The FCPX Fiasco

I’ve been trying to find the best angle to write about the whole fiasco surrounding the launch of FCPX. You see, it’s become a controversial subject because, as with most Apple related subjects, once someone complains or protests something Apple does, a dozen or so people will pop up to defend the company, regardless of the merit of the original complaint, or even their understanding of the subject. The FCPX launch is no different. As you’ve undoubtedly witnessed by now, professionals in the video industry were somewhat upset over the launch of Apple’s latest version of final cut pro. I’ll get into why in a minute, but needless to say, lots of non video pros chirped in with their own “analysis” of the situation defending Apple from those mean video editors who had dare to question the wisdom of Apple.

You see, in the eyes of these people, having learned editing for years and having worked in an extremely demanding industry doesn’t really count for anything at the end of the day, because when Apple says jump, you either jump or keep your mouth shut. It doesn’t matter if you can’t do your job, meet your deadline or fulfill the needs of your clients. All that matters is that if Apple says that this is the way you’re going to do things from now on, that’s the way you do it, and they invented the iPod so they must be right. I’m being facetious here of course, but that’s not far from the tone of some of the pieces defending Apple’s handling of the FCPX launch. Funnily enough, most of these pieces attacking pros for their “feelings of entitlement” usually contain some variation of the phrase: “I’m not a video editor but….” or “I don’t normally use Final Cut Pro, but….”

Well, I do use final cut pro, and I do work in the video industry, and although I’m normally one of those people defending, or at least trying to understand Apple’s moves, in this case I can’t defend them for how the Launch of FCPX was handled. Just so you know I’m not talking out my derriere, let me give you a brief history of my experience. I’ve worked in television for the last 15 years, primarily as a motion graphics artist (which involves, both doing some editing, but also working very closely with editors). I’ve worked in this industry since before FCP was launched, I’ve watched how it grew and transformed the industry from the inside and I’ve seen the impact it has had. I’ve worked very closely with all aspects of the pipeline, from the offline edit through the final finishing process. Ive been involved as close friends set up whole facilities based around Final cut pro. I know how integrated and how important it has become to the industry, so when I read pieces from idiots claiming that professionals are just being hysterical or over-reacting in their response to FCPX, or that they should just suck it up for the greater good, I have to say, it makes me very angry.

Let me make this absolutely clear: FCPX is not a professional application. It may contain the word “Pro” but that’s as far as it goes. Let me start by answering some hypothetical questions:

Could you do pro work on it? Probably, if you tired really really hard and your needs were limited.

Is it a replacement for Final Cut Studio? Not in a million years, not in its current form.

Are you just over-reacting, because Apple always likes to push the envelope and people need time to adjust to a new way of working? Nope.

Are you sure? Yes.

Why? Surely the arm chair analysis is right, and you’re just not trying hard enough because you’re too close to the subject? Nope.

You hate Apple, don’t you? No, I love Apple’s products, and most of the time I defend their decisions when I feel they’ve gotten bad press.

Let me explain a bit further to you why this is such an issue since you’re living doesn’t depend on it…

First of all, I think if this had been launched under a different name, this whole debacle would be a different story. But I think that’s a separate issue, and I’ll get to that in a minute. I really want to address the criticism of the non video pro that pros are over-reacting or that they’re just not giving it a chance. I’ve heard so many things that are just blatantly wrong about how this affects pros that it’s frightening, and I want to address a couple of them. First of all there’s the myth that this only affects the high end pros. This is not true. It is in fact complete bullshit. It affects everyone working in the video, television or film markets. This is not a small niche as some would have you believe. This is in fact an industry that employs millions of people worldwide and generates billions of dollars in revenue. If you’re just making videos for your blog, you’re probably fine. You might even consider yourself a “pro” and that might be technically right but that’s not my definition of it. But for the sake of this article, I’m going to define a “pro” as those who work in the video, television and film industry. These are the people who primarily used Final Cut Studio, and this was the market that Apple directly targeted as Final Cut’s customers. It was also the demographic they decided to first demonstrate FCPX to when they showed it at NAB. Despite what you might think, there are a lot of people working in this industry, and a lot of those depend on FCP.

If you work in this industry, you more than likely can not use FCPX to do your job. It’s as simple as that. It’s not because you have to learn a new way to edit. It’s not because editors are lazy or stuck in their ways. You simply can’t use it. Why? Well, it’s a complicated answer. On the basic side, at the moment you can not get projects in or out of it. It’s only suitable if you are working on your own, or are working with only FCPX in your pipeline and very few if any professional facilities work this way or professional projects are completed this way. That may get addressed in future versions though, but it doesn’t negate the many many other issues.

