Re: Apple are hilarious

[Walter Soyka] "They kind of are off in their own bizarre world. No one else has a parent/child timeline model, and that's the critical factor here in interchange."

The parent/child timeline is just a richer way of arranging stacked clips in time. It's entirely possible to throw away the original richness (the clip relationships) and reduce the timeline to clips stacked on tracks. It isn't really all that uncommon for content creation apps to have a rich internal data representation to aid in their operation, that is simplified or entirely discarded when moving data out of the app in an industry-standard interchange format. I don't see a problem with this. After all, what's the alternative? Apps never supporting anything that can't be encoded in a pre-existing industry standard format? That would slow apps to the level of progress seen from, say, web browsers (especially in the days before WHATWG), where lots of vendors spend years arguing over things as part of a standards process before new features can be made available to users.

[Walter Soyka] "In order to work with FCPX, other apps must develop specific FCPX support."

Or the ecosystem surrounding FCP X needs to provide a general solution for getting an EDL out of FCP X (for the probably 5% of FCP users who have ever needed this) -- which seems to be happening. I don't really see a problem with Apple leaving certain features as third-party 'market opportunities'. Particularly if doing so encourages progress, and I rather suspect Apple has left EDL out of FCP X to date at least in part because they want to pressure other developers to support richer interchange formats.

It's not that different from leaving ADB and serial ports off of the first iMac, thus creating pressure on peripheral vendors to switch to USB -- and that was a case where Apple didn't have a 'clean slate' and their actions were rather disruptive, but it worked. Apple's OS 9 to OS X transition was also significantly more disruptive than, say, Microsoft's transition of the consumer market to NT-based Windows. Apple has always been willing to subject its users to more disruptive transitions in order to push the market to move a little faster.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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