Yup, once you buy more than 10 or 20 licenses. I have legitimate post production clients where there are about 6 seats of FCP.
The bottom line is, Apple doesn't care. You do it their way or not with their tools.
Or what if I wanted to buy 20 licenses of Pixelmator for a client of mine? Any smartass ways to work around that?
Well, let's say the software in question in FCPX & Compressor?
..not the nuclear physics. I kinda thought this way before, but reading http://www.gregpalast.com/vulturespicnic/ really exposed the problems. That book gave me some understanding on why greenpeace pulls these stunts, which always felt a bit silly to me.
Now if they could conway the message that the problemis the companies, not some inherent problem with he physics.
No, Apple is not going to make a cheap tower. This has been quite clear for the last 5 years that people have been asking for one. You are either happy with the iMac or you are willing to shell out for the Mac Pro. A mid-tower just makes no financial sense for them, in terms of ROI, lost iMac/MacPro sales etc.
And here is the catch: the current iMac is actually a pretty decent machine. You can get it with a nice GPU, you dont need to shell out for a screen and you get Thunderbolt, which will largely make those PCIe slots and HD bays redundant. At the moment the Mac Pro is worse than useless, a pimped out iMac gives you much more bang for your buck.
The server software is a joke these days, no use is running it in a Virtual Machine. You are better off running Windows and the AD connectors for Mac. Apple had the window in somewhere 2007/2008 where a little push would have made OS X Server a brilliant piece of software. Instead they let it stagnate and never fixed those pesky problems with iCal, which made it a pain to administer. Never mind the selfexploding OD databases, rudimentary webmail and the hoops we needed to jum through just to allow users to set their own vacation messages. Sorry Apple, the server train passed.
The only thing I would consider using OS X Server for is Xsan metadata-controllers, and maybe, MAYBE, OD. Everything else is easier to do with your run of the mill BSD/Linux/Illumos/your-unix-version/clone-of-choice or even Windows Server.
Oh, and until Apple fixes their bugs with Solaris SMB implementations they are off my christmas card list.
Sure, using IT infra in this ways is purely evil. And no, companies should not provide any tools for oppressive regimes.
But when will see the first complaints that Open Source tools allow governments to do largely the same things?
I'm nos saying that OS is bad, but is there anyway that OS projects can ensure that their products are used for oppressive means?
"being cool because I use Apple" is such a useless straw man, I don't understand why you bother to throw it around.
Apple has long cultivated the "cool" factor in their products, marketing and advertising. At the very least, they have done nothing to dissuade the notion, and rightly so, that Apple is "cool"; even though they never explicitly say, "we're cool". Steve Jobs is a master of coy secrecy in marketing, so this angle is surely not lost on him. Therefore, the notion of "being cool because I use Apple" is not a straw man; the concept has currency because the marketing perceptions become the purchasing realities, especially with Apple.
Marketing is marketing, I couldn't care less. Do you honestly feel that coolness is the only factor anyone could come up with when proposing a switch over to Mac? Because in my experience many people feel more productive and capable with macs, and when I have seen whole companies do the switch, I have never met anyone willing to go back to Windows, not even the bean counters or managers. I'm not saying it is for everyone, or that it is perfect (how about onsite care?) in any way. But to dismiss the whole platform as only an attempt to be cool is just plain dickery.
They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.
The last time they tried something similar(!), it didn't go too well. That's possibly most striking with past Apple efforts at my place, which also had "push Apple into schools, kids will get used to them,
It's a triangle, three markets possibly influencing each other - business, education, consumer. Starting from the 2nd one doesn't seem to work terribly well. As for working from the 3rd... hm, who knows (anecdotally: here, two generations of Commodore machines were the consumer standard for a decade - and also ignored by businesses, their computerisation basically started with PCs anyway when the time had finally come)
The logic goes something like this: people love the iPhone and iPad, will test out a macbook or a imac at home, and after a while they will demand a similar environment at work. Sure not everyone has the pull to do it at work, but if enough C-level people get interested it might happen, in some industries.
Unless... there really will be a dynamics-changing shift, and the tablets will turn out to be the "PC for normal people" (so also good for a very large chunk of business machines); here Apple is doing fine so far, even at my place (unless the world also waits for "PC tablets"...)
