significant fraction of Final Cut sales are "We have this Mac system anyway, let's throw Final Cut on it."

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Not sure which kinds of post environments you edit in Jeff?

Oy. These days? Whoever will have me! But in the past it's been overwhelmingly spot work, and in the past couple years some industrial.

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But Motion kicks ass for the average video editor.

I've heard this, and that's what I was trying clumsily to say when I said that Motion is well liked by the people who like it. It's so tricky to talk about this stuff without sounding like I'm casting aspersions, but I think we agree that there is a difference ? not a better-or-worse thing, but a difference ? between the one-man shop that does small, independent jobs and a commercial post house that does spots or episodic TV. Different business models, different workflows. I've got more experience with the latter than the former, but Motion is not a serious graphics platform in my experience. My experience may not be typical!

I think I see your point about Motion in general, though. Would it be fair to say that you think Motion is a worthy companion to Final Cut even if it's not good enough to succeed as a standalone graphics package? 'Cause I can go along with that, no problem.

I do wonder, though ? this is even more off-topic than the rest of this discussion, so feel free to skip it ? whether it would make more sense to take the important features of Motion and just roll them into Final Cut. Like the text tool, for example. Does anybody use Final Cut's built-in text tool for anything but slates? For me it was always either Boris Title 3D or After Effects; I've heard others say Motion has a good titler. If Motion's titler is as good as they say, why can't it be a Final Cut feature?

And so on. I've never liked the DVE tools in Final Cut at all. I've found them to be awkward and frustrating to use every time I've tried, hence my (perhaps) over-reliance on After Effects. Even if all I'm doing is a simple pan across a high-resolution still, I'll fire up After Effects, because I can artsy-up the shot by throwing a couple lights on there, and I have good control of the camera. If I had those same basic controls in Final Cut itself, I'd say probably half my trips to After Effects would be unnecessary.

I have a bit more experience with Soundtrack than I do with Motion; I've used it to record myriad voiceovers, and it was more than adequate for that. But in those situations, I was only using it as a multitrack recorder and basic editor. I did literally nothing else with it, no sweetening or anything.

I also used Soundtrack to do the final audio mix on a half-hour industrial piece I did about a year ago. It was ? adequate. It frustrated the hell out of me, because unlike Final Cut, it did crash on me a couple times. My mix wasn't complicated at all ? probably a dozen or two dozen tracks, stereo and mono, no surround at all. But for whatever reason, a couple times Soundtrack just wet the bed. I was extremely leery of it after that, opting to just get the basic mix finished as quickly as possible and get back into Final Cut. I could better evaluate it if I knew more about audio.

But again ? does it need to be a separate application? If we're talking about the "average video editor" (to borrow your phrase), is Soundtrack as it sits right now more application than necessary? It seems like it's in a weird sort of middle place, obviously not as capable or reliable as ProTools, but more than just an add-on utility for Final Cut. Is there virtue in taking out the core features that the "average video editor" has use for and integrating them directly into Final Cut? Maybe audio recording that's superior to the cruddy little voiceover scratch tool that's there now, with low-latency multitrack recording. Maybe support for Audio Unit plug-ins, I dunno. I'm really dumb when it comes to audio.

Yeah, you really hit an important point about Color. I was just talking to Shane about this the other day, coincidentally. I like Color very much because I have a lot of familiarity with the lift-gain-gamma model of color. Color is based on lift-gain-gamma; it's got very standard tools if you're accustomed to working in a lift-gain-gamma model. I was able to get up and running in Color really quickly (despite an idiosyncratic UI) because the underlying ? well, mathematical model, I guess ? made sense to me. The three on-screen trackballs have always been sufficient for, I'm not exaggerating, 99 percent of all my color grading needs.

When I want to grade a whole timeline, I use Color. But when I only need to grade a few shots, I'll use Colorista instead. Why? Cause it's also based on the lift-gain-gamma mathematical model, which means my hands know how to push and pull the on-screen balls to do what I want. I'll never be a colorist, but I can move the balls around to do what I want as long as my ambition is fairly modest, and assuming I can do what I want at all, I know I can do it quickly. So those tools work for me.

The three-way color corrector in Final Cut? It pisses me off. It does not use the lift-gain-gamma model, so moving the controls affects the color in ways that I don't understand, and that frustrate me. Seriously, I know no faster way for me to positively ruin a shot than by throwing a three-way on it.

I say all this to point out one of my personal blind spots about Final Cut. If I had that magic wand I mentioned earlier, one of the first things I'd do (after a V1/V2 split view and 3:2 support) would be abolishing the three-way color corrector to the depths of hell and replacing it with some variation on Colorista that doesn't take all winter to render. Would that be a good decision, though? I don't know! Maybe the three-way color corrector is widely beloved by the majority of Final Cut users. I know I hate it because I'm too old and set in my ways to learn to use it, but maybe I'm in the distinct minority.

