The Sudden Rise of FCP

I was trained on the Avid Meridien platform and my first time using FCP was on my very first job which I took on part-time while I was in my final year at Film, Sound and Video in Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

My employer at that time had a G4 running FCP v1.2.

It was slow, unstable, crashed a lot, lacked realtime effects support and dissolves needed to be rendered.

Suffice to say, it failed to make much of an impression. It was an interesting mix of a NLE with some motion graphics capability but lacked many of features we have been spoiled with on the Avid.

In the interim, I worked on the Avid Meridien based systems and transitioned to the Adrenline when that line was EOLed. I became overly familiar with the Avid error messages to an embarrassing extent.I remember a producer quizzically looking at me when I started explaining to her about DRAGON Error messages, BUFFER OVERRUN and UNDERRUN codes.

Progress

During that time, under the auspices of Apple’s ProApps department, FCP improved. Enough for Walter Murch to decide that he could do Cold Mountain on it. Before that, Rules of Attraction, Full Frontal and The Ring had also been cut on it.

It was a necessary response from the company now that Avid had decided to migrate to Windows XP for the Adrenaline, Mojo series of Media Composer. Apple no longer had a video killer app solely available on the mac platform.

Apple had to get marketshare back somehow set that in motion by purchasing Keygrip from Macromedia and renaming it Final Cut Pro.

Apple’s G5 became the biggest dongle in the world for the new fastest growing NLE.

Avid’s regression

Avid still had a dominant installed userbase and felt no need to compete with Apple on the basis of their disruptive price point. DVXpress was deemed to be their equivalent product line, but the restriction of it’s maximum output resolution to DV25 without additional hardware meant that it’s usefulness would be restricted to the hobbyist/prosumer/budget/boutique production house.

Avid’s workflow for footage originating on tape is first class.

The media management tools, offline/online media reconnection all save us loads of time by storing it in the omf media database and enabling simple and mostly painless media management.

However, importing files to Avid, has always been a pain for the exact same reason.

Importing video files in particular is akin to pulling teeth. The files have to converted to omf media on import before they can be used.

If the current show I’m editing was done on the Avid, I would easily be converting up to 80% of my footage.

Also, the disruptive price point of FCP meant that a lot of boutique production houses were sprouting up. Final Cut Studio meant any one man operation with $2500 had the tools (not unnecessarily the skills) to compete with a production house with an Avid and graphics department.

This has resulted in the freelance editing market shifting from 80% Avid, 15% FCP, 5% others in 2002 to what seems to be a 70% FCP, 25% Avid, 5% others pie. (These numbers are obviously not scientifically gathered, it’s just me asking other freelancers the percentage of jobs they do on each platform.)

Apple’s complacency

Apple hasn’t really been pushing the boundaries of what FCP can achieve. The impression that Avid seems to have given up on competing with them for the budget/boutique user demographic seems to have left them free to their own devices. Both companies neglected to have a booth at NAB.

There are numerous bugs that have existed from the first version I used (v1.2) to this very day.

Particularly annoying are the edit to tape compression error, the keyframe editor redraw bug, inconsistent render file linkages and the fact that every point update breaks the project file.

I think the problem with FCP is that the Proapps team seems to find it cooler to add new features than fix existing bugs.

The Future

I hope Avid continues to try to compete with FCP.

Competition is necessary for innovation and I think the best work we’ve seen from both developers were when they were fighting for marketshare. It would be great if Quantel, Sony (Vegas/xpri), Media 100 got back into the mix. The key to FCP’s sudden increase in marketshare wasn’t Avid users throwing away their Meridien and Nitris Boxes. It was the multitude of new users investing in hardware/software that was no longer priced out of their reach.

This market is ever expanding and it would be a great pity, not to mention a missed opportunity, if other companies allowed Apple complete dominance of this space.