As someone who currently works in video production, the failures of Final Cut Pro X interest me.  For all intents and purposes, it is superior to its predecessor in many ways.  It is faster, makes better use of underlying hardware (especially 64 bit architecture), has more features, and has better integration inside its product family, with Motion and Compressor specifically.  Yet many working professionals panned it, and many studios either fled Apple, switching to Adobe Premiere or Avid, or simply refused to upgrade, opting to stay with Final Cut Pro 7.  What went wrong?

Final Cut Pro X is, in many ways, a total anomaly in the history of Apple.  Apple has a long history of understanding branding.  When Apple designed the multicolored iMacs, they showed the world that computers could be more than just workstations, they could be colorful and fun, and they forced the rest of the industry to follow suit or fall behind.  Then, Apple shifted towards the sleek, sophisticated look of brushed aluminum, and again the rest of the industry was forced to adapt.  Similarly, Apple has been the computer for creative people.  Ever since the groundbreaking ‘1984’ ad, Apple has been the favored computer of designers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, art directors, and many other creative professionals.  In part, this image is aided by the fact that Apple includes better creative software with its operating system than its competitors (e.g. iLife vs. Windows Movie Maker).  More importantly, Apple also produces a range of affordable, full-featured professional software packages, such as Final Cut Pro, Aperture, and Logic.  So with this strong track record, and equally strong brand image, how did Apple so thoroughly drop the ball when it came to Final Cut Pro X?

Amongst the recurring criticisms of the new Final Cut was that Apple seemed to have abandoned the creative professional in the hunt for the vlogger market.  While there are exceptions, much of what is created for YouTube is simple, even amateurish, in its production.  Vlogging, for example, takes only a single fixed camera and basic editing.  Since Final Cut Pro X’s release was accompanied by the death of the Final Cut Express line, the traditional software choice for the prosumer video producer, the fear of many working professionals, like wedding videographers, industrial filmmakers, and even Hollywood post-production houses, was that Apple was chasing this “semi-professional” market by dropping complex but necessary features to make things simpler.  In fact, the core problem with Final Cut Pro X was that it seemed less professional a tool than its predecessor.  However, this was a result more of branding mistakes than product design mistakes, although there were a few of those as well.

The largest contributor to the image problems of Final Cut Pro X was the choice to kill Final Cut Express while simultaneously cutting Final Cut Pro’s price.  It is a well-established concept in branding that when a company cuts its prices too much, consumers get suspicious.  For example, if a new car enters the market significantly cheaper than its competitors, consumers will naturally worry about what corners had to be cut to get the price so low.  Did they use cheap materials?  Is the car still safe?  This is doubly true for premium brands, like jewelry, perfumes, luxury cars, or high-end enterprise solutions.  Final Cut Pro was one of these premium brands, so when Apple killed the low-cost alternative and dropped the price on the premium option, it left a lot of professionals with that nagging feeling in the back of their mind: What did Apple do to make Final Cut Pro so cheap?  What features did they cut?  Is this the new Express, with no replacement for the Pro?

Bizarrely, Final Cut Pro X’s image was actually hurt by an improvement in over-all features.  Final Cut had, for a long time, been a member of a fairly potent package of video production tools called Final Cut Studio.  Like Adobe’s Creative Suite, the idea was that, while each individual piece of software could be used on its own, they were designed to be better together.  In Final Cut Studio, this meant buying Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Color, Compressor, and Motion.  The lead designer behind the Final Cut suite decided that it would be a good idea to condense much of the capabilities of the family of software into Final Cut Pro itself, increasing the simplicity and decreasing the cost.  On its face, this seems like a good idea.  More features for a lower price ought to be very attractive to studios looking to pinch pennies.  Unfortunately, Apple has a bad track record with these kinds of transitions.  An example of this was when Apple transitioned from Shake to Motion.  Several years ago, Apple created special effects software called Shake, which won some Academy Awards.  Apple also had Motion, a much less powerful piece of effects software for creating animated, 3D graphics, with limited compositing features.  Apple decided to kill Shake, which was underselling, and bundle its features into Motion.  Only the incredible flexibility and power of Shake was largely lost in the transition, so while Motion came out much stronger, most studios ended up switching to Adobe After Effects.  The news that Apple had effectively killed Color, and was rumored to be discontinuing DVD Studio, left a lot of people convinced that this was history repeating itself, and that Final Cut was losing its power in order to court a broader consumer base.  In truth, Color had a terrible, unintuitive user interface that was disliked by many of those same working professionals, and the improvements to color-correction in Final Cut Pro put basically the same functionality, with a better interface, into Final Cut natively.  But perception is reality, and people were too angry to see how the new software benefited them.

