28 June 2011

Apple - stop trying to be so clever

Let's start with full disclosure: I am an Apple fanboy. I love Apple products - I have a Mac Pro, an iMac, an old MacBook, an iPod and an iPhone (the only reason I don't have an iPad is because I'm addicted to the phone). I've been using Apple computer products for twenty years ever since I went to Cambridge and discovered the only desktops in the college computer room were Mac LCIIs. I loved the easy UI and I loved the design (a bit chunkier in those days, but somehow more attractive than their PC equivalents, which at that point were still using floppy disks which really were floppy and looked like the sort of thing Bill Gates ate his breakfast off). When I started on the film-making path, Final Cut Pro was the obvious choice, being relatively cheap, running off an operating system with which I was familiar, and earning high praise not only from amateurs but also from industry professionals like Walter Murch.

So why am I now considering whether to ditch the editing system on which I have cut all my work, in favour of the more expensive Avid Media Composer or the somehow less intuitive Adobe Premiere Pro? Because Apple has released a new version of Final Cut Pro.

In the old days, this wouldn't be bad news - a new FCP release was something to look forward to. We'd marvel at the innovative tools and tricks, welcome the plug-ins which we didn't have to search for separately any more, breathe a sigh of relief at the changes which would make our lives easier (even silly little things, like being able to increase the text size, or colour-label a clip). Blogs would become animated with reviews of the upgrade, while forums would swamp the inevitable naysayer ("but it still doesn't make coffee") with the enthusiasm with which Apple fanboys (and girls) are perhaps unfairly caricatured. We'd groan if we had to pay for the upgrade, and maybe we'd hold off for the bugs to be ironed out, but there was a universal appetite for the software unmatched in many other arenas.

But this time it's different. FCP X (why the X certificate? Did Apple realise they were being a little bit naughty?) has been greated not with joy but with wailing and gnashing of teeth. There were reports that comments on the App Store were closed because of the deluge of negativity, though I understand they have since been re-opened. The latest news is that Apple is having to refund customers who bought FCP X and didn't like it.

For example, Walter Biscardi dubs it "iMovie Pro" and says, "[it's] the worst product launch I've ever seen from Apple or pretty much any other software manufacturer." Jeffery Harrell outlines why the new workflow doesn't work and doesn't flow. HD Magazine's review isn't so harsh, but it also concludes that this is not a professional application. Angus McLellan concludes that it would be great for new editors who don't want to spend time learning a 'proper' editing program. We've no doubt all seen by now the Conan O'Brien piss-take (is this the first time a relatively esoteric piece of software has been lampooned on network television?). And someone has rushed out a pretty good parody in the Mac vs PC style (I'm ignoring the inevitable Downfall parody - can anyone, out of interest, date the point at which Downfall parodies stopped being funny?). The overall consensus seems to be that FCP X is grand for editing home movies. It might cut the mustard as a professional wedding video application. You could probably cut a feature film or a commercial on it, but not one you expected to be taken seriously.

(Incidentally, for those who are interested, or for those who have already taken the plunge and are tearing their scalps off, there's a comprehensive tutorial on FCP X by Steve Martin which, to my mind, actually highlights many of the program's drawbacks despite the constant upbeat tone. In fact, given the achingly positive line the author takes - "the hand-wringing can now mercifully stop" - perhaps he's the Steve Martin.)

Writing in the New York Times, David Pogue attempts to counter some of the criticisms, although many of his attempts at soothing the waters are based on misapprehensions, statements like "FCP 7 could do that, yes, but if you did it wrong you were in trouble..." (eg assigning material to specific scratch disks - we didn't do it wrong, David; we probably did it wrong the first time then learnt our lesson), or assurances that Apple are "working on it" (oh, I'm glad they're working on it - is there a reason why they released this software before they'd finished working on it?). As several of the comments in the article points out, Pogue is not a professional video editor and does not grasp the needs of professional video editors, people who - like myself - have grown up with the application. It's not that we didn't want it changed (as I pointed out above, we were eager every time a new version was released). It's just that Apple have thrown away so many of the things that made FCP an equal competitor with other professional applications like Media Composer and Premiere (and others) for the sake of... well, for the sake of what?

