The web is going to be full of comments today about how this new release represents Apple backtracking in the face of industry rejection, but I don’t buy it. The signs that Apple always intended FCP X to be a real “pro app” have been there from the beginning. They were simply doing precisely what I described last summer: shipping as soon as they had something that was useful to some people, with the full intention of iterating until they had something great. The 10.0.3 release is a big step in that direction. I don’t think they’re done yet, but we’re already starting to see the new engine pay significant dividends. For instance, from Gary Adcock’s overview in Macworld:

Apple did not stop there. Because FCP X contains the most powerful metadata engine of any NLE, users now have unprecedented control over multicam events, with the ability to access and sync tracks not only via time code, but with keywords, in or out points, or audio tracks.

Multicam functionality is intelligent enough via the underlying metadata structure to be able to dynamically identify multiple takes from the same camera and drop them sequentially onto a multicam track—something that is utterly amazing. Apple augmented FCP X’s audio syncing capacity by allowing the app to exploit audio metadata to sync multiple cameras with similar audio content when there is no matching timecode on the files.

It does not end there. The biggest surprise is that unlike any other NLE, FCP X allows multicam projects to handle cameras with different codecs, image rasters, and frame rates, without conversion. Think about handling a multicam project that includes footage from DSLRs and DV, HDV, and professional cameras, without having to pre-process the content first. You can change, add, or delete camera angles at any time and work with different codecs, frame sizes, and frame rates without conversion.

The technical foundations of FCP X (its heavily optimized high bit depth rendering engine, its extensive metadata support) were always extreme overkill for the market some people claimed it was targeting. Now we’re starting to see what can really be built on those foundations.

Apple plays a long game. I suppose it’s too much to hope for that people will remember this and not freak out the next time Apple ships an initial release of a new product with missing features?

I’ve been trying to think this through systematically, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the behavioral changes in the magnetic timeline are essentially all about one thing: more reasonable defaults.

Let’s say you’ve got clips A, B and C on a timeline (in that order, on one track), and you drag C so its head is lined up with B’s head. Do you really want to overwrite B with C? The vast majority of the time, you don’t. You want to swap their positions.

In Final Cut Pro 7, overwriting is the default action taken in response to this command. Rearranging requires you to use a modifier key. Worse, you have to start dragging and then hit the option key. If you hit option before you start dragging, you’ll just overwrite B with a duplicate of C. How often have you ever wanted to do that?

In FCP X, swapping is the default behavior. For that one time in a hundred that you really want to overwrite, move C using the Position tool.

Another example of the magnetic timeline’s more reasonable default behavior is how it handles audio. Sometimes, you entirely discard clip audio. Sometimes, you deliberately slide it out of sync. But in the most common case, you leave clip audio linked to the clip it came with, in its default sync.

In FCP 7, audio tracks are always displayed separately from video tracks. Worse, there’s no particular visual indication of a link. Worse still, linked selection is a global mode; once you toggle it off, nothing prevents you from breaking audio and video apart for any clip in the sequence, even for clips where you’d never want to do this.

In FCP X, audio and video are combined into a single clip on the timeline by default. You can perform J and L cuts without having to separate them at all. Audio is only broken away from video if you explicitly ask for it to be; it’s not something that can happen because you moved the wrong thing with a global mode activated. Moreover, links between audio and video clips are shown explicitly, even after they’ve been separated.

It is true, in general, that these new FCP X behaviors are probably much easier for new users to grasp. But that’s not because they’re less “professional” — because they remove the user’s control. OS X is easier for new users to users than MS-DOS. Does that mean it’s less powerful? Obviously not. FCP X’s enhanced usability comes not from removing control, but from simply having more obvious default behavior.

Performing more reasonable default actions in response to commands doesn’t just make software more accessible for new users — it also makes it more efficient for experienced users.

