The End Is Nigh...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
The recent hubbub over Final Cut X (which you’re no doubt familiar with, but if you aren’t, Tom Ellard’s highlights here and a funny but informative bit from Conan O’Brian here) is kind of silly. It’s like standing on the train tracks, watching a train coming straight at you, and saying “there’s no fucking way that train’s gonna hit me.” They showed it at NAB a couple months ago, and all the pros had a look at it. They knew what was coming, but they’re all “there’s no way they’d release that. It’s just iMovie Pro!”
Newsflash: Apple don’t care. Apple don’t give a shit.
Ironically, for the kind of video stuff I do, which is of the “line up an audio track with a single video file, and shit it to YouTube” variety, Final Cut X is remarkably well kitted. I tried to use Final Cut Express for a couple months, and eventually pitched it for iMovie. Apple realizes that there are a lot more people out there like me (video-wise) than there are people that edit feature films. They’d like to make some money, please. Enter Final Cut X.
The thing to watch out for (and down the road when it happens, I’ll reference this post as an I-Told-You-So) is this: Logic Pro is managed by the same group at Apple as Final Cut Pro; the Pro Applications group. This is the group of managerial types who most assuredly don’t work in the media professions any more, and haven’t for years. They’re the group that thought making a “pro” version of iMovie and replacing the top-of-the-line video editing software with it was a good idea.
What do you think that bodes for Logic? Logic / Garageband has exactly the same pro:hobbyist footprint as Final Cut Pro / iMovie, and is managed by the same people. Pretty simple math there.
If you’re a professional user, I’d strongly suggest taking a serious look at the other top-line DAWs: ProTools 9 and Cubase 6. I would, for obvious personal reasons, recommend the latter. It is a mostly lateral move from Logic Pro, features-wise. I’m not saying it’s time to jump ship. I haven’t heard anything more than you have. I am, however, deeply ingrained in the music software business, as you know, and have been for some time. You can smell these cycles.
Or don’t bother, and when Logic X comes out and doesn’t have a mixer, you can come back to this post, wherein I say I told you so.
44 comments
@stretta: if that's the case, they have only themselves to blame for their repeated "deprecation" of various portions of the OS. I mean, everyone else who writes OS X apps and plug-ins is expected to deal with shifting to 64-bit, Cocoa, etc. so why should they be any different?
Man, I crack myself up sometimes.
--Adam
@sean: I believe that your other other hand is the correct one, and the reasons for FCX being the way it is have nothing to do with engineering constraints and decisions. However, I disagree that it totally fucking sucks from your/our perspective. If Logic goes by the wayside, we're no longer competing with its bundled plug-ins, whose very existence is subsidized by Apple rather than the usual market forces.
The creative class will be out there whether or not Apple continues to cater to them. If Apple ceases to cater to them, it means more opportunities (and less headaches) for those of us who do.
@rawx: Yeah, Digi made an effort, all right. They made an effort to totally shaft us, way back when we were just trying to get the company started.
--Adam
Excellent post about Final Cut Pro X:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/professional-video-editors-weigh-in-on-final-cut-pro-x/
The post seems like it is regurgitated from Apple spokespeople - the comments are where it gets interesting. What is most notable: Apple confirms that not only is Final Cut Pro X not backwards compatible, but they have no intention of making it compatible with older projects.
Almost makes me wonder if Jobs has shares in Avid - the inevitable Downfall/Hitler parody nails more than a few issues with FCP X
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVV9wEQZmGE
The most telling sign for me is the new FCP feature "Analyze and fix audio problems" - still laughing about that one...
I dont think the iMovie Pro comments are right, I think its just iMovie, plain & simple
I assume that Apple would continue to make pro apps because, why else do you need a 16-core, 64-bit computer?
Interesting to hear if Murch, Coppola or ay of the others who have collaborated in the past were spoken to during this process. I mean, if you had Walter's number, wouldn't you use it?
coppola makes wine these days...
unless you're talking about his fantastically alluring daughter
I was just mulling over saying something along the lines of "anyone who thinks Apple cares about backwards compatibility is either a new Apple user or not a developer," and citing a number of examples to bear up my point (OS X itself was the first that sprang to mind). But then I thought of one simple and relevant example:
Logic used to host VST plug-ins.
