Was there almost a Final Cut Pro 8?

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Apple released Logic 9 on the App Store AS IS with a price change and changing the 19GB worth of extras as an in app download. Clearly they learned now isn’t the time to reinvent anything as Steve put in back in ’97 “sometimes it’s 10% better but usually it’s 50% worse”. I hope they will finish Final Cut Pro 8 and add it to the app store and drop Final Cut Pro X to $99 or something.

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So today we heard that a 64bit “evolutionary” Final Cut Pro 8 was in fact almost ready but someone decided to go in the “revolutionary” Final Cut Pro X direction.

I gave Final Cut Pro X time, patience, the benefit of the doubt, and even gave it a pass on not opening new projects and still find it horrible. Here’s what I specifically hate about it:

  • Even when turing off previewing, scrubbing, waveforms, etc, timelines are still “choppy” to navigate and the shrinkable pro-kit scrollbar was much better than the current crap.
  • Multi-monitor support is a joke. I used 4 displays in Final Cut Pro 7. I can only use two in X and I can’t really decide how to lay them out.
  • The iMovie style quick selection is a pane in the ass. I’ll trim my clips with precision thank you, just let me put the whole damn thing on the timeline please.

In summary, the UI of Final Cut Pro X is terrible. The only good thing it has is the magnetic timeline vs static tracks.
Do you know what was wrong with Final Cut Pro 7?

  • Only rendered on 4 Cores
  • Only rendered on CPU
  • Antialiasing sucked / nonexistant
  • Unsupported import Formats

In other words, all of Final Cut Pro 7’s problems were under the hood, and most of it was due to it being built on Carbon, which Apple chose not to provide 64bit, Grand Central, or OpenCL support for.

I’ve always maintained an attitude of knowing skills rather than specific pieces of software.  As such I’m down for any nonlinear editor. Maybe Final Cut Pro X.2 or XI or whatever will blow me away. I still feel like Apple made the wrong decision and left actual professionals high and dry. It’s already clear the Mac Pro won’t be upgraded, we’ll never get our TowerMac, and the 15″ MacBook Pro is about to go Air. If Apple continues to move too fast towards the “Post PC” era they’ll accidentally create a bunch of former Mac users who now buy Dell boxes or at least VMWare to get by.

Note: My Final Cut machine was a Dual Quad 2.8GHz 2008 Mac Pro with two NVidia 8800s and 20GB of RAM.