FCP X vs SE2

Yeah, after I posted, I thought I shouldn't use the term "professional". Sorry about that.

That is too vague and implies that people who don't use OMF/EDL/Batch Capture-RS422 control are not "professional." Let's circumvent the unproductive flame war and allow me to retract the usage of that term here. I agree, completely. (Duh, as if someone using a Tricaster isn't pro, or a pro cannot do commercial editing on SE, etc. That is not accurate all. I agree that is idiotic!)

To get the thread back on track, the focus should be on the specifics of the points I made beyond the term I used too loosely, these being the ones I believe we have agreement upon and are reflected in the facts (e.g. features that some editors use in a traditional, commercial post-production environments).

1. SE was never geared to those who need those sort of collaborative workflows (e.g., output to OMF for a ProTools Session, EDL for a high-end, expensive online/finishing session, work with various flavors of SMPTE Timecode, etc.) and that has/is fine for many people.

2. FCP-X is turning away from people who need these kinds of traditional post-house environment features.

Larry's blog was excellent. If you don't need those features, then FCP-X will be fine. If you do, then you need to keep using FCPX. Or, yes, if you don't need them, consider SpeedEdit.

If you do, then one would have to hang on to FCP7 for dear life.

Avid must be having a party today....that's the sad part of this, imho.
 
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tmon said:
Yeah, after I posted, I thought I shouldn't use the term "professional". Sorry about that.

That is too vague and implies that people who don't use OMF/EDL/Batch Capture-RS422 control are not "professional." Let's circumvent the unproductive flame war and allow me to retract the usage of that term here. I agree, completely. (Duh, as if someone using a Tricaster isn't pro, or a pro cannot do commercial editing on SE, etc. That is not accurate all. I agree that is idiotic!)
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TMon. I salute you.

To be fair to you, you are not the only one to make that distinction, but you seem to be one of the few who are man enough to hold his hand up and say 'I see where you're coming from and I take back my comments'. And for that you get my respect and are my best friend again now :thumbsup:

tmon said:
2. FCP-X is turning away from people who need these kinds of traditional post-house environment features.

Larry's blog was excellent. If you don't need those features, then FCP-X will be fine. If you do, then you need to keep using FCPX. Or, yes, if you don't need them, consider SpeedEdit.

If you do, then one would have to hang on to FCP7 for dear life.

Avid must be having a party today....that's the sad part of this, imho.
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Given that Apple have a track record for setting trends in the industries their involved with, it makes one wonder if they know something the rest of the post-production industry don't.

As Larry's blog post states, Apple control their walled garden of products but not the post production industry.

Well, I know that the mobile (sorry, cell) phone industry thought the very same thing when they learned that Apple were entering the mobile market, and they never dreamed that a computer/mp3 player maker could demolish them as badly as Apple did. Apple literally changed the game.

Could they be doing the same thing with FCP-X?

What do they know, that we don't?

Scary innit?
 
Fcp

I don't feel that Apple was that innovative with their video products.
Final Cut was put together from a bunch of tec that Apple brought from other innovators. They grabbed up the team that created Adobe Premiere to create FC which was called Keygrip back then. Live Type was a PC product called India Titler and they took it away from us PC users and then they killed it (It was not added to Final Cut 7)
Apple Shake was a PC program created by a company called Nothing Real..Apple pulled the same deal as they did with India.
SpeedEdit was created from Newtek from the ground up.
 
FCP X vs SE2? No. Apple copies NewTek

I just came across this blog post from Gigaom:

final-cut-pro-x-troubling-or-just-transitional

and I was amazed how Apple's perceived approach to the video editing market that they've nurtured, lured in FCP customers and capitalized on, seems to parallel strongly with SpeedEDIT's customer view of NewTek.

Is this common business practice or are we as customers all mugs?
 
Richvideo said:
I don't feel that Apple was that innovative with their video products.
Final Cut was put together from a bunch of tec that Apple brought from other innovators. They grabbed up the team that created Adobe Premiere to create FC which was called Keygrip back then. Live Type was a PC product called India Titler and they took it away from us PC users and then they killed it (It was not added to Final Cut 7)
Apple Shake was a PC program created by a company called Nothing Real..Apple pulled the same deal as they did with India.
SpeedEdit was created from Newtek from the ground up.
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Very true. Apple's history has been one where they've taken the ideas of others and made it their own.