--Adam
and rtas plug ins too ;)
edit: in the sample editor anyway.. destructive editing w/DSP. was very useful for tweaking little bits of audio here and there.
I ditched Logic when Apple made it Mac only, and said 'well, you can buy a new $3000 system and replace all your software as well if you want to keep Using it'. They do absolutely not give a shit about users, pro or not.
Apple has done a brilliant thing. They have kidnapped and rapped their user and developer base for year, but managed to take advantage of some serious stockholm syndrome to get away with it. (not unlike the catholic church, now that I think about it). If you wake up one day, your wallet is empty and your ass is sore, your probably a regular apple customer.
Raped, not rapped. I do not want to see Steve Jobs rap.
You've remarked in the past, "not one of the people involved has ever set foot on stage..."
So easily avoided: just call it something different. Final Cut X, with the pro upgrade coming later. Same with Jupiter 80. It would be a great program if it wasn't supposed to be the direct replacement of something incredible.
I think Logic's persistence in the market speaks volumes to just how good a job Emagic did with it in the first place. Apple has done so very little with it in the years since, in much the same way that Sony has done so little with Sound Forge.
Fucking big companies. Suck, the lot of them.
That, exactly. Someone that was using Logic 6 (the last true emagic version) and immediately jumped to 9.1.4 would not have any trouble finding his way around, and would probably be happy with the couple of extra plug-ins.
Of course, that guy running Logic 6 was probably doing it on a 19" CRT with a horizontal pixel resolution somewhere in the mid triple digits. He'd have a hard time making out the cluttered mess of UltraBeat. He'd also wonder what happened to the Environment. Once he figured out where it was, he'd be all "why did they leave it in but go to such great lengths to hide it?"
He'd also be bemused at all the Apple Loops, and the weird channel presets, especially the instrument ones, that assume that every user is in a Jethro Tull cover band. But he wouldn't have to use those. He'd have a product that was, at a fundamental level, exactly the same as the one he left. Except it wouldn't load VSTs.
-CR
I think that outlook is a little drastic. Logic is already tied in with GarageBand pretty well (vs. the disparity between iMovie and FCP before this week) and the big moves in Logic already took place within the last couple of revisions, especially with the more automated handling of the Environment.
The two big complaints with FCP X are the inability to open older FCP projects (which is, frankly, a WTF? decision and I hope they have enough sense to be working on a solution, whether it's a converter or translator between the old and new formats) and the inability to export XML/EDL to work in other apps for color grading, etc.
But FCP and Logic started from very different codebases and it became clear that FCP was not aging well. I don't see the same thing happening with Logic. I expect the issues with FCP to be worked out over time but I'll keep my rose-tinted glasses on in regards to Logic's future.
i've heard all kinds of rumors.. "apple is getting rid of all the instruments, no mixer, garageband pro.." etc and i'm curious to see what they do and how vigorously they screw the pooch.
i pretty much only use logic for mixing these days as i like the plugs and i'm just used to it. it feels like home and it sounds good and it does sound better than live.. you can't tell me otherwise.. get a lot of tracks and DSP going and live just doesn't get where it needs to..
if they really drop a giant turd on logic i'll just stay with the version i have and wait as long as possible to crossgrade to something else.. i do own DP and have dabbled with it for years so would maybe just go there but i kind of loath the feel of it even though it does many things in a more transparent way than logic.
pro tools? screw that nonsense. what about that presonus thing? cubase looks like windows to me... like sonic foundry's acid or something.
does logic have a larger user base than final cut? i know there are countless video people out there but logic seems to be everywhere
The music industry is to the video industry as, say, this pitiful rebel fleet is to a fully operational Death Star. Video is an order of magnitude larger. Think of it this way: at an NBA basketball game broadcast on TNT, you've got maybe 700 people that deal with all aspects of getting that game on camera and bouncing it off a satellite. In contrast, there's like 2 dudes that deal with the audio. In the stadium itself, there's another dude that either plays the organ or hits "go" on some sort of sample-playback engine.
That's pros, though, of course. There are way more music "hobbyist" types than there are video hobbyist types. That fact alone would probably serve to cast doubt on my argument.
-CR
My guess is the complete break with the past was an unmaintainable code base confronted by major architectural changes like 64 bit, plug-in compatibility or certain UI libraries.
So, basically, opening/importing an older FCP project would vary between imperfect to terrible translation, so, why bother? Hopefully there will be some third party utility to rescue some amount of your project.