This is not the case. I’m defending Apple because I legitimately believe in what they’re attempting here, even if I disagree with some of their specific actions. I’ve tried a bit, but I haven’t been able to articulate very well why I feel this way. Yesterday, however, a reader sent me a link to this article, which has solved that problem for me… with the words of Mike Bernardo, a former Avid employee:

Even though the FCPX rollout seemingly exposes Apple’s hubris, I’m glad they did it. They seem to be the only company capable of pushing boundaries. I have no doubt FCPX will eventually catch up to where FCP7 was in terms of features and capability.

When I was at Avid, I worked on a few internal projects trying to solve this exact problem – we saw Apple coming after us from the low end and knew it was only a matter of time before they reached Avid’s capabilities.

We worked on building “next generation” editor software. New UI, new technical foundation that would take advantage of multiple CPUs and GPUs. Unfortunately these efforts ultimately went nowhere, since the company as a whole was too timid and worried about disenfranchising the existing customer base – exactly the problem Apple is facing now.

This is it precisely. For all that they’ve done wrong with this launch (canceling FCS3 way too early, failing to effectively communicate about future plans, shipping before working out the details of volume/education sales, etc.), Apple seems to be the only company capable of pushing boundaries. Avid saw the future, saw what they had to do… and didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger, even with a safer, more gradual transition plan.

And honestly, it’s hard to blame them. Ever since Ron Brinkmann’s X vs. Pro post made the rounds, people have been arguing that the reason Apple has been able to so act unilaterally with the FCP X launch is that Apple just doesn’t need its pro video customers enough. That Apple is so successful in general, it can afford to alienate users in this market. This is absolutely true.

I ran some rough numbers the other day. Avid’s quarterly revenue (almost entirely from pro audio and video products) is equivalent to about three days of iPad sales, based on the projected iPad numbers for this quarter. Avid absolutely cannot afford to alienate its existing user base, or even a small fraction of it. The company is teetering on the edge of profitability as it is. Commonly on the wrong side of it. Meanwhile, Final Cut Pro revenue is probably close to being a rounding error for Apple.

Yes, this means Avid is never going to ship a release that doesn’t have EDL or OMF exporting. It means Avid is never going to ship a release that discards backwards compatibility. It means Avid is never going to ship a release that eliminates a major feature like multicam.

But it also means the future will not be invented by Avid.

Apple is worth defending because, if any progress is to be made, this industry needs a company that is willing to do what, it seems, only Apple is willing to do.

Look at the features that have become the focus of this debate: XML/OMF/EDL export, audio track assignment, deck control, video I/O. Who needs these features? Primarily, it’s people delivering for broadcast, and people cutting feature films. That’s what “pro” has come to mean in the current discussion: broadcast and feature film work. And if you’re not a pro, you’re a consumer.

This has lead to the creation of a narrative in which the old FCP was targeted primarily at pros, because it had these features, while the new version is targeted primarily at consumers, because it lacks these features. In other words, Apple’s focus has shifted, from the pro market to the consumer market.

The problem becomes obvious when you restate this narrative with the unpacked definitions of “pro” and “consumer”. The old version of FCP was targeted primarily at editors doing broadcast/feature work because —

Wait. No. It wasn’t.

FCP has always been primarily targeted at the overwhelming majority of actual video pros (defined here simply as people who get paid to edit video) who don’t do broadcast/feature work — they do web video, event video, corporate video. These folks are probably more than 80% of the market for video editing software sold at a non-trivial price point.

This is why Apple didn’t wait on features like XML support before shipping FCP X. Not because it’s a “consumer” product (consumers do not buy $300 content creation software), but because most of the actual pro video market — if we count everyone who makes money editing video as a pro — does not require high-end workflow features.

Fundamentally, Apple’s priorities didn’t shift from the original Final Cut Pro to FCP X. The reason FCP 7 had a bunch of features to support more niche markets, and the initial release of FCP X is missing some of these features, is simple: ‘classic’ FCP had been around longer, so Apple had worked its way around to implementing lower-priority features, i.e. features that matter to fewer customers.

