I’ve been thinking about Final Cut Pro X for some time now as far as what it means for Apple’s goals at large. It’s an interesting release, not just because of how radical and polarizing it is, but because it brings the app more in line with how it started as: an affordable, clear-cut, and professional-quality solution for video editors.
Think of it as a film school lab that comes in a box. That was one such billing of the product for the first version, something that was a cut above iMovie but also far less expensive than established video editing tools. The first site even quotes Herbie Hancock: “The interface is quite intuitive, which is a big help to someone like me whose main occupation isn’t video editing.”
It is arguable that FCP7 began to move away from that, then. Its interface did not age well going into the era of Mac OS X, and its legacy underpinnings were beginning to show. While almost all of Apple’s app offerings dropped in price over the next decade, Final Cut Pro stayed at $1000 — cheap in 1999, but pretty hefty compared to the price decreases in Apple’s other products over the years. It became a suite, and branched out functionality into numerous different smaller apps. And having that much weight becomes increasingly difficult to market: between all the pro apps and their Express counterparts, it wasn’t immediately clear where you should go if you want to move up from iMovie.
The move to FCPX is an example of three tenets of Apple’s product lineup: clarity, uniformity, and accessibility.
A lot of people compare the transition from FCP7 to FCPX to Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. But it’s not totally accurate: demand for a totally revamped Final Cut Pro was not nearly as strong as a new version of Mac OS was at the time. And, unlike Mac OS 9, the old Final Cut Pro is still, by and large, a very stable and feature-competitive application. While Mac OS X 10.0 had similar “real-world” stability problems as Final Cut Pro X currently does, the fundamental stability problems with Mac OS 9 aren’t comparable to Final Cut Pro 7′s.
Not to play it up too much, of course. FCP7 was still stuck in old 32-bit Carbon, complete with a UI that had been left untouched, in many places, for over a decade. But if this was really just a codebase switch, why scrap newer, popular, modern apps like DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and Color? Apple has demonstrated in its consumer products that it is very good at porting codebases without UI changes, so why upheave all that work?
Apple is infamous for two things: they aren’t afraid to scrap successful products, and they hate stagnation. Their removal of DVD Studio Pro and relative banishment of iDVD aligns with their slow removal of optical drives from their computers 1. They view color correction as a feature that belongs directly in Final Cut, which is why Color is gone and some of its functionality was moved into FCPX. And Soundtrack Pro only exists as part of Logic Studio, which is on track to either be a) scrapped or b) overhauled.
At one point, Apple had three video editing apps — iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and Final Cut Express — and five audio apps: GarageBand, Logic Express, Logic Pro, Soundtrack, and Soundtrack Pro. With the new Final Cut Pro suite, Apple is slowly on track to significantly simplifying its multimedia offerings. Rather than vaguely-defined suites that cost $500-$1000, complete with separate Express versions, they’re going for a simple matrix:
| Video | Audio | Photo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer | iMovie | GarageBand | iPhoto |
| Pro | Final Cut Pro | Logic Pro | Aperture |
All Cocoa, all 64-bit, and all (eventually) available on the App Store.
Apple’s constant streamlining is institutional, applicable not just to their product lines, but even how their apps interact with each other. It goes beyond product marketing: even their choices of codebases and file organization are designed and thought out with the future in mind. With Lion, Apple is trying to steer people away from directly manipulating the filesystem, something I don’t need to go into because it’s already been done well by writers better than I am.
A good in-depth example is how FCPX now handles video and project files on disk. As of FCPX’s release, all of Apple’s visual media apps sort data by Events and Projects 2 3. This has been true of iPhoto and iMovie for a while, and now Final Cut Pro has followed suit.
By itself, a simple filesystem change sounds technical and, from the user’s point of view, inconsequential. Make no such mistake: it’s quite significant on a macro level. It neatly integrates and encourages the use of these apps together, makes upgrading from the consumer to pro apps seamless, and most importantly, de-emphasizes the filesystem by not requiring users to learn many different ways of media organization.