As for the general NLE discussion - I wonder if Vegas could get more chance out of this, at least among "indies"; it's quite fine overall, and perhaps unbeatable for the price (with the possible exception of Lightworks). More broadly, I wonder with which tool would you prefer to get accustomed with, on which would you bet as having the greatest chance of filling the void now that FCP might be on its way out?
I guess Premiere Pro, especially since a remarkable segment of machines with FCP will already have PP installed (as they will have Production Premium for Photoshop and After Effects).
And regarding Vegas (thoug one of my favourite apps before I started using Macs), fine as it might be, it is still a Sony product, stuck somewhere between the professional Sony (Sony broadcast is a dependable if expensive partner for most companies in the field) and the entertainment Sony (please distribute my password and CC information to the world). I would be very hesitant of using it as my tool of choice for that reason alone...
Stupid is as stupid does. Invest in your product not the company which produces it. There are free programs which could be brought up to speed provided that you start paying the developers and companies working on those programs. And there isn't an excuse here. We've produced advertisements with free video editing tools that are just amazing.
Apple makes allot of stupid decisions all the time. This isn't a big ohh fuck we screwed up situation. This is just part of the constant flow of shit coming from Apple that people are given the impression due to solid marketing that everybody loves. It isn't true.
Those who actually have purchased Apple products know the company is about making toys. Nothing more. If you are going to get serious there is no advantage with going with Apple. Only downsides.
Free software at least has some advantages with those disadvantages. One of them is you get to take part in the development and have a say in which features come and go.
I'd love to hear about viable OS solutions to post production. So far, every single one we have evaluated has been clunky at best, and quite difficult to integrate into our workflow.
There are many things one can say about FCP, but it has been very easy to get it to work with almost any other software / system used in the industry, which again allows us to work nicely with others.
They almost had a viable solution for the SMB market
With the exception of boutique and creative business, such as advertising, Apple is mostly absent from the small business market. There is very little business case to be made for paying twice or even three times more for the same software and hardware (i.e. Microsoft Office + Quickbooks) to run a small business. Microsoft has always offered the best value proposition for small business and the use of PCs by most of them reflects that.
I work in the creative businessess, and my point is that even there Apple is losing it's place in the server room. For all it's faults, the Xserve was a solid piece of hardware and OS X Server was almost a fully functioning SMB server that had all the tools that a company needed, without any extra license fees. Also, the Xsan was a really, really cheap way of building a bonafide Stornext SAN, a mature storage system.
and a ease of use so far missing in other offerings
The two most commonly used software products in small business are Microsoft Office and Quickbooks. Whether these programs are used on a Mac or a PC makes little difference, so "ease of use" isn't a factor here.
I meant that the OS X server was easy to use, so that in many creative agencies it was run by an artist or a manager.
If they had offered a really good way of syncing iPhones to their Calendaring/Email system, something on par with Active Sync, it could have been a killer.
If it didn't sync with Microsoft Exchange, the most common choice in small business email servers, then it wouldn't add much value. If it did sync with Exchange then it wouldn't generate any additional Mac sales , people would just sync their iPhones with the Exchange Server or Outlook running on their PCs. Even if the syncing support had been better it wouldn't have been "killer". No small business owner would ever say, "You know, the Mac Calendering and Email syncing with iPhone works so well that I'm going to ditch the PC and the Exchange server and replace them with Macs!".
If they had had a way of syncing their own server system to the iPhone, I bet they would have sold a few more of the server systems. Nobody would have switched off a working system, but many owners who were switching to macs on the desktop would have taken a longer look at OS X Server. They didnt, so they decided to kill off the whole product.
They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.
Which will never happen on a large scale. The IT department supports Macs and iPhone in the corporate infrastructure when C-Level executives or the people who sign the checks ask them to, but everyone else will continue to use the company issued PCs and standard desktop software installs and they will like it that way . If they disagree, they can find another job. Businesses care about making money, first and foremost. If being "cool" helps to make money then maybe, but for most businesses Apple offers less effective or at least no better business performance for a much higher price; that's a non-starter for official corporate IT support, especially in these economic times when IT support budgets have been cut to the bone.