The same thing will happen — is happening already — with FCP X. If you believe this process lead to a credible tool for broadcast/feature work the last time around, there is no reason to believe it won’t this time. And probably a lot faster; the first release of FCP X is much closer to meeting the requirements of these market segments than Final Cut Pro 1.0 was in 1999.

For reasons I’ve already laid out at extensive length, I am entirely convinced that Apple does not intend to abandon the pro video editing market. If that’s the case, Final Cut Pro X is clearly a huge risk. Apple is not a company that’s afraid of risk, however.

One of my favorite examples of this dates to the early days of the iPod, when Apple introduced the iPod mini, which had 1/4 of the storage of other iPods, and was only $50 cheaper.

Critics were all sure the iPod mini would fail; who’d buy a player with a capacity that much smaller, just to get a slimmer form factor? A year later, the mini was the most popular music player in the world, and Apple canceled it to introduce the iPod nano, which was the same price and had even less storage space. The nano, of course, went on to cement Apple’s position as the overwhelmingly dominant force in the music player market.

From the Mac’s two major architectural transitions, to the elimination of the floppy drive in 1998, to the launch of the iPad into a tablet market that had been moribund for a decade, Apple is a company that often takes risks, and rarely fails.

Well, Apple has unleashed Final Cut Pro X on the editing community, and the editing community is up in arms. Is FCP X one of Apple’s rare failures?

I doubt it.

The truth is, most of the backlash over the last ten days has not been a direct consequence of people reacting negatively to the product’s substance. It has been a consequence of people erroneously believing, because of a handful of missing features, some superficial similarities with iMovie, and a whole lot of preexisting paranoia, that FCP X signals Apple’s departure from the pro market.

Many people who have actually sat down to edit something with the new app, giving it a fair shot on its own terms instead of merely being frustrated that it works differently, have said positive things about it. My experience has been that the new timeline is really just a lot of fun to edit with (the importance of this should not be underestimated), there are some great new organizational features, and in terms of speed and quality, the new engine is a home run.

Six months from now, you will be able to take a sequence out of FCP X and bring it into Resolve. There will probably be a way to export OMF that doesn’t cost $500. You will have more control over audio track exports. You will almost certainly be able to hook up a real video monitor. While some detractors will still grasp at straws, and while there will still be a few gaps and limitations here and there, the claims that FCP X is not a pro app will have been pretty thoroughly undermined.

Pros will start doing interesting things with it. After a while someone will cut an indie feature with it, and Apple will run a profile on them where they rave about the importance of metadata and the freedom of the magnetic timeline, and talk about how they did assembly edits on location using MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt RAIDs.

Word will get around that rumors of Final Cut’s demise were greatly exaggerated.

Nobody has to believe me about this today. Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see. But, not to toot my own horn too much here, I am the guy who predicted this whole present blowup, in broad strokes, over a year ago:

We’re going to get the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch goodness that everyone wants. But we’re not going to get an app with a strict superset of Final Cut Pro’s functionality. Instead, we’re going to get an app that Apple believes is better overall for the tasks video editors perform, even if some features are cut. And we might also get a significantly overhauled UI; something that results from a process of sitting down and questioning every assumption about how editing interfaces currently work.

In short, I think they’ll come up with something really interesting… that will probably cause a bunch of people to totally freak out about how Apple has ruined everything and make forceful public declarations about how they’re leaving the platform. Meanwhile, people actually willing to embrace the thing might discover it has a bit of that iPad ‘magic’.

I think I have a pretty good feel for these things.

Most of the resentment of the magnetic timeline, as far as I’ve seen, seems to revolve around how it handles clip collisions. In particular, a lot of people seem to be viewing the new timeline’s behavior as bumping clips to other tracks without asking them, and thus viewing FCP X as having tracks they can’t control. But that’s not quite right.