For comparison’s sake, here’s a look at the new-age iMovie and Final Cut Pro compared to their predecessors:
| iMovie | Final Cut Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Legacy | All media and editing information stored in self-contained folder | Captured video automatically organized by Project name in separate folder; all other data must be manually organized by user |
| Current | All media stored in customizable Events, available across all Projects | |
If this comes off as confusing or inconsequential, let’s take a look at FCP7 for a sec to see how this legacy system could screw you over.
If you dragged in, say, an audio file, FCP7 wouldn’t copy it into a self-contained place — it left the file where it was and referenced it. By itself not a big deal, but when you’re working with dozens of imported files, many of which you’re hastily exporting out of Photoshop or Pro Tools, you’re not always keeping everything organized. The result? Files get lost, or renamed, or outright replaced, and you end up with this screen.
Not so in FCPX. Drag a file into an Event, and it’s automatically copied over, easily accessible in the Event viewer. Need to make a small change to it? No problem — go to the Finder, overwrite the old file with the new one, and FCPX keeps up. Hate all of that crap, and want the old FCP7 way? Just drag it to the timeline and FCPX leaves it alone, allowing you to organize it yourself. 4 5 6
Looking at that table though, it’s arguable that Legacy iMovie made file organization simpler. Current iMovie is keeping separate Events and Projects folders, but Legacy iMovie merged the two together, resulting in nice, neat, self-contained files for everything you’re working on. The truth is, while it might be easier to grasp if you’re brand-new to editing, it’s a huge blow to flexibility.
Consider a person who needs to put together a compilation of clips taken over the last eight months. Organizing eight months’ worth of material is cumbersome at best, but it’d be a nightmare if you had to comply to the filesystem and merge it all into the same project: gigabytes and gigabytes of files, small thumbnails, all under the same label of “Project AB”.
With separated Events, you can keep the eight months of footage organized the way it makes sense to you, then go back to as many Events as you want for your project.
This, along with the re-jiggering of Apple’s video editing app organization, represents refusal to comply to the limitations of a filesystem, and for people who actually get how this works, it sounds scary. Self-contained files were the way to go when the basis for organizing video projects was the Finder, and opening your video projects came from the Finder. But Mac OS X is moving beyond that. And when it comes to something as rigid and resource-heavy as video editing, Apple prefers that you let the application organize this stuff for you.
Does this work beyond theory? The answer, quite simply, is that it doesn’t matter. This isn’t the drastic overhaul of FCP’s organization system that some people complain it is, but instead an evolutionary step toward making the filesystem easier to grasp — much like the rest of Mac OS X itself is doing. Capture scratch is still put in a different place than Projects, and external files can be manually or automatically organized. If Events gives you another option for organizing your media, great. If you hate them, then name your Projects and Events the same thing, ala FCP7, and you won’t notice the difference.
This started as a review of FCPX, the conclusion of which was that I couldn’t see myself using it, but that probably wouldn’t last long. That hasn’t stopped plenty of previously-happy FCP customers to protest about it, though. If the original app was such a breakthrough, easy-to-use product, and it hasn’t changed much, UI-wise, since then, why scrap it?
Because anyone can always do better. Standards for usability change over time, and although video editing has a learning curve, Apple does not see this as an excuse. That FCPX now aligns with iMovie is not some marketing gimmick — it will make learning FCPX significantly easier compared to learning the archaic FCP7 essentially from scratch.
Most people — or at least those aspiring to make movies — can get the big picture about computers and smartphones. What they have trouble understanding are the little things. How movie files are organized. Where effects are located. Organizing clips. Getting all of these details right is what separates Apple from their competitors in other fields, and now, that treatment been applied to FCPX.
For every hardcore, tech-savvy pro Apple loses to FCPX, they’ll gain ten more aspiring filmmakers who wouldn’t have touched the old, difficult, and vastly more expensive FCP7 with a nine-and-a-half-foot pole.
