[Jeremy Garchow] "I don't mind third party solutions. Things don't always work, or something changes, or my workflow/footage needs a bit of customization. It is right here that having a small, responsive third party company to deal with shines, and shines brightly. Third party has always been a major strong suit with fcp, but maybe people don't see that as a strong attribute. I don't mind it, as I'm very used to it. Also, it is from these developers and workflow forumulists that holes and bugs within the underlying language of fcp get discovered and therefore squashed. Fcp7 would not be the strong app without the help of the above mentioned companies/people, along with the many others that aren't mentioned... My view is that third parties made fcp better even if some people don't realize it."
[Michael Gissing] "You still are at the mercy of Apple. They tweak a spec in XML, it breaks something for the third party developer. So you may enjoy the tech support of the third party but they have to trust Apple to warn them of anything before publicly breaking third party software."
I agree with both of these statements.
Interchange capabilities certainly improved from FCP4 (when Apple introduced XML) to FCP7, but FCP was pretty mature by version 4.
FCPX is young, and the data model is apparently still a work in progress (as evidenced by the changes between 10.0.0 and 10.0.3). Also, FCP Classic had the advantage of working in basically the same manner as every other time-based media platform on the planet. FCPX's approach is unique, which adds an extra layer of complexity to interchange.
Once FCPX development is no longer a moving target, I think robust third-party extension will be reasonable.
All that said, I'm sympathetic to Simon's point that Apple should handle at least some of this, too. EDL and OMF/AAF are not esoteric workflows; they're table stakes for collaboration.
Walter Soyka
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