FCSvr future

carlosr2 wrote:
With the new Apple politics (no XServe, no ProApps upgrades...), does FCSvr have any future? What do you think?

Does it matter? Buy what you need today.

Apple don't have any new politics... the ProApps are fine and there will be updates. The ProApps have nothing to do with Xserve! That's the whole point... most FCP users don't use Xserve and Apple thought they would get huge Xsan user push back but when they investigated they found many users aren't using Xserves so it wasn't that bad.

Final Cut Server is a v1.5 product so who knows but in general I would listen to the above comment. Understand what 1.5.2 can do, know its limitations, know what you can do outside it with automation and systems integration and make your call on it. If it comes down to budget then its hard to beat give or take what you're trying to deploy.

We can ask the question, because Apple are not upgrading FCS/FCSvr while other (Adobe etc...) are upgrading and find new feature.
FCSvr is a good software but with a lot of mistakes and as usually we can ask ourselves if there is some editors in Apple developpement team !!!!

Let's wait NAB and perhaps a new upgrade !!!

So there is a lot of uncertainty going on in the community about the future of Final Cut Server. I myself have had over 30 conversations about what I think a customer should do now.

My response in every case is:

- Buy what works now.
- Buy the Xserves before January 31, 2011. They work.
- Pay for the Apple care warranty which will cover you for 2 additional years
- 3 years from technology will be very very different.
- If you're building an asset management, you should really be looking at things year to year.
- If you're afraid to commit to $1k for FCSvr, then commit to 10k + For CatDV, 125k or more for North Plains, OpenText etc.

Some would say this a very very selfish of me and self serving of me. But really it isn't. Technology will always and always evolve. Software is very very very complicated to create and it's even more difficult to find engineers to create it.

In my opinions there a very very good iOS, Mac OS X, and ProApps developers don't work for Apple, they create tools and applications that leverage the platform and bring more value. If it were so easy to just build a better Final Cut Server or Final Cut Pro someone would have released something on Linux for free.

There aren't any Cocoa developers that I know that are genius programmers that have "I work for food signs" on the side of the freeway.

Even if we were at Final Cut Pro version 15, there would still be complaints about what it doesn't do even for an application that's $1k. Funny thing is I hear complaints about what 150k digital asset management system don't have that Final Cut Server has.

There will always be complaints about Mac OS X, iOS, even Windows. So my point here is not to vent or even defend Apple. They have been great to everyone that has bought their products. Adobe and Microsoft has been great to everyone as well.

I really think we should all appreciate what we have more. We all have benefited from the Apple Pro Apps ecosystem and that is way larger than the Xserves or Xserve RAIDs.

Apple will do what's right for their customers. I am sure that none of us at the perimeter fences of Cupertino really know what they have planned, we all follow blog for rumor tips about new laptop and portable devices.

Let's all be nice, patience. Final Cut Server isn't the end for all, it's very great and I religiously am committed to it, but I think Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and OpenBSD are great. Am I crazy?

Right Final Cut Server is really really good at what it does, and if you need something that you can deploy today that will cost you $1k to experiment with, it's the only game in town.

Hope this helps, and I really welcome any true responses to this.


Nicholas Stokes
XPlatform Consulting

To wit: Apple announced they were dropping their own support for Java a few weeks before they closed the loop and announced Sun would pick up the slack.

Apple has never released new major releases of their pro apps more frequently than every two years. FCP7 came out in late 2009, so.....

Avid and Adobe don't publish roadmaps either.

We can ask the question, because Apple are not upgrading FCS/FCSvr

Huh... didn't FCP 7.0.3 come out in Sept 2010? http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2521

FCSvr is a good software but with a lot of mistakes and as usually we can ask ourselves if there is some editors in Apple developpement team !!!!

It's a version 1.5 Product. Welcome to early adoption my friend. If you want Adobe features then buy Adobe. If Apple update and you want those features than switch back to Apple. If you can't budget or commit to that workflow then it's far easier to not waste time asking questions noone can really answer. It's best to just improve and work with what you have.