While Color represents features that were stripped from discontinued product lines and added to Final Cut, there were several features that somehow failed to make the transition from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X.  The two features that caused the largest backlash were the absence of multi-cam editing and the lack of backwards compatibility in save-files.  Both of these reinforced the image of Final Cut Pro X as a product for the semi-professional.  Multi-cam editing was a staple of many studios’ workflows.  For example, many production houses that specialize in covering live events want to have multi-cam editing.  If a music concert is being recorded for a concert video, in order to get the coverage needed there should be multiple cameramen shooting all around the venue.  When it comes time to edit, multi-cam makes work much easier by letting the editor seamlessly edit between each different view while watching all the recordings simultaneously.  Needless to say, when it was revealed that Final Cut Pro X didn’t have multi-cam editing, people were livid.  Ultimately, Apple gave a mea culpa and reassured everyone that multi-cam was going to be added as part of a free update in the near future.  This was too little too late, and the damage to their product image was already done.  Similarly, the lack of backwards compatibility removed an important feature from the toolkit of production studios.  Final Cut Pro X is the first version of Final Cut that can’t import old project files.  Being able to access old projects is an important part of what production houses do.  Archiving past client projects lets them re-edit, re-use and re-purpose that work whenever the client wants adjustments made.  For example, if a company creates a promotional video for a client’s website, that client may come back three months later looking to replace something that is now out of date.  They don’t want to pay to create a whole new video; they just want to pay for the minor fix.  Without backwards compatibility, when the studio switches over to Final Cut Pro X, they lose the ability to make those minor changes, as they are no longer able to access their old project files.  Like multi-cam editing, a solution finally came, but this time it was a third-party plug-in that suffers from several quality of life bugs that make it less than ideal.  So again, Final Cut’s image was tarnished.

Between the killing of old software, the adding of new features, and other shake-ups in the Final Cut family, two staples were left with unknown fates.  DVD Studio Pro and Soundtrack Pro both seem to have disappeared from the core of Final Cut offerings, as they have disappeared from the main product pages, while Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor remain.  On the other hand, unlike with Color, there hasn’t been an official word from Apple as to whether they are fully discontinued.  The possible death of DVD Studio and Soundtrack represents yet another blow to professional image of Final Cut, as DVD Studio is a staple of the post-production workflow for physical media production companies, such as wedding videographers, and Soundtrack, in addition to being a decently capable scoring tool, has a large selection of filters and audio behaviors that make it a much better audio sweetener than what comes with Final Cut itself.  Neither of these are needed if the intended user is only producing videos for the web that require little or no audio mixing, which immediately draws the connection to the dreaded YouTube vlogger.

Vlogging isn’t the only thing that can operate in this workflow, as this digital only system, with limited audio features, works well for some TV work (audio mixed separate from editing), advertising (depending on the ad), and online marketing (due to its similarity to YouTube content); it’s just also inexcusable that it completely fails for small production outfits like freelancers (who need flexibility), wedding videographers (who need to make DVDs), and independent filmmakers (who need good audio mixing but can’t afford a separate mix-down).  The fact that those outfits used to rely on Final Cut Pro and now maybe can’t, depending on Apple’s whim, makes those outfits wonder if they should stick with Final Cut Pro 7, instead of updating, or leave Apple all together.  The worry amongst many is that Apple sees a physical media free future, and that their hardware/software ecosystem is changing to reflect that.  If entertainment is all sold over the cloud through the iTunes store, to be consumed on disc-drive free devices like the iPad or Mac Air, what need is there for future video producers to produce DVDs?  Well, to give to the Bride and Groom to distribute to friends and family, to give to the client who wants to include them in a direct mailing campaign, or to give to the band to sell at their merchandise table while on tour, that’s why!

