Former Shake Employee says Apple doesn’t care about Pro Market

Macrumors has this interesting interview with Ron Brinkman, Shake’s product designer. Shake was the industry standard compositing program that Apple killed after 2 updates for no reason, except maybe to mine Q-Master for Compressor.

I love what he has to say:

And back then the same questions were being asked as now – “Doesn’t Apple care about the professional market?”

In a word, no. Not really. Not enough to focus on it as a primary business.


Brinkman goes on to explain that there are maybe 10,000 “high-end” editors in the world while the market for an easier to use more casual product is “at least an order of magnitude larger”. The market size, however, isn’t necessarily the only reason. Brinkmann offers an interesting anecdote about how the high end market tends to be 90% driven by product requests from the big customers. Apple doesn’t work that way:


After the acquisition I remember sitting in a roomful of Hollywood VFX pros where Steve told everybody point-blank that we/Apple were going to focus on giving them powerful tools that were far more cost-effective than what they were accustomed to… but that the relationship between them and Apple wasn’t going to be something where they’d be driving product direction anymore. Didn’t go over particularly well, incidentally, but I don’t think that concerned Steve overmuch… 🙂


Apple’s hierarchy is also described as one in which easily demo-able features tend to be easier to promote within the organization. He goes on to say that in the case of FCP, Apple would rather introduce more easy to use features for the broader audience even if it means pushing out some items for high end editors.

Honestly I have never seen performance like this

OK, so the same 4 video clips in Canon 60D H.264 on the timeline and I put Magic Bullet Colorista 2 on one, and did a color correct, and then played back in real time! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHY DIDN’T I TRY THIS EARLIER! AMAZING!!!!!!

Sure adding an effect on a second clip basically slowed it down too much and I had to render, but I never thought it would work that well. Wow!

Got My Refund!

Well after only one day, I got the following letter and got my refund for Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 and Compressor 4. It is time to purchase Premiere Pro, which is really impressing me to no end!

I did have a disturbing thought though, is Apple doing this to remove some of the worst reviews on their site? Every refund should be one 1 star review they get rid of!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Dear Jonah,

Thank you for contacting iTunes Store Customer Support. My name is *****

I’m sorry to hear that the application you recently purchased is not functioning as expected. I know how eager you are to get this issue resolved. I will make sure that this issue is resolved at the earliest.

Jonah, I have reversed the charges for the purchase of applications “Final Cut Pro X”, “Motion 5” and “Compressor 4”. In five to seven business days, a credit of $399.97 should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.

If you require further assistance, please feel free to reply to this email and I will be happy to assist you.

Have a good day!

Sincerely,

*****

Color me impressed

OK, that is the most responsive timeline I have ever seen.

I just ran my first Premiere Pro 5.5 Cuda test with an NVIDIA QUADRO FX 4800. I imported some RAW Canon 60D H.264 footage, and put it in a timeline, scaled it 50% and added 3 more shots, and it played back smoother and fast than any timeline I have ever seen. Color me impressed.

Premiere might not just replace Final Cut Pro, it might blow it out of the water!

AJA releases Premiere Pro 5.5 Drivers for Real Time

Studio Daily is reporting that AJA has released drivers for Premiere Pro 5.5. that allow realtime editing with the CUDA accelation. They are working fast after Final Cut Pro 7 was killed. Nice!

I installed them and a small test looks like it’s running fine with good performance for the Mercury Playback Engine with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac. Once installed, you get a full set of AJA presets:


aja-adobe-seq-presets


If Adobe is really serious about competing in the pro video editing space (and I think they are), they’ll get on their hardware partners like AJA, Matrox and Blackmagic to be as quick supporting Premiere Pro as they have been about supporting Final Cut Pro.

My request for a refund from Apple

So here is what I wrote to apple in my request for a refund for Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 and Compressor 4.

I am writing you about my orders for Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 and Compressor 4. Order numbers M3NT1XYK15, M3NT1XYK7J and M3NT1XYLSB. I want to get a refund on these because the products do not function as advertised. Today you released a FAQ on Final Cut Pro X and it’s very first entry states that I cannot open Final Cut Pro 7 projects into Final Cut Pro X (it should not be named that, what if Adobe had made Photoshop CS5 not able to open any previous Photoshop docs when it became 64 bit) and as a professional editor, that is a good 75 percent of my business, working on variations of old projects and fixing projects for other people. Without this features the program is useless to me and the FAQ says it will never happen. If this FAQ had been out when the app was released I would not have purchased any of these 3 apps. Honestly I can say I am furious! I have already paid money for Ripple Training, and have also upgraded AUtomatic Duck, and since every statement after FCP X came out was that features were coming I expected that opening FCP 7 projects would be the first priority, but since it will never happen I must get an editing suite that can open FCP 7 sequences like Premiere Pro or Media Composer with Automatic Duck (which as I said I already own).