The Apple 1 and 2 were inventions based on the 6502 chip that was made by legendary Commodore engineer Chuck Peddle. And they were only made possible with his help (although he was never credited or paid for his input), because The Woz didn't have enough engineering background to understand how it worked.

Apple Lisa and Macintoshes were only made possible because Apple took Xerox's Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointers (WIMP) software.

Nonetheless, they do have a knack of knowing how to make successes out of other peoples ideas.
 
Shabazzy, thanks for accepting my retraction....I don't need any credit though, just give me an NLE that does what I need it to do! :)

Seriously, there's NO way anyone buys SE wit FCP-X selling at a $600 lower price point. This is the worst thing about FCP-X relative to SE's entry price point.

I also agree that Apple has done better because of ruthless purchases or stealing of software...yep, I said it. Anyone ever notice their out of court settlement with Creative?

Too bad they wouldn't sell India Titler Pro or whatever it used to be called back to the PC market....it's one thing to buy a software, another to kill it off completely. Geez.

Are we as customers all mugs? The proof is in the pudding, and it ain't in OUR pockets. ;)
 
Shabazzy said:
I just came across this blog post from Gigaom:

final-cut-pro-x-troubling-or-just-transitional

seems to parallel strongly with SpeedEDIT's customer view of NewTek.

Is this common business practice or are we as customers all mugs?
Click to expand...

How so?

As for the link for FCP X where they say that all the issues that editors are complaining about will be addressed in future updates - that's bizarre. They know who uses their software and that decision didn't go into some of the tool sets for FCP X from the start? An upgrade should be just that -not a step or two back in some areas.

It shouldn't surprise me though - it seems like a lot of companies are out of touch with their customer base and simply don't respond to meet their needs. Which is why customers move on to other products.
 
Shabazzy said:
The only difference between a Professional and an Amateur (or non-professional to put it another more simplistic way) is one gets paid to do something and the other one doesn't.
.
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You can be a pro on a $100 million dollar film or a $100,000 film.
You can also be an amateur at those levels as well.

I've always considered the difference between a professional and an amateur is a professional knows how to get the most of their tool set (what they have access to). That is what makes the difference on screen not what their salary is at.
 
JEFFilm said:
You can be a pro on a $100 million dollar film or a $100,000 film.
You can also be an amateur at those levels as well.
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This is precisely my point. The distinction between the two is defined by whether you are paid or not, not whether you are more skilled. I know people who work in animation who call themselves professionals, who are simply outclassed in quality of work by people who do the same thing for free, as a hobby .

JEFFilm said:
I've always considered the difference between a professional and an amateur is a professional knows how to get the most of their tool set (what they have access to). That is what makes the difference on screen not what their salary is at.
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This is how I feel it should be too.

Like you, I don't see the money as a way justifyable way to define professionalism. But like art, it's definition is very subjective. But in most industries, being paid for one's skillsets is how individuals would justify that label to any potential employers or clients. Otherwise their just not seen in the same light.

Sad but true.
 
I was hoping a retraction of my admittedly careless usage of the term "professional" would prevent this thread from derailing, ;) so I'm going to try and get it back on what is a more constructive track...more along the lines of: Should anyone care about the features that SE never had and the ones that FCP-X has dropped?

If you don't need them, you won't care. If you do, you may have to start thinking of contingency plans. Regardless, an NLE is bread and butter for many of us, and while yes, the tool set does not make the editor, in some environments, the feature set as well as workflow efficiencies DO make a difference in the product one can produce, particularly when faced with tight deadlines and obnoxious, control-freak producers that can't make up their minds.

Probably no NLE or any other software app is going to be all things to all people, but clearly, Apple did NOT have certain post-house post-production editors in mind as the priority target market when releasing FCP-X v1.0. Again, I am specifically talking about things such as XML I/O, EDL I/O, OMF I/O, RSS422 control and multicam editing, etc.

