Krazy Ken: Oh, boy, you picked a good episode to listen to today. If there's any company that can create a massive controversy over a video editing program, it's fricking Apple. Now, this wasn't just any old software update. This was a major rewrite with many new features. But it left many people feeling, well, let's just say emotional. This story actually got so big that a documentary was made about it. And we'll talk about all that stuf and more today in this special episode of Apple Keynote Chronicles.

Krazy Ken: Apple Keynote Chronicles is sponsored by Linode, simplify your infrastructure and cut your cloud bills in half with Linode's Linux virtual machines. To put it simply, if it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. Hey guys, how are you all doing? If you're new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken and welcome back to Apple Keynote Chronicles. And it's a special episode today because it's the 10th anniversary of Apple's Final Cut Pro X video editing software. And we're taking a brief break from our Steve Jobs Apple '90s timeline, and we're jumping to 2011 because a special Apple event happened at the SuperMeet in Las Vegas. And we're going to be talking about that today. But don't worry, we'll be resuming our regular timeline later. And I am joined here today, not by my normal co-host Brad, but my other friend, Brad. All of my friends are named Brad, who is the creator of the Of the Tracks documentary. Brad, thanks for coming on the show today.

Brad: Yeah. It's great to be here, Ken.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, absolutely. So I know we've known each other for a couple of years and we did a live show about a year ago about Final Cut Pro X, but for the listeners that don't know you, feel free to introduce yourself.

Brad: Yeah. My name is Brad Olsen. I am a flmmaker. I've been making videos since the late '90s. Started out on Adobe Premiere as a kid, maybe not a totally legal version of Adobe Premiere as many did. But then, I was introduced to this amazing thing called the Avid when I did an internship, I was 16 years old. And hey, video actually played back and I can edit with it. It was awesome. But then there was a problem, which was that the thing costs 80 grand. And my heart sank because I didn't know how at 16 with no job and just an internship, how I'd ever be able to aford that.

Krazy Ken: No way. Brad: Until a friend came over with an iBook G3 and Final Cut Pro running on it. And I saw the future right there. I was like, hey, the Final Cut is awesome. This is something I can actually hope to use. And over the years, that software got more and more popular. And then, this event that we're here to talk about happened. But I kind of built a career in those early days on Final Cut Classic as we call it or legacy or whatever you want to call it. And then when the transition happened, I made the crazy move to Final Cut Pro X. I've cut about a dozen independent feature flms, my documentary, and countless other projects on Final Cut. And have been out there for the last decade advocating for it even though in those early days, there was very few people that in the professional video market. There were very few people who were interested in using it and they all looked at me like I was crazy.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. I was a day one user as well of Final Cut Pro X. And I know we'll be talking a lot more about that kind of stuf later today as well. I guess you could say I was pretty crazy too, but it's in my name, Krazy Ken. So, it works. So just a little bit of background for anyone who's listening, who doesn't know what the software is we're talking about. Final Cut Pro is Apple's professional video editing software. And a big thing it did for the industry was, well, it kind of, it liberated this technology to people who didn't have $80,000 to buy these expensive hardware solutions to edit video on computers. It was just this, what was it? A $999 program, right? You put it on your Mac, you plug in your FireWire camera, and you can edit your videos right there on, like you said, at a fricking iBook G3 or whatever.

Krazy Ken: So, that was really cool. And then in 2011, Apple rewrote it. So, there's this dedicated loyal fan base. And now, there's this rewrite and a lot of changes and there were some sour reactions to it like you said so. And the story got kind of big. And we'll be talking about the aftermath of that today and the physical events that took place on stage during the sneak peek at the SuperMeet in Las Vegas. But I think it's going to be a good idea to just go over a brief history of the Final Cut Classic timeline. So Brad, if you'd like to go, you may take it away.

Brad: All right.

Krazy Ken: I can chime in too.

Brad: Yeah. So we talked about Adobe Premiere, that actually was created by a guy named Randy Ubillos in the early '90s. He did the frst three versions, single-handedly wrote those versions himself. And then, version four was something he did collaborate with the team on at Adobe. And then, I guess that was stressful. I don't know. He ended up moving away to Macromedia who was interested in developing their own video editing program. And then something kind of crazy happened, which was by 1997-ish, Apple wasn't looking so great. I think if you're talking about that timeline on your [crosstalk 00:05:19] podcasts, people might be familiar with that. But Steve Jobs really wanted a video editing application for the Mac and you saw Avid and Adobe were starting to withdraw support. So, there was a very dedicated professional video editing community that loved being on Mac.

Brad: And in 1999, when Final Cut Pro, which was previously called Key Grip at Macromedia, when that was being released or announced to NAB, Avid made a critical air, which is they said they were no longer going to support the Mac, which drove all these people over to this Apple booth and NAB, which is the National Association Broadcasters convention in Vegas. And it gave it a really good kind of early start in 1999. Of course, it was never really positioned at that time to overtake Hollywood editors, but it ft this niche between somebody cutting their home videos and that top high-end. There's kind of this middle area of television and documentary flmmakers, corporate video, weddings, and all of that. And Steve Jobs had this incredible vision of DV, FireWire digital video, and the Mac. And of course we had iMovie, but the Final Cut Pro was the more professional video editing software.

Brad: So, that all started out really great. And the big moment for Final Cut Pro where it started making its way into the feature flm world was with Cold Mountain, which was edited by Walter Murch. And he was just really crazy. It was Final Cut Pro 3, I think. And this was 2003 that this movie is released. So he kind of forced this application to work in a Hollywood feature flm environment, which it wasn't really designed to do. But that sort of blew the lid of of the possibilities. And Apple started really doubling down. They made Final Cut Pro HD. They made Final Cut Studio. They added Color, and Soundtrack Pro, and Motion to the mix. So, it was this fully featured suite of apps. You could burn your DVDs with DVD Studio Pro. And there was all these other little tools and great things about Final Cut Studio. I'd say around 2005 to 2007, it really felt like Apple cared about the video professional.

Brad: And they started taking ground from Avid as well, which is probably scary for Avid. Apple also had Shake, which wasn't part of Final Cut Studio, but it was this really high-end compositing program that they bought. And they took the licenses for $40,000 and they brought it down to $500. But then when they brought the price down, they said, "Oh, and by the way, we're end of lifeing Shake," which people are still upset about to this day in the visual efects industry. And that put Final Cut Pro into question. What is Apple's loyalty to Final Cut Pro? There was also a really small thing that happened in 2007 for Apple. I don't know if you're aware of that, but it was an announcement of a new device that maybe changed the company's direction.

Krazy Ken: Oh, yeah. The Newton, that's right.

Brad: Oh, yeah. The Newton.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. The "i" thing.

Brad: That was totally, the iNewton.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. I think we're talking about the cellphone thing.

Brad: Yeah. The one that Steve Palmer laughed at and said, "No one's going to pay $500 for a phone."

Krazy Ken: To be fair, he did say, "It could sell well." He did say it could.

Brad: Yeah. After he made a fool of himself.

Krazy Ken: That's true. Yeah. The iPhone, big deal.

Brad: Slight [inaudible 00:08:43]. iPhone really changed I think a lot about Apple. It blew the company up. I mean, I shouldn't say think, we know it did. And it really changed the whole company as far as the proft margins and where the money was at. And I think a lot of focus shifted at Apple as far as priorities. And it felt like from somebody on the outside that maybe video professionals wasn't their priority anymore, which was a little sad. But it felt that way because then in 2009, when they rolled out Final Cut Pro 7, there was hardly any love put into that release. There was hardly any features. They gave us colored tabs and markers. It was the main thing I remember. It was such a ridiculous... And they lowered the price and it wasn't 64-bit, which was really odd that by that point in 2009, it felt like everybody's switching over to 64 bit architecture wise, Final Cut Pro not. And we would run into these memory limitations. It would say, "Oh, you've used your 4GBs of RAM."

Krazy Ken: Oh, 4GBs. Brad: That's all we had.

Krazy Ken: Yep.

Brad: Boom! And you can't do anything more. It's like, oh, thanks, Final Cut. So I think that's important context to be aware of before you get into what happened in 2011, because I think a lot of people were wondering if Apple still cared or if they only cared about iPhones and then the iPad came out. And they were looking to see, well, what are they going to do? So then, we get to 2011. I don't know. Did I cover everything? Is there any interesting tidbits?

