With the new FCPX being released today, I guess I should be blogging about it, trying to be first at discovering some hidden bug or missing feature. However, I won’t be getting it for a while – we’ll be getting my husband a new MBP this fall and I’ll be installing it on that for sure – and I don’t really have much other observation to add to the noise. I will say it’s been extremely amusing to watch Twitter and the COW light up with so much negativity. Somewhat exhausting to be following it since 9am ET when it was posted, and then having the same comments rehashed over and over as new time zones wake up (if I hear “IT DOESNT OPEN FCP7 FILES?? CONFIRM?” one more time..). Very entertaining to see the doomsday of “This is a massive failure! This is laughable! This is such an embarrassment!!” Really? It’s been in your hands for like 2 hours and it doesn’t overwrite FCP7. In fact, it FCPX would do nothing but enhance my current workflow at my day job, though I occasionally output XML to AE so I suppose that wouldn’t work so much anymore. I had no idea so many people still used tape. I feel so bad for them.

Anyway, the thing that’s really been interesting to me is to consider how something like a software rollout is changed so much by social media and how interconnected the world is. It feels like editors are really high-strung, negative, and difficult to adapt to anything if you look up FCPX on Twitter, but they’re generally the opposite most of the time in my experience. Social media gives a voice to everyone equally and just like in anything else, you’re more likely to get online and talk about the bad than you are the good.

The other thing that’s interesting about this is that we’ve never really had a sudden change in the way our editing software works nor the venue to discuss a major change. The transition from analog to digital was way more gradual, and the changes between FCP versions were more gradual – and I’m saying this all from what I can gather, I was like 12 when FCP 1.0 came out. Now with the App Store + social media + high speed internet, the software we use daily can change in an instant, and a second later we can start yapping about it. The only way we could get it any more instant is if Apple can beam it right into our brains (v.2?) What was previously relegated to meet-ups, conferences, and gatherings between 2 or 3 in an edit suite is now a network of opinions that can find each other, discuss, argue, cry, rage, etc, the moment anything happens.

It’s very interesting to think that this is rather new. We’ve never been able to gather so many post production professionals in one place to build up hype and then blow up, in person or virtually. And as far as FCPX goes, I realize some people think it’s missing some big important features and maybe it doesn’t work for them right now. I think that’s a given. It’s brand new, why would you switch for the first version if your workflow or your work is SO delicate that it can’t be chanced? I think within 2 years, we’ll be thanking Apple for having the guts to plunge forward into brand new editing territory and help keep nonlinear editing moving forward, providing us with more tools to help us tell our stories faster and easier with less emphasis on the technical.

Hopefully some of the more talkative tweeting editors find some work to do soon because I have 100 unread tweets from the last 20 minutes. Seriously?