Final Cut was originally a macromedia project, so not invented here. Logic is the same thing, but, as far as I know, much of the development team is still intact. I'm not sure the same kind of drastic change will affect Logic, but what do I know.
At this point, being any sort of "pro" using a Mac has become something akin to a George R.R. Martin novel.
Mad props on: "Apple don't care. Apple don't give a shit."
I would predict that Logic will eventually look & behave more like FCX/iphoto/imovie/iOS, though.
Ok Am I living under a rock or something? This week we get FCPX and its a professionally unusable turd dipped in chocolate. Now I am in this thread, freaking the fuck out that the Software I used since version 2.0 is gonna go the way of software formally known as FCP. Its like that movie where everything in the world has been dumbed down so far, the result is a planet inhabited by morons. Look I jumped from Stienberg when they wouldn't fix Cubase on Mac, tools hardware to Logic and have been a happy camper ever since. I was a little wary @ 6 when apple bought Emagic and they effectively made me a happier camper. 8 they fucked with my workflow, (I still run 7 on my mix cube system and its great) but I forgave them,9 got better. Now your telling me there is a possibility they are gonna reverse engineer my world, retrograde my artistic existence? Take away my virtual mixer and instruments?...(that's irony rite there isn't it)...No..Shirley not, your all fuck'in with my head and dont call me Shirley. I am already on Google maps as we thread, surveying potential clock towers or Book repositories in the vicinity of said Pro Applications group (Sounds like a hooker rolling on a condom) ...Who are these people?.....Steve's cancer isn't in his pancreas its in his company...Slice the brown bit off the apple before we take another bite I say. I'm a diplomatic technologist, a futurist and a pragmatist. I think Apple need me to go over and address the head of development at the Pro Applications Group with a great big book on diplomacy and I will enthusiastically beat him to death with it. Apple Genius Bar? More like a Zombie ranch.
"That's pros, though, of course. There are way more music "hobbyist" types than there are video hobbyist types. That fact alone would probably serve to cast doubt on my argument. "
yeah, i guess that's what i was getting at. also, i wonder where logic express fits in to their product line up?
I keep saying this, but it should be obvious to any one of us; Apple is trying to make computers for my wife (and the millions like her). She works on a computer for hours a day, but doesn't really understand it. She doesn't really care if an app isn't backwards compatible as long as it works. I tried to tell her about the FCP hoopla and she just stared at me. There are way more of her than there are of me.
Of course that shit is going to happen to Logic. I can't believe it's gone on as long as it has. It doesn't fit in with Apple apps at all, it's a mess. Apple may do many things some of you don't like, but carrying dead weight is not on their list of faults.
Does anyone really think this is a good time for a major tech company to be invested in the pro audio industry? What pro audio industry? They'd have to find it first. Now the amateur audio industry, that's doing just fine.
What Apple does, the secret to their success, is give people like my wife exactly what they want and need, and tell them what they want and need. They cater to them and say "fuck the techies and the pros" because you can't try and have it both ways or you end up being Microsoft. And the pros will figure our how to get the tools they need and get the job done, because they're pros. The amateurs will not. My wife will just not buy anything she can't figure out in 2-3 clicks. Nor should she.
bb
@stretta: if that's the case, they have only themselves to blame for their repeated "deprecation" of various portions of the OS. I mean, everyone else who writes OS X apps and plug-ins is expected to deal with shifting to 64-bit, Cocoa, etc. so why should they be any different?
Man, I crack myself up sometimes.
--Adam
@bongo_x - my friend's wife is an editor for a living ;)
i get what you are saying and i think most people do but how many people like your wife want to make music with a computer?
those people like your wife who want to do that already have garage band.. why do they need a way better garage band with "pro" features?
arguably, if apple does make logic into garage band pro then a lot of the people who like garbage band for all its simplicity and "3 clicks and done" UI might be turned off..
Adam: I wonder if the ProKit framework (or whatever it is called) used at Apple also includes some version of 64-bit Carbon. It seemed like 64-bit Carbon was well underway before they pulled the plug.
On the other hand, if they had such a framework, presumably they would have ported the existing Final Cut Pro framework to 64-bits, instead of releasing the X debacle.