Krazy Ken: That sounds perfect. I'm going to throw in my little tidbit about iMovie. Because I remember when the newer versions of iMovie were coming out, it was having features that weren't in Final Cut Pro. And I was like, whoa, wait a minute, I'm jealous now. The consumer Apple video editor has built in stabilization and all this cool skimming and flmstrip view stuf. But to be honest my young brain, I wasn't really too much of a techie back then. I wasn't even thinking about the future and thinking, oh, this could be the next Final Cut. I wasn't thinking that.

Krazy Ken: I was just salty that I didn't have those features in Final Cut, but all the iMovie kids had it. But that was the same as we're going to fnd out later, Randy Ubillos, who is the chief architect on the new version of Final Cut was also doing this iMovie stuf. I just rewatched your documentary earlier. Randy was working on something like a program to go along with Final Cut, right? And it had all this cool stuf. And Steve was like, that's the next iMovie. And that's what ended up happening before Final Cut Pro X, right?

Brad: Yeah. So, you can actually fnd the video online to Steve Jobs site. I put a video up on YouTube that goes into that a little bit more where it shows a clip from Steve Jobs and then my interview with Randy, where they talk about this story of Randy went on a vacation. He and his husband were flming underwater with an HDV camera in a housing. And they had all this footage of underwater and some sharks occasionally. So as he scrubs through in Final Cut Pro, he's opening up a clip and he scrubs through it and it goes blue, shark, blue, shark. So, he found it was this very tedious thing to load up each clip and drag the scrubber. So, he had this idea of what if you had flm strips and what if you could just skim along them and it would show you the frames. Brad: So he had someone mock it up, as far as the UI. He did obviously some of the code for that and they called it RoughCut. And they present it to Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs saw it and said, "That's iMovie, because we need a new iMovie." And I saw that and I heard that story and I had a similar reaction to use. By this point I was starting my kind of professional, I was still in college, but I was starting my professional career in video, and I was defnitely jealous of this idea that Final Cut wasn't good enough. I mean, come on, it's Final Cut Pro.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, right?

Brad: What do you mean it's not good enough to do your project on? But then I too found myself, like my parents would want to do a video for my grandparents' anniversary or something, and they would have tons of photos. And I realized it's just so much easier with the Ken Burns efect and the magnetism of moving things around to do this in iMovie. So, that's the only time I was really dabbling in iMovie, but I did fnd it was faster at certain things than Final Cut Pro. That was defnitely one of them. It was just so easy to click and zoom in on an area and go to the next picture like, oh, I want to swap the order. And it was just really fast at swapping things around.

Brad: Whereas Final Cut 7, the transitions and everything, it was just really clunky to try to copy and paste and open up the timeline. So, I started feeling like Apple's got to do something new and diferent. Even when I saw the iPad release, we are now getting rumors about, will Final Cut Pro come to the iPad? I was thinking, what would that look like back in 2009 when the iPad was announced? So what's right, 2009, 2010?

Krazy Ken: 2010, yeah. Early 2010.

Brad: Yeah. But I was starting to imagine what that might look like back then. So, I was looking at the future. Everybody else was wondering, what is Apple doing? It looks like they're abandoning professionals. And I think the stage is set for what came next now.

Krazy Ken: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. There is one more thing as Steve Jobs would say that I wanted to mention, the email. There was the email in 2010 and Steve Jobs replied to it. You want to speak to that a little bit?

Brad: Yeah. What was the guy's name? Alex J. It's Alex, I think.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, it was Alex something. Alex Jason, yeah. Brad: Okay. There was an email from a guy I think named Alex J. He asked Steve Jobs, what was going on with Final Cut? Or does Apple just, do you care about the professional market or just iPhones and iPads? And Steve Jobs actually emailed him back and said that the next release will be awesome. That was a big line. So it was like, we got something. I remember there being rumors around that time. And yeah, it was just building that sort of excitement of, okay, what are you going to do? Steve Jobs says, it's awesome, it better be awesome. And it's hard to think of now with how big Apple is and just Tim Cook really, is he aware of Pro Apps? But Steve Jobs at that time was involved in every little thing Apple did and he was defnitely aware of and looking at what the Pro Apps team was doing.

Brad: The rumor I've heard is that he was the one who said, "Don't just make Final Cut 64-bit, rethink video editing." He gave that mandate to the Pro Apps team. And that got them thinking about what's happening. People are shooting on memory cards. People are shooting more footage than before with digital video. Film and tape was pricier than just shooting on a memory card. So, what types of tools will people need in the future? [H shot 264 00:15:22] was becoming a thing and it did not play well in Final Cut 7, even though Final Cut 7 said it supported H shot 264. That was a lie. So I mean, you had to transcode, it wouldn't play back. So, there was these areas where Final Cut was clunky and old and wasn't updated. And there were ways to kind of work with media diferently. So, that I think a lot of that was the conversation around how do we reinvent or rethink editing.

Krazy Ken: I agree with what you said earlier. I think everything is set for that fateful day, April 12th, 2011.

Brad: So a couple of weeks before that, leading up to that event. Well, actually prior to that, Apple if you remember they pulled from events. They used to have a booth at NAB. And they pulled from Macworld. They announced they're only doing their own events. They're not going to be at other people's expos and other people's events. That included NAB. So a couple of weeks before NAB, Steve Jobs comes by and says, "Hey guys, what are you showing of at NAB?" And they're like, well, what do you mean? We pulled out of events. We don't have anything prepped. He's like, oh, you got to show the next version of Final Cut Pro. And they're like, oh, okay. So, there's this creative pro user group that Michael Horton and Dan Berube would put on. And it had been going for a little over 10 years, I want to say around 10 years at that point.

Brad: And maybe not the SuperMeets, but the creative pro user group community that building up over a decade. And they did these SuperMeets. And they already at this point, obviously had their sponsors lined up and presenters lined up. And Apple comes in and says, "Hey, will you guys let us show our Final Cut?" And they're like, oh, well, we could probably open up a slot. They're like, no, we'll buy out all your sponsors.

Krazy Ken: Oh my gosh.

Brad: Because we have to control the show. It can only be us on stage. So you had the Final Cut Pro user group SuperMeet at NAB. And it's like, what are they going to do, not show the new Final Cut Pro?

Krazy Ken: Right.

Brad: Their hands were tied. They really had no choice. I'm sure that made competing editing software companies happy. And of course, there's just all this buzz, because this was like, hey guys, we're switching the program. Apple's now going to present. They're taking over the whole evening. And from talking to people who were there, the fre marshal had to kick people out. There was too many people cramming into that room.

Krazy Ken: That's just like the original Macintosh at the Flint Center. There were so many people there. They had to go outside. The shareholders, man, that's crazy. Apple just drums up so much hype and stuf. That's their super power, man. So everyone, it's like 1700 people packed in this hall, and Apple's got it all decked out. So it looks like a typical Apple event with their nice curtains and the little simple lighting and the nice traditional Steve Jobs gradient, keynote background and everything. It looks like a normal Apple event, but at the SuperMeet at NAB. So, Richard Townhill comes out on stage and he was the director of video applications at Apple at the time. For those who want to see the keynote later, it was not ofcially recorded. It was just recorded from people in the audience.

Krazy Ken: Some parts are chopped of and whatnot, but I tried to fnd the most complete version. And I put a link to that in the show notes there. But yeah, Richard Townhill from Apple comes out on stage and people are excited. People are cheering and applauding and they're really hyped up. And he comes out and says, "We're going to introduce, give the sneak peek. We're going to introduce this version of Final Cut Pro that's going to be as revolutionary as the frst version of Final Cut Pro." So that's a pretty bold statement, so everyone's getting excited. And he talks about the Power Mac G3 and FireWire, how you could just have your Mac and you can plug in your camera and capture your video and edit. And that was like $50,000 cheaper than competing solutions. If you wanted to edit video, you can just do it right at your desk.

Krazy Ken: And one of my favorite parts was when he was talking about the DV format that Final Cut was pushing. Someone in the audience was just like, yeah. He just yelled so fricking loud. I just love that kind of energy in the room. And then, it kind of just quickly goes through a few statistics. What kind of major broadcasters are using Final Cut Pro, ABC, BBC, CCTV, CBS, CNN, Walt Disney? He talks about how big it is an independent flm, 94% customer satisfaction, and the install base in 2010 just passed 2 million. So just for context, this is a big deal. A lot of people use it. The customer satisfaction is high and the fan base is really strong. So that's why if you make a lot of changes, there might be people that are really happy and there might be some people that are not so happy about that.

