Re: New blog post from Philip Hodgetts. Worth the read.

[Herb Sevush] "I don't think Apple was trying to shake things up - they already knew what they had, they had tested the UI on Imovie. They were simply trying to redefine their market - out with the upper 5%, in with the theoretical hordes of new users for their simplified workflow."

First, I think you nearly totally misunderstand the target market for FCP-X.

It's popular to think it's aimed at the iMovie crowd, but if you'd have spent any serious time with it, you'd know how silly that sounds.

iMovie folks do not need a complex database in their NLE. They don't need 32 bit floating point math accuracy. They don't need or want clip collections, I/O paths to Motion or XML interchange.

And if you think the X interface is "simplified, you really haven't used it much. I'd argue that it's significantly more complex than Legacy ever was. Not because the structure is currently "built out" at the same level Legacy was after a decade of development, but because at it's core - it's a whole lot more "extensible" than Legacy ever was.

The truth of X is that it sequesters assets upon import - then allows the editor to affect them by the application of robust metadata to represent clip change states in ways that allow the user to preform countlessly more complex operations than Legacy ever did.

The reason is that the timeline in legacy was a dumb beast. It was a fixed container that "learned" from nothing and "informed" nothing in return.

X, on the other hand, is an agile data container (one type of which can be video assets, but can equally be fixed graphics, motion graphics, sounds or whatever) that can be affected by other data (and can in turn reflect it's internal states via data export) in ways the Legacy was simply never built to do.

As robust as it became over time, FCP-Legacy was a pretty DUMB construct (if often operated by many, many very smart people.)

X is a much smarter design - and when it grows more, you'll be seeing whole new possibilities emerge from that intelligence.

Every month I learn more about it as a user, I'm more and more comfortable betting my whole business model on my growing certainty that time will prove this view to be accurate.

And the "it's dumbed down FCP-Legacy" to be totally discredited.

We shall see.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor