@Jeremy Garchow

Ronald: "The one that really surprised me was Apple closing the door on FCP Legacy. It was profitable and it had a huge audience. Killing it made absolutely no sense to me."

Jeremy: "Final Cut Studio was based on a Quicktime architecture that is ceasing to exist....very long in the tooth....it certainly needed a massive ground up rewrite."

I recently posted a link to Apple's 22010 OS X developers docs for media architecture: QuickTime got 2 sentences. That was two years ago. They probably can't do less than 2 sentences, but I doubt they've added any since then.

To me, the immediate EOL of FCP Legacy is the thing Apple did MOST right. FCP had basically been in stasis since 2005 anyway, certainly by 2007, so it's clear that they hadn't been investing meaningfully in its future for half a decade or more. Call it zombieware. At a certain point, you bury a shovel in its skull and move on without a lot of ceremony.

In all seriousness, I think that FCP Legacy was, in practice, more or less a placeholder. There was really not much that was all that revolutionary about it. Actually, 1 thing, ironically enough: that it could do top-quality online work on a laptop. A large part of FCP's audience rarely, if ever, used it on a desktop. The idea that Apple needs to keep towers alive for this market doesn't hold up.

No, love it or hate it, the revolution is in FCPX. This is the first version of FCP that looks even VAGUELY like it was designed by Apple. Before this, it was virtually indistinguishable from what Apple bought from Macromedia 14 years ago.

My guess re: profitability for FCPX is that from last June to today is the most profitable period in its history. Apple shuts down an entire channel, slashes production costs to nearly zero, reduces piracy to precisely zero, adds a zillion new seats and keeps all the money.

What I'm enjoying about everything happening now is all of the ways that you can describe revolutions -- revolutionizing WHAT? Changing WHAT game? The short answer: all of them.

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou