As someone else has intimated here this is indicative of Apples decreasing support of Professionals. Why should they too as the pro creative market, or whatever you want to call it, makes up such a small percentage of apples revenue these days as to be irrelevant. Anyone who saw what they did with shake shouldnty be surprised by this, the massive difference in price between the Mac version and the Linux version followed by the poor support (actually IIRC they completely withdrew support in the end) forced the large studios that rely on it to spend large undisclosed sums to buy the source from apple. Also, they made Shake a plugin on the Mac version which shows a complete lack of understanding what the softwares role is, and this lack of understanding seems to be the same with then new version of FCP. So, the Foundrys Nuke has and will continue to eat up the old Shake market, and maybe either Premiere or Vegas will do the same to FCP.
As an ex-software designer/developer, releasing a version of an application incapable of opening a previous versions projects without providing any method to migrate them to the new structure is absolutely gobsmacking. Also the RED support, come on, every other top end NLE provides RED support and has done for a while, why the feet dragging ? More proof of Apple not really bothering that much about the pro market, or more accurately the creative market, they're only interested in consumers these days and not content creators. Its not just RED support thats missing but also native AVCHD support as more indie filmmakers are switching to hybrid DSLRs to shoot with such as hacked panny GH1s and GH2s (hack coming soon). As for 4K support, I see no evidence yet of the big studios switching to that format, it's not just disk space costs that grow using that format, but also the processing time explodes exponentially. Anyway how many projectors are out there in
cinemas that can deal with a 4K format, I thought most DLPs were 2K (though I don't pay attention to such things tbh). 2K is that nasty 'good enough' so we'll be using it for a long, long time. Also the Apple are 'working on it' is just fanboyism as far as I can see. Speaking of fanboyism that Times article linked is chock full of it really, saying things like 'well, yes its gone but you can spend an additional 50$ to get that feature back' (quicktime compression control) is a fanboy defence really. Admittedly most of the bitching about the new FCP is the common 'OMG you've changed the interface where is everything ?!' rants that accompany a UI improvement and that will eventually settle down. However removing features from software is a decision and not an accident, they will probably stay removed. this all may force a migration from the platform, not that Apple care as it won't actually hit their bottom line in anyway they'll notice.
Full disclosure, I've never owned a Mac as it never made any sense to me because I could always buy better and faster hardware for less, and source software as good as or better then what I could run on Mac.I have used Macs a lot though, professionally and didn't find them any better or worse at doing the job. I don't have anything against proprietary closed systems, I built my first video editing suite on a bunch of Amigas, then switched to Silicon Graphics boxes ( a horrifically expensive mistake) before settling on PCs.
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Received on Tue Jun 28 2011 - 01:20:25 CDT
