Philip Hodgetts on Planet5D.com

A valiant effort today Philip. I know your heart is in the right place, and I admire technical neatness like the next guy, but with a heavy heart, I go to bed on day two thinking this is the end of Final Cut as professional tool.

It started with Quicktime X and it ends today with another X.

I have been in software design for maybe 15 years and a professional user of Final Cut for maybe 5 and i have never seen a product day as dark as this. ( OK maybe New Coke or whatever it was called).

Contrary to what you so passionately state, Apple does not deserve a break claiming this is V1 of a product.

They had 10 years to learn how to do this right. They DO deserve a break similar from when we went from OS 9 to Mac OS X – that was big, stuff broke, it was hard, but we could see it was worth it. We could do some things with it on day one. Open a WORD doc written in OS 9, play a movie made in OS 9, run an old DVD etc., etc., It was more than Macdraw and MacPlay.

This is different – whats there works pretty well, even lovely sometimes.

What is fundamentally NOT there is likely the basis of the firestorm across all the boards, blogs, tweets, etc.,. the industry is scared because this is it. And Its not enough to make a living on.

Respectfully you do 1 million Final Cut users a disservice defending this on purely ‘technical growing pains’ grounds. Collectively we are little more than a rant to Apple, but you owe it to this community to re-educate Apple on the difference between tools and toys.
I don’t need it all to work, but this is an unprecedented shitstorm of discontent and you ignore it at your own professional peril as someone we look up to.

It really might be that pulling up 5 million iMovie users is far more lucrative ( in the short term at least) then improving the workflow and life of hundreds of thousands of professional editors who need to eat every day. Maybe 5 million youtube videos equal the revenue of 2,000 feature films and a few hundred thousand professionally edited to the frame network commercials,theatrical trailers, music videos, and television as we know and love it etc., etc.,

My AVID friends may be the happiest of all today. A quote from a friend and one of the best professional editors in America – grew up on AVID, and has been slowly adding Final Cut to his workflow:

“Now we know what it feels like to be in bed with a company that is not committed to making money by helping us make money. I can’t wait for the exodus to start in New York. We’ll all come crawling back to Avid.

You might want to learn it.”

This is my last ‘rant’ as you call them.