getting the obvious right doesn't mean you're smart

So NAB has come and gone. Both Final Cut Studio 2 and Final Cut Server have been announced. The revelations weren't exactly revelatory which is probably why I predicted them fairly well.

COLOR

Apple bought Silicon Color - makers of Final Touch - back in October, 2006.

This is what I had to say about it:

My gut feeling is that it [Final Touch] won't be built into Final Cut because its too late to be integrated into FCP6 (NAB 2007, mark my words) and, frankly, a dedicated colour correction application is a better idea because of the different workflow between editorial and grading. They can do this quickly: They can move on this very quickly too. Take what would have been FT3, tidy it up, and release it as part of FC Studio 6 with Apple branding.

Bingo! Not really a surprise though. Apple seems to have just focused on improving the integration which still, apparently, sucks total balls...

Press play. Color, when doing the kind of stuff that makes it worth using, is not real-time. Which, of course, is totally OK—but what's not OK is that Color doesn't render any sort of interactive preview that you can view in the context of a session. To see your work play back smoothly, you must batch render and view the results in Final Cut!

-- per The Other Stu over at ProLost

(NB: He was behind the design of Colorista which is a competitor to Color and is integrated within FCP... not sure how it gets around the lack of 32bit timelineness in FCP though)

[blah blah blah]

However, part of my blog-rant was the implications for Shake's replacement [aka Phenomenon]:

I see the Silicon Color acquisition as part of a wider strategy to slow customer emmigration while Apple work out their next-generation application. It creates buzz and keeps the mindshare that Apple is still serious about shipping a pro level application. After the non-event of Shake 4, Apple needs to *ship* a modern compositing application. The more people in facilities that are convinced that this is the case, the less likely they are to switch in the short term. I speak of facilities because they are the market for a compositing application of Shake's power and flexibility.

In some ways this is true -- Apparently, there were FCP editors at NAB asking what Shake operators would do now that Color is out. Um, I dunno - continue to composite? Point is -- Colour, within the much wider finalcutsphere, serves as mindshare replacement for Shake... and frankly, mindshare is a large part of why Apple bought Shake. As I've said before: "Yet, somehow Shake became a symbol of Apple's (growing) maturity as a developer of professional production tools. Shake probably sold more copies of Final Cut than it sold of itself."

... and y'know what? Color is more useful to more users than Shake ever will be.

... and I ain't going to go into any length about the (de)merits of democratization colour-grading. I went through all that shit when Final Cut Pro came out. Only one thing to say: Your job becomes convincing people that your skills are worth paying for - not your equipment - this a business, not tenure. Oh and 1985 called -- they want their desktop publishing allegory back.

So where does this leave NuShake™?

At the Foundry. Its called Nuke.

Apple have made some good progress with Motion and Final Cut Pro. Enough for their staff to ask my old colleague Alex Fry

"what he thought now Shake was built into Motion and Fcp".

(I'll let that sink in for a moment). Yup, for Apple's own staff Shake was a really expensive way of tracking, stabilisation and retiming... Hmm.

My feeling? Apple won't ship a feature-film-vfx-level compositing application. Too niche. Too demanding. Too crowded. There's no reason to democratise that level of compositing. Motion is going to be good enough for the huge installed base of FCP.

Apple will continue to improve Motion. It may even (touchwood) at a nodal interface. It'll get closer to what Shake was -- and it'll be realtime, GPU driven -- but it won't be a replacement for Shake. Not in the way current Shake users need it to be.

I'd like to keep hope that Apple may see the light, but I wouldn't build a business around that hope.

- If I were setting up a shopw, I'd be building my pipeline around Nuke. Thought the dirt-cheap-ness of Shake ($500AU) does literally buy you time to be non-commital -- especially when you consider how drop-in-able Nuke is.
- If I were running a shop, I'd be really closely looking at Nuke. Maybe getting in a few licenses and running a small job that way. I'd be planning for the time when my ShakeSource license expires.

[FYI: Ron Brinkmann has also now left Apple and is consulting at the Foundry. So y'know, their 40 pound gorilla in the corner has just crossed-the-floor]

... I'll write on Final Cut Server next time. I have shots to deliver.