Brad: Because you were talking about how is the FireWire and the DV and how did it make changes that might upset some people. My favorite thing from...

Brad: ... you make changes, it might upset some people. My favorite thing from Richard's presentation, which at the time made me go, "Yeah!" as a Final Cut fan, but then looking back, I'm like, maybe that wasn't the most diplomatic thing to do, was a graph that he showed of Final Cut users and then the competition. And it was showing that Avid and Premiere were kind of nose diving, and Final Cut Pro was getting up to like 2 million users. And me, as a Final Cut Pro person, it made me feel really excited. But yeah, maybe not the best thing to do after you stole the stage and booted them of. And now they're in the back of the room, booing and hissing.

Krazy Ken: Oh gosh, I didn't even think about that. Because even when he's on stage, he's like, "The competition is probably not happy that I'm showing you this." He says something like that. And like they're in a race for second place in the graphs drawn on the screen. Yeah. Ooh, poking the bear. Oh no. So then, Peter Steinhauer, who is the architect of Final Cut Pro, he comes out on stage. And he's like, "This is the worldwide sneak peek of an all new version of Final Cut Pro. It's a brand new version, Final Cut Pro X with a Roman numeral X." That's what Apple did with Mac OS X, they put a Roman numeral X on there. I guess that's their brand name for like, "Hey, this is all new." So it's rebuilt from the ground up, modern application on a modern foundation.

Krazy Ken: And this got a crap ton of applause. It's 64 bit now, there we go. No more four gigabyte ram limit. But hey, if you're rewriting an application, why not, like Brad was talking about earlier, rethink editing? Redo the application, make it better, don't just spend all this fricking time rewriting all the code underneath. You might as well do other things while you're in there. And the cool thing is Apple had this advantage because they weren't making cross-platform stuf, they just had to deal with the one platform and make it great. So they can make a [coco 00:21:51] application, they could put in all of these Snow Leopard technologies, which was the version of Mac OS X at the time. So you could do things like core graphics and core animation and OpenCL, which took advantage of the GPU for computational tasks, grand central dispatch, which utilized multi-cores in your processors more.

Krazy Ken: Things we, especially as non-developer people, we kind of just take for granted today. But back then, OpenCL was a newer thing. This was introduced in the Mac OS in 2009 with Snow Leopard. So it was only like two years old at the time. And all this stuf makes for a really fast application. And for those who haven't used Final Cut Pro X, it's really fast. That's one reason I use it, it is this speed. And I love that someone from the audience, right after Pete says it's 64 bit, there's like a guy in the audience that is like, "Thank you. I love you, Pete!"

Brad: Well, that's something to just comment on. Because making my documentary, I obviously interviewed people who were there, people who were on stage. And the interesting thing was this idea that some people thought everybody in the audience was so excited and that they were all jumping up and they were so thrilled. And it was like any big Apple event, but just for video editors. And then people who are a little further back in the room saw that yeah, half the audience was jumping up and clapping and applauding and [crosstalk 00:23:13] things. Krazy Ken: Sure.

Brad: The other half was like, hold on, what are we changing here? What's missing? Am I still going to have everything? And is this going to work for me as a professional? Because again, that doubt from before was still very much in the room.

Krazy Ken: Absolutely.

Brad: I think everybody wanted to love what Apple was going to do, but there were defnitely skeptical and cynical people there.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. And it's a good thing that you mentioned that, because a lot of this footage that you see is the front row people. And those are probably the people that are going to be excited no matter what, and that's what you see on camera. But yeah, there are those people back there. And I get it, I'm the same way. Any time at my day job someone comes in and they're talking about these technology changes, my brain is constantly going, "Wait a minute, is that going to work? Wait, what is that going to break?" I totally get it. Embrace the future, that's what I got to do. But my brain still sticks there.

Krazy Ken: So then, they waste no more time. They show this new user interface on the screen, it comes up on the slide. And I remember, there was no live stream of this, but I was watching somebody post the pictures on the MacRumors live feed or whatever. And I remember seeing it and my initial reaction was what a lot of people thought, I was like, wait a minute, this looks like iMovie. I was kind of stuck at frst. But the more I looked at it, the more I liked it.

Brad: Because there was a look to it that was very much... If you remember that time, Apple was kind of taking things from the iPhone, which had some skew morphism stuf.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, true.

Brad: And they had the cross hatch background and some things in it that looked a little consumery and not like what you would expect from a professional application. I was more interested in the innovations and what it could do. I fgured that some of that UI design could be ironed out. But for sure, the iMovie Pro moniker came from that moment of just seeing it and it looks like iMovie. So that's who they're trying to get, is that prosumer. and everybody thinks they're more than that, so... Even if they aren't. They want to be more, they aspire to be more than that.

Krazy Ken: And for those who want some visual representation of what we're talking about here, I do have a link in the show notes that will... it has some screenshots in it of what the older Final Cut Classic looked like and what Final Cut Pro 10.0 looked like so you can just get an idea under your belt. Because I'm friends with some other buddies, even my other co-host Brad, he's been using Final Cut for a long time, but even he wasn't a 10.0 user. He started using it when the library system came out in 10.1, which was a big update. But that was in 2013, that was like two years later. So yeah, I got some screenshots in that link in the show notes.

Krazy Ken: So during the presentation, they broke down the user interface and the three big things they were focusing on were image quality, organization, and editing. And again, as video people now, and especially video people that weren't editing back then, we take a lot of this stuf for granted. But this was kind of new at the time. So one thing they were promoting was color sync, which is something Steve Jobs frst introduced at a [Sabled 00:26:14] seminar I believe, to get color to look the same across diferent displays for desktop publishing and all that stuf. Now it worked for video, fully color managed color synced video was a big deal. So now that was built in and resolution independent. So if you've got a fricking 4K timeline and you want to put SD and HD and all these diferent formats in there, it worked. Like Brad was talking about earlier, transcoding HT64 and stuf like that. You didn't have to do that, you could just throw things in and it would play. So that was a big deal.

Krazy Ken: And they also talked more about Grand Central Dispatch, which was that multi-core Snow Leopard technology. And I do have a little sound bite here because I love this part, because any person who was using Final Cut Classic just absolutely loves the writing video window. When you go to render you can't do anything else in the app and the little progress bar just chugs across the screen. But with Grand Central Dispatch, you could do background rendering. So I'm just going to play this part. I love it here.

Speaker 1: The [GQ 00:27:11] that you got installed on your machine to scale from your MacBook, all the way up to the highest end machines, and render your work as quickly as is possible. What that means in practical terms is this dialogue that you love is gone. Krazy Ken: Oh man. And I love it, it just disintegrates on the screen. Background rendering, oh man, fricking love it.

Brad: Yeah, how much of my life has been spent watching progress bars?

Krazy Ken: Dude, I know.

Brad: And the funny thing is I actually turn background rendering of and manually render when I need to, but most of the time in Final Cut, I don't have to render because it just works so fast that I can play back unrendered things and it works.

Krazy Ken: I'm the same way. I turn of the background rendering because it works fne. I rarely have any problems unless I have a bajillion efects stacked up or something. Yeah. And if I have to render, I just select it, press my shortcut key, and then it just does it.

Brad: Content auto analysis was another big one where it sounded really, really cool, and I hope with AI they get back to it, but I turned of because it takes too long. And it's like, I can look at the shot and see there's a person in the shot. I don't need you to analyze it to tell me that.

Krazy Ken: Right, yeah. I thought the same thing. It's cool that it can automatically determine like, "Hey, this shot has one person in it, this shut has two people, this is a medium shot, this is a wide shot. Oh, we can do-"

Brad: Is it shakey?

Krazy Ken: Yeah, is it shakey, is there a color balance we can do? It's cool that that's there, but I'm the same way. I turn all of it of. I don't turn any of it on until I'm like, okay, I got a rough cut here and now I know, okay, I just need to turn on the stabilizer here. And then you click a button and yippee. It doesn't need to do it all in the background for me, whatever.

