It's Day Two of
The Feature Thief, the mini-series of columns examining just what in the world was in Apple's mind when it abandons years of development in favor of a shiny new application nobody likes. To be fair, though, it's also examining how sometimes that move was necessary, and often how it works out rather well or even superbly in the end. Once the furor has died down, and especially once Apple has put back some features it's dropped, we can often say that the new applications are better. Whether it's worth the ride getting there is a different question –– and whether you should jump ship to rival companies' products is another.
Do read
part one's account of just what went wrong and just what went right with Pages, plus there's the
introduction to this mini-series where we share your pain.
If the saga of Pages was a drama, there is a way to see what's happened with Apple's video software as more of a sitcom, or maybe a farce. For the first thing, everyone said when Final Cut Pro X came out was that it had been dumbed down into becoming iMovie -- and iMovie fans could only say yep, been there, seen that. For what happened to Final Cut Pro in 2011 had already happened to iMovie in 2008.
Users of both abound. Of our 100-person polling pool which we discussed in some depth yesterday, nearly all (98) used iMovie at one point, with 49 still using it today. Even Final Cut Pro, by all accounts a piece of software catering to a specific market, had 12 regular users, with eight of them using the software "since day one."
Should iMovie and Final Cut Pro users have gotten together to share a drink, commiserate and talk about the good times, though, iDVD users would've been at the other end of the bar, sobbing over their whiskey. Apple has created many excellent video tools -- it has also broken them all, too, sooner or later. Today, of the these three main video applications, two are fairly inarguably better than they were before, and one of them is not.
Today's trio of programs, or at least two of the three, are an example of an imposed change that we talked about in our introductory article. In the case of both iMovie and Final Cut, Apple brought out a radically new version of the app, and while the old version didn't go away immediately, Apple dropped support and enthusiasm for them faster than a prom date with an STD. It was a classic case of Apple falling in love with its brilliant new idea, but perhaps rushing it out a bit too brusquely.
iMovie 6 HD was the pinnacle of six years of development
In this case, the irony is that the same man responsible for the creation of the original Final Cut Pro -- and the mind behind its main rival, Adobe Premiere -- was the guy who set the house on fire, Randy Ubillos. A video software engineering genius, Ubillos had had a revelation in 2006 when trying to put together vacation videos more rapidly -- thinking like a casual user or consumer rather than someone who makes their living doing this stuff -- and worked out an entirely new system for parsing, choosing, and assembling video clips into a finished project.
He first applied the idea to iMovie in 2007, and, frankly, it could've gone better.
MacNN's comments sections rumbled with complaints, and
The New York Times called it "an utter bafflement." Here's how bad it got:
MacNN reported on a PCWorld blogger who seemed to be the only person to like it.
What most users were dismayed about was that iMovie just wasn't iMovie anymore. What other companies and power-users were distraught about was that their add-on plugins stopped working. Some of the missing features were specific, and perhaps niche: iMovie could no longer import DV video, so mid- to higher-end camcorder users were stopped in their tracks. Whatever your camcorder, iMovie '08 wouldn't work with the full quality, it always had compression. Then, if you used iMovie to make video for DVDs, you no longer had the option to embed chapter markers: you had to do that in a more laborious way over in iDVD.
iMovie '08 was a radical shift, but eventually won out
However, the rest of the missing features were enormous. The entire look, feel and the way that you used iMovie changed. It's actually hard to remember now, seven years on, that we ever edited video in any other way than we do now, but we did -- and at the time we liked it. We also liked adding visual effects, slow motion, and we liked being able to reverse video, but all that was gone, along with any semblance of audio editing. Surely the Mac hardware of the time benefited from how iMovie '08 now only allowed you to work on one video at a time, but that felt like a blow too.
One of the reasons for this mini-series of articles is that Apple these day seems quite ready to just bulldoze on ahead regardless when it has a replacement product -- but back with iMovie '08, it appeared less confident. Contrary to media reports at the time, Apple had originally planned and did in fact make iMovie HD 6, the previous version, free to anyone who had bought iMovie '08. Those who already had iMovie 6 HD installed did not lose it; it was simply moved into a folder called "iMovie (previous version)," with the newer iMovie taking over as the default. Shades of the iWork app revamp, and more recently Photos, but this was one of the first times Apple ever did this.
Normally, new versions just overwrote the old version, and that was that. Perhaps recognizing that some users would be unhappy, the company opted to keep the old version around and functional for a limited time to help users make the transition. This strategy worked about as well then as it does now: poorly. Confused users complained, and when it was pointed out that the old version was still there, they would cling to it like apes to a banana tree, and refuse to adopt the newcomer. Some wags have referred to this as "XP syndrome," but it continues to this day.