If we define a ‘track’ as a linear container for clips, that runs the full length of the sequence, Final Cut Pro has exactly one of these: the primary storyline. It’s the only place you can drop a clip in an empty sequence, and it’s the only vertical area of the sequence that’s visually demarcated. Even the primary storyline, however, is not quite the sort of track you might be used to:

Yes, you can put audio clips into the primary storyline, and you can attach other video clips under it. This ain't your grandpa's 'V1'.

The fundamental organizational principle of the magnetic timeline is not based around tracks, but around relationships between clips. When two clips collide, and FCP X moves one of them above or below the other, that moved clip isn’t being bumped to another track. There are no tracks. Rather, FCP X is simply overlapping those clips. Vertical stacking is just the way overlapping is presented. FCP X doesn’t have tracks the user can’t control. It has clip relationships the user can control, and it presents the relationships the user has defined using a standardized visual representation.

Looked at in this light, complaining that you can’t directly control what ‘track’ a clip is on in FCP X is like opening a raw text document in a text editor, and complaining that it automatically lays out each character in sequence, in a series of horizontal lines, instead of allowing you to position each character where you want it.

There’s nothing at all ‘unprofessional’ about FCP X’s approach here. In fact, using clip relationships rather than tracks as the fundamental organizational principle for a sequence is extremely powerful, and it’s clear that a huge amount of thought went into this design. But it’s very different, and a lot of people don’t seem to have made a serious attempt to understand it before deciding to hate it.

1. A way to export sequence data.
2. More audio exporting features.
3. Support for third-party I/O hardware.
4. Multicam.

The FAQ Apple released today speaks directly to three of these. On exporting sequence data:

We will release a set of APIs in the next few weeks so that third-party developers can access the next-generation XML in Final Cut Pro X.

On audio exporting:

An update this summer will allow you to use metadata tags to categorize your audio clips by type and export them directly from Final Cut Pro X.

On multicam:

Multicam editing is an important and popular feature, and we will provide great multicam support in the next major release.

On support for third-party I/O hardware, Apple is a little vague. They say they’re working with hardware vendors, but they don’t explicitly say they’re going to support real video output. That’s the way I’d bet, but for the skeptics, I have nothing concrete to point to today.

I mention this because some people are acting as if they are unaware of this fact. What are the three major complaints about the FCP X rollout?

1. The first release is missing some features that conventional industry wisdom would consider critical.
2. There is virtually no communication about future plans.
3. Backwards compatibility has been sacrificed on the alter of innovation.

You see where I’m going here, yes? A lot of people have tried to explain these three data points with the theory that FCP X is deliberately abandoning the professional market and/or that Apple is simply clueless about what features high-end pros need. But no such theory is required. All of this is entirely normal behavior for Apple, Inc. Examples abound, including in key markets that nobody could possibly argue Apple didn’t care about.

With respect to the first point, for instance, iOS initially shipped without copy & paste, third-party app support, multitasking, Exchange support, over the air updating, MMS, tethering support, etc. all of which conventional wisdom said one couldn’t ship a smartphone without. The first iPhone hardware lacked GPS and 3G. The first iPad lacked a camera, which many considered a basic feature, and the iPad 2 still lacks USB ports.

With respect to the second point, virtually the only time Apple talks about future products significantly before a product’s release date is when developers have to have time to prepare for them or when, for some reason (required FCC filings for the iPhone, for instance), it would be impossible to keep them secret. There are no FCC concerns here, and while there are a few developers Apple might want to bring into the fold with respect to future FCP X developments, this can be done quietly.

With respect to the third point, all you have to do is look at how Apple handled its transition to a fully modern OS vs. how Microsoft handled its transition. Microsoft’s approach was far more gradual, and eventually brought old apps over in a way that felt ‘native’. Apple cut the cord and stuck the old OS in the Classic virtual machine, where there was no attempt to make old apps behave like native apps. Apple is also being relatively aggressive dropping Rosetta (PPC emulation) from OS X — it’s gone in Lion. Apple has simply never had much interest in extensive backwards compatibility efforts; they’ll do the minimum required, and in this case that means allowing FCP 7 to be installed alongside FCP X.