Krazy Ken: So another big feature they introduced was the whole keyword collections feature set, which is something I still use today. Anytime, like at my day job, we just got some new hires that came from a Premiere background. And every time we show them the keywording stuf, it's kind of like, whoa. So the keyword collections is a set of features and one of the features is range based keywording. So in a traditional NLE, non-linear editor, let's say you had a clip that had two criteria. Maybe it's a guy surfng, so it falls under the criteria of there's a person in this shot and the criteria of water, because there's water in the background. Well now you'd have to duplicate the clip and put it in a bin to have it all sorted and all this stuf.

Krazy Ken: But with Final Cut, you can just label stuf with these keywords. And you can just click and drag and say, hey, I just want this middle part of this clip to have this keyword, not the rest of it. And it just does it for you. It's so cool because it's very database like, and then you can just search things and click on smart collections that automatically can pull stuf together. And it's just like even today, 10 years later, super useful features that I still use pretty much every day.

Brad: Yeah, I love keyword collections. And prior you mentioned duplicating things, putting them in diferent bins, you would also create sub clips.

Krazy Ken: Sub clips, gosh.

Brad: And what was annoying about that is once you created a sub clip, there was kind of this disassociation with the original clip. So if you wanted to drag out something beyond where the sub clip ended, nope, got to go back in the other bin and fnd where that other clip is and drag out the media again. It was just really rigid. The way that bins work in traditional editing software is very, very rigid and limited. And most people would end up doing a lot of string outs and organization on the timeline where you'd have two or three hour timelines with media and they'd put things on diferent tracks. And sure, it was kind of organized, but compare that to the power of a keyword collection and it's not even close.

Krazy Ken: Not even close.

Brad: And the fact that I can just type in and search for birds, boom, there's all my shots with birds. It's incredible. And I look forward to the day, again, we talked about AI may be improving some of these things I don't use as much, but that is one area where I envision in the future... Already services like Photos on the iPhone and the Photos app analyze a lot of this stuf. Google and Amazon analyze a lot of this stuf. If we can start getting those range based keywords to be AI driven and then have a keyword editor where we can check on and of the things that we want and don't want, then imagine how much that's going to speed up. And Final Cut's already got this foundation for that. I haven't seen anything in Resolve, Premiere, or Avid that really compares. You can select markers and give markers arrange, but it's not as dynamic and quick and searchable and database like as keywords are. Krazy Ken: Yeah, totally. It's interesting that you bring up the AI thing because I guess I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but with Apple Silicon being in the Macs, the neural engine, that could totally speed up AI things. And yeah, it will automatically detect birds and animals or whatever. I don't know, maybe even mountain formations or something. I don't know, it could just like it does on the iPhone, but inside your video editing software. Yeah, that could be pretty cool.

Brad: Well, and this all ties back to what we were saying earlier, right? What was one of the problems with having too much footage and too much material? You're not going to be able to watch it all. They always say, oh a good editor sits and watches everything and logs everything. Problem is-

Krazy Ken: I'm not a good editor.

Brad: When you've got... yeah. When you've got too many, too much footage and not enough time, Final Cut is your friend because these organizational things basically compress that amount of time you need so you can fnd things faster than that. And keywords was a huge part of solving that problem.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, absolutely. So then they talk about... Well, that was like the organization part. Then they talk about editing, the main heart of this whole thing. So in a track based editor, which is the stuf before Final Cut Pro X, Final Cut Classic or whatever, it can be easy to forget relationships between clips. If you have a sound efect underneath the video clip and you move the video clip, now the sound efect is just stranded there. Well, the software doesn't know there's a connection there. You may remember at that time, but the next day you'll be like, "Oh crap. That's not going to where I want it to go in my head."

Krazy Ken: But this whole clip connections thing, this was a new feature for Final Cut Pro X. It fxes that. So if you do have, let's say a little video clip, you have a title connected to that video clip and a sound efect attached to that video clip, you move the video clip and everything just travels with it, which is super handy. I still use that all the time too. And it prevents all those collisions from happening where you may accidentally overwrite stuf, and then you accidentally delete something out of the timeline and have to bring it back or you knock something else out. It prevents that from happening, those clip connections there. Brad: Yeah. And this whole magnetic timeline is... The organization is something that I always say people... I don't know why anybody would resist that, anybody wouldn't want that. Everyone wants that. The magnetic timeline for editors who've cut in traditional systems is the thing that they fght against the most because they're not-

Krazy Ken: That's what you're... yeah.

Brad: ... sure what it's doing for them. Things move, they move something and other things move around it and move with it. And maybe you don't want that sound efect to come with it. And how do you do that? And they're used to lassoing clips and selecting multiple edit points and doing the ripple edits or opening up the timeline and closing it back up. And they're sort of the master of organizing all of that. But when you have 24, 36 tracks of audio and a dozen tracks of video, that goes of your screen. And being able to remember all of those connections is time consuming. And you have to double check it. And my biggest problem in Final Cut 7 and earlier editing software, or other applications, because I still use Premiere from time to time and Resolve-

Krazy Ken: Same here.

Brad: ... is I would actually start arguing with producers and clients about whether or not we should do a change late in the process. Because I knew it was going to potentially mess something up with the music or overwrite or I might accidentally delete something. So they'd be like, "Can we add a shot or can we delete this shot? Or can we take second of of this?" And I'd be like, "Well, you liked this yesterday. I don't understand why you want to make this change." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 10 minutes later we'd either make the change or wouldn't. And in Final Cut X, I just make the change. It doesn't matter. I'm not worried about breaking things.

Brad: And you have an unlimited amount of undos from the time you open the application. That's something I don't know if people know that, but other editing applications would limit you and in Final Cut X, it's like you can just keep undoing to the point that you opened it. So I never worried. Once I wrap my head around the magnetic timeline, everything just became about the creative storytelling and that part of my brain in Final Cut 7 that had to think technically and plan six or seven moves ahead like a ninja, I just don't think about it anymore. Like yeah, sure, you want to extend that shot? Done. You want to delete that? Gone. It's huge. And yet, it's the controversial thing with Final Cut because people are like, "I don't understand what just happened."

Brad: And I should say, this is for older generations of editors who are used to other systems, not kids who are coming from iMovie and have never looked at another editing system. To them it just makes sense. Of course this clip comes after this clip, and if I want to reorder it, it goes like that. And of course the title I had there goes with it, why would it not? That's where I put the title. So that to me is encouraging that this new paradigm could really take hold with a lot more people than the older paradigm, which was very technical driven. And I think there's a lot of emotion surrounding 10 years of technical knowledge. Like, I spent all this time learning every little thing about Final Cut 7 and they ripped it away from me and this thing doesn't work the same. So who am I? What is my identity? People had a real crisis with that.

Krazy Ken: Right, they did.

Brad: So I interviewed people that were excited about magnetic timeline. You move a clip and the audio clip bumps out of the way, there's no tracks that restrict it. And then there's other people like, "Wait a minute, what are you doing? You're ruining everything. Stop. You can put lipstick on the interface, you can give us keywords, but please don't touch the timeline. That's my domain. I know that. Why are you changing it?"

Krazy Ken: Yeah. I remember when I frst used it, it maybe confused me for like 10 minutes, but then I was fne. And as I started using it more, I was like, oh, this absolutely makes sense. I can move this thing and it doesn't knock things out of sync. If I drag a clip to change the ordering of a clip, the other one just bumps into where the old clip used to be. And it just works. And this is a personal thing of mine, I don't know if everybody loves this, but I like it that when I press undo it animates backwards what I did so I can actually see the thing moving so I know where, point A to point B where it actually moved. Because sometimes I'll do something and be like, wait, what'd I do? Undo, see it fy across the screen, oh, that's what I did. So those little touches work really well with how my brain works.

Brad: Yeah. It's visual feedback.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, visual feedback. That is how it is. Also when you're slipping a clip, in older editors, you slip it, you'll get your view up in the top. Like, okay, where's the in and out point? But in the timeline, it's just kind of a box. But in Final Cut, it's like a physical flm strip that moves. You see the thumbnails move with your mouse cursor to see what's happening, what am I actually doing when I use this slip tool here? And it just makes sense.

