The Motley Fool Looks at Our NLEs

Here we are just after Apple’s biggest update yet to Final Cut Pro X. Multicam, broadcast monitoring and better third-party support are all things FCPX needs in order to gain back some of the marketshare it has lost in the professional community. Since we don’t know any actual real numbers as far as marketshare won or lost, then I’ll say these features are important for mind-share, if nothing else. They were inevitable and Apple has kept its promise to deliver them. What The Motley Fool has done is take a look at Apple’s release of Final Cut Pro X from a more business-oriented standpoint in a three-part series called Last Call for Final Cut? Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. A lot of the information and opinion presented in the series of articles is a rehashing of what we already knew: FCPX is different, it caught a lot of traditional FCP users off-guard and made them angry, Apple’s handling of the release of FCPX and death of FCP7 was a bit ham-fisted. But what the Fool does do is dig more into the financial situation at FCP’s competitor Avid. The writer spends time talking with Avid’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, as well as with Adobe’s director of video product management. From a purely financial standpoint, it’s hard to argue with an Apple stock price at some $450, while Avid and Adobe hover around $10 and $30, respectively. A lot of Media Composer and Premiere Pro naysayers always point to the stock prices during their argument of FCPX’s superiority, but we all know Apple’s share price has a lot less to do with FCPX than it does with iPhones and iPads. That said, Apple looks to a simplified future for its products and that’s what the FCP7 to FCPX move did for its nonlinear editor: made it simpler and pushed it beyond the traditional NLE product we have all been using for quite a while.