7.0.3 wasn't a big upgrade, they just fixed bug and improved minors thinks. But bugs are still running.
- keyboard bug
- no sequence in dropzone
- impossible to removed selected filter
- no optimisation for XDCAMHD
Etc etc ...

And it's not a solution to say "do with what you have" ... I'm 200% with apple but they used all the ressources for iProduct. I just hope that they will spend more time to improve FCS/FCSrv ...

Apple took the Proximity Artbox platform, and with a little programming effort and a lot of marketing, turned it into Final Cut Server. It's as simple as that. Artbox was never designed to work with video, it was primarily to push images around and to change their format to match a bunch of different graphics systems in use at TV stations. The fact that it did any video at all, was limited to anything they could transcode into low res proxy files using Quicktime. If it wasn't in a very short list of video formats, Artbox could still take a video asset and assign metadata - but it could not generate the proxy files for it. They did manage to use a few tricks to pass the video through an outside encoder - like Windows Media Player, but for most purposes, if they couldn't use Quicktime for encoding, then video files were treated no differently than a Word document, or a spreadsheet.

Apple bolted Compressor onto Artbox. This enables FCSvr to transcode many more video formats into proxy files, but the overall system is exactly the same. Where Artbox was chewing on image files and the occasional video, FCSvr is working exclusively with video files.

John:

Let's be fair here buddy 🙂

Your statement

"Where Artbox was chewing on image files and the occasional video, FCSvr is working exclusively with video files."

Since when can FCSvr not deal with images. It handles, Photoshop, Tiffs, Jpegs just fine. I know I know, it's using the old Artbox code, however, with additional scripts and integration I've got it working with creating thumbnails and posterframe for PDFs, Illustrator, inDesign, Office files etc.

Also, what do you think of this? These guys have turned FCSvr back into Artbox. Shouldn't they be praised.

http://blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/briefingroom/2010/09/28/diaquest-unveils- quemanager-software-for-apple-final-cut-server-15-newsroom-systems/

The Artbox software is actually outlasting the hardware it has been running on. Just this week, a station lost their Artbox system because the system board went bad. I have never heard of an Artbox database becoming corrupt or failing for any software reason, even on the older versions of PostgreSQL. There have been times when the event tables got jammed - but that was only because people set up conflicting workflows. Once the bad workflow is eliminated and the tables cleared out - the system goes back to work like a reliable diesel engine.

This is the last viable selling point for Final Cut Server. Because it's almost the exact same architecture as Artbox, it could prove just as reliable for the next few years. As long as Apple doesn't release some 'patch' that screws with any of it, it will be what it is for as long as you can keep the hardware going.

with additional scripts and integration I've got it working with creating thumbnails and posterframe for PDFs, Illustrator, inDesign, Office files etc.

I've been looking for a way to do this! Is this documented somewhere and I'm blind (or stupid)? FCSvr has been working great for our shop. I'm holding on tight to see what's around the corner.

"I've got it working with creating thumbnails and posterframe for PDFs, Illustrator, inDesign, Office files etc."

Can you whip up a downloadable software solution for this so I can buy today? 🙂

...really?

The FCP "bugs" mention earlier are your system, not FCP, most folks don't see those bugs. FCP 7 was a big update, added new features, lots of stuff that makes life much easier for editors. Yes, the Final Cut Studio development team does work with some very well established, top of the line editors. Why do you think it has 50% of the professional post-production market? And we have an update coming this year. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

FCSvr is alive and well. As a trainer and consultant, my FCSvr work is exploding right now, I'm getting calls left and right, and all my clients and students love it. It's a very powerful, flexible product. It's not going away any time soon. It's sales are up.

Xserve boxes are being discontinued because they weren't selling enough to justify it's existence. Besides, you'll never get a 12 core CPU system inside a box that small.

{quote:title=BenB wrote:}Besides, you'll never get a 12 core CPU system inside a box that small.{quote}

I think you are missing the point.. we WANT a box that small.