Brad: Yeah. It makes you more confdent in what you're about to do or what you're doing when you're doing it. Or like you said, the animating backwards, it really helps you understand your story. And I think it feeds into this design principle behind the original Macintosh, which was this idea that if somebody was over your shoulder watching you on the Mac, and same with like the iPad, it's like the Apple philosophy, right? That they would understand how to use it based of of watching you use it. Very true with the iPhone, right?

Krazy Ken: Yeah.

Brad: Does the iPhone come with a user manual? Now think about a Blackberry. Blackberry's came with user manuals. An iPhone never came with a user manual, but you could watch somebody... Grandma could watch you do a few things and she can do it too. And Final Cut Pro, very much in its DNA with Final Cut Pro X, had that mentality.

Krazy Ken: Yeah.

Brad: To me, that's light years beyond. And if you look at other companies, I don't think they have... This was, when I talked to Dave Cerf who was one of the lead designers on the magnetic timeline, this was very much in the design philosophy of what they were trying to achieve. And he said, "At other companies we would never have been given the freedom to get some of those things right." For example, when you want to ripple an in-point in Final Cut X and you drag to the left, it pushes things down the timeline. Now, technically it's not like you just started things earlier in time, right? What should probably technically happen is that everything grows to the right. But it doesn't feel right. And that was something that they spent months on getting right. And Apple said, "Yeah, keep working on it until it's right." Whereas Premiere they're like, "The gray box is fne. Move on. We need to get the other feature out."

Krazy Ken: Yeah. So Pete is wrapping up on stage and he's like, "I could talk about this for hours." And someone from the audience yells, "Yeah, we waited for hours!" So, okay. So he's like- Krazy Ken: ... yells, "Yeah, we waited for hours." Okay. So he's like, "Okay, Randy Ubillos is going to come out on stage. He's the chief architect video applications at Apple." And then he brings Randy out on stage. But I did want to circle back and talk about those sponsors for a quick sec that Apple bought them out to have the space. And I get it, but I'm glad they didn't buy out my awesome sponsor and my awesome friends at Linode. Because without them, I couldn't be doing this podcast. I've been working with them for a while. They are really awesome guys and they've got a pretty cool product. So if any of you guys listening need simplify your cloud infrastructure and cut those bills in half, you can do that with Linux virtual machines by Linode. You can develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.

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Krazy Ken: All right, so we're back at the SuperMeet in Las Vegas at NAB 2011, and Pete Steinhauer is just leaving the stage. And Apple's chief architect of video applications, Randy Ubilos is coming out on stage and he's going to do a live demo of Final Cut Pro X, which he does disclaim is a beta. And he's like, "Hopefully it cooperates", which I think it did. So this is where they frst show that flmstrip view in action, which Brad already talked about, where you can just skim through things and fnd what you're looking for and kind of just select the range you want, kind of like you're selecting text in a document. And that's the frst time we see that demo live.

Krazy Ken: He shows the favorite button, which I love using. You can just highlight something, press F, it puts a little green line there and it's like, "Hey, this part of this clip is green. This is a favorite part you like. Now you have it." And it's just such a simple user interface that he shows of. And again, I got links in the show notes if you guys want to check out the stuf more graphically. And he shows of things like the timeline index, which I love using. It's like a vertical table of contents of your timeline, so to speak.

Krazy Ken: And he does verbally say, "There are no tracks." I'm pretty sure people who were watching the event kind of were picking up on that, but not like verbally, it's like, there's no tracks. And everyone in that audience is used to editing on a track based editor. So this is a big shift for everybody, like we were talking about, the new and old paradigm, the magnetic timeline. It's diferent. There's a learning curve here, but I totally think it was worth it. Thankfully I've only been cutting on a track based editor for like three years before I jumped into Final Cut Pro X on day one, so I really didn't have to unlearn anything. That was just my lucky situation, I guess.

Brad: Some people call it the learning wall.

Krazy Ken: The learning... Bam!

Brad: You got a break through it.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, yeah. I like that. There we go, yeah, screw the curve, you got to break through this wall. But yes, it's not tracked based per se, but in a way tracks somewhat kind of come and go as they're needed, especially a little more now that we have newer features like the audio rolls and stuf. Those are a little more tracky, but still not as rigid as tracks. And another cool thing Randy demoed was clip syncing based on time code, but also based on waveform, which is pretty sweet. So if you record with a lower budget setup, with a DSLR and a separate audio recorder, Final Cut can sync the good audio from the audio recorder with the scratched crappy audio from the DSLR, sync them together just by looking at the audio wave form. And that was a big deal because I'm pretty freaking sure Final Cut [class 00:44:29] couldn't do that. I was on Express, I know I couldn't do it on Express, but that was really cool.

Brad: And speaking of, this is getting ahead, but multicam was not demoed or showed of.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. I'm pretty sure that a lot of people crapping their pants in the audience.

Brad: That did that show up. But there was a way to synchronize audio at that point.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. And then, I got to play the soundbite for this one, this one was really cool. He was showing the color matching, which I don't use a lot, but it was a cool technical demo to see how quick it adjusted. And it was also cool to see how fast those color corrections just rendered in the background. So I'm going to play this right here with Randy's demo from the event.

Randy Ubillos: So we have this clip, it's a sunset shot. And the next one is the cars driving away. It would be nice if those two matched. All we have to do is come up here and choose match color. And this brings up two up this way. And then I just select the clip I want to match to. So if you want to match the interview shot, I just click, if I want to match to the inside of the car or I want to [crosstalk 00:45:31] color match the sunset shot. The one [crosstalk 00:45:33] I'll show you, you see the orange bar up there that's there? That's the render bar that's up there. And... oh, it's gone.

Krazy Ken: "Oh, it's gone." So Randy wraps up his live demo, Richard from the beginning of the presentation comes back out on stage and he's like, "Well, hey, when does it come out?" "We're shipping in June." "Yeah, that's great." And then he's like, "How can you get it?" "Well, App Store." Because this was new on Snow Leopard. The App Store was a new thing on the Mac and this is the frst version of Final Cut to be downloadable from the App Store, so that was a pretty big deal. And then the cost. Because this-

Brad: What's it going to cost? Krazy Ken: Yeah. He was like, "How much is it going to cost?" "299." That got a standing ovation. People were cheering like crazy. It was so afordable. And that was going back to the frst version of Final Cut, it being 999 and usable on a Mac as opposed to like a $50,000 system, just making it more afordable and more accessible was part of their mission. And making this 299 and just having it as a simple download from the App Store, that was a big deal, that made it super accessible to people.

Brad: Now aside from people who thought we don't want accessibility, which is a silly thing to think, any professionals, like, "I don't want people using the same tools as me. I don't want kids using the same thing as me." It's like, get over yourself. Are you a professional storyteller and editor or are you a technician pushing buttons? Because that shouldn't bug you. But I can feel some sympathy for say retailers and third-party sellers. And there's this whole market of people that would go around selling Apple systems and software to professional production companies.

Krazy Ken: Good point.

Brad: And that just nuked everything they did. It's through the App Store, there's no more box, I can't get them a deal on it, I can't make a little cut when I sell a Mac with Final Cut on it. So there was this whole kind of side business market that just was blown away by that announcement. And I'm sure they were like, "Oh, well, I guess I can't do that anymore."

Krazy Ken: Ooh. Yeah. I didn't quite think about that perspective, but yeah, that's totally understandable.

Brad: Things change, things move on, and honestly, it was something Apple had to do. But I think this also, this whole 299 App Store announcement had another side efect. Which was if you remember when iMovie 08 came out, you would buy a iMovie 08 and you could get iMovie 06 with it. The install disk would come with it.

Krazy Ken: Oh, yeah.

Brad: And iMovie 06 had features that iMovie 08 didn't.

Krazy Ken: And I remember that, because I was still on 06 because I... Wow, yeah. I didn't really like 08 at frst.

Brad: Yeah. 08 was very much a new application, missing a lot of features, sound familiar? So Randy had this idea that he pitched to the marketing team, which was, well, we should launch Final Cut 7 with Final Cut X. But how do you distribute Final Cut 7 on the App Store, which is old code, old software, previously came in a box, how do you release that? You ship them a box? There was this whole thing of we can't put an old piece of software that wasn't... Final Cut 7 wasn't a self-contained app. That's another thing about the App Store is you kind of have to have a bundled app that's all together. And Final Cut 7 was not that.

