Final Cut Pro X is now on the market for a few days and there have been many opinions on it, most not too positive. Others have stated, how can you dismiss a program after just a few hours? On the one hand this is true, on the other hand has Apple always set their own standard very high and so they will be measured on that. If you use rhetoric like revolutionary, ‘change everything’, etc. chances are higher that people will be strongly disappointed. We are just used to great stuff from Apple and in FCP7 we had a great and stable system that worked great for most people even though it got a little dated.

When Microsoft introduced Windows Vista, Apple spend a whole lot of effort and marketing resources to put out the message that if you take a Mac it just works out of the box. Unfortunately exactly that is one of the big problems I have with FCPX. It does not work out of the box. It is not compatible with FCP7 so you wont be able to open old projects, it is not compatible to many of the old plugins and peripherals and you will have to relearn quite a bit. I will also not except the excuse that it is a version 1.0 (for my first two points) because this has simply nothing to do with bugs and errors of a version 1.0 but with deliberate decisions from Apple.

One of those Apple decisions has been that they wanted to aim Final Cut not only to the ‘professionals’ anymore. I am not even saying that Final Cut is not a ‘pro’ version anymore or that they don’t want to aim it at the ‘professionals’ at all anymore. Especially since that is a flowing border. However Apple lost their interest in developing programs exclusively aimed at this small limited market. They dropped ‘Shake’ and seemingly now dropped ‘Color’, two programs they actually bought in the first place and the sad thing is that this actually turns them into something that they never wanted to be. A big company prohibiting ideas and progress. Something they always criticized IBM and Microsoft for. Apple has rearranged its priorities and that is not going to be taken back.

That said, not everything is wrong with Apple and Final Cut. They are still a highly innovative company on the consumer market and Final Cut is still a solid product. I like the ideas of the new timeline, the rendering process, the idea of auditioning clips and the possibility to work with the files from the card while they are still being imported in the background. I do like some of the base ideas behind the new file-managment system but I hate how it is done. I like some of the ideas from the new layout but I hate that I can’t freely rearrange the layout anymore.

Overall, just as Apple didn’t know who they really want to aim Final Cut at, I currently really don’t know what to think of it. So please don’t see this as a review but more as a first impression. There are many small things that I don’t like (for example the dumbed down markers) but it might be that I just haven’t found a work around yet or that Apple will improve those with coming updates. Then again, I am just a small filmmaker who is editing his own projects. I am certainly not a professional editor. So if even I feel that the new Final Cut is not really what I hoped for, then I don’t even want to know what a professional editor has to say about it. Especially considering that Apple killed a lot of the things they would need for their daily workflow in a big post-production house.