Thanks Studio Engineer.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm missing something. Why do some people here instantly understand the cataclysmic impact this has had on the post-production industry and, by association, those people's sense of betrayal, whilst others appear not to begin to have a clue?
The issues at stake here are not mere operational details of a technical nature, something at which this board has excelled. No, the arrival of FCP X brought into question fundamental questions about hardware, third-party software, training, workflow and professional credibility, to name but a few. Surely these are highly relevant issues for this board to discuss? Most of us are in the same 'shock and awe' boat, and sharing our fears and ideas as to how to navigate out way out of here is at least therapeutic, perhaps potentially even life-saving.
Trust is a fragile thing. It takes a long time to build, but can be shattered in a blink by an uncaring, unthoughtful action. Or, and this is what makes recent events so hurtful, in an apparently deliberate and calculated move.
All I wanted after FCP 7 (2009) (although arguably since FCP 6 2007) was FCP 8, with the essential enhancements most users wanted: bug fixes, 64-bit and rendering acceleration. Heck, if we'd got that I would have been ecstatic.
However, for some reason Apple thought better and made the decision that FCP 7 was broken and needed a total rewrite. I do not agree. We're not at a 'Betacam is dead, time to ditch the linear BVE900' moment. We're also not at a 'capture from tape is old hat, time to ingest files directly' moment (although for some houses this is still an occasional but essential requirement). Actually, we're not at any great 'game changing' threshold at all, except that, yes, online distribution is becoming increasingly important, but it's a continuing trend, not a revolution (FCP 7 already had some of these 'Share…' features (even if some did not work......), so nothing really new in FCP X there). I do believe Apple's vision could have been accomplished with a genuine upgrade of FCP 7 to FCP 8, even if it required some rework to the underlying technology.
It's taken me a huge number of unbillable hours to get my workflow operating with third-part apps in a manner that is robust, reliable and readily understood by others I collaborate with. FCP X may have some great technology underneath it, but it is currently completely incompatible with my workflow. Now, that may change, but (a) I have seen nothing official that tells me FCP X will provide the necessary hooks to do so, and (b) such hooks require third-party companies to re-engineer their products, something I am not confident will happen. Even if these two unknowns were to happen, I then have to ask myself, 'given the events of the past few years (think Shake, QT-X, etc), do I still want to persist with FCP?' Will I get fooled again? Perhaps like Apple, I should not be sentimental about my future decisions.
People who use FCP 7 for eight (actually, sometime up to 16) hours a day know the keyboard shortcuts, etc., and how to get things done fast. From what I see and hear of FCP X, it is not actually significantly faster in getting to the end result. It may be 64-bit, but it does not have an equivalent to Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine, which achieves faster than real-time rendering by off-loading it to a GPU card. You may now be able to continue to edit FCP X before it renders, but it still has to render, albeit in the background, which takes time before you can export the final finished product. As far as I can see FCP X still does not fix this fundamental problem: It appears I still can't do fast rendering with FCP X (I'm doing a test now with some filters and a speed adjustment in FCP X and it's still only 32% complete and by the looks of it won't be done for some time yet, although my test edit is 'finished').
Sorry for the rambling post, but it's late. However, I can't help feeling this is a pivotal moment for Apple. How they respond in the next few days will speak volumes about how they and their presence in the professional applications market will be perceived.
At a personal level, it's as if my 'marriage' with Apple has gone from unconditional love to severely damaged goods. This is not a healthy watershed in any relationship. And as I said in my opening remarks, trust is a very fragile thing. For me, and perhaps for many people on this forum, I fear the relationship has been irrevocably damaged going into the future. And if this is true, then it's been a completely avoidable monumental tragedy.