Final Cut Pro X

A client of mine is a world-wide organization, with literally millions of dollars worth of FCP stations on maxed out mac pros, with xsans-- all over the world. End of Life for FCP is going to hurt them big time. It's going to zing me too until I'm up and running on whatever system they choose. And other clients of mine are migrating to Avid and premiere. I suppose I'll have to go back to Avid and also learn premiere. THAT makes me grumpy.

Who knows if that doofy FCPX interface and workflow is going to mature enough, quickly enough to be used by such as I and my clients? I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't care.

Arrrgh!! Jeeezzz!!!

FCP7 wasn't going any where. There was nowhere else to take it! There still isn't. And it still hasn't GONE anywhere. It works in Lion, I can testify to that. OK, it's not 64-bit but that's not an issue with the current version. Remember, making it 64 bit would involve a COMPLETE rewrite. ENDofLife happens with EVERY peice of software EVER created. We carry on and move on. After the 'death' of Shake, years after, I still know several studios using it!

Pi

But what ****** people off is that they said they were working on it. They said were developing an upgrade to FCP that was 64-bit. But they weren't. They flat out lied. People have been waiting for years for the upgrade to this. Waiting since 5.1. v6 was a step forward, 7 was almost nothing, after five years of waiting, they say sorry we're not developing that product, it's EOL, and there's this other product with the same name.

My core competency is being a Dad. If worse came to worse and I became an invalid in a cozy-chair, I could still excel at my core competency just by virtue of being there, watching my kids come and go, dishing out appropriate praises and censures, and fielding their concerns as they arise. The core competency of an editor-in-cheif must be something like that? There's no end of life for that.

Deciding what hardware and software to invest in and when, and finding the right kids who know how to use it efficiently is a different problem, but nothing unusual to a successful business owner.

I doubt Apple could foresee the impact of the name they assigned to their launch, but the older guys at Apple probably should have been more able to consider communicate the impact of an entirely new platform on the lives of their piers at the other side of the screen.

I agree (re: Tom Wolsky).

As I said before, if Apple wants to leave the Professional video environment - and its now rather clear that they do - they should have made that clear without stringing the professionals along.

How would you make that clear? As it is, what did they say, 2 years? Would you really expect that five years ago they would have been able to say, "We're not making a FCS upgrade, in seven years we'll be discontinuing support for the product, it's EOL".

The language was 'ground-up re-write'. I can understand how expectations could be understood as a normal upgrade rather than a new platform. But how could anyone possibly expect them to have said "entirely new platform"?

Clearly, it is apparent that along the way decisions were made to string-along current customers with expectations, which exposes the essentially avaricious nature of corporate life, but what reasonable alternative could there have been?

We didn't need 5 years heads up.

Maybe instead of advertising FCP X as a tool that would revolutionize editing and set expectations that they would be keeping up with Avid & Adobe in the professional video realm, they could've announced they were ending FCP and only continuing on with iMovie.

If Apple wants to make a tool for the average person to edit their home movies well - that is FINE. I have zero problem with that. As long as they are open about their intentions.

The writing has been on the wall for years at this point and folks have been saying Apple was going to abandon serious video post-production since even before FCP 7 - but they were rarely taken seriously as Apple has always maintained they were in the game. Heck, as recently as a few months ago, I was still excited about FCP X as some of the features do look quite helpful, and ignored the worries that it would be iMovie Pro. I guess I was wrong. At this point, I can't even install the program on my system to try it out as it's utterly useless to our business in its current form.

And even now, Apple still claims - publicly - that they care about professional video editors.

Obviously, they were not being sincere.

It's time to end the charade. If they want to kill FCP, fine - just don't call it FCP.

Ethical behavior?

What, specifically, are you not able to produce as an end product through FPX? Or is it the fact of the platform being entirely different that makes it unusable?

It strikes me as unethical somehow, but without any reasonable alternative that could have or should have been taken, apart from the choice of names, what blame is there? (Unethical to me is SONY charging $1500 for the only digital 8mm tape player on the market).

without any reasonable alternative

BS. The reasonable alternative was to do the right thing and tell their customers where they were going. Their culpability is shameful at best.

To me it's a sign that Apple is too deep into SONY and London.

Emergeproductions wrote:

Wow, ... I've seen teenagers editing better videos that people that have been in the business for 15 or 20 years due to resistance to change.

Honestly, you really, really don't have a clue what you're talking about. Patrick is absolutely right - our patience has been sorely tested, but to suggest our opinions are "whining" is really just shocking ignorance masquerading as total arrogance. You simply don't have any idea - the professional world is one of constant, continuous change. New codecs every other Thursday which require new workflows. New formats, resolutions, output devices, gamma requirements every month. New software and hardware tools which allow new capabilities and require new workflows to get in/out of them. New locations to edit in with new challenges - how do you edit with no access to power?

Oh, the whining will coon come soon enough but this time it will be from the teenagers when they realise their fabulous productions they've shot and created on their laptops won't ever make it to film festivals or theatrical release becasue they can't add the final polish that requires. And believe me - those standards are getting higher, not lower.

Is there academic discount for Final Cut Pro X? or there is just 1 version for $299?

No academic discounts. Though there will be multiseat discounts available sometime this month.