Not to betray my age, but I switched from Windows 3.1 to MacOS 6.something back in like the mid 1990s—long before the iPod days.  Avid was the only editing-software game in town back then and it only ran on Mac, as was the case with Adobe software.  So, naturally, the entire burgeoning computer editorial industry likewise ran on MacOS, which was the underdog OS and barely supported by any other software manufacturers other than Avid and Adobe.  MacOS back then was considered the platform for creatives, and Windows was for business-types, science-types and computer geeks.  Those were dark days for Mac users, believe that.  There was very little available software, no games (except for like “Myth” and “Castle Wolfenstein”), not even third-party email programs.

 But there was Avid, which I absolutely adored.  An ambitious assistant editor, I would stay long past midnight at work every night, honestly, just to gaze at it.  Just to watch it work.  I would copy the editors’ sequences into subsequences and make new edits of my own, and just generally play until it was time to go home and shower, and come back into work in just a few hours.  Avid absolutely blew my mind.  And because of my attachment to it and my constant involvement with Avid, I came to love MacOs just as much.  Every editor who worked during this time would most likely sympathize.

Then, circa 2001, an unexpected miracle happened.  Apple bought a program called Final Cut from Macromedia.  Tensions had long simmered between Apple and Avid, and that’s a long story for another time.  But suffice it to say that there was a general sense of scorn from Apple fanboys who seemed to believe (along with Apple) that Avid was holding Apple down by demanding so many hardware products tailored specifically for their software.  In other words, Avid required so much attention that they made it impossible for Apple to cater to their own faithful customers.  And nobody was buying Apple products other than the fanboys and Avid editors like myself, which left Apple in an unenviable position of being forced to cater to Avid at all costs.  Well, now with this acquisition it seemed that Apple was preparing to shoot itself in the foot and go to battle directly with Avid, by producing an inexpensive editor that was intended to capture what was coming to be known as the “prosumer” market.  There were also rumors that Apple, having been host to Avid’s code for so many years, had “acquired” a lot of that code and were going to port it to Final Cut Pro.

I attended Apple’s demo of what they were calling “Final Cut Pro 2.5” at NAB and was most impressed.  It was actually pretty good, though certainly not as solid as Avid.  When version 3.5 came out almost two years later, I bought it for my home computer.  Well, I absolutely loved it.  I edited my first short film on that rig, a few other freelance projects, and prepared all of my demo reels right there in my underwear at home.  It was a revelation.  I would edit at work all day and then come home and edit my freelance projects (or work on music) all night.  Perfection!  What had once required an entire machine room of video hardware, towers and towers of hard disks, and tape machines in every format available could now be accomplished just as easily and professionally at home with only a computer.

Well, needless to say, Avid was not happy about this at all.  In response, they began producing and pushing Avid to Windows, which sent quite a ripple throughout the Apple-loyal professional editing community.  Not to mention, Avid made it so that a Windows rig cost about half as much as MacOS (which was still about $50K for an HD-capable rig).  So a lot of the editing market immediately fled MacOS and went with Windows.  It was on!

By the time I moved to San Francisco in 2004, Apple had released Final Cut 4.5.  I edited two documentaries (one of which comprised more than 165 hours of footage), two short films, several commercials, and scores of corporate videos in Final Cut 4.5 on a variety of different rigs all over the city.  Projects and their accompanying media were now easily portable, which meant you were no longer attached to any physical location whatsoever.  If I got behind at work (which is rare, btw), I could simply email my project to myself and work on it at home.

It was during this period that Final Cut Pro finally captured my heart away from Avid.  I had drank the koolaid and fully converted.  It was steadily becoming the tool of choice for freelance editors.  Feature films, the standard by which all editor back then was judged, were being edited on FCP regularly.  Sure, plenty of my editing friends sneered that I had been relegated to the ranks of “prosumer”, somehow no longer as much of an editor as themselves.  I didn’t care.  Within two years, literally ALL of them had Final Cut rigs of their own.  Anybody who had $3,000 could own a professional editing rig, so everybody got one or got left behind.

Avid went reeling from the desktop revolution, and have never recovered imho.

But Final Cut was on a continuing roll, culminating in the release of Final Cut 7 in 2009.  It was editing Nirvana.  The UI was perfect.  The threading was perfect.  It finally had the “old blood and guts” of Avid, but wrapped in the most beautiful and flexible interface ever developed for any productivity software in history.

With Final Cut 7, I honestly expected I would never need another editor.  I had finally found my perfect tool, and the market seemed to be agreeing with me.

Then in April 2011 Apple released FCPX, a train wreck of an abomination of a piece-of-shit editing software.  Built to resemble iMovie, FCPX was  clearly created for amateurs specifically and was unusable for professional editors.  Sure, it was cheap ($300), but none of the flexibility or beauty of the previous version remained; and, adding insult to injury, Apple made FCPX so that it was no longer backwards compatible, meaning it would no longer even open projects created in previous versions.

That spelled complete disaster for every editor and every shop who used FCP.  Post houses which had spent thousands of dollars on Final Cut rigs were now cut off from all of their previous work if they upgraded.  All freelancers (including myself) either lost access to all of their previous work or stayed on Final Cut Pro 7 for as long as possible, hoping against hope that Apple would still support them and their own flagship software for as long as possible.

Well, Apple didn’t…

It was really about more than dollars and cents.  Apple betrayed an entire professional market which it had fostered, a market which had single-handedly supported the company throughout the dark days of the 1990s and helped to build it into the multi-billion-dollar international conglomerate it is today.

But it wasn’t just the betrayal alone, it was the cavalier attitude with which Apple destroyed an entire professional industry by completely destroying the tool on which it was based—as if the masses would just shut up love it.  Like they always do for every iPhone release.  As if to say, “Because we are Apple and you are small, fanboi editor, you will love it because we tell you to.”

Well, fuck Apple, we all left…

Just a few years ago, I did not know one professional editor who did not own a copy of Final Cut Pro; now, I do not know a single professional editor using FCP.  Not one.

It seems to me that the market seems to have dictated that editors move to Adobe Premiere, so I have followed suit.  FCP is still a disaster.  Avid, “the granddaddy”—while still an excellent editor and reasonably affordable compared to how it used to be—perpetually teeters on the brink of financial apocalypse.  It could die any day.  So Adobe CC seems to be the best longterm choice for the time being.

And I’m reasonably happy with it.  Sure, it’s not like that original Avid and definitely not as beautiful as Final Cut Pro 7.  But it does everything an editor needs it to do, scales to the size of the project, moves whenever and where you need it, and has a couple of unique charms of its own (like native 4k, any compression… NATIVE).

One thing I know for sure, though…  No matter how aggrieved, no matter what Apple does or says, like thousands of other fellow editors I will never go back to Final Cut Pro.

If you’ve made it this far, here is your reward!  Here’s the Conan O’Brien FCPX skit, which is the funniest indictment of Final Cut Pro ever.  Enjoy!