My suspicion is that Apple's focus is shifting. Buoyed and encouraged by its undeniable success in the consumer product market - MP3 players, phones, tablets - it's doing what so many of its enemies have long criticised it for doing - putting more emphasis on 'cool' than on 'professional'. Let's face it, if your brand is 'cool' you can shift loads and loads of cheaper products with a decent margin on them. If your brand is 'professional' - well, you'll still have the same margin but you won't be shifting quite so many units. There's a massive (and growing) market out there of people who want to play with technology, to entertain themselves and their friends with it. They don't want to have to go to night school. They don't want to make a career out of their hobby. They probably don't even expect to make any money with what they produce. They want it simple - but they want it to be able to stand out from the blurry, shaky mass on YouTube, so maybe they're happy to spend a bit more time on it than their mates. FCP X seems like the perfect application for them.

And that leads me on to the second concern. FCP X does a lot of things for you. Analysing your clips for "problems". Calling your bins "events" like iPhoto does. Making the Timeline "magnetic" to anticipate the changes you want to make. Like Apple's avowed intent to move your data off your desktop and into the "cloud" there's an uncomfortable feeling here of a company which wants to pat you on the shoulder and tell you not to worry your pretty little head about all this complicated stuff. I'm not implying that there's an Orwellian (there, I said it) agenda here; rather, it suggests that the Apple developers under the increasingly skeletal Steve Jobs have got a bit carried away with their vision of computers being so clever and so intuitive that they can deliver 'freedom' to their users by anticipating their needs and carrying out the difficult functions under the bonnet, so that the users can concentrate on having fun.

In fact, there's a danger of the opposite happening. With data only accessible via apps, regardless of whether it's stored on the system or in the cloud, we may be more and more at the mercy of having to do things the way the developers tell us they can be done. Precisely, in fact, the very thing PCs were criticised for back in the days when Apple made personal computing so very exciting.

Stephen Coltrane

[UPDATE, 29 June 2011: More serious comment has emerged. Richard Harrington, whose ubiquitous but essential tutorials are a godsend to anyone working this stuff on his or her own, gives a comprehensive list of all the ways Apple could have got this right and didn't. And even more damningly, Ron Brinkmann, who was one of the development team who devised Shake, confirms what I had suspected:

Let’s talk economics first.  There’s what, maybe 10,000 ‘high-end’ editors in the world?  That’s probably being generous.  But the number of people who would buy a powerful editing package that’s more cost-effective and easier to learn/use than anything else that’s out there?   More.  Lots more.  So, a $1000 high-end product vs. a $300 product for a market that’s at least an order of magnitude larger.

Brinkmann's revelation (he makes clear it's actually conjecture, but it's based entirely on his experience with Shake) is that Apple sees its video software as mass-market, not high-end, and that the motivation behind any particular piece of development is how good it looks on a demo, not on how well it delivers its functionality to specialist users. As he comments: "high-end customers are a pain in the ass."

It's become clearer to me that Apple is not interested in supporting the kind of software that professionals like myself (and probably you, if you're reading this) need to do our jobs. For all that the apologists for FCP X are bleating about how it's not as bad as we're making out, I remain convinced that once support for FCP 7 runs out (does anyone know if FCP 7 will run OK under Lion? No, of course no one knows yet, except people who are under instructions not to tell us) it'll be time for me to move onto another provider. Time to blow the dust off what I can remember from those early days when I first uneasily poked my way around Premiere. They tell me it's got much better since then...

Thanks, Apple. It's because of you I became an editor. Thanks to you, I'm at risk of having wasted thousands of pounds of my own money. Guess my appetite for Kool-Aid is sated.]