One of the strangest differences in Final Cut Pro X from its predecessor, and unrelated to the typical complaint of seeming unprofessional, was changing the color scheme.  Apple creative products, starting with the earliest versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, have featured an interface built around light grey work areas with light green elements in the timeline.  Final Cut Pro X switched to a much darker grey with darker element colors.  Color scheme, not just in the logo but also in the product itself, is an important part of any branding strategy.  UPS owns that tint of brown, and Netflix red marks its interfaces both online and on set-top devices.  Every version of Final Cut up until X was immediately familiar to anyone who had used the software before.  But not only was the color change strange in that it broke tradition, and established branding, but it actually made the software look more like Adobe’s products, one of their main competitors.

It is easy enough to list the mistakes that Apple made in retrospect, but there is value in trying to figure out how they could have avoided this catastrophe.  In large part, their mistakes stemmed from a place of justifiable hubris.  Apple had made its recent fortune providing the consumer with products that they didn’t know they wanted until they were real.  The iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are all examples of products that came from Steve Job’s genius and not from a customer survey.  So when it came to their software offerings, it is not a stretch to believe that the designers at Apple thought they were doing a wonderful thing with Final Cut Pro X.  They, in their infinite wisdom, have seen a future that is better served by Final Cut Pro X than by Final Cut Pro 7.  Unfortunately for them, the world wasn’t ready.  Or at least, it wasn’t ready for everything to happen at once.

In addition to the features I have talked about already, there were other major changes to the workflow of Final Cut Pro X as well.  In order to streamline editing, Apple changed Final Cut’s underlying file structure, and the way the main timeline functions.  Both of these were arguably improvements, as the new file structure made importing to scratch-disc far more intuitive, and the timeline overhaul added a huge number of time-saving improvements, but both were major departures from the old way of doing things.  When you add this completely reworked base program to the litany of other changes, it is easy to see why people rebelled.  I would argue that Apple tried to do too much all at once.  If they had adjusted the file system and the timeline and done nothing else, things might have hiccupped as people adjusted to the new workflow and eventually evened back out again.  If they had killed Color and added most of its important features into Final Cut Pro and nothing else, people would have been happy to save money not buying the additional program, with its confusing and arcane interface.

Finally, a lot of these problems could have been avoided if they had just done the very un-Apple thing and asked working video professionals what they wanted.  The Final Cut Pro X splash page gives a few examples of productions, like TNT’s Leverage, that endorse Final Cut Pro X and use it in their post-production workflow.  But this is offset by the hundreds of posts on filmmaking forums, like creativecow.net, that decry Final Cut Pro X as the devil.  If Apple had just talked to more working professionals, they would have known that they simply couldn’t release the program before multi-cam was implemented.  Final Cut Pro X was not on a hard release date, so they could have easily delayed long enough to add in multi-cam to avoid the bad press.  If Apple had talked to editors about what the new timeline workflow would look like, maybe they would have thought to include it as an option, even the default option, but leave the old system in place for the veteran editors who would have trouble adjusting to the new interface.  If Apple had talked to production houses about why they bought Final Cut Studio, and not just Final Cut Pro, they would have learned that they needed to do a better job of publicizing the alternatives to discontinued, or potentially discontinued, software.  If Final Cut can do everything Color could do, but in-program and with a better interface, say so!  If Apple killed Soundtrack because it was becoming increasingly redundant with improvements to Logic, make Logic and Final Cut talk to each other like Soundtrack and Final Cut used to, and then tell everyone about it!

Many things could have been done differently with the release of Final Cut Pro X.  The new software was loaded with tons of new features that would be a dream for any Final Cut Pro 7 user: hardware acceleration, real-time rendering, better Motion integration, better color correction and filtering tools, a faster editing workflow, and audio-video syncing tools that used to require an expensive third-party plug-in.  But these new features came with a lot of baggage: discontinuation of popular programs, loss of old features, negative press, branding mistakes, and a feeling that Apple’s creative software department had lost its way.  Even when a company has had as much success as Apple giving people what they don’t know they want yet, perhaps it pays to make sure what they are giving them is something people will ultimately want.