So I dunno. Mine's a hard point of view to state succinctly. On the one hand, I really love working with Final Cut. I'm a useless mouth-breather in front of an Avid, and by now I'm so rusty on a Smoke that I barely remember how to do the most basic tasks. But Final Cut feels like home to me.

On the other hand, though, I guess I kind of have no illusions about it. There are aspects about it I absolutely deplore. There are whole features, whole chunks of the program that I just refuse to use, because I've had bad experiences of one type or another. I'll even advise other people in the strongest possible terms never to use those features, even though I know that smarter, more skilled, more experienced editors than I have used them to good effect. (Yes, I'm talking about nested timelines, may they rot in hell.)

I guess it's kind of a Stockholm Syndrome sort of thing. I fought and struggled with Final Cut back in the bad old days when working in anything other than DV was asking for trouble. Final Cut beat me up so bad that it kind of broke my will, a little bit. And now I have this sort of half-cowed, half-terrified relationship with it. See, I know it loves me. And I know when it's bad to me it's only 'cause I did something it hates. I'm sorry, Final Cut, I don't mean to make you mad.

I can say this with absolute certainty: One of three things is going to happen. Either Apple is going to pull off some kind of magical transformation with Final Cut that turns it into a full-fledged competitor to Media Composer and revolutionizes offline editorial, or they're going to cancel it outright, or they're going to do something in between those two. My money's on the something-in-between.

(Totally with you on the Express Card mess, though. Seriously, Apple. Pulling the one expansion slot from your most popular high-end laptop model? A bunch of dicks, all of you.)

Jezus Kriste Jeff...why not just start a blog site?

Well...I'm not the wordsmith Jeff is (way too much stuff to do ), but if this is the beginning of the end of FCP / FCS / Pro Apps, Adobe is gonna sneak right in the back door with the apps package they have been updating regularly that include Premiere Pro (Production Premium CS4).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

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but if this is the beginning of the end of FCP / FCS / Pro Apps, Adobe is gonna sneak right in the back door with the apps package they have been updating regularly that include Premiere Pro (Production Premium CS4).

Nah, I'm betting on Casablanca

Michael Horton
-------------------

What's Casablanca?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

[www.macrosystem.us]

Michael Horton
-------------------

If their editing system is as user-friendly and easy-to-use as their Web site, sign me up right now for precisely zero copies.

An even better web site

[www.mickeyjones.com]

Michael Horton
-------------------

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The video editing systems by Casablanca / MacroSystem are being used by professional editors, schools, police departments and companies all over the world.

Well, I'm sold. If it's good enough for police departments, it's good enough for me.

(I shouldn't be so rude. But honestly, after looking into this Casablanca thing I can't tell if you're sincere or joking around, Mike. You're joking around, right? I mean ? they advertise the fact that this thing has composite video on it like it's a selling point.)

While I feel apprehensive at joining in to such an erudite conversation, I have to say that your post about the iPad and the future of invisible computing was absolutely brilliant Jeff.

A perfect pluge.

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Mike. You're joking around, right?

Me? I have no sense of humor.

Take a look at this. It was edited on Casablanca. I believe it won an award





Michael Horton
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> Take a look at this. It was edited on Casablanca. I believe it won an award

Yow! Boy, do they need more font choices...


www.derekmok.com

Just in the interest of full disclosure here, it might interest you to know that Jeff and I are also having a simultaneous argument in PMs right now about LOTR and the non-scouring of the Shire which I believe has passed the 10,000 word mark.

This guy can TYPE!

>"Santa Rosa" codename

[www.everymac.com]

It may have been susceptible to heat issues. But it's remarkably hardy, like a tank. A friend of mine dropped his down a flight of stairs, and it works fine, aside from a cracked casing. Okay, not so tank like.



I really hate it when guys mention FCP as a poor man's Avid. And in many regards, I wish they'll fix some stuff and offer an alternative for some of the new features I'm seeing and liking a lot (script sync, audio transcriber, a proper open timeline, fix media manager, etc...)

Man, I'd love to type more, but i'm on a short between session break, and I can't type as fast as Jeff.



www.strypesinpost.com

bollocks .. i went out and bought a coupe of books this lunchtime ... if i'd known Jeff was so busy updating this thread then I could've saved my money

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a simultaneous argument in PMs right now about LOTR and the non-scouring of the Shire which I believe has passed the 10,000 word mark

Okay, that's just totally flippin' unfair of you, Jude. You know damn good and well that that argument started out as a discussion of the monomyth and how it does and does not apply to "Avatar," and only turned to "The Lord of the Rings" when I sent you that hobbit-themed erotica.

You just can't trust some people, I swear.