Secondly, if you are working for television, you can’t currently deliver projects in the necessary format for broadcasters to accept. You can’t play out to tape for a start, and while there are long winded work arounds for that, you can’t put audio in the correct format to be accepted at all, negating even the work arounds. Why can’t you properly work with audio? Depending on what you’re doing, it is frequently a requirement that you play audio out with certain things on certain tracks. There is currently no way to do that from within FCPX because there are no tracks. (I’m simplifying this for the non-video pro to understand)

Here’s a few more examples of things you can’t do. You may never heard of these tasks but if you work in the industry, they’re bread and butter requirements. Say for example you’re working on a documentary that has subtitles, or even name supers. When that’s being mastered to tape, you will often be required to play out a separate version with all those elements turned off. This is referred to as a textless master or a sub master. Normally what you would do is put all those elements on a separate track and turn that track off. You can’t do that in FCPX because there are no tracks. You would have to go through your piece and find everything you need to turn off and turn them off one at a time. No one is going to do this.

Which gets me to another point. This isn’t just about missing features, it’s about some of the fundamental way FCPX works. Apple and the Pro Bashers argue that FCPX re-invents editing, but their re-invention seems to solve problems that they never quite understood in the first place. The idea of a trackless workflow is great if all you do is cut video together and use tracks to put bits of video over other bits, or for basic compositing. But that’s only one of the ways in which tracks are used. It’s as if Apple never bothered to check to see what other reasons people use tracks for. They’re solving a minor issue and creating major ones with the solution. This is just one example. There are lots of other things like this in the software, where something that was simple and could be done with one step now takes multiple steps or work arounds to do tasks that are absolutely essential to professional editors. These aren’t just missing features either, they’re fundamental design decisions in the software. It’s as if they decided to create a new way of editing without fully understanding the needs of people who actually edit in the first place.

Every professional editor I’ve talked to has said the same thing. There is no way you could use FCPX as it is in a professional capacity, especially for TV or Film work, or even corporate video work. You just couldn’t. It’s not just that it’s missing a few things or needs a few updates, it is that it’s so far away from being useable in a professional capacity that its laughable to suggest that it is.

Mind you, this all assumes that they intended it for the Pro customer in the first place, because that’s not exactly clear either. You see, if you consider FXPX to be a replacement for Final Cut Express then it makes perfect sense. There is a gaping hole in the market for something for those who need to cut video but aren’t professional editors. The blogging industry and the increasing needs of the semi-pro DSLR shooter are a huge growth opportunity, and FCPX is is a great solution for that end of the market.

If Apple had just came out and said that then everything world be dandy (well, maybe not Dandy, but it would be less inflammatory), but they didn’t, they doggedly stuck to the story that it’s a replacement for Final Cut Studio. If I was to make a comparison it would be to compare it to Pages. Pages is fine as a word processor or a page layout tool if all you need to do is basic word processing or make flyers or the like. In fact it’s very good for that. But you wouldn’t write a manuscript with it or produce a magazine with it. If Quark or Adobe had come out with Pages and told you it was a replacement for Xpress or In Design you’d laugh at them, yet this is what Apple has done and people are lining up to defend them. In fact, even as I write this another piece has appeared on Macworld, which is basically saying that Pro’s should just suck it up because apple shouldn’t have to cater to those who got it where it is, and that they have to go where the most money can be made. But if any other company had done this, no one would be defending it. This directly affects the livelihood of thousands of people.

Which gets me back to an earlier point. The bigger issue people have here is not just the fact that the software is not a pro level application. That would be fine if you consider it as a separate piece of software aimed at a different market segment, but Apple seems to be schizophrenic in their marketing of it. On the one hand, they announced it at NAB to a room dominated by people who work in broadcasting. (The “B” in NAB for those who are wondering) The little communication there has been from Apple execs has been to stick to the story that this is for pros, and deny point blank that they’re aiming this at the lower end, semi-pro, final cut express segment of the industry. And yet despite the denials, they then come out with a page like this one pitting it as a step up for iMovie users. They even say, and this is a direct quote:

“As an iMovie user, you’re already familiar with some features in Final Cut Pro X — such as skimming and the Magnetic Timeline — so you can start working right away. Create a new project in Final Cut Pro, or import one of your iMovie projects, complete with media, graphics, and edits.”