On the other other hand, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Apple is making a choice to no longer cater to the "creative class." From Apple's stockholders' perspective, this is probably a great thing, as the consumer class is way bigger than the group of people creating content for others to consume. From the perspective of someone who makes a living by designing specialized tools for "the creative class," this totally fucking sucks.
I worked ten years on Logic Audio, and when apple bought it.. For me it was the beginning of the end ^^
I tried many DAW and finally took Ableton live, a really great DAW, but many problems.. (PDC.. lots of crash) I added Protools 9 to my setup because I've no feeling with Cubase..
1 month on Protools, lots of bugs too... Avid seems to be a worst company.. But Protools is a really great tools (when the V9 RC will be here...)
Please AD, release rtas versions !! I know you hate Protools but, they made a effort, now we can used our soundcards.. ;) and buy Protools for 480€.
Shamann is exactly right that Logic has endured this long only because Emagic did such a phenomenal job with it when it was under their care. All Apple has done is slash prices and give it a fresh coat of paint.
IMO Apple exiting the pro audio market would be a boon to developers. Nobody would have to pretend to support their stupid proprietary plugin format anymore or learn Cocoa just to get a knob onscreen. Microsoft may be *indifferent* to pro audio but at least they're not schizophrenically *hostile* to it the way Apple is.
Only today did it occur to me that FCPX:FCP7 as Quicktime X:Quicktime 7. How did we not see that coming?
@sean: I believe that your other other hand is the correct one, and the reasons for FCX being the way it is have nothing to do with engineering constraints and decisions. However, I disagree that it totally fucking sucks from your/our perspective. If Logic goes by the wayside, we're no longer competing with its bundled plug-ins, whose very existence is subsidized by Apple rather than the usual market forces.
The creative class will be out there whether or not Apple continues to cater to them. If Apple ceases to cater to them, it means more opportunities (and less headaches) for those of us who do.
@rawx: Yeah, Digi made an effort, all right. They made an effort to totally shaft us, way back when we were just trying to get the company started.
--Adam
Doesn't really feel like Apple has catered to the creative class since the launch of the iMac. Stayed friendly with for a few years at least, but not catered to. Can't say I blame them, compare 1997 Apple to 2011 Apple. A giant built on catering to the consumer market.
@Adam: good points. My fear about Apple turning away from supporting content creators is less about a particular app, and more about what the App Store and iOS models may end up leading to post-Lion. Us plugin developers tend to presume a certain level of access to system folders, and are used to being able to sell plugins through the sales channels of our choice. I don't know if Apple would actually close the door on that software model in favor of locking down the OS the way they have with iOS, but this latest Final Cut "Pro" release makes it clear that their loyalties are not towards their current Mac user base.
I hope that I am just being paranoid. But if someone told me a year ago that the latest Pro app from Apple would completely abandon backwards compatibility, I would have thought they were being paranoid as well.
Seriously, I am really wanting to be proven wrong here. Show me links to the Apple spokespeople, saying that their commitment to creative professionals is unwavering. Throw me a frickin' bone here.
I'm with boobs.
Damnit! The "I'm with boobs" button is a little too close to the first/previous links. That last post was a total misclick. My bad.
..on a lighter note I just stuck Goldbaby's new library WADRA 2 in pipe and smoked it....get dat shit...
I have no dislike for Steinberg & Cubase, but if the Pro Apps/Logic team were to pull in 3rd party devs to work in their native tools at even half the rate of Steinberg one can only imagine where Logic would be.
For built in UI in a DAW I'll probably fall on the side of Live, even with the buggy year or so that v8 has had (until recently). Minimalist, vector, usable and not obtrusive. If PDC was more reliable, automation lanes a bit more flexible in their views and Max4Live still not such a kludge I could even replace Logic with it (as it is it makes a great sampler & plugin host alongside Logic).
Maybe Studio One for it's workflow has an honorable mention but that's mostly for the actual UI of the app and how it works, not for the GUI on the plugins.
is live any good at sequencing external midi gear and doing in depth midi things? sysex, midi event editing and all that??? i've never bothered with it for sequencing hardware. whenever i use it it's for an all in the box kind of thing or for capturing jam session or doing DSP stuff during jam sessions.
