Re: What a Long, Strange Year It's Been!

I enjoyed your post and I too feel the fear of abandonment weighing on my software and hardware systems, but I think many editors and producers are not recognizing a new and emerging market that FCP X is helping to create. That market is the enterprise wide production market. Remember when they packed all the power of a Dicomed into PowerPoint and added graphics? Clients would request PowerPoint operators to create their presentations just they had for slide shows. Once the application was available on their PC's as part of their word processing suite, the presentation production fell to their Administrative Assistants. That is why so many presentations suck!

Video is inevitably going to take the same course. More people are creating their own videos and using them in their corporate presentations. In my organization people always say, "If you can't be at the event, gimme a Flip Cam and I'll get it." Of course they won't but pretty soon they will! If everyday people can start a project in iMovie and then submit that to a professional editor to finish in FCP X, then there is the brilliance of Apple.

Sure there may be a disconnect between FCP X and other professional NLE's, but that doesn't mean that the "professional world" will always be heading down the same path. Those paths may soon diverge with broadcast and feature production going the traditional route and corporate heading down the road I have described. Sure, from a content point-of-view that is scary, user generated content always is, but steno-pools and typesetters have gone the way of the Dodo. The same may come true for the corporate video production house unless they can manage the process and education. I think FCP X is the tool for this. It may not be as easy to plug into your current post setting, but a majority of presentation production doesn't need all that.