I read a post this morning talking about the reasons that FCP may be doomed… the fact that it sucks as pros we don’t know what our suppliers are doing. We can’t forecast jobs into the future because we don’t know what our tools will or won’t be able to do by then.
And I agree.
It sucks that we haven’t had a good upgrade to Final Cut Pro since… well… I’d say that the last substantial upgrade was FCP HD… Not that I don’t think colored markers are BAD ASS (and I don’t). Actually I saw the writing on the wall when they first posted the web page for Final Cut Suite 3 and they highlighted, as in one of the top 7 features, colored markers.
Really? thats a feature? Come on!!!
But alas, there may be hope… A couple months back I had the chance to talk at the SF Cutters meeting in San Francisco. Great group of people and they have a meeting this thursday July 15th, 2010 if you are in town. The night I talked Karl Soule from Adobe was there talking about the new Adobe Premiere Pro, that is a part of CS5. Karl is a skilled demo dude and has been doing it for a long long time.
What was interesting was who was in the audience. Right as Karl began his presentation a guy walked into the back of the room and stood at high table with his brand new iPad and flipped open the case and started taking notes… who was it? I recognized him as the Final Cut Pro Product Manager from Apple. His name is Steve Bayes I believe and he used to work for Avid but about 5 years ago moved to Apple to head up the FCP team.
Steve stood there furociously taking notes while Karl presented new features in CS5, both features of Premiere and features of Photoshop. I thought it was cool that Steve (not THAT Steve) would come out and see how people were using his product. However. as soon as Karl was done talking about CS5 he flipped close the cover to his iPad and headed for the door.
So FCP may be on its way out… we don’t know cuz Apple won’t be upfront with what they are doing, but we DO know they are still watcing. They are still looking at the competition and we DO know that they consider Premiere Pro ‘the competition’.
Maybe I should switch??? Where would you go?