Apple’s video editing software lead Randy Ubillos quietly addressed some of the fears of professional video editors following the rocky introduction of Final Cut Pro X. Shortly before the company’s more technical help, Ubillos was adamant to a CreativeCow forum member that the feature set wasn’t concrete. Alluding to an upgrade pattern similar to iMovie, he saw it as a foundation for a larger platform.
“Final Cut Pro X 1.0 is the beginning of a road, not the end,” the executive said.
He added that the inability to port Final Cut Pro 7 projects stemmed from a lack of data and the development work that might have been involved in the conversion process. Links between connections in FCPX are built into the timeline, not the editor’s head as in 7. Other posters saw FCP7 as having a fundamentally different approach to joining video clips.
No pressure existed to find a workaround for this, Ubillos explained, since he didn’t expect video editors to risk losing work or slowing themselves down moving from 7 to X. “We never expected anyone to switch editing software in the middle of a project, so project migration was not a priority,” he said.
The app has taken flak for dropping a number of features that some video editors consider crucial, such as multi-cam support, more independence over audio tracks, and numerous other features that can be necessary for some movies and TV shows. Apple allows FCPX to run without overwriting 7 but may leave some companies editing with the old version for months or more if they don’t switch to a rival system like Adobe Premiere or Avid.
