On Tuesday, April 19, 2022, a team of over 100 people worldwide in TV and film production sent an open letter to Apple’s Tim Cook about the Final Cut Pro and some missing features that professional editors think the software should have. Another concern is the lack of frequent updates.
You can read the whole thing Petition at GoPetiton.com here. Below is Tim Cook’s response.
To the authors of a recent open letter regarding Final Cut Pro in the TV and film industry: The creative community has always been so important to us at Apple, and we appreciate your feedback.
With Final Cut Pro, many exciting projects have been created to date – from Hollywood movies and high-profile commercials to the big television shows and the big names in creating online content.
While we believe we have plans to address your important feature requests, we recognize the need to build those efforts and work with you to support your film and TV projects and help you keep up to date on important updates. These include taking the following steps:
> Introduce new training products and Apple-approved certification For pro videos starting this month with our partner Future Media Concept.
> Establish a panel of industry experts for regular consultations from this summer.
> Expanding the content and frequency of Final Cut Pro workshops for major film and television productionsWe would love to work with you to support your film and TV projects, and we will continue to explore opportunities that allow us to better connect and encourage users to engage in important conversations with our dedicated community.
Tim Cook
CEO Apple
What I find interesting is the Final Cut Pro and a bit of the second work about professional use. When FCPX was first launched in 2011, it was widely panned as an amateur and was called iMovie Pro. Apple has solved a lot of problems over time, but things seem to be coming back to haunt the professionals. One big problem is sharing files / libraries for large scale projects. Collaborating on editing features is very common, and can be a huge solution when you can’t share a project and media with multiple editors.
Many editors prefer to use FCPX. I personally don’t use it often, mainly because my employer is PC-based, and we use Premier Pro as our daily driver. Previously, we were Mac-based and used FCP7. The only reason we moved to Windows PC was because of the lack of development with FCP7 and once FCPX came out it was not ready for broadcast at all. The timing was terrible. We need to update our aging machines. At that time we were behind Apple for PC and Premier Pro.
This story, I am sure, is known all over the world in professional places. People like FCPX and want to use it as a pro. Hopefully, Apple will address the concerns and make changes that will give users the features they need to use FCPX. It is always reassuring to hear that they are caring and listening.
To put it mildly, I thought this 2011 Conan skit was a lot of fun when FCPX was first released.
