Re: One year later...

[Andrew Kimery] "I agree that if FCPX would've launched with high-end features enabled that would have given a different perception to the launch. And what you are saying furthers my hypothesis. At some point during the development of FCPX the choice for launch features was set (iMovie thumbs up, XML thumbs down). If it was a time crunch issue why didn't they get started on development earlier? I'm sure w/all of Apple's in-house development experience they could do a good job of planning out realistic development schedule."

Despite the bad PR, it seems to have been the correct choice for Apple to ship as soon as it had a release suitable for mainstream editors, rather than waiting on high-end features -- they seem to have sold a lot of copies over that first 12 months, after all. Consequently, had they started earlier, I imagine they'd still have done a minimalistic initial release.

[Andrew Kimery] "Honestly, I think the resources got pulled to work on iOS projects, which also explains the final, lackluster update to the FC Suite, and so there was a rush job to get FCPX out because they natives were really getting restless."

I suspect the final lackluster update to FCS was due to resources being pulled to FCP X, and was also an illustration of why FCP needed to be rewritten from the ground up -- a lot of the features people would have wanted in that update were probably impossible to implement within the old codebase. Native support for non-QuickTime media, better use of GPUs and multicore processors, 64-bit, etc. This stuff just wasn't reasonably possible in a creaky old Carbon app.

[Andrew Kimery] "Sure, Avid and Adobe might not be reinventing the wheel (though they are both doing a better job of supporting old media and new media workflows than Apple currently is) but I don't worry about the next version of MC or PPro getting delayed, or under-delivered, because they diverted massive internal resources to work on an iDevice app. I can't say the same for FCPX."

As I noted previously, Premiere is probably not one of Adobe's more important products (and because of the way almost everyone buys CS apps in bundle form, it's not even clear how many actual additional sales improving Premiere with produce for Adobe), and Media Composer faces some risk posed by Avid's problems at the corporate level. It's not immediately obvious to me that FCP X is the most risky long-term choice here. It's true that it's not Apple's primary focus, but Apple has 250x Avid's revenue and actually sells a smaller number of products than Avid does, so it doesn't logically follow that FCP X will receive less investment than Media Composer.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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