The way the FCP X rollout has been handled has nothing to do with Apple slighting pro users — it’s just Apple being Apple. It’s annoying as hell sometimes, but while it’s temping to believe Apple could discard these behaviors and deliver equally successful products, I’m not sure that’s actually the case.

To me, this looks like another one of those situations where there are multiple narratives that fit the same underlying set of facts, and a bunch of people decide, for whatever reason, to embrace one that makes Apple look terrible.

In this respect, it’s much like the iPhone 4 antenna issue. It eventually came out that Apple knew about the underlying technical issue there before ever shipping the device. But they also knew that in the real world the iPhone 4 actually held onto calls better in a lot of instances. Their comprehensive testing had shown they’d made reasonable design tradeoffs. They clearly never expected the issue to be framed the way it was in the tech media. They were, as a consequence, no doubt surprised by the resulting backlash.

With FCP X, Apple has introduced something that has quite a few pro features, was introduced at an event for pros, is positioned as the successor to a pro product, and has ‘Pro’ in the name. I think they anticipated people understanding it as a pro product that’s still missing some features (because it was just rewritten from scratch), and are probably surprised by the number of people who are determined to see it as a non-pro product, and are seizing on every possible justification to support that conclusion.

The truth is, you can play that game with anything. I could make a very compelling argument that FCP X is a pro app and it’s Final Cut Pro 7 that’s not. I mean, a bunch of effects in FCP 7 render in 8-bit! How amateur is that? FCP 7 won’t even warn you when exporting a sequence with offline media! I can’t work with important projects like that! And how am I ever supposed to organize long-form projects if I can’t even tag things? And don’t forget the QuickTime gamma bugs.

I’m familiar enough with FCP 7 to go on for a long time like this, but you get the idea.

There are, when you get right down to it, a grand total of about four big things missing from FCP X that matter to high-end users:

1. A way to export sequence data.
2. More audio exporting features.
3. Support for third-party I/O hardware.
4. Multicam.

And not all of these matter to all high-end users. For instance, we mostly work on features, and couldn’t care less about multicam in that context.

Combine these missing features with some iMovie user interface similarities, and a bunch of people who’ve already been skeptical about Apple’s commitment to the pro market for the last couple of years (ironically, skeptical because Apple hadn’t yet rewritten FCP as a 64-bit Cocoa app, which is precisely what FCP X is), and you get the current PR mess.

But the actual material facts in no way conclusively support the narrative of Apple abandoning pros. Many of the features FCP X does have, as well as some of what we’re hearing out of Apple via Philip Hodgetts and David Pogue, point in the other direction: that FCP X is a pro app. It’s just a pro app that happens to be missing some features in its first release. And Apple is not unaware of this, and is working to resolve it.

PEXMLImport
PEXMLImportButton
importXML:
importFinalCutXML
importXMLViaAppleScript:
scriptingExportListAsXML:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Python
Py_IsInitialized
Py_Initialize
Py_SetProgramName
PyRun_SimpleFileExFlags
/usr/bin/python
FCPythonPluginExecutor
sharedManager
loadPythonScriptAtPath:runFunction:withArguments:
setupPythonEnvironment
PEPythonPluginManager
loadPythonModuleAtPath:functionName:arguments:

This suggests partial or stub implementations of XML import and Python scripting features are already present. As far as the XML import goes, my guess is FCP X was supposed to ship with XML import, and this was the solution for bringing in FCP 7 projects… but it wasn’t done in time and they decided to ship anyway.

Notice that there’s no XML exporting, however. (Except maybe clip lists?) What’s the deal with that? Well, Python might actually explain that. Normally if I saw references to Python like this in an app, I’d assume it was merely being used internally by the app, but here it appears along with references to plug-ins. My guess is that the plan is to allow third-parties to write Python scripts that hook directly into FCP X. This could, if implemented the right way, be far more powerful than simple XML exporting, because it could give third-party tools access to FCP X’s functionality, not just to static project data.

