I'm still on FCP7. Here's my take on it as so many other reviews are so painfully forgetful of the past.
Adobe created a new video editing package, they called it "Final Cut" (weren't expecting that, were you?).
Adobe sold Final Cut to Macromedia.
Macromedia sold Final Cut to Apple.
This all happened for a variety of reasons, but the initial product Apple purchased was really raw. Early adopters had many problems with it crashing and not having all of the features that they as linear editors expected a "professional" editing package to have if they were going to move from their Steenbecks to a digital doohicky. The other options at that time (early 90s) were Diva Videoshop (precursor to Avid -- just flip the company name around) and the newly minted Adobe Premiere. Both had 2 video tracks and a transition track in between them.
Apple spent a year trying to make this old behemoth with code from 2 separate companies cut (pun intended) the mustard. After a year and a half or so of release after release, it finally hit its stride and was being adopted by professional editors with whom Apple worked very closely to give them what they needed from a package.
Apple, historically, has always been really good at taking very complicated and powerful systems and wrapping them in a deceptively simple UI. With the initial Mac, it was just a toy, but no other PC on the market could keep up with the graphics that were being drawn to screen constantly -- you could still see the remnants of that race in window draws on every thing up to Windows XP, frame first, then the contents of the window.
Apple bought NEXT with its BSD Unix based OS. The BSD community outcry was horrible, all 12 of them were shouting loudly, you can't wrap all this power in such a bubble gum looking interface. After a year and a half or so of development, Professional IT folks started to talk notice. The hugely powerful stuff was actually all still there for them, accessible through the "Terminal" program... but the rest of the system was suddenly accessible by more than just the comparatively small BSD community. That actual chunk of OS that EVERYBODY uses, was there and easy to get it. The power was hidden, but still there.
Apple bought Shake from Nothing Real, mostly for it's motion tracking and smoothing code "Optical Flow" you san see it in the motion tracking and smoothing in FCPX.
Apple bought Color from Silicon Color (it was called FinalTouch). You can now see it in a simplified form in the color panel of FCPX.
Apple's been developing iMovie for years and has a good feel for the simplified interface that MOST people actually need to do a quick editing project... this is the simplified interface part of the equation.
I've been in a neat position professionally to watch Apple develop things over the course of a couple of decades. Their latest and greatest are usually put together from a couple of fits and starts and smart acquisitions for key pieces of a puzzle... it wouldn't surprise me at all if they'd been planning this move for a decade. I've seen other projects start as pieces and parts to get to a simplified interface wrapped on top of really powerful technology. Apple's Standard Operating Procedure is to try to give high performance with a simplified interface. It often offends folks who are accustomed to power having a clunky interface... Final Cut is a completely non-Apple interface, it always has been, it was still fundamentally the interface they were handed by Macromedia who had been handed that interface by Adobe so long ago. The comments at the time was that the software would never catch on in the Apple community as the interface was so horrible and ungainly to work with and learn... so only dedicated professionals learned it... 1% of the potential market of the software... revenue hell!
Apple has used iMovie and the even more simplified interfaces of Quicktime Player (i've edited clips together using that -- so quit whining people
) and the iOS editing options for video clips to gain a feel for how a simplified interface could work. It feels to me as if this was their testing ground all of these years for the revamp of Final Cut.
Hindsight is easy, but I've been able to look back at alot of their releases to see the technology trail that led up to it... Apple doesn't just do things, they are planned and methodical about everything. The outcry of the Final Cut community is nothing new. It's part of the strategy, it lets apple know what to add back next. The first release of FCPX was missing everything but the basest level of the interface. It really was iMovie with some Final Cut Server meta-tagging built in and more file format options than iMovie. The community screamed... the loudest, most frequent screams were for feature A... Apple added feature A back in. Feature B was then the next loudest, so Apple added in Feature B. (think backwards compatibility, then multicam) These are real issues, and Apple knows about them and is addressing them with each release. The nice thing is... they're able to do this one in a very Apple way and add them into a product with their own interface... so once it's all back in, the crap that no one used will just be gone and not bogging the program down on the back end.
There's really no other way to move forward with technology than to start fresh sometimes... and often the pros are the last to go into the future, because they're invested in the existing technology. I can't wait to see FCPX after the next few revisions. If it's like so much else Apple has done, every other company will be kicking themselves for clinging so tightly to the past... every other company will be playing catch up -- again.