I would speculate that most people do NOT need these features, so why should a for-profit company like Apple worry about those relatively few grumpy old-school editors who want to output their audio project to Pro Tools for a sweetening session, or move a session to another platform via XML if they can sell a gazillion more units of a now faster NLE to a much larger consumer base? Apple can throw their marketing might at a market that at one point could have been Newtek's for the taking with SE but wasn't due to the Tricaster priorities and accompanying tactical R&D and marketing concerns.

Many videographers do not need the aformentioned features, and I can see tons of people moving to FCP-X with it's faster speed and more "SpeedEdit-like" behavior. And yes, they WILL get many home movie hobbyists to "upgrade" from iMovie.

Upon thinking about this some more, they might be figuring they can "keep" the existing FCP7 user base, who won't go anywhere unless forced to do so (FCP7 and FCP-X can co-exist on the same workstation), and then later, in true Apple fashion, make the people who want those other features in FCP-X PAY for them (XML I/O, EDL I/O, OMF I/O, RSS422 control and multicam editing, etc.).

This makes sense to me as I was trying to figure out why the heck they would want to just hand that sector back over to AVID after grabbing such a big chunk of it away from them over the past 5-6 years?

In the meantime, how about the question of what this does to SE's potential to grow market share with an entry point of $1000? The entry point for FCP-X is pretty bold, IMHO, with the only drawback being the always more expensive host Apple hardware. Will NewTek make any adjustment in their SE marketing strategy, or just stand pat with the Tricaster mission and let the SE/PC Market chips fall where they may?
 
Here's another fun question:

With the release of FCP-X, is SpeedEdit still the world's fastest NLE?
 
In a post by JimC on the 'SE2 update' thread, he stated that he believed that NewTek would continue the development of SE because of it's tight integration with the Tricaster. He also believed that those developments would extend to the standalone version too.

However, given the nature underwhich the standalone version was born, the current pricing strategy and now this move by Apple. The pressure would be on, for NT to win back any market share they had in the video editing arena. I'd say that these pressures are a little too much for them to bear, and I can see them dropping any intention to push SE standalone version forward as one of their product lines.

I think from a business point of view it would be seen by the industry as an act of desperation if they lowered the price of SE standalone and it would probably harm their image and their other products if they did so.

The void left by Apple's move to lose features for their current product is not something that I can see NT filling.

It's not that they couldn't. It's just that I think they are restrategising the company's direction. I think they realise that they've made too many different products in the past and made a lot of mistakes that they are trying to learn from and not repeat. They had to drop some of them for various reasons because I believe they had forgotten their roots and lost focus on what they are about.

I think they are trying to get back on track and focus on making a few thing extremely well and proving great support, instead of making many half-arsed things that are poorly supported.

And I think SE standalone will be one of the casualties.

I also believe that Apple will do a 'Coke Classic' on it's FCP product.
 
"The void left by Apple's move to lose features for their current product is not something that I can see NT filling."
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This will absolutely never happen.

The reason why so many editors LEFT SpeedEdit in the first place (or never looked at it) was because of many of the features now being DROPPED in the first release of FCP-X.

It looks like AVID, Adobe and maybe Sony Vegas will be getting some of the castaways....
 
Fxguide.com
Check out the RC Podcast to hear a very unhappy Jason Wingrove (who seems very representative of the professional FC community) vent his frustrations.
 
Shabazzy said:
I can't see how Apple can turn it into a mass market product, since that would mean extending their software to non Apple customers and I don't see them doing that in my lifetime. So it'll always be a niche product.
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No trying to toot Apple's horn for them, we use everything at DiscreetFX. Win7, OS X, Linux. But Apple is now worth over 110 billion dollars more than Miscrosoft. They sell OS X machines as fast as they can make them. If price is no object since they run Win7 and Mac OS X it's a no brainer for customers to buy them and they do buy them in masses. As far as Final Cut Pro goes the old interface was dated and a bit crap. It has needed a face lift for years and years. Final Cut Pro X looks like a modern program instead of the crusty old GUI/Workflow that we never liked. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
 
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