We’ll have to wait and see what comes of this, but these indicators do look promising.

But I don’t buy that this isn’t a pro app. To me, this looks a lot more like a pro app that was pushed out the door with features still missing than like a consumer app. It has DPX/OpenEXR exporting, 4K support, and credible video scopes… these are not ‘consumer’ features. Plus, there’s the extensive metadata/tagging stuff, which seems designed for large, complex projects.

OpenEXR is not, last time I checked, a consumer video format.

Why would Apple do this, instead of waiting and doing a more feature-complete release later? Well, the key to answering that question is to look at who this release is useful to: it’s seriously useful to anyone who does work in formats FCP 7 doesn’t support natively, and who doesn’t need offline/online editing. Among other folks, this includes most DSLR shooters, who are a pretty big market. Apple presumably figured it was worth getting something out there for these folks ASAP.

The real issue here is that Apple is sufficiently secretive about its decision making process that they’re probably not just going to come out and say this; they’re going to let people freak out for, probably, months, before missing features start quietly showing up in updates.

If this seems hard to swallow, consider that we’re talking about the same company that, in 2007, shipped a new smartphone platform that didn’t support third-party apps, copy and paste, and other features that people thought should be taken for granted, without so much as a word about future plans to fill in those gaps. People freaked out. But things turned out pretty well for the iPhone in the long run.

FCP X seems to provide a strong technical foundation, and some long overdue rethinking of the standard non-linear editing user interface conventions. Apple has a history of starting off with simplified products and building on them incrementally. Being annoyed by the fact that FCP X isn’t useful (to you) today is perfectly reasonable; personally I was hoping it would solve a couple of problems for us that it doesn’t solve yet. But writing off Apple in the pro video editing market is premature.

The Bleeding House (formerly County Road K), on which we provided digital dailies, workflow support, and color grading, is currently showing at Tribeca, and being distributed by Tribeca Film. Produced by Will Battersby, Tory Tunnell and Per Melita, directed by comic book creator Philip Gelatt, and shot by Frederic Fasano, who has previously shot films for Italian horror master Dario Argento, it’s a seriously creepy indie horror film.

Nice Dissolve graded The Bleeding House from raw Red files in DaVinci Resolve, to preserve as much image data as possible through the pipeline. While this is our standard workflow, it was particularly important on this project, as principle photography predated the existence of the much more light sensitive Mysterium-X Red, and a significant portion of the film is comprised of night exteriors. Working from raw files allowed us to reach down into the shadows to recover image that other workflows would have lost.

The film, which employs a visual style carefully crafted to inflict a sense of tense unease, is a great example of how a cost-effective indie post process based around today’s high-powered commodity hardware and software tools can produce entirely uncompromising results.

A trailer is available from Apple’s trailer site, you can rent the film on iTunes or Amazon, and of course, if you hurry you can still catch screenings at Tribeca.

I think this post over in the Creative Cow forums correctly identifies this as a mechanism for switching between multiple open sequences. That should allay some people’s fears that the new UI doesn’t seem to allow for easily working between multiple sequences.

But there’s something else here. Look at the icon. It’s a document icon. Next to a sequence.

Now, have a look at the Event Library:

You might notice a few things:

• It’s rooted at the storage device.
• There’s no reference to any specific project. (Based on the icon, “Audi” is clearly a collection of footage, not a project.)
• There are no sequences mixed in with the clips.
• It’s called, well, “Event Library”.

In the current version of Final Cut Pro, the documents you work with are project files that represent collections of media and sequences. Looking at these screenshots it seems clear that this is not how FCP X works. In FCP X, rather:

• Sequences are stand-alone documents.
• All of your media lives in a single library broken up into collections called “events”.
• Projects are probably gone altogether.