I also never saw any documentation that said that the magnetic timeline could not be turned off and that you can’t assign tracks. I work on 28:30 long infomercials often with 20 tracks of video and must put different graphics on different tracks in order to organize so that any editor can open it and understand it, with the magnetic timeline I might be able to make a sequence that looks the same visually, but it would not be organized so any editor could see it or so that I could easily turn texted on and off. This is another reason that this suite is not usefull to me.

As for Motion, I only got it to edit effects within FCP X, and to me it does not vastly improve over the previous motion. I don’t notice any major speed increases, and I see it as a downgrade since it is missing the send to features in FCP X that made it a good companion to final cut pro.

And Compressor 4 is not even 64 bit, and I am fine with having Q-master seperate, and since it won’t get video sent from Final Cut Pro 7, it is useless to me.

Please refund my money ASAP because these apps do not do as advertised, and you have only made these shortcomings aware as of today. I tried to learn and use FCP X, and did the ripple training, but found it is not at all a replacement for FCP 7, and instead feels like a consumer downgrade.

Apple released a FCP X Faq

And right off the bat the FAQ shows that is useless to me, as the first note negates the usefulness of FCP X.

Can I import projects from Final Cut Pro 7 into Final Cut Pro X?Final Cut Pro X includes an all-new project architecture structured around a trackless timeline and connected clips. In addition, Final Cut Pro X features new and redesigned audio effects, video effects, and color grading tools. Because of these changes, there is no way to “translate” or bring in old projects without changing or losing data. But if you’re already working with Final Cut Pro 7, you can continue to do so after installing Final Cut Pro X, and Final Cut Pro 7 will work with Mac OS X Lion. You can also import your media files from previous versions into Final Cut Pro X.


Basically being unable to open FCP 7 projects or sequences (though it can open the consumer iMovie ones) is a huge part of my business, and I would rather move to Premier Pro 5.5 or Media Composer 5.5 which can open my FCP 7 sequences via XML (Media Composer with the help of Automatic Duck, which I already own).

The FAQ did have some good answers, but this above alone was enough to send me to try to get a refund.

Does Final Cut Pro X allow you to assign audio tracks for export?Not yet. An update this summer will allow you to use metadata tags to categorize your audio clips by type and export them directly from Final Cut Pro X.



Of course this feature as well, not being able to assign tracks means my 20 video track infomercials would be so confusing it would hurt! And mixer’s will still hate the exports of audio, even if things are tagged!

So I am going to fight for a refund!

Magic Bullet Suite 11 and short film Plot Device

So Magic Bullet today released an upgrade to it’s Suite of video filters created by the great Stu Maschwitz, and giving you the ability to give your video controllable filmic looks, control the color, denoise, enlarge, and now has new effects.

Cosmo is an effect to clean up skin in your video, and has some pretty amazing results, and they have updated Magic Bullet Looks to 2, with a much improved interface and better functionality.

This is a suite I have used for years and couldn’t recommend more highly.

To see some of the effects in action Red Giant has created a short film called PLOT DEVICE to showcase the effects, and it is fun and well worth checking out.

Now that FCP is dead, let’s hope Stu manages to make this suite for AVID Media Composer in the near future, though I am OK with it being in Premiere, as that is probably my next edit system.

Google+

I just read about Google’s new Social Network to rival Facebook. It is called Google+ and it actually seems an interesting concept. You can try and sign up, but the beta is full, still it looks interesting.

It is basically a Facebook designed so you can limit what different groups of your friends can see about it, basically a Facebook with much better privacy settings, though of course Google is not the best on privacy either. I hope that it is decent, because it is a good idea, though it certainly won’t make money like Facebook as that makes money by basically selling the user data, but google can integrate search into it to make money.

I also hope they integrate Buzz, which hasn’t taken off, but I always makes notes in my google reader account on a ton of stuff that I read about in RSS feeds.

Looks interesting, and I hope to eventually get chosen for the beta.