Brad: So it really wasn't possible to Final Cut 7 onto the App Store and allow users to download it. But that was one of the things people hated, is that Final Cut 7, aside from the boxes that were already on the shelves, Apple wasn't producing more, shipping more, and it was basically pulled of. And Final Cut Pro X pops up on the App Store. And another thing if you weren't careful is if you decided to buy it and you wanted to run both, you had to put Final Cut 7 in a folder in your applications folder, otherwise when you downloaded X, it would overwrite 7.

Krazy Ken: Oh no. Oh, what?

Brad: So a little bit fast forwarding, but that whole App Store thing, there's a lot tangled up in that announcement that's so exciting, but also, wait a minute, what does this break? And it did break some things.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. And that does kind of segue into the aftermath and the negative reactions we'll dive into here in a quick sec. But yeah, ultimately Apple was like, "Yeah, we don't want to do the whole 7 and X thing at the same time, that's not the Apple way." They kind of just burned the past and moved forward in a lot of cases. So it wasn't necessarily the smoothest transition, which was odd because they've been through transitions before, like going from OS 9 to OS X. It was like, "Hey, we got this compatibility mode for you so your apps work for a couple of years while you transition." Going from PowerPC to Intel, "Hey, we got this Rosetta thing so your PowerPC apps work as things-"

Brad: Going to Intel to Apple Silicon, you got Rosetta 2.

Krazy Ken: There you go, we're going through it right now. But with Final Cut 7 to X, I can understand, especially with big companies, lots of infrastructure and investment and everything, and suddenly it's just like, "Boom, we went to this other thing", it'd be like, wait, what? Brad: EOL. Yeah, end of life and we're not supporting it. And oh, when you want to search Apple Support for Final Cut Pro questions, all of them get redirected to Final Cut Pro X.

Krazy Ken: Oh crap, they did that?

Brad: Yeah.

Krazy Ken: I liked the part in your documentary where [Surf 00:50:51] was saying, "It's like Apple that came in and burned down my old house, but they built me this cool new mansion with all this cool stuf. And it's like, wow, that's great, but you burned down my house?"

Brad: Why did you do that? No, there was, yeah, there was a lot of funny, funny moments in that.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, totally. So there's a lot of good and a lot of bad. Let's just say, okay, so now the day is over, it's the next morning. I remember seeing things on MacRumors from all these people that were saying all of this bad stuf about it. They've never used it, they've never touched it, but they're saying all these bad things about it. Anything you want to share about the morning after, so to speak, of this aftermath?

Brad: Well even the night of.

Krazy Ken: Oh yeah, sure.

Brad: So I saw some footage that was like exit interviews of people. And it was really funny to see even the people who were excited were also really worried about what they didn't see. I didn't see Motion, I didn't see Soundtrack Pro, I didn't see DVD Studio Pro. Is there still going to be a Final Cut Studio? Am I still going to be able to use all of these apps? I mean, there was this sense that Soundtrack Pro and Color were kind of thrown into Final Cut Pro X, like you can do all these other things as well. I think even Randy alludes to that when he's demoing Color. But the truth is, the Color tools, we talked about the color board, it wasn't Apple Color, which was a third-party app they bought and then updated kind of twice and then abandoned. So there was so much uncertainty about what we didn't see.

Brad: And I think that when it got to the next morning and people kind of woke up, maybe some of them a bit hungover, were like, "Wait a minute." And the thing that shocks me the most is that competitors like Avid the day after, Avid's CEO takes out an article in Variety and says, "Apple's abandoned professional users. Don't worry, Avid's got your back, we're still here."

Krazy Ken: Oh, wow.

Brad: "This is a prosumer..." Everyone's saying iMovie Pro, they're making fun of it, they're showing that Apple has killed it. And you're right, none of them had actually touched or used the application. They were so emotionally tied up. And you talked about the transitions from other things. When OS X came out, OS 9 was still available, right?

Krazy Ken: Exactly.

Brad: And Steve Jobs, fnally at one of the events, you may know exactly which one, but I remember this distinctly of Steve Jobs holding a funeral for Mac OS 9.

Krazy Ken: Yep, WWDC 2002, I believe.

Brad: Yeah. Final Cut Pro 7 deserved a funeral service.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, I know. Yeah.

Brad: It deserved it. This application had been around for 12 years by this point and had made so many people's careers and people loved it so much, and they just pulled the rug out. And it's like, we never got resolution. I was kind of one of the people maybe torching your house and moving on into the mansion, but I could understand why that was so frustrating for users.

Krazy Ken: Absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I guess I'm kind of lucky that I wasn't super emotionally invested, but I can absolutely understand why there would be that visceral reaction to this big change all of a sudden, especially if you've built your career on it. Holy crap. Ooh, that's heavy, as Marty McFly would say.

Brad: I remember the day it came out distinctly because I just had picked up a brand new 2011 MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt. First Mac with Thunderbolt. And I got it, I had ordered it a little bit before, and it shipped on June 21st, 2011.

Krazy Ken: Oh, nice.

Brad: And I came home and I opened it up and I set up the computer and I hadn't checked the internet or anything, and I thought, wouldn't it be so cool if Final Cut X was out today? And it was. I popped open the Mac store and it was there. So I bought it immediately. And then I downloaded it and I was very careful. Well actually, no, I didn't have 7 on it at all at that point. So I installed 7 later because I had all these edits in Final Cut 7 and I thought, okay, previously every time they updated Final Cut Pro, you could open up your FCP project in the new version and it would just update it. And so I'm like, will it open Final Cut 7 projects? Nope.

Krazy Ken: Nope.

Brad: It didn't see it, it didn't recognize it, it didn't have any way of opening it. I could import iMovie projects.

Krazy Ken: Right, right.

Brad: So that was great. That made me feel great. I was like, oh, okay, so I'd been cutting in iMovie this whole time, I could open that up in Final Cut Pro X, but I can't open up my Final Cut 7 projects? And I was more sad that I had to install the old software on my computer than I was of jumping over to X. Because I had to get projects done. Now sometime after in the fall, they released an XML for Final Cut Pro X, which wasn't there in the beginning. And as part of that, there was a company called Intelligent Assistance that released a 7 to X application that would take XML from 7 and important into X.

Brad: It would get your edits across, but re-timing and efects and things did not translate over very well. So it was kind of like if you're forced to kind of upgrade your project to X, you can do it. But it really left me in a spot where I just had to fnish everything in Final Cut 7. And then at the end of 2011, going into 2012, I was ready to leap... to just fully switch over to Final Cut X. But that was six months of sort of going between the two, learning the new thing while working actively in Final Cut 7 and trying to wrap my head around this new thing.

Krazy Ken: What were some of the other nice features that were missing from the initial version of Final Cut Pro X, like multicam?

Brad: Yeah, multicam is the biggest one, right? It's one of those funny things that you go from 7, you skip eight, skip nine, and then you come out with X and X has some new features that are really cool, and we've talked about some of those that were demoed like keywords, and a whole lot of things that you've relied on that were gone, just not there. And you're like, well, why did you release this if you didn't have these core features in?

Brad: And so I've got a little short list of missing features, which is, like you said, multicam, XML, which I talked about, they fnally did that. That was one of the frst things, in 10.0.1, XML was the kind of the main feature release. You couldn't use broadcast monitoring. You talked about color sync earlier, which is cool, but professionals buy $50,000 reference monitors. You can't use it with Final Cut X. That was weird. One that I don't care about but at the time people felt very weird about not having it was a source viewer was what it was called in... They had a source and canvas viewer in Final Cut 7. You don't need it in X, to be honest.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, I don't use it in X.

Brad: And they did eventually come out with the event viewer, but I never turned it on, ever.

Krazy Ken: I turned it on and I was like, oh, I'm wasting screen space. Turn it of, yeah. You don't need it.

Brad: Because of the flm strips and because of skimming, it's really redundant. And then another one was that I know afected some friends of mine in the professional workspaces, you couldn't output multi-track QuickTimes. So you used to be able to... you would want the English audio and you might want an efects and music mix so it could be dubbed in foreign languages or you want the French or Spanish languages tracks. And they'd all be on separate tracks. On Final Cut 7 it was cumbersome, but you could take all those tracks and assign in your export to go to specifc tracks in a multi-track QuickTime. Final Cut 10.0 didn't let you do that. It also meant that you didn't have a good way of, because there was no XML and there was no multi-track output, you didn't have a good way to go into any sort of audio mixing app like Pro Tools or Logic. You couldn't take anything from Final Cut and send it there and do a professional audio mix.

