And they said I was crazy.
Once upon a time, I had a real job editing video, back in the bad old days one 1", Beta SP and even BVU. I did the hard yards and as you would expect, have an opinion, and a good deal of experience in the Post arena.
In the non-linear era, there has been a battle royal raging between Avid and Apple for post supremacy. In the early days Lightworks was a player as was Media 100 (and still is if you are in Germany), but the hard hitters have always been the 2 big A's.
Avid has always offered post production systems at a "professional" price, Apple moved into Post as a lever to sell more hardware. With Avid, you buy hardware, you buy a dongle and it basically works and keeps working. You will pay the market rate for support, but they will provide it, their reputation rides on it.
Adobe too is a software company that makes a lot of products that support the production process (and have done for a long time). They do not make hardware and are only able to succeed if you keep using there software. They are not using software as a carrot to sell something else, if their software doesn't work and support the needs of the industry, they are history.
Once upon a time, I had a real job editing video, back in the bad old days one 1", Beta SP and even BVU. I did the hard yards and as you would expect, have an opinion, and a good deal of experience in the Post arena.
In the non-linear era, there has been a battle royal raging between Avid and Apple for post supremacy. In the early days Lightworks was a player as was Media 100 (and still is if you are in Germany), but the hard hitters have always been the 2 big A's.
Avid has always offered post production systems at a "professional" price, Apple moved into Post as a lever to sell more hardware. With Avid, you buy hardware, you buy a dongle and it basically works and keeps working. You will pay the market rate for support, but they will provide it, their reputation rides on it.
Adobe too is a software company that makes a lot of products that support the production process (and have done for a long time). They do not make hardware and are only able to succeed if you keep using there software. They are not using software as a carrot to sell something else, if their software doesn't work and support the needs of the industry, they are history.
Apple on the other hand provided FCP at a relative bargain price and the dongle was really the Mac, no PC version available, it had to be a Mac, and only Apple makes Mac's. This was a very clever move. Without doubt, Apple had made huge inroads into the creative community, with Mac being the platform that students of graphics had more than likely learnt on.
This created a wave of people entering the workforce saying, "where is the Mac?" or "you need a mac if you want to do graphics". This community also crossed into cutting moving pictures together, and Apple jumped into this and purchased a company with a very good product called Final Cut Pro. This then allowed the creatives to do graphics and cut the pictures and naturally made more people want more Macs.
As these creative types gained stature within their respective organisation, so the Mac mantra grew in power. Over the years, I have argued with the creative leadership of companies I have worked for, saying buy you products from a company that is invested in the post industry. But I was shouted down, and the Mac's stuffed full of FCP came to town and filled the desks in the promo department.
Don't get me wrong, to edit promos, they worked just fine. they handled broadcast bit rates, are quick, did the required effects, managed to do audio work Ok and kept the creatives happy. And when they where happy, we were happy (they left us alone).
FCP worked well, as I have said, but as a desktop edit solution. It did not reach beyond the desktop, it was an editor, not a post production system. Avid on the other hand started to build Interplay, a workflow engine and added tools to aid collaboration, browse viewing and file exchange. They moved further into the concept of providing systems. This is a good idea as a manufacturer, it extends your engagement with your customer and opens up more avenues for product sales and support contracts.
Apple identified this shortcoming in FCP and went looking for an answer to Interplay. The found a product by a small Australian company called Proximity and that product was Artbox. This was a cool / clever product from a clever bunch of guys. So Apple purchased the lot, lock stock and barrel, fed it into the Apple machine and popped out FCP Server for a knock down price.
Some people purchased this (at a knock down price), with the promise of workflows and proxy edit. We purchased it at work in London, partly driven by the creatives. Has it rocked our world, no not really. Are the creative out there sitting on the District Line cutting Promax winning promos on their Mac Books? no, that didn't happen either. It's a shame that most of the cool bits of Artbox must have been confiscated by customs as Proximity got exported for assimilation by the Apple Borg.
We have two main post streams at work, programme reformatting and completion is one, and this is done on Avid, and promo production being ever cool and funky on Mac and FCP. I have been pretty much the single voice of resistance to the cry of lets do it all on FCP. My stance is that I would rather do the stuff that makes us money on a system that is purpose built by a company invested in your post production success. By invested, I mean that their reputation is based on your continued satisfaction and success when using their software and systems.