A number of features were brought back into iMovie '08 over the next 18 months, and Apple eventually stopped supporting iMovie 6 HD (or offering it for download) by the time it moved on to iMovie '09. That did not restore all the missing features, and it did not even bring across everything that been in iMovie HD 6: it took until iMovie '11 for most of that to happen, though in many cases the "replacement" version of the features were much, much better than they had been in any previous version of iMovie.
Apple's migration strategy cost it some users, but it can be argued that YouTube was the larger user bandit. In our polling audience that was once 98 out of 100 strong, 31 later abandoned the iMovie application altogether, solely because they felt they could do anything they needed to do with the rudimentary iOS tools coupled with YouTube. Some (10) stopped because personal needs changed, and there was no real need to edit video as much, or any more. Two migrated to Final Cut along the way. All but one regular iMovie user in the polling group is using the latest iMovie iteration, with a sole holdout sticking to iMovie HD 6, because "it's what I know, and it works fine on my hardware."
Is that multiple tracks of video and audio we see?
However, alongside the iMovie '09 release, Apple cannily reduced the price of Final Cut Express. You can see the logic: get the most demanding iMovie users to move up to the lite version of the pro-editing software. Then wait until they're used to it, get them to move to the full Final Cut Pro -- and then do an iMovie '08 on them all over again. Insert nefarious villain laughter here.
Final Cut Pro X
The concept behind the iMovie revamp was then writ larger and applied to Final Cut, a program at the heart of a $1,000 video-editing suite called Final Cut Studio Apple was selling at the time -- itself an order of magnitude cheaper than other software-based NLE systems, and those were one-tenth the cost of a good hardware-based NLE system from only a few years prior.
To say there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when Apple substituted its award-winning non-linear editor (NLE) with what many critics at the time called an advanced version of iMovie (and meant it as the worst sort of insult) would be a massive understatement: there was a full-on industry revolt. Apple genuinely lost users over the move (though most have sheepishly returned to the fold since), and the professional magazines (remember those?) dedicated to the video-editing field were positively aflame with outrage. Professional users like to think of themselves on the bleeding edge of technology, but it often turns out they are some of the most resistant to change of all.
They did have some valid points. Keep in mind that the original Final Cut Pro 7was still available, and if you had it on your Mac, nobody was forcing you to move to the new version. Yet, every user of the FCP7/FCS3 knew that their favourite video tool of choice was now dead, because Apple would surely not develop it any further. New features that users wanted would not now come, not to the old application, and sooner or later an update to OS X or to the Mac hardware would mean it would stop working. And pro video houses were still very slow to dare to move away from the tried-and-true, being a deadline-oriented industry.
More, if studios or editing houses expanded and needed more staff to work on the same projects with the same software, it was certain to become harder to buy the old software. Just as Apple has recently removed Aperture from sale, so it did with Final Cut Pro 7, although it was still possible to buy extra seat licences for a time.
Final Cut Pro 7, still in use today by some
So this was a big deal in a big industry where Apple was doing very well but still had a long way to go: a 2008 survey by the American Cinema Editors Society said about a fifth of its users were using FCP, while the rest were working on the long-standing
de facto standard, Avid.
It hadn't been that long since editors were working with celluloid and Movieolas. Avid was only formed in the late 1980s, and the first film edited on it was a barely-known 1992 movie called
Let's Kill All the Lawyers. Legendary film editor Walter Murch cut
The English Patient on Avid in 1996, and won the first editing Oscar for a movie done digitally.
Interestingly, it was Murch who gave Final Cut Pro its biggest boost: he moved entirely to FCP in order to make
Cold Mountain with Anthony Minghella in 2003. It was the first major feature film edited in Apple's software -- and if you think the industry was slow moving to digital, Apple thought it was going too fast.
Apple was genuinely scared of the
Cold Mountain project, and what would happen if it failed. Apple's cold feet over
Cold Mountain got so bad that at one point Walter Murch emailed Steve Jobs saying: "is there anything you can do to help us? If we now find that Apple itself won't offer us support, even in token, it makes it more difficult for me, politically and technically, to move forward with Final Cut Pro" (source:
Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain
using Apple's Final Cut Pro, and What this Means for Cinema, by Charles Koppelman).
Jobs got Murch the support.
Cold Mountain was nominated for a best editing Oscar (it lost to
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).