Brad: This combined with the emotion of Apple abandoning 7 I think really played into at least half or more of Final Cut 7 users just not even giving Final Cut X a try and just abandoning it completely. Most of them through 2011 to 2012 stayed on Final Cut 7, and then a lot of professional editors were lured away to Adobe Premier because Adobe Premier had a few years before that upgraded to a pro version. But honestly, it was missing some features too in 2011 that by 2012, they got up to speed at the same time that X was getting up to speed. But because everyone had stopped paying attention to Final Cut X, and honestly were hoping Apple just got rid of it, or there was a lot of people who would write into Apple saying, "Bring back Final Cut 7."

Brad: A lot of people who would write into Apple saying, "Bring back Final Cut 7, just bring it back, or make the source code available. Don't abandon us. Don't leave us in the lurch. We want to use this thing." All of those people, then they could trade in their Final Cut studio boxes and get 50% of of Adobe Premiere. Adobe and the creative suite at that time, it was before the creative cloud, and Adobe got a ton of people to go over because of that. That was the backlash.

Brad: Sure. There was a lot of people who weren't paying attention to any of that, that weren't video professionals that tried Final Cut X out immediately and thought, this is a cool thing and I'm going to use this, but anybody working professionally, I bet a lot on Final Cut X because I believed that the keywords and smart collections, the magnetic timeline were the future of editing. I had this choice in my mind to switch over to Premiere or stick with Final Cut X, and I felt strongly that if I stuck with Final Cut X, I would have a few years where it'd be really rough because I'd be alone, but eventually good ideas win the day and eventually people would start coming around to it.

Brad: A decade later, I can say I'm really, really glad that I stuck with Final Cut X because it brought my career into position that if I was one of the herd with Premiere, I'd be just another person. Betting on Final Cut X has introduced me to so many cool people, has got me in touch with people at Apple, and it's got me in touch with a great Final Cut community around the world, it got me in touch with you. And so I'm glad I bet on that. I got a little bit ahead of myself, but I did also want to talk about some of the weird things about 10.0 Before we wrap this up completely.

Krazy Ken: Oh, yes. Fun glitches and whatnot.

Brad: Yeah. Is there anything you remember from frst opening up the application?

Krazy Ken: I will say going of of what you said, which was very beautifully put by the way, I was a 10.0 day one user as well. In my case, I never opened up Final Cut Express ever since I got 10 installed. I just went with it. I do remember, one cork I had to get over was you couldn't really save your project anywhere. It just kind of put it in your home directory or whatever. It was a weird thing like that. The other thing I remember happening was if I had a title, it would default back to the regular font setting when you reopened the thing the next day. Those are the two I remember. It was a long time ago, but what do you have?

Brad: I got a list. Those two things are on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Starting with project and event libraries, before we had a unifed library model, event libraries is where your media was collected. There'd be either video clips, audio clips, graphics, and by default, those would be saved in your movies folder. You could however save them on an external hard drive, but they had to be on the root level. When you wanted to edit your material from your event library, you had to then create a project in the project library. The project library was just timelines.

Brad: It was kind of cool because it actually had a flm strip that you could skim across it, which was really neat, but you'd open that up and it'd be in the timeline area and you'd open that up and your edit would be live in the timeline and then you could go back and you could open up other projects, which was really, really confusing because before we were used to a project that contained bins with your media and sequences was just where you would edit. Wrapping your head around that was kind of confusing. Initially the events and project libraries couldn't live on shared storage. Although, they fxed that with an update, but you could put them on external hard drives.

Brad: Now, the biggest annoying thing about it is Final Cut would launch and it would see whatever hard drives you had connected and whatever's in your movies folder, and it would load all your events and project libraries.

Krazy Ken: Take forever.

Brad: It'd take forever. Also, it was a little awkward if say you were working with one client that didn't know you were working with another client. The way around this was you could create a folder and then move your events and project libraries into another folder and hide them as it works.

Krazy Ken: Hide them from the all-seeing eye of the software. Brad: Which then I think a company called Arctic Whiteness had a library manager, which you could open that up and then check the ones you wanted to show and the ones that you didn't want to show and it would automate that a little bit, but it was pretty silly to say the least that we had to do it that way.

Brad: Anyway, let's blaze through a bunch of these because these are fun. Weird things, weird things or design things that were kind of odd that mostly have been fxed in Final Cut. Fonts, like you said, when you were making a title and then you would close Final Cut and then you'd reopen Final Cut. It would reset to a default font, that was super annoying. When you selected a range on your flm strip, and then you clicked on the next clip, that range would disappear.

Krazy Ken: Oh, I didn't have that happen, but that sounds catastrophic.

Brad: Well, that wasn't a bug. That was just how it worked.

Krazy Ken: Oh my god.

Brad: If you wanted to save a select in and out range, the workaround was to make a keyword or a favorite before you clicked of of it, but if you accidentally clicked on another clip, your range went away and you couldn't select multiple ranges like you could in later versions.

Krazy Ken: Okay. The range selection went away. I thought you meant like the portion of the clip vanished. But yes, I see what you're saying now.

Brad: No, no, no, no. No, no. Yes, it wasn't that scary. It was just the selection that would disappear.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. I took that for granted just now because it's like, I use that all the time. You make the range, you click on something else. It saves the range. It just grays it out or whatever, but yeah, you're right. When you clicked of of it, the in and out points-

Brad: It disappeared.

Krazy Ken: Holy crap.

Brad: Now, what's cool is you can actually, if you hold down command, you can select another range and another range and another range, which is really cool. You couldn't do that in 10.0. I mentioned that they had the import from iMovie in the UI in the browser, which was just kind of a slap in the face for [inaudible 01:06:07]. iMovie Pro, you're like, well fne.

Krazy Ken: No re-link media. I remember that being a thing. No.

Brad: Couldn't re-link media, no custom start time code.

Krazy Ken: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Brad: They had a unifed window layout, which led a lot of people to believe that you couldn't spread things to two monitors, which I think you could. If you had a second monitor hooked up, you could send your viewer over there.

Krazy Ken: I think that was in 10.0. Yeah.

Brad: Yeah, but the unifed interface where it's just a single window, which was a very big thing with Lion apps for Final Cut for Apple, that annoyed people because they would have all their own custom layouts in Final Cut 7. A lot of people still do that in Adobe Premiere that they put their panels wherever they want. I appreciate somebody taking a lot of time to think about the simplest way to design the interface, and the interface is customizable enough, especially now where you can turn of the timeline when you don't use it and you're just organizing media. Yeah, whatever, but it did throw people of.

Brad: You couldn't reorder color corrections. There were no audio rolls. I mentioned that with the multi-track output. Initially, you couldn't say tell something. Now, you can tell something, it's music or it's efects, or you can give any custom rule you want and that allows you to kind of channel audio through in a unique way. You can reorder your clips based of of roles. It's really cool. I love showing, especially people who do recording of audio, I love showing them how their audio comes in from the recorder with the IXML data that'll actually label subdurals and have all that access.

Brad: You had a global pace and copy and remove efects. It was like, oh, I could copy efects and paste them onto another clip, but it was every efect.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. No pick and choose.

Brad: No pick and choose, and then they did paste attributes, but then it was funny. It took them a while to do remove attributes. Krazy Ken: That's right.

Brad: Paste efects, remove efects and paste attributes, but don't remove attributes. I don't know why that took so long, but that was funny. Compound clips, initially you could create them in the timeline, but they wouldn't be in your efects browser.

Krazy Ken: Oh, yeah.

Brad: Sorry. Not efects browser. They wouldn't be in your browser and the events. They changed that eventually where compound clips could actually live in the events. I remember when that happened, a lot of people changed their workfow to not have projects in the project library, but instead they would do their edits in the compound clip, that way the compound clip could live inside the event and they could just move that whole folder over and the edit would go with it. It was a hacky way of getting your edits to be in your event browser and be more contained instead of this weird separation.