Live is a great for a million little/big reasons .but i'd never make it my only DAW. i can't mix in it. once in a while i can but usually it comes out sounding good by some accident or because the track i'm working on is a massive editing/automation/routing frenzy and all the DSP sort of makes the mix happen. otherwise i need Logic to mix in.
and no matter what anyone tells me.. live's summing bus doesn't sound as good as other DAWs. logic wins over it every time even just loading up the tracks at same volume w/o eq/compression etc. it's really kind of amazing. if i export all the tracks from live and pull them into logic and set the faders at 0 (which is where they'd be anyways since all the volume etc automation in Live was written into the exported files) logic just sounds way better. the air up there especially. and i don't really know why it's that way though i've read some things from some apparently smart people who boil it down to how busy your mix is and how many tracks, plug ins etc you are using in live.. that eventually it kind of becomes a pot that is boiling over.
I agree, I can't mix in Live either, at least not in the tradional DAW sense. I rely too much on Logic's bag of tricks these days for that. Namely converting between what I used to call OBA & TBA or I think Logic now calls Track Automation and Object Automation (drop the, Based), duplicating track objects so I can have multiples of the same thing dedicated to viewing certain automation types, and easily expanded & contracted to 'subviews' of those lanes (related parameters) with a keybind etc etc.
However 'mixing' in Live is more of a live affair, hence the proliferation of controllers for it now. If I use my APC40 I can just sit there and jam, record the results into the timeline and edit at will to grab the good sections and weed out the crap. A different workflow with different results, but it still works well for me in tandem with Logic since I've always used Live as a loop tool and sampler by triggering individual clips by notes sent from Logic (unquantized is the trick here so it ignores Live's timeline but adheres to tempo). I can just record the results into Logic as audio, record the automation into Live's timeline as I jam, or both.
Truthfully, for external gear & live Midi timing went to shit somehow a while back. Your note-to-note or event-to-event timing is fine within the midi clip or relative to other clips UNTIL the clip retriggers. It was pointed out to me that the start of clip point varies by a few dozen ms or more so overall the events in the clip will shift slightly in time relative to the overall timebase, but the individual bits will still have their same relative timing/groove intact. So you work around it by layering within the same event/drum racks/trigger multiple things in your external gear by the same event (say layered drum hits in a sampler or MD) rather than multiple clips. Audio seems fine in this regard, and when I do live stuff I tend to do a lot of my drum work in straight audio so I didn't notice it until it was pointed out to me. That's supposedly being resolved in the 8.2.2bX (betas) but I have yet to confirm that.
(Chris, can I request an edit button available for a few seconds after I post? My typing at night is atrocious and the record here stands!)
Forgot to add 2 things, my interest in Live has increased tremendously as of Max4Live. I have several uses for it, some of which are current & some planned. It's not a replacement for Logic's environment--the learning curve is higher if you're not already a Max user and the much greater capabilities means you have more options (blank canvas at times too).
One of the things that made me happy to see Max show up in Live was that it allows me to overcome the limitation that I can only map a control to a single thing in Live. In Logic I can split the incoming midi off from an input, filter it down to the control that I want to assign to other things, make as many duplicates of that as I wish, transform those duplicate signals to be new values (CC's etc) that map to other things, scale them so that the affected device is affected 'optimally' with the same source parameter sweep that hit other things (say map 0-127 to 44-64 on a filter sweep) and so on. Live was always 1:1 when mapped via it's built in mapping, Max4Live lets me get around this now.
There's some other things I use it for to sync Live visuals & dmx to my Live performance, and there are plenty of other people out there starting to use it this way too.
The metadata features in FCP X look really useful. Depending on the project I might trade those for a mixer.
And I dunno versioning and autosave(and free online backup?) might be in the next update and I'd take that over backwards compatibility.
"But for me, somebody who just moves samples around in a DAW without being able to play an instrument is not a musician."
By that logic, you could argue that Paul wasn't a musician on the intro to "Strawberry Fields", because he was just moving samples around on a Mellotron. Or is there some sort of arbitrary distinction between analog & digital samples, or a keyboard & mouse interface?
Also, I'm puzzled as to why you consider means more important than the ends?
A Mellotron is an instrument similar to a sampler that needs to be played. So what's the point? You can't "move" sample around on a Melotron.
Hard to say how credible this guy is, but he claims to be a former FCP team member and his attitude reflects the most pessimistic reactions here:
http://sachin.posterous.com/why-apple-built-final-cut-pro-x
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