The Quarrel Over Final Cut Continues

NY Times by David Pogue

This week, the big news in tech was the lovers’ tiff between Apple and professional video editors. And I managed to insert myself right smack in between them.

In Thursday’s paper, I reviewed the new Final Cut Pro X for my audience: laymen. My conclusion was this: “Some bugs need fixing, and the ‘coming soon’ features need to come soon. But despite the footnotes, and if you can get past the shock of the new, Final Cut X is already intuitive, powerful and very sweet.” I stand by that review — for consumers, film students and advanced amateurs like me.

I pointed out, though, that it’s a different story for professionals, who “say the new program is missing high-end features like the ability to edit multiple camera angles, to export to tape, to burn anything more than rudimentary DVDs and to work with EDL, XML and OMF files (used to exchange projects with other programs). You can use a second computer monitor, but you need new TV-output drivers to attach an external video monitor.”

The next day the complaints poured in — on blogs and online, and through e-mail — but with a lot of misinformation. People were reporting missing features that aren’t really missing. Since I’m not a professional editor, I worked with my Twitter followers and e-mail correspondents to produce a list of the top 20 missing features, and confronted Apple with it over the phone. I wrote up Apple’s responses in this blog on Thursday. read more...