Walter Biscardi is a Creative COW publisher, and this time he wrote a long and informative article on the year 2011. What are his thoughts?

Well, first of all he was not prepared for what Apple showed with Final Cut Pro X - he even believes, that what we saw was worse than expected and he doesn't entirely understand why Apple decided to start from scratch: 

"A complete reboot is a fine decision for a consumer-focused product, a movie franchise, or even a videogame franchise, but the professional world responded with a resounding, "Let's see what else is out there." Or more accurately and concisely, they responded with a resounding "WTF?"."

Of course Walter is aware that Apple released the software they planned to release - and that the Cupertino company is probably sure that FCPX will change the industry for better. But on the other hand he feels that everything about it is different from the industry norm:

"As a concept, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but when you go so far as to even change all the terminology, that creates problems, particularly with media management that completely and utterly changes what we have considered "a project" to be for all these years."

The closed architecture is also some kind of problem - for instance you cannot send a project to Pro Tools for sound mix. The software was also released with zero support for any project created in earlier versions of Final Cut Pro. But Walter sees also positives:

"Now, big changes are not necessarily a bad thing. In the 11 years of FCP, we've switched from analog to digital to HD to 2K to 4K. We've had to adjust our workflows all along the way to ensure that we meet the ever-changing demands of our broadcast television and independent film clients."

The situation with Final Cut Pro X forced many editors to move to other suites - such as Adobe Premiere Pro. Even though track assignments, audio and project setup can by annoying, Walter writes that as a whole Premiere works very similarly to FCP 7, and, unlike FCPX, it allows you to import your FCP 7 projects. And of course Adobe provides a lot of other production focused programs.

Avid's Media Composer is also a good option and an interesting alternative to Final Cut Pro but another one, according to Walter, is... Windows!

"Now I'm doing what I would have considered unthinkable at the beginning of this year. I'm considering Windows 7 workstations to replace our aging Mac Pros to run Adobe and Avid. We have a copy of Windows 7 in our shop that I originally intended to install into a Mac Pro, but now I'm looking at the hardware from other companies as well. (...) I'm not going to simply throw away 10 Mac Pros in one fell swoop. That would be crazy. I will make a slow transition over to Windows as we replace the boxes, one at a time. And even there, we most likely won't replace every single Mac with Windows. (...) The interesting thing about all of this is that I know I'm not alone. I'm sure when evaluating the expected response to Final Cut Pro X, Apple's internal discussions anticipated some users would leave the application -- but I suspect that they never expected so many people to be discussing leaving the Mac platform altogether."

The sad conlcusion is simple - Walter feels, that Apple destroyed the long FCP story within just a few months and he sees that people abandon Apple, regardless of what Apple does with FCPX after this.

For more you can read the whole article which you will find here.

Source: http://magazine.creativecow.net