On top of that numerous people who have worked for Apple have all said that this was the plan all along.

So, it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, everyone who sees it thinks it’s a duck, the people who were there at its birth have confirmed that it’s a duck but Apple still tries to make us believe it’s really a swan, while at the same time showing it off as an even better duck to other duck owners. (yes, I did torture that metaphor to death)

Which kind of makes you wonder just what’s going on inside the Pro Apps devision at Apple. They were once extremely active in both promotion and investment in the pro industry, but over the last few years, it’s as if they just lost interest in it. They used to have a very active “Pro” section on the Apple website. They used to post inspiring industry stories of how their products were being used. It was a great source of news and inspiration. Then, all of a sudden they just stopped that. They used to actively and massively market their pro Apps. There was a time when, if you opened any trade magazine you would see an ad for Final Cut Pro or some other Apple pro app. They haven’t advertised or marketed to Pro’s in a few years now. They bought up up and coming or established software suites, half heartedly upgraded or tried integrating them and then just killed them when they lost interest.

The industry is still reeling from the loss of Shake. The pro bashers will tell you that shake was a very high end piece of software that was only used by a very few people in very high end situations. This too is bullshit. Shake was widely used and widely respected, and I know lots of people who still use it. Unfortunately you can’t buy it any more so you either pirate it unless you already had a copy.

Now we can add Color and Final Cut Server to the hit list, along with cinema tools. While final cut server might have been a niche product, Color wasn’t. I know several companies who built a business around color. They’re now screwed if they want to expand. Luckily, unlike shake, there are affordable alternatives, but again, like shake, Apple didn’t bother letting anyone know they were going to discontinue it, or even let people know when they did. Apple never even officially discontinued shake, at least not in a public way. They just took it off their website. They never issued a press release or even clarified what the support there would be going forward. They just stopped talking about it.

Companies have also heavily invested in Apple’s Pro Res codec. Final Cut had become so entrenched in the business that companies were starting to build ProRes support into high end cameras such as the Arri Alexa. Since no one is going to be using FCPX in the end of the market that would be shooting with this camera any time soon, that seems like a complete waste of investment now.

There’s one other point I feel that needs to be made too. The FCPX defenders have argued that, Final Cut Studio still works so what are you complaining about? That may be true, but you can no longer buy it. (And apparently Apple told retailers and apple specialists t destroy or return existing copies so they couldn’t even sell the ones they had left on the shelves) If you take on a new job that needs extra seats of the App then you’re screwed. If you’re starting a business and need to expand, FCP is no longer an option. The video industry is constantly in a state of flux and you can’t seriously maintain a business, the heart of which is based on software that you can no longer buy or get proper support for. Not when it means you can no longer expand your business. People are arguing that FCPX will eventually be good enough, but that could take several years, and are you going to, A, not expand your business for several years, and B, trust that Apple will bother investing in the pro space, when every indication is that they won’t?

At the end of the day, all of this bad feeling from the Video Professionals would have been mitigated if Apple had done several things. They should have launched this as a replacement for Final cut Express and kept Final Cut Studio on the market. The idea of a product transition implies some kind of actual transition, not just stopping the old product dead and adopt a like it or lump it approach to the new one. Secondly, they should communicate with users. And, no that patronizing FAQ that came out wasn’t good enough. That sidestepped so many of the issues that most people I talked to, considered the FAQ as adding insult to injury.

If Apple wants to peruse the prosumer space, and get out of the pro end of the market, then that’s fine. Just be honest and straight up with your customers about it. In fact I really wish they would do this instead of the half in half out approach. I know I’ll get attacked for suggesting that’s what they’re doing, but again, every indication is that it is the modus operandi at the moment. The only thing to contradict it is people from Apple saying that they aren’t abandoning the pro space, despite all evidence to the contrary. And it’s not like representatives of Apple haven’t never said one thing and turned around and done another.

Whatever your feelings are about this, trying to shift the blame for the furore to the Pros who’s livelihood depends on the software is reprehensible. Claiming that Apple has the moral right to release an application with the very word “Pro” in the title and not have it useable by Pros, and that those professionals have no moral right to be upset or vocal about this is equally reprehensible. For all those defending Apple on this, unless you work in this industry, you literally have no idea what you’re talking about, so stop trying to vilify those of us who do. Will FCPX be successful? Probably. Will it still be dominant in the television, film and video industry in a few years time? Highly unlikely.