In a recent Creative Cow podcast (on i-Tunes), Walter Biscardi and Richard Harrington go into vivid detail about why FCP-X won’t work for them as professional editors. Matthew Levie makes some similar points in a five-part diary describing his first experiences with the program. Though their comments represent the earliest of first impressions, the fact that these long-time FCP users had so many problems has to be taken seriously in Cupertino.
Whatever you think of Apple, Jobs and company sure have a knack for stirring things up. Depending on your background and your prejudices, Final Cut Pro X is either a stroke of genius, modernizing and expanding the company’s dominance in the semi-pro world, or a classic blunder, alienating some of its most loyal customers, who owe their careers to the democratization that FCP brought with it. The new program has many problems: no compatibility with FCP7, no import or export beyond Compressor and Motion, no provision for site or volume licensing, no good way to use multiple monitors, minimal support for tape I/O, a metaphor based on “events” and “projects” rather than media and sequences, a single on-screen viewer rather than the traditional source/record windows, and a powerful resemblance to iMovie. All of which says to existing professional users, “We don’t see you as our customers anymore.”
Apple is working a playbook it knows well, the same one it used with the original FCP: democratizing and enlarging the market by going after a group of customers that the other guy doesn’t know exists. But the first time, they were seen as a savior, a Pied Piper. This time, they have an existing user base. Those people have already pinned their hopes and built their businesses on Apple. All that accumulated experience now will have to be relearned.
This undoubtedly represents big opportunity for Avid and Adobe. But as pro users migrate to other applications, Apple’s competitors would do well to remember that FCP1 was also seen as a toy. Avid didn’t seem to take it seriously until the growing customer base began to suck the oxygen out of the post production environment. And despite the initial problems, FCP-X contains plenty of real innovation. At the end of the day, it’s the innovation that matters — the company that makes the best musical instrument, the one that lets me produce the sweetest music and have the most fun doing it, is the one I want to use.
As creative professionals, we all rely on an implicit, long-term collaboration with the developers of the applications we use. Did Apple made a business decision to accept defections at the top of the market in exchange for more customers further down the food chain? Or did its legendary secrecy cause it to underestimate the push-back it would encounter for changing so many basic features? It may take some time to sort that out. But one thing seems clear: the relationships we create with our favorite software applications may be more one-sided than we think.
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