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> It’s never been about the tools. FCP 7 is a very powerful tool that many editors used for many years. It’s not like they edited Parasite in iMovie. If anyth

> It’s never been about the tools. FCP 7 is a very powerful tool that many editors used for many years. It’s not like they edited Parasite in iMovie. If anything, this shows how important good tools are for a professional. The filmmakers presumably didn’t “upgrade” to FCP X because part of experience is mastering your tools and knowing what you can get out of them. I’m sure the FCP codebase was ancient and becoming difficult to maintain (it used to run on Mac OS 9!) but the wholesale rewrite they did meant that professionals now had to throw out a lot of their tool-specific knowledge learn a brand new editor, whether that editor was Apple’s initially buggy and feature-incomplete one or Adobe Premier. Premier had its own issues, but it was already proven usable in industry, had been around long enough that switching meant you weren’t as much of a Guinea pig as you were going with FCP X, and unlike FCP 7 was actively maintained. If Apple had gone for a modular rewrite of components of FCP 7, gradually modernizing the code and the interface, they could have avoided alienating a lot of their user base. I haven’t used FCP X so I can’t say if the end result was “worth it” but FCP 7 (and the prior versions) were such a dominant force in the industry, and now FCP X is just another player.

lostgame 4y ago
This, this, this. You can’t disrespect your core, dedicated audience. Apple slapped every serious, dedicated, industry director and editor in the face who used Final Cut with the release of FCPX. The incompatibility of plugins was one thing. That we couldn’t - for the first time ever - open project files from a previous version into the new version, made it further useless for folks who would be looking to ‘upgrade’. Then there was the staggering lack of basic features. One had to wonder what the hell Apple was thinking. There are easier ways to shoot oneself in the foot.
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Quark disaster in the early 00s. Went from 95% market share to having their lunch eaten by Adobe InDesign.
  - contingencies 4y ago
    They wrote the paper on destroying the market in paper design. Turtles all the way down, baby.
- greenknight 4y ago
  > That we couldn’t - for the first time ever - open project files from a previous version into the new version They put the time and effort at the time to allow importing of iMovie Projects though... Just that was a massive slap in the face of all professionals.
NonNefarious 4y ago
Apple bought FCP from MacroMedia, and its internal design was a mess. You can see amateurish data-structure blunders if you look at FCP XML files. The UI also suffered from the asinine floating-window fad that afflicted the Mac for much of its existence, being a glued-together mass of individual windows that prevented you from minimizing, resizing, or moving the FCP UI. That was far from the only UI gaffe. Remember when footage would go missing, and you were presented with "Find" and "Locate" buttons right next to each other? WTF. But... you could get work done with FCP 7. No doubt about it. Apple cleaned up the floating-window mess with FCP X. But it failed to fix fundamental mistakes from the earlier version. Most crippling is its continued failure to distinguish between clips (media files, which reside in bins) and timeline events (sections of the clips that are used in the timeline). An event should always point to a clip. That makes it easy to (for example) apply an effect to all the uses of a shot, or to just one instance of it in the timeline. If you want to apply an effect to all uses of a shot, you apply the effect to the clip. Otherwise, you apply it to one or more tineline events. Easy, right? But you still can't do that in FCP X. To make matters worse, Apple misuses the term "event" to mean... I don't even know. Some kind of dumb iPhoto-like auto-organized group of media by date, I think. That's ignorant of industry standards and definitely not professional. Also unprofessional is FCP's overly "helpful" timeline. It's a chore to edit your footage with frame-level precision, which should NEVER be a problem today. And I have no idea why you couldn't open old FCP projects in X. Plenty of other vendors (and even other groups at Apple) wrote parsers to ingest that poorly-conceived XML schema and turn it into something useful.

lostgame 4y ago

This, this, this. You can’t disrespect your core, dedicated audience. Apple slapped every serious, dedicated, industry director and editor in the face who used Final Cut with the release of FCPX. The incompatibility of plugins was one thing. That we couldn’t - for the first time ever - open project files from a previous version into the new version, made it further useless for folks who would be looking to ‘upgrade’. Then there was the staggering lack of basic features. One had to wonder what the hell Apple was thinking. There are easier ways to shoot oneself in the foot.

kjellsbells 4y ago
Reminds me of the Quark disaster in the early 00s. Went from 95% market share to having their lunch eaten by Adobe InDesign.
- contingencies 4y ago
  They wrote the paper on destroying the market in paper design. Turtles all the way down, baby.
greenknight 4y ago
> That we couldn’t - for the first time ever - open project files from a previous version into the new version They put the time and effort at the time to allow importing of iMovie Projects though... Just that was a massive slap in the face of all professionals.

NonNefarious 4y ago

Apple bought FCP from MacroMedia, and its internal design was a mess. You can see amateurish data-structure blunders if you look at FCP XML files. The UI also suffered from the asinine floating-window fad that afflicted the Mac for much of its existence, being a glued-together mass of individual windows that prevented you from minimizing, resizing, or moving the FCP UI. That was far from the only UI gaffe. Remember when footage would go missing, and you were presented with "Find" and "Locate" buttons right next to each other? WTF. But... you could get work done with FCP 7. No doubt about it. Apple cleaned up the floating-window mess with FCP X. But it failed to fix fundamental mistakes from the earlier version. Most crippling is its continued failure to distinguish between clips (media files, which reside in bins) and timeline events (sections of the clips that are used in the timeline). An event should always point to a clip. That makes it easy to (for example) apply an effect to all the uses of a shot, or to just one instance of it in the timeline. If you want to apply an effect to all uses of a shot, you apply the effect to the clip. Otherwise, you apply it to one or more tineline events. Easy, right? But you still can't do that in FCP X. To make matters worse, Apple misuses the term "event" to mean... I don't even know. Some kind of dumb iPhoto-like auto-organized group of media by date, I think. That's ignorant of industry standards and definitely not professional. Also unprofessional is FCP's overly "helpful" timeline. It's a chore to edit your footage with frame-level precision, which should NEVER be a problem today. And I have no idea why you couldn't open old FCP projects in X. Plenty of other vendors (and even other groups at Apple) wrote parsers to ingest that poorly-conceived XML schema and turn it into something useful.