So by the early 2000s, Apple had video editing software that was Oscar-standard, it had a growing user base of the most demanding professional editors in the world, and by the end of the 2000s they were all grumbling a bit that it wasn't being updated enough. Everybody always grumbles about that, but this time they got a bigger update than they imagined in 2011.
Final Cut Pro X, at long last an industry standard
The current "new" Final Cut Pro X, now at version 10.2, just celebrated its fourth birthday, and is arguably more popular than it has ever been. It costs just $300, is an industry standard (again), and we're going to say that this one is done now. The latest version of this is surely back to being the full, powerful system it was before the change, and indeed far more so (and ridiculously more productive). After a year or so of being unfashionable for its sudden radical shift, once the plug-in manufacturers adopted the new version the protests quickly died down, people re-approached it with a bit more of an open mind, and lo and behold discovered that if you re-learned it, FCP X was actually kind of awesome. Ubillos the Heretic was right, after all.
Of the 12 Final Cut Pro users we spoke to, four of them lost the faith, but three ultimately returned to Final Cut Pro X. Another four remain on the original Final Cut Pro, and the last four either always worked in FCP X or ever used FCP 7 very briefly before making the jump.
If you can honestly look at what FCP used to look like and say you prefer it to the current one, you spent way too long using that old version, and probably have a fax machine and a working hot-type press in your basement, because you loathe change. You might also, possibly, have an Oscar.
Nonetheless, there were and are alternative, world-class video editors for those who just couldn't handle the changeover, and surely the biggest software one is
Adobe Premiere. Some people just preferred it anyway, before Apple temporarily removed features from Final Cut Pro X, but that move did prompt others to take a fresh look at what else was out there -- which again, while painful, is sometimes a very healthy thing to do. There are other options out there as well, but unless you're better off using the stand-alone and lighter Premier Elements for very occasional or basic use, Adobe's pro video offering is certainly one of the main alternative contenders.
Right now, what you'll have to subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud to get the current Adobe Premiere CC, and pricing is a three-coffee decision. It's different for individuals and businesses, it's different if you are a new customer or an upgrading one, it's different if you just want the one app or the whole bundle. Right now, an individual will pay $20 per month to get the use of one application like Premiere, or $50 per month to get the entire CC suite, which of course includes loads of other great apps. For those who do or are trying to make a living at this, we recommend the everything package: the ability to fire up Photoshop for the one day in a hundred that you need it and not have to pay extra is, for pros in particular, worth the money.
Or you could save a load of money, and embrace the new.
iDVD
We reckon that any minute now, that's what you're going to have to do if you really, really still insist on burning your movies to DVD. For here we are in 2015, with OS X Yosemite, and yet you may well still find poor old iDVD sitting on your hard disk and stuck on version 7.1.2 since 2011. That's so old that Apple was still naming its operating system after cats. OS X Lion came out in 2011, and with it the first Macs to not automatically include iDVD.
Maybe it's a sign, but we didn't even realize that until we went looking. We also didn't notice that we still had it on any of our Macs. Launching it today is like stepping back much further in time than we really are: it's not like this is the software people made silent movies on, but we were surprised that it didn't have cobwebs. It does, however, still work.
If you still want to burn DVDs, you can do it with iDVD, and it is as good as it ever was -- which is to say it's fine, it works quickly enough -- and even benefits if you've moved on to an SSD. It's really best for compiling iMovie videos into Apple-themed designs, and then burning those. If you burn more than that,
take a look at Roxio Toast. If you can get buy with extremely basic, functional DVD menus for your project, there's even a free option:
Burn is showing its age, but it still works. And before you ask, no it doesn't do Blu-ray.
It's faster and easier, particularly if you are working in HD or 4K, to post your video online somewhere (either privately or publicly) such as Vimeo or YouTube these days. There will still, for a good while yet, be reasons why you might want to make a DVD -- but Apple called it correctly when it went the online route rather than fight with Sony over Blu-ray licensing; video is in the cloud now, and the mighty Blu-ray is starting to feel the setting sun on its back.
Curiously, Apple got much more flak for abandoning the DVD optical drive than it did for forgetting that iDVD even exists. If you do still use it, do add a comment here telling us why. It should be noted for readers thinking of firing it up again that the same caveats to getting it to work well then apply today:
lots of spare hard drive space is required,
lots of RAM is recommended, and be prepared to sit around watching it multiplex for
lots of time. Oh yes --
now we remember why we don't miss this program much.
Tomorrow: Apple brings web page creation
to mainstream consumers with iWeb, then watches as everyone uses it, outgrows it, and demands more.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher) and Charles Martin (
@Editor_MacNN), with polling data by Mike Wuerthele
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