Properly implemented, this could be an extremely flexible and robust approach to managing footage. And it’s a big shift, that reenforces how seriously Apple has questioned the usual set of assumptions about how a non-linear editing app should work.

In general, [Apple is] willing to do things that they know people will complain about loudly — but this gives them the flexibility to sometimes make exceptional products.

I suspect this is precisely where they’re headed with FCP. We’re going to get the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch goodness that everyone wants. But we’re not going to get an app with a strict superset of Final Cut Pro’s functionality. Instead, we’re going to get an app that Apple believes is better overall for the tasks video editors perform, even if some features are cut. And we might also get a significantly overhauled UI; something that results from a process of sitting down and questioning every assumption about how editing interfaces currently work.

In short, I think they’ll come up with something really interesting… that will probably cause a bunch of people to totally freak out about how Apple has ruined everything and make forceful public declarations about how they’re leaving the platform. Meanwhile, people actually willing to embrace the thing might discover it has a bit of that iPad ‘magic’.

Hmmm….

I noted a couple of days ago that for all anyone knew it could just be switched off, like snapping in the current FCP timeline. Aindreas Gallagher over on the Creative Cow forums may have identified the toggle.

(Clipped from the screenshot attached to this post.)

It could also possibly be the switch on the left here:

There’s clearly a lot of shared DNA between FCP X and iMovie, as marcus.sg noted in commenting on the previous post. But the most accurate way to look at this is to view iMovie and FCP X as having a common ancestor, with a bit of horizontal gene transfer since the apps split off. I suspect an accurate depiction of the relationship runs something like this:

(Horizontal transfer probably occurred more than once and it’s hard to say exactly when, but that’s not really the point.)

The idea that Apple only recently realized it wasn’t possible to modernize the old FCP codebase, and belatedly decided to start over from the iMovie codebase, isn’t very plausible. The old FCP was obviously not the way forward. Its interface felt like something from a different age, it was the only Carbon pro app left, and it was clear at the very least that the entire rendering engine was going to need to be rewritten to use GPU acceleration and multiple cores.

It seems far more likely Apple started serious work on FCP X immediately after wrapping up FCP 6 in 2007 (FCP 7 was more of a maintenance release) — this would have actually been somewhat before the product’s release date, which was April of that year. Now, shipping a pro video editing product based on an entirely new technical foundation is a serious, high-risk undertaking. But Apple happened to have another video editing product where the new engine and even some of the new UI could be tested without much risk: iMovie.

So along comes iMovie ’08, in August of 2007. Rewritten from the ground up, it’s clearly a much more modern app… but it has so many features missing it seems almost more like a proof of concept than a finished app. My theory is, that’s because it pretty much was. It was Apple’s early-stage work on its next-generation video editing platform, quickly packaged up as a consumer app.

When you get right down to it, most of what sets a pro video application apart is not related to the core task of arranging video clips in time, but to ancillary functions like format support, video I/O, workflow integration and metadata management. So, if FCP X is an offshoot of the same codebase as iMovie, but adds support for these things… well, that makes perfect sense. Why would Apple not allow iMovie and FCP X to share DNA this way? Why is this a bad thing?

What’s funny is that nobody would object to this if the release order had been reversed, and the shared new features and UI had shipped first in FCP X and not shipped in iMovie until, say, iMovie ’12. But the truth is, pro users are all much better off for the fact that Apple isn’t dumping four years of code on them with no real-world testing. FCP X will be less buggy because Apple has been using consumers as guinea pigs for nearly four years.

I’ve seen speculation that FCP X won’t support EDL/XML/OMF export, won’t support professional video I/O interfaces, won’t support third-party plug-ins, won’t work well with large projects, no longer supports three-point editing, and even that new automation features won’t be possible to disable.

Why are so few people willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here? After all, it would be unusual for a new and ostensibly improved version of an application to drop all sorts of critical features that previous versions had.

