Check out this article on FCP X, and why it should have been a professional app when it was released, and not a partial app that will slowly have new features, which is commenting an article at Post Magazine. Which I totally agree with and have bee saying all along. Adobe did it just fine in bringing their apps to 64 bit, why did Apple have to not have feature parity or even compatibility with their old app?

And the fact that FCP X now has XML, but it is still not, and will never be compatible with FXP 7 is a joke. If Premiere Pro can do, Apple could do it, but they won’t.

I like this part:

At one point in the article Townhill notes that Apple is responding to feedback and changing the application quickly to meet the demands of the Post community.  The strange thing to me is that Apple was given much of the same feedback during the beta testing and it was roundly ignored.  Pages upon pages of information was fed to Apple with pretty much everything that has been said publicly since the application was released.   In all cases, Apple ignored the suggestions moving ahead with the product as they developed it.   NOW that there’s a tremendous outcry, NOW Apple is “responding to the Post Production community.”   Maybe if they had responded to the people who were testing the product, they could have avoided this entire fiasco.

So it looks to me like Apple’s original plan was to just release FCP X as a prosumer product that really didn’t need the full fledged Post Production community blessing because there are millions of consumers out there and only a couple hundred thousand Post Pros.   If it was truly aimed at the pros, then Apple would have listened to the pros during beta testing about all the things that were badly missing from the app.

But with all the subsequent negative press on the product, Apple is desperately trying to backtrack and figure out how to add the extremely basic functions that it left out by “skating where the puck is going.”  (read the article to understand)

If Apple was truly dedicated to the professional editing community they would have taken the two to three years to deliver something that built upon their 11 year legacy.  I just see what they’re doing now as creating a whole box of band-aids to make the product cobble along and sort of kind of do what the product has done for the past 4 years at least.  Apple is admittedly leaning heavily on third party vendors to fill in what they call gaps, what I call chasms in the software.

So true so true. Apple made FCP X on purpose, they knew they were giving up on the pro community completely and all the businesses that make a living making plug-ins and hardware for final cut pro, but they figured they would make more money by making a consumer application and banking on the name of Final Cut Pro which has come to mean something in the industry. Now they realize they may have screwed up, but it is too late. These new features could have been add ons to a true 64 bit Final Cut Pro and it would have been awesome, but this weird prosumer app they have made with some pro features and the rest decidedly consumer will never be used by Pros, and shouldn’t even have Pro in the name.

iMovie is not called a pro app because it is not, and adding some pro features to it, when it forces you to work in it’s limited way does not make it pro, and never will. And nothing Apple does will ever make this app right for professionals, Apple has ceded this market, and Adobe and AVID are going to be really happy to fill the gap.

Tags: Final Cut Pro X