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There is a rea­son that the crit­i­cism of Final Cut has caught fire.  The story plays into one of the old­est crit­i­cisms of Apple as a com­pany; that it doesn’t make prod­ucts suit­able for ‘seri­ous pro­fes­sion­als’. Apple adresses that charge in this tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial, which pre­dates the release of FCP X by a few years:

Well, in the case of the newly released Final Cut Pro X, the young employee in this ad wouldn’t be able to do any­thing with that disk.

Yes, with FCP X, Apple has released a prod­uct that lacks many of the capa­bil­i­ties that existed in the pre­vi­ous ver­sion.  How­ever, there is more to the story than miss­ing fea­tures. In order to under­stand the very heated emo­tions behind many of the bad reviews in the App Store, a bit of back­story is helpful.

In 1999, when Final Cut Pro was first released, it was in the same  sub-$1,000 price class as Adobe Pre­miere, but it its cumu­la­tive fea­ture set made it com­pet­i­tive with Avid’s Media Com­poser which, at the time, cost over $100,000.   That same year, Avid announced that they were aban­don­ing the Mac plat­form.   It prob­a­bly had lit­tle to do with Final Cut.   Pri­mar­ily they were angry about  the newly released ‘Blue and White’ G3. You see, they needed six PCI slots to accom­mo­date the abun­dance of hard­ware that the Avid soft­ware required.   Apple had released a desk­top box with only three slots and indi­cated that was the stan­dard going forward.¹  Avid own­ers would now have to buy PCI Expan­sion chas­sis, adding yet another costly ele­ment of poten­tial incom­pat­i­bil­ity to their already sprawl­ing hard­ware.  The were referred to in cer­tain cir­cles as ‘slot hogs’.

Avid was the Microsoft of the edit­ing world.

Sure, Apple was now sell­ing a sur­pris­ingly pow­er­ful edit­ing prod­uct that worked seam­lessly with the newly inte­grated firewire port, but it’s likely that Avid was like the old man in the com­mer­cial.  They looked at Final Cut as some­thing for ama­teurs, not a threat.

Ulti­mately, Avid relented, and they con­tin­ued to sup­port the Mac plat­form.  How­ever, they strug­gled for a decade as Final Cut chipped away at the lower end of the edit­ing soft­ware  mar­ket.  Their work­horse prod­uct, Media Com­poser, which sold for $100,000+ in 1999 is now less than $3,000  (and requires no PCI slots at all).

Avid still dom­i­nates in Hol­ly­wood which is a tiny mar­ket com­pared to the over­all user base of edit­ing pro­fes­sion­als.  Around town, there are many facil­i­ties using Final Cut, but on the twenty or so TV series I have edited on, only three used Final Cut, and only one of them was a lager scale show. Per­son­ally, I like cut­ting on Avid and Final Cut in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions.  I liked Pre­miere the last time I used it as well.  But I def­i­nitely have an emo­tional invest­ment in Final Cut unlike the others.

Final Cut empow­ered many of us who could not oth­er­wise afford to access the pricey Avid sys­tems.  We felt like rebels and rene­gades, stick­ing it to ‘The Man.’  Often times we had to jus­tify or defend our choice of Final Cut to clients or Pro­duc­ers.  They wanted to edit on a real machine, an Avid.  But Final Cut could do the work.  Sure, it didn’t ini­tially have things like mul­ti­cam, and real-time ren­der­ing, but it was worth the extra effort to make it work.   Over time, Apple filled in many of these features.

I can rea­son­ably say that many of us became emo­tion­ally invested in the out­come of the com­pe­ti­tion between these two prod­ucts.  It impacted our aspir­ing careers and our liveli­hoods,   To this day there is a global com­mu­nity of Final Cut Pro users who are pas­sion­ate about the prod­uct.  if you are not famil­iar with these groups, think of them as the Mac fan base at the height (or depth) of the PC wars.  It’s a proud com­mu­nity of FCP evan­ge­lists who feel that, in part­ner­ship with Apple, they top­pled the monop­o­lis­tic Avid regime.

So Final Cut Pro users were part of two suc­cess­ful insur­gent tech­nol­ogy move­ments.  Apple, as an oper­at­ing sys­tem,  and Final Cut Pro, as an edit­ing plat­form, had each, in their own way,  out­per­formed pow­er­ful rivals over the past decade and were com­fort­ably bask­ing in their suc­cess.   Microsoft and Avid, while still pow­er­ful, do not enjoy the monop­o­lis­tic mar­ket share (and mind share) they did in the late nineties.

Then along comes FCP X.   Now, the rebels and rene­gades are estab­lished edi­tors and busi­ness own­ers and post pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties.  Apple has sur­prised their sup­port­ers the way they sur­prised Avid more than a decade ear­lier.   The reac­tions of the Final Cut com­mu­nity are, by now,  well known.  There are def­i­nitely  prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for peo­ple who’ve built a busi­ness around Final Cut.  But there is also a feel­ing of betrayal that is fuel­ing some of the most heated crit­i­cism.   I think some of that has to do with how Final Cut devel­oped into some­thing much larger than a soft­ware prod­uct.  For many peo­ple, Final Cut Pro is part of their cre­ative and pro­fes­sional iden­tity.  And, for now, they are not sure who they are, or who they will be a year from now.

I am cur­rently explor­ing the soft­ware and will write about my impres­sions soon.

 

¹ The 3 PCI slot stan­dard coin­cided with the end of the ‘cloned’ Mac era.  This turned the Mac 9600 into a col­lec­tors item for years to come because it was the last, most pow­er­ful Mac able to sup­port the PCI demands of the AVID hardware.