The skepticism toward FCP X makes little sense based on the actual content of Apple’s announcement. It only makes sense if you went into the announcement with a preexisting conception that Apple was pulling back from the pro market. A lot of people clearly did precisely that. But where did such a preconception come from?

As far as I can see, the primary evidence for the notion that Apple was pulling back from the pro video market is that there had been no really major new release of Final Cut Pro since 2007. But there were always two ways to explain that:

1. Apple was de-emphasizing the pro video market or
2. Apple was quietly working on a major, ground up overhaul of Final Cut Pro.

We now know definitively that the latter was the case.

It makes no sense to evaluate what we know about FCP X within the context of a mental model of Apple retreating from pro video, when the mere existence of FCP X removes the primary evidence for the validity of that model.

Well, the long-awaited major rewrite of Final Cut finally dropped yesterday… sort of. Apple’s Supermeet presentation showed off lots of flashy new features that will be extremely convenient for creative editorial, including a dramatically improved timeline. But an on-stage presentation isn’t really the best place to discuss crucially important workflow details, so we still know little on that front.

What we do know is good. The new Final Cut is resolution independent, extensively uses OpenCL and Grand Central dispatch (for leveraging graphics processors and multiple CPU cores), it’s 64-bit (no 4 GB memory limit), and it’s Cocoa. It also uses floating point video processing like, say, DaVinci Resolve, which depending on other details conceivably makes it a valid high-end finishing tool, not just an NLE. And it supports ColorSync. In theory that means you should be able to get something pretty close to accurate color with just a desktop display and a $200 calibration probe. I’m curious to try that next to one of our calibrated video monitors and see how well it works.

On the other hand, this is a new app. A ground-up rewrite. As a consequence, one can’t necessarily assume it has a strict superset of the features of Final Cut Pro 7. There may be some things missing. We just don’t know yet. And many questions about anticipated new features were left unanswered, and may not have clear answers for a while.

Native support for Red files, for instance, wasn’t mentioned yesterday. Maybe once info on FCP X goes live on Apple’s web site, this will be there. But if it’s not, we won’t immediately know the implications of that. If there’s a flexible new plug-in architecture that would allow for it, for instance, it might be better if R3D support was handled entirely by Red, so users wouldn’t have to wait for updates from Apple when Red upgraded its color science, etc. But we probably won’t know this until Red has had some time to kick the tires on the new release. The same applies to formats like DPX — if they’re not there out of the box, the answer to the question of how smoothly they can be added will have extremely significant implications for where FCP X fits into the market.

And then there are all the little entirely un-flashy things that people in the post business deal with every day. Can the new Final Cut finally relink a timeline entirely based on timecode + reel number? Can it batch-sync dual-system audio based on timecode? Can the new PluralEyes-like auto syncing feature be used to sync up dual system audio, or just multiple video tracks? How much has Final Cut’s XML file format changed, and what implications will that have for its integration into complex workflows? Has Apple fixed the bugs FCP 7 has with EDL exports? Some of these questions quite likely won’t be answerable from whatever promotional info Apple posts on its web site, and some of this stuff is sufficiently esoteric that early reviews probably won’t touch on it either. We’ll have to wait until FCP X goes live in the App Store.

Also, before I wrap up here, a few words on pricing. FCP X is going to be $299, available through the App Store in June. Initially this seems like a huge price cut, but there are two things to keep in mind.

First, the App Store lacks upgrade pricing. So yes, FCP X is $299, But FCP 11 (or whatever they call the next major release) will probably be $299 as well, even if you bought FCP X. $299 has long been the upgrade price for Final Cut, so really this is just a discount for first-time customers (which makes sense; Apple seems to be aiming for aggressive growth here).

Secondly, this is just Final Cut Pro. Apple has announced nothing about the rest of Final Cut Studio. My guess is some other FCS apps are slated to be axed, while others will live, see significant upgrades, and be sold separately from Final Cut Pro in the App Store.