Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1474752
Fall 2022 – LOCAL695.ORG 53 During the period between 1998 and 2010, all three developers worked to incorporate features and quality-of-life improvements that would steal users away from one another. The user interfaces began to resemble each other more and more, while features praised in one platform soon found their way into the others. At the same time, however, each attempted to leverage its own unique strengths to go places where their competitors couldn't follow. Avid's software was supported by its vast array of hardware peripherals to achieve processing results far and above what Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere could manage. To close this gap, Apple began to develop its Mac Pro workstations specically with Final Cut Pro optimization in mind. Adobe, with no hardware portfolio at its disposal, began to integrate Premiere Pro with its other suite of award-winning software, including industry standards like Photoshop and After Effects. As a result, all three products saw some degree of use in the Hollywood creative sphere. Avid Media Composer has maintained a majority share of the userbase since its release, but Final Cut Pro began to see use on major productions as well. Films like the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, David Fincher's The Social Network, and Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain (for which retired 695 member Walter Murch won the Academy Award for Best Editing) were all edited in Apple's application, demonstrating its ability to compete in professional work environments. Premiere Pro, on the other hand, struggled to break into the professional market, gaining a reputation for being a prosumer grade product. Then, in 2011, it seemed as though Apple dropped the ball. It had been two and a half years since Final Cut Pro version seven had released and the application was beginning to show its age. Even as Apple's workstations migrated from 32-bit to 64-bit processing architectures, their software had not. A Mac Pro might have shipped with eight, sixteen, or even sixty-four gigabytes of RAM, but without rewriting the software to take advantage of the new architecture, Final Cut Pro couldn't utilize more than four. Multicore processor threading had been poorly implemented, meaning that Apple's software wasn't fully leveraging the power of the Apple computers for which it was exclusively made. Moreover, the application was designed only to work with Apple QuickTime les, meaning that many modern camera formats simply weren't compatible and required transcoding before use. To be sure, these were issues that Avid and Adobe encountered as well, but their solutions had been to patch their software accordingly. Both programs were optimized for 64-bit computer systems and multicore threading, allowing them to fully utilize the hardware of whatever system on which they were installed. Additionally, although both programs had been optimized for specic le formats (Avid DNxHD and Apple ProRes les respectively), both could also import and work with a multitude of le formats while Final Cut could only make use of Apple QuickTime les. At this point, it seemed as though Apple had puzzlingly elected to fall behind its competition. And then came Final Cut Pro X. At NAB in 2011, Apple unveiled a new edition of their editing program and the editing world collectively lost its mind … and not in a good way. Final Cut Pro X may have carried the Final Cut name, but on a fundamental level, it was a brand new and untested program.Allegedly, Apple had internally developed a working version of Final Cut Pro 8, but it was rejected for being "evolutionary, not revolutionary," at which point their software engineers were tasked with creating a new program from the ground up. This new version of the software lacked many professional features that users had come to rely upon, was not backward compatible with previous Final Cut Pro projects, and did not integrate with most of the infrastructure that users had invested in to support Final Cut Pro editing. At the time, this decision to so drastically change their product was viewed as a major betrayal of trust. The backlash was so severe that the Stephen Colbert show even did a segment lampooning the new Final Cut in primetime. Now until this point, Apple's market share in the editing world had been growing. Their suite of editing applications were becoming popular with independent and low-budget lmmakers who couldn't afford the infrastructure to support editing in Avid. Many considered them to be in second place in "The Editing Wars," but the release of Final Cut Pro X changed that. Their market share amongst professional editors dropped and, to this day, they still have not recovered. Adobe, keen to capitalize on the situation, fast tracked an incremental update to Premiere Pro that included the option to switch keyboard commands and shortcuts to match those of the old Final Cut Pro and began offering the reduced upgrade pricing they typically offered to their own customers to Final Cut users. They even began publishing tutorials on how to import old Final Cut projects into a Premiere workow, proving that they