Re: Apple are hilarious

[Walter Soyka] "I don't disagree with this at all, but I do think that reality is somewhat subjective. I'm a designer and finishing editor, and in my little niche, I have yet to see an FCPX project. All my clients are still mostly FCP7 with a little Avid. "

Yes, this is what we see as well. But this is a conservative industry. People were still bringing us FCP 6 projects two years after FCP 7 was released. So I don't think this lack of FCP X adoption 12 months in really means very much.

[Walter Soyka] "This is an interesting example, but I don't think it's the same as what FCPX is doing. Apple made the iPhone fit into the industry; Apple is asking the industry to fit into FCPX.

The iPhone was adopted in enterprise because Apple added Exchange support. By making the iPhone interoperable with large companies' existing infrastructures, Apple made the iPhone a viable handset choice.

Apple has taken a different tack with FCPX. Rather than supporting existing industry standards, Apple has invented new ones, and are now waiting for the industry to adopt them."

Your point about Exchange with respect to enterprise adoption is taken, but consider that the iPhone was primarily a consumer product selling into a market where it was commonly believed consumers wouldn't buy expensive smartphones and data plans, the iPhone completely eschewed mobile standards like J2ME, instead requiring developers to write new apps for Apple's proprietary APIs (and buy Macs to do it with!) and the iPhone ignored conventional wisdom about how business users demanded hardware keyboards. So in both the consumer and enterprise markets, Apple was in many ways trying to bend the market to the product, rather than the other way around.

FCP X adopts a lot of industry standards as well. It works with ProRes. It works with native formats from many cameras. It supports standard frame sizes and frame rates. It supports timecode and reel metadata. It can export color information as CDL. It can export in industry-standard formats ranging from H.264 to DPX. It's not like Apple is completely off in its own bizarre world here. Yes, FCP X abandons some established conventions and standards. But Apple has the clout to establish new standards -- classic FCP's XML files were no more of an actual standard than FCP X's XML files, after all -- developers had to add support for that format just for Apple, and now they're supporting FCP X's equivalent.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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