I tend to believe that there in especially SMBs the Macs would offer a lower TCO, as they truly seem to need a bit less administration than their Windows counterparts (here I mean companies that do not employ full time internal IT staff). Otherwise I tend to agree with you. And "being cool because I use Apple" is such a useless straw man, I don't understand why you bother to throw it around.
I did indeed acknowledge that I neither work in nor know the film, television and advertising businesses. However, I can see how tools like FCP would be popular in television, especially advertising, where schedules are tighter and budgets are smaller than they are in feature films. Are you certain that FCP gets lots of use in the films business? I thought that Avid had most of the big movie studio business these days. Who uses FCP in film? Independent films or perhaps porn producers (that would be ironic given Steve Job's well known opinions on that subject matter)?
As a disclaimer: I actually work in the Film industry, as a technical manager. So I do know what I am talking about.
I would say quite a few hollywood films are edited on FCP. There is no use using high-end workstations for offline editing, FCP works fine as an editing tool. Sure, in some markets Avid _software_ versions are used for editing, but FCP has penetrated the market to a large degree across the globe. It's dead cheap, any editor or director can do editing anywhere on their laptop. There are quite a few big name directors that have been working with FCP for years.
FCP is not used for effects, grading or any of those things, but as an editing tool it definately is used in big studio features, as well as in indies and probably porn as well.
Active Directory. Sure, I dislike windows, but AD makes sense for many of my clients, allowing us to rely on one username/password combo internal (fileshare, wiki) systems and external services (CRM, Google Apps)...
If you're a big enough facility who needs to add another seat, I'm sure Apple will find a copy for you somewhere. I agree, though, I've suddenly put off my upgrade plans for a while.
I find that hard to believe. Sure, if you are a big broadcaster with 50+ seats it might be possible. But a lot of post houses are fucked (we have 10 seats, which is a lot in our market), Apple will do nada for us.
No one is removing copies of FCP7 from users. I suspect some people will be using for a couple more years.
How long has FCP been around? I bet it must be a mammoth task to make sure all the backwards compatibility is maintained. Effort that Apple obviously thinks is better spend looking forward.
Sometimes it makes sense to wipe the slate clean. It's not like they make these moves all the time. Could they have handled the situation better? Sure. And who's to say they won't? I hasn't even been a week.
Wiping the slate in this case might make sense for prosumers and hobbyists. HProfessionals otoh can have 10 years worth of projects archived, and needing to redo old projects is actually extremely common in this industry. Need a new version of your documentary with a different voice over or new subtitles? Sure, here is a quote *FOR DOING THE WHOLE FRICKING THING AGAIN, SINCE WE CANNOT OPEN THE OLD VERSION IN OUR SOFTWARE ANYMORE*. How do you guess the clients will feel after that?
just to show that Apple is in no way interested in the business market
Apple has seemingly never been interested in the business market, always treating it as a side show or icing on the cake compared to their consumer product lines. By all accounts, they never seriously attempted to compete head to head in the business and professional markets with IBM, Sun, Oracle and yes Microsoft. It should come as no surprise then that Apple once again chooses to move in the consumer direction.
They almost had a viable solution for the SMB market, with nice integrated tools and a ease of use so far missing in other offerings. Sadly, they never quite just made it. If they had offered a really good way of syncing iPhones to their Calendaring/Email system, something on par with Active Sync, it could have been a killer.
You are of course right, to a degree. They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.
Now I'm not a professional in the film, television or video editing business
You are completely wrong, but that is because you do not know the market. FCP is in everyday use with high end professionals, working every day in feature films, broadcast and ads. FCP is a perfectly good tool for what it is used for (offline or online editing). The high-end (hardware based tools) from Avid, Autodesk and Quantel are aimed at different points in the workflow.
There is a large group of upcoming pro FCP users - the freelancers that are basing their video production business off of a dSLR video workflow. Apple saw this coming, and created a great editing suite for them. It doesn't have the major high-end features like Color or Shake, but I think the release as-is is fine for freelance pro use. Additionally, the goal is to get this new market experienced on this release, so they're prepared for a workflow that includes more advanced color correction and group projects.
Studios are going to hate it, freelancers are going to love it.
Except that the freelancer will be fucked if he needs to hand the project over for grading or mixing. No XML export, remember?
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