Brad: You couldn't export a range from the timeline. That was super weird. I remember if I wanted to just send a part of an edit, I'd either have to export the whole thing and then trim it down later or I'd have to duplicate the timeline and then cut out the parts I didn't want to share. Those were the main ones that right of the bat in the frst couple months of using it, I thought this is weird, this is weird, this is weird. I feel like most of those were addressed by the 10.0.3 release, which was a big one and the 10.0.6 release. We fnally got our multi cam. We even got Red Raw support in 10.0.6. By 10.0.6, I felt like the app was really ready for prime time, which was in 2012 and that's when I was like, people need to start looking at this again, but it took a lot longer for people to look at it again.

Brad: I felt like the frst time people really, really took a serious look at Final Cut was in 2016 with 10.3 when they introduced the new user interface and the new audio rules. They called it the Magnetic Timeline 2, and then a year later we got our color wheels and curves in 10.4.

Krazy Ken: I love them.

Brad: That's when I started to see people say, hey, should we look at Final Cut again? But that was fve, six years later. Meanwhile, I had done fve or six feature flms in Final Cut X and loving it. Krazy Ken: Right. Exactly.

Brad: I don't necessarily miss the way the old UI looked. I think it looks a lot prettier and sleeker now.

Krazy Ken: I agree. It defnitely matured with those updates and there's a lot of people using it now. It's really big for YouTubers, people on smaller budgets. It's just a great application to have. Even like that big Despacito, the big music video on YouTube, that was cut in Final Cut Pro, fve billion views or however many it has now.

Brad: Some insane number of views. Yeah.

Krazy Ken: I know we've been going on for a while, so I'll keep it quick. Is the plugin ecosystem for Final Cut, it unlocked a whole app store on the iPhone, plugins for Final Cut. It opened up this huge ecosystem of third party solutions for Final Cut Pro X.

Brad: It's been 10 years. Where are we at with Final Cut? Where do we see it going? You mentioned a lot of YouTubers on it. I've seen in the last couple years a lot more interests from feature flm and television editors.

Krazy Ken: Oh, good.

Brad: I've seen a big opportunity. There's actually a quote that I wanted to read to you that I came across recently. I was watching this video that you can fnd on YouTube that's about the digital revolution and they interviewed George Lucas and he said, "There's a social drag on how fast you can take an idea and turn it into a reality, that actually is part of the social system. It takes about 10 years for people to kind of get their heads around it from the point where it's introduced to the point where they accept it."

Krazy Ken: 10 years.

Brad: Think about the timeframe he's referring to, which is Attack of The Clones comes out in 2002 and it was shot, the frst major feature flm shot digitally. By 2012 the Arri Alexa and the red cameras are fnally starting to be used in Hollywood movies. Even when red was introduced in the 2007 to 2009 period, there was a lot of apprehension and people still shot on flm, but around 2012 there was a tipping point and nearly everything was shot digitally. For a while, everything was until a few flmmakers, they were like, we have to stick to flm. Christopher Nolan and others that were like, I have to shoot on flm, but those are the exceptions now. Everything is shot digitally.

Brad: In the case of Final Cut X, which is this huge paradigm shift for a lot of people, fast forward to just a job I was on a month ago working with about 40 or 50 editors and training 60% of them had never touched Final Cut X before. Some of them were Avid editors who'd been editing on Avid for 20 to 30 years. It was really interesting to see how they reacted to it. After two or three weeks of using Final Cut X, a lot of them were saying, I want to use this. Some of them were saying, I don't want to go back to Avid.

Krazy Ken: Oh my gosh. That's saying something.

Brad: When I asked about it, because as somebody who felt very alone for 10 years, I was like, well, why now? The answer I got back, it's not that all of them thought that Final Cut was IMB Pro and they didn't want to use it and all that negative backlash. A lot of them, it's like nobody was paying me to use Final Cut 10. They'll pay me to use Avid. They'll pay me to use Premiere. They're not paying me to use Final Cut. I couldn't take the time to go learn this other application when I had paying jobs in these other systems.

Brad: This was a unique situation where we had a week of training just in Final Cut Pro X for these editors. I personally think there's a huge opportunity for Apple to maybe push some of their stuf that they're making for Apple TV Plus and even go to Hollywood and train editors out in Hollywood on other projects, and then create some sort of incentive because based on the reaction we had on this project and seeing how these LA editors reacted to it and were willing to accept it and even fnd they were cutting faster and enjoying it. It took them a couple of weeks to get up to speed. To me, that's like, okay, maybe we're fnally at that point.

Brad: Circling back to your Richard Town Hill presenting Final Cut, he does have a quote where he says, "This is the platform for the next 10 years."

Krazy Ken: Here we are.

Brad: It's been 10 years. Is Apple going to abandon Final Cut again? I think that's one of the big concerns that people have is, hey, they did it before. Are they going to kill this version? We just found out about it. This was one of the things that people were saying to me. My response to that is no, I don't think we're in the same boat. The reason why I don't think we're in the same boat is even though features have been a little bit slow in the last couple of years, we did have them, Apple stopped and rewrote Final Cut, the graphics side of it, to be fully supported of metal, and when they announced the Mac pro in 2019, they demoed Final Cut Pro and they said, it is the example for benchmarks and how fast metal can run.

Brad: And then 2020, they introduced Apple Silicon, and then they show Final Cut Pro running in Apple Silicon. From what I understand in both those cases, this wasn't a simple, like let's just port it over. There was intense rewriting in the application to the point that from my understanding, if you download Final Cut Pro today, you're actually getting two versions of the app in the bundle. One is the Apple Silicon version and the other is the Intel version.

Brad: The fact that they took the time to update it, whereas going back to the beginning, Final Cut 7 wasn't 64 bit. Final Cut 7 didn't support all these snow leper technologies. They didn't update and rewrite Final Cut 7 to support the new system. However, Final Cut X, which now is called Final Cut Pro again. I don't know if you've noticed that, but when they updated to 10.5, they dropped the X, has been updated to run on all of Apple's new technology moving forward. There's no reason to do that if you're just going to kill the app in a year or two.

Krazy Ken: Yeah. I think the future is looking really good and that whole George Lucas thing makes sense. On average, it takes 10 years for it to become socially acceptable, so to speak. Here we are now on the 10th anniversary of Final Cut Pro X, lots of tens and future's looking pretty fricking good. Well, Brad, thank you so very much for helping me out today. This has been a lot of fun.

Brad: Yeah. I love the conversation. I feel like compared to the last chat we did, we've covered more a organized ground.

Krazy Ken: I was going to say, we took a lot of history here too and shoved it into this short timeframe, so that was impressive. I think we both deserve a pat on the back for that.

Brad: Me trying to get you of the path a lot.

Krazy Ken: It's just a secondary storyline. We talked about Of The Tracks quite a bit, your documentary. I just want to say everybody I've watched it like four times. It's super fricking good. We have links in the show notes. Go check out Of The Tracks. You'll love it and feel free to subscribe and follow Apple Keynote Chronicles here, because hey, if you're here, you're a new viewer, but you like Apple and Steve Jobs and all that kind of history stuf, we're going to be talking about a lot more of that stuf. Feel free to check out our past episodes and we're resuming our normal timeline real soon.

Krazy Ken: Our next keynote we're covering is where Steve Jobs introduces the power PC G3 chip and the frst power mag G3, as well as the all new Apple store where they frst start doing build to order confgurations, which is stuf we always use today, but that wasn't a thing back then. Lots of cool stuf to cover on Apple Keynote Chronicles, so subscribe and stay tuned for more of that. As Steve Jobs would say, "It's going to be insanely great." Brad, anything else you'd like to add in?

Brad: Whatever you do with video, I'm sure a lot of people use video in ways they didn't know they were going to 10 years ago. Go out and make a movie and use Final Cut. You'll like it.

Krazy Ken: Yeah, absolutely. Use Final Cut Pro, abso-freaking-lutely. Guys, thanks for tuning in. One more huge shout out to our Linode guys, our awesome friends at Linode. You can feel free to get the $100 free credit with Linode.com/computerclient. You can check out the link in the description or in the show notes. Hey, we say show notes on podcasts, I guess. Another huge shout out to Brad for being my awesome guest co-host for today. We'll see you on a future episode of Apple Keynote Chronicles. Thanks for sticking with us. Catch the crazy and pass it on.

Transcriptions are outsourced. Please forgive any inaccuracies.