On the FCP side, try asking Apple for support or lodge a feature request. FCP is such a small part of their business that they are just not motivated to really do anything apart from just sell it. They treated FCP as a mass market product, but the market is not massive, the post market is tiny in world terms. As a percentage of Apples income, compared to the money they make from selling i-things, FCP sales would not even appear as a blip on the graph.
Reading some of the early reviews of FCPX, there is a lot missing or limited in functionality, like the ability to ingest or print out to video tape, you can't current export XML or EDL's and you can't open old FCP projects on FCPX. The reviewers all said that Apple will re-introduce the missing features rapidly and introduce support for codecs that got dropped in the first release.
So FCP may live on as a product, but I would question Apples engagement in the post market. Just from the financial standpoint (and the accountants are in charge these days), I don't think Apple's heart is in the post business and I would be looking at products from vendors who live and breath post production.
Apple is a hardware manufacturer, the software is there to make the hardware sell..
Buy you systems from someone invested in your success
This created a wave of people entering the workforce saying, "where is the Mac?" or "you need a mac if you want to do graphics". This community also crossed into cutting moving pictures together, and Apple jumped into this and purchased a company with a very good product called Final Cut Pro. This then allowed the creatives to do graphics and cut the pictures and naturally made more people want more Macs.
As these creative types gained stature within their respective organisation, so the Mac mantra grew in power. Over the years, I have argued with the creative leadership of companies I have worked for, saying buy you products from a company that is invested in the post industry. But I was shouted down, and the Mac's stuffed full of FCP came to town and filled the desks in the promo department.
Don't get me wrong, to edit promos, they worked just fine. they handled broadcast bit rates, are quick, did the required effects, managed to do audio work Ok and kept the creatives happy. And when they where happy, we were happy (they left us alone).
FCP worked well, as I have said, but as a desktop edit solution. It did not reach beyond the desktop, it was an editor, not a post production system. Avid on the other hand started to build Interplay, a workflow engine and added tools to aid collaboration, browse viewing and file exchange. They moved further into the concept of providing systems. This is a good idea as a manufacturer, it extends your engagement with your customer and opens up more avenues for product sales and support contracts.
Apple identified this shortcoming in FCP and went looking for an answer to Interplay. The found a product by a small Australian company called Proximity and that product was Artbox. This was a cool / clever product from a clever bunch of guys. So Apple purchased the lot, lock stock and barrel, fed it into the Apple machine and popped out FCP Server for a knock down price.
Some people purchased this (at a knock down price), with the promise of workflows and proxy edit. We purchased it at work in London, partly driven by the creatives. Has it rocked our world, no not really. Are the creative out there sitting on the District Line cutting Promax winning promos on their Mac Books? no, that didn't happen either. It's a shame that most of the cool bits of Artbox must have been confiscated by customs as Proximity got exported for assimilation by the Apple Borg.
We have two main post streams at work, programme reformatting and completion is one, and this is done on Avid, and promo production being ever cool and funky on Mac and FCP. I have been pretty much the single voice of resistance to the cry of lets do it all on FCP. My stance is that I would rather do the stuff that makes us money on a system that is purpose built by a company invested in your post production success. By invested, I mean that their reputation is based on your continued satisfaction and success when using their software and systems.
On the FCP side, try asking Apple for support or lodge a feature request. FCP is such a small part of their business that they are just not motivated to really do anything apart from just sell it. They treated FCP as a mass market product, but the market is not massive, the post market is tiny in world terms. As a percentage of Apples income, compared to the money they make from selling i-things, FCP sales would not even appear as a blip on the graph.
Reading some of the early reviews of FCPX, there is a lot missing or limited in functionality, like the ability to ingest or print out to video tape, you can't current export XML or EDL's and you can't open old FCP projects on FCPX. The reviewers all said that Apple will re-introduce the missing features rapidly and introduce support for codecs that got dropped in the first release.
So FCP may live on as a product, but I would question Apples engagement in the post market. Just from the financial standpoint (and the accountants are in charge these days), I don't think Apple's heart is in the post business and I would be looking at products from vendors who live and breath post production.
Apple is a hardware manufacturer, the software is there to make the hardware sell..
Buy you systems from someone invested in your success
