FCPX, the 1980 software battles all over again

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

To be clear, I'm not telling you anything.

What I asking is why anyone would want to open a FCS3 project in FCP X.

If you created is FCS3, then open it in FCS3. Nothing to be gained to FCP X.

Surely you are joking.

The logical extension of this sort of 'reasoning' would by why have any compatibility between any version of software. If someone has a FCP v1 project, they should stay with FCP v1... Heck, FCP v1 was good enough for them to buy it in the first place, there should be no reason why they would want to fiddle with a project in FCP v2... or v3... or the like.

Customer comes back 10 years later, just fire up the old PowerPC brown monster, heck fire up Mac OS 9, and tweak few elements for that valued customer...

Alternatively... following Apple's lead... and perhaps there is something there... tell such a customer to bugger off, they were a 'small' percentage of the current and future 'valued' customers... and well, tough luck.

 

[VMT]

As an ex CEO of several software and Internet companies, this whole argument reminds me of the early days of software, 1980s, when "experts" proclaimed that people should learn to use powerful but hard to use tools rather than redo the tools so that they are easy to use and behave as you would expect.

We produced the first WSIWYG word processor and all of the old word processor companies said that people were already expert on their hard to use systems and that they would not give up that expertise to use simpler systems. None of those word processing companies are still significant market factors - none of them.

We went through the same thing when switching from the command line interface of MS-DOS to graphics interfaces of Windows and Mac. People constantly pointed out that the command line was much more powerful if you would just take the time to learn it. No one uses MS-DOS anymore, and even the "expert only" systems based on UNIX command lines, which almost no one reading this will have used, are now housed in LINUIX and OSX graphic interfaces.

Experts will always say to stay with the old and difficult because it is more powerful, but what is more powerful - a system that is used infrequently and only by a few or a easier to use system accessible to the many. And for that future FCPX is powerful, and it makes it easier to focus on the story, not keeping track of countless technical details. Just wait, and you will see that FCPX may be the MS Word of the future, a system that was scorned by the Word Perfect experts but evolved into greatness.

BTW look at all of Apple's software and you will see the same vision behind all of them, accessibility always wins because it follows the inevitable expansion of information.

Information follows the laws of entropy, Shannon's Law, and will expand so that it fills the maximum ecological niches and produces the greatest distribution of information. Expert systems try to go against this, and that is why expert systems always die off.

So when I here someone complain, as are most of the "pro" editing community, that FCPX is bad because it ignores their hard earned expertise I know that they are the same as the word processing experts who fought the introduction of WYSIWYG word processors with graphics interfaces.

Just so you know, I have worked on legal copies of Final Cut from version 3 to FCS3. Will it do more than FCPX - of course it will. But I also see that video is becoming the new media of communication, and that duplicates the revolution that happened when word processors turned everyone into writers. Before that writing was a specialized skill, and now it is expected. Whenever a new communication media starts to become widespread it will move from expert systems to accessible systems that grow in response to the new imperatives of mass communication.

I still do somethings in FCS3, no choice; but I recognize that Adobe and AVID are the same as the word processing companies I dealt with at the beginning of the personal computer revolution. Do not mistake short term advantages for the long term advantage of following a media revolution as it becomes democratized.

I am also a best selling author, and I found that there is still a market for my writing skills, despite the fact that it is now easy for the masses to publish their thoughts online or in print via Lulu.com and its other printing on demand competitors.

Good editing will always win. Only bad editors should be in fear, for as video becomes an instrument of person to person communication there will be lots of talented newcomers. I look forward to seeing their work.

Until then it will be impossible to stop the movement of editing software from expert based systems to accessible systems. Do not think that the masses will ignore EDF or OMF or XML exports, accessible systems will evolve to use those pipelines. The history of software is that systems use more and more interchange pipelines as they become more accessible, and that is their source of ever increasing power.

In the 1980s Steve Jobs tried to purchase my company, and during our talks he gave his vision of how software would inevitably develop to first connect to the masses and then to fill new ecological niches (not his terms). I worked with, and in competition with, Apple during the word processing revolution. AVID and Adobe are like Word Perfect, which was an expert system that dominated word processing in the 1980s and early 1990s but is almost unknown now. The "consumer and prosumer" word processing systems grew to be more powerful because expert based systems are so complex that they are not easily extendible. Dead ends despite their power at this moment.

In the early 1990s, I was part of a group that tried to buy EditDroid, an early editing solution, from George Lucas when he saw that AVID was going to take the first steps to democratization of editing - thankfully he did not sell to us. That system was very powerful, and yet he knew that its days were limited. In our very brief conversation he said that he liked any new tool that took film making from isolated technical experts and gave power to storytellers.

I will occasionally still use FCS3 because it is more powerful for certain things, but the current "expert" based systems will give way to simpler systems with pipelines that let people add utility as needed. I lived through it in the early days of word processing, it is a pattern that ALL software follows.

Look at the response to MS Word, it was scorned by Word Perfect experts, yet which software survived? All of Apple's software follows the same philosophy, accessibility will always win because it is the nature of information to expand into every niche.

More accessible software lets you concentrate on the story, and story always wins. FCPX is a story telling device, not a nerve center that aggregates the results of closeted film experts. It has the force of history on its side.

Good points about the evolution (darwinian?) of Apple's top NLE from expert software to consumer/pro software. Of course it probably don't mean a thing to editors pissed off that FCP7 was EOL-ed and now feel they have to learn new tools or edit on the same system as Youtubers.

The fear of some pro editors, of any purely technical expert, is that they will be irrelevant and replaced by new technology that can be easily used by non-technical experts, who are in most cases their superiors. If a producer, director, writer, or youtuber could use FCPX to adequately tell a story, where would the technical expert fit in or what would happen to his status or salary grade?

 

[David Saraceno]

Because they are not 'programs'. They are projects.

If we aspire to be productive in our exchanges, let's start here. Obviously, I mistyped. I apologize.

There are plenty of the threads here that discuss the "iMove Pro" comparison.

There is nothing new in this thread; it has produced a number of personal comments; the subject is discussed in previous threads; and it is time to move on.