Last week, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced that he would be [joining Facebook’s board of directors](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/27/reed- hastings-facebook-netflix). The overlap between the two tech companies has some implications that could be good for consumers and filmmakers alike. Hastings has earned a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking executives in business (see: the name “Netflix”). I think if we consider where Netflix wants to be in five years, this alliance could have far-reaching effects for the film industry.

Network, Not Utility

A 2009 study told us what we already knew. As published in Variety:

If marketing mavens want to reach younger moviegoers when promoting their films, they need to embrace social networks or risk being ignored.

In short, young audiences go online to learn about what they should watch. A friend’s recommendation holds far more weight than that of a film critic. The trouble is that most studios believe that social networks are a great marketing outlet. I think Netflix realizes that social networks are the network. They are the place where people go not only to discover new tastes but to experience them. Netflix doesn’t want to play the studios’ game anymore. It wants to forge ahead and start something that’s never been tried before.

The first clue as to where Netflix sees the future is their [acquisition of the David Fincher series House of Cards](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-outbids-hbo-david- fincher-167882). The company bought the 26 episode first season for $100 million, outbidding HBO. This marks their first foray into original content and perhaps paves the way for them to break free of the television networks and studios that license content to them. Netflix doesn’t want to be a utility like water or power; it wants to be a network. And if they start acting like another network, then there will be more opportunities for filmmakers to create compelling content to reach a wide audience.

1.4 Billion Eyes

Current estimates have Facebook at about 700 million active users worldwide. Everyone uses the site differently, but we know they all use it. In the U.S. there is an [estimated 150 million users](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/13/facebook-users-members-us- growth-drops-may-2011_n_875810.html) while Nielsen clocks households with televisions at [around 115 million](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/nielsen- estimates-number-of-u-s-television-homes-to-be-114-7-million/). Perhaps a difference of 35 million doesn’t seem that daunting, but consider this: Facebook is everywhere (at work, on your mobile, on your tablet, on your home PC, etc.) whereas your television is only at your house. The potential is monumental.

Netflix has roughly 23 million users in the U.S. and Canada, a healthy number especially for a pay service that requires users to buy devices in order to take full advantage of it. If one third of their user base tuned in to original content, like the forthcoming House of Cards, it would be one of the most popular shows on cable TV. That may seem unlikely, but don’t forget there was a time when no one thought HBO would be able to garner as big an audience as it has. The accepted wisdom was that people wouldn’t want to subscribe just to watch a single show, but once The Sopranos hit the audience came in droves. Netflix wants to be the next HBO.

Look at how many opportunities have opened up over the last few years as pay and included cable channels have beefed up their schedules. Quality work is getting made on a scale that was once unimaginable in the world of network television. Documentaries are more popular than ever. Low budget sitcoms like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The League are no longer a pipe dream. Indie films are getting snatched up by emerging channels that need content to fill their airwaves. If Netflix starts acting like a network that barrier to entry could be eradicated even further. We’ve already seen them exhume films that would have otherwise been forgotten, small indie gems (or total crap, sometimes) that wouldn’t be worth financing a DVD re-release can now be streamed to new audiences. The internet has always been a boon to filmmakers in this way, but Netflix and Facebook are where people are. It’s a willing audience that filmmakers should be looking to hook.

Social Curation

Today, our social streams and our video entertainment are, for the most, part, separate. Right now I can plop in front of my couch and flip on my Boxee Box and see what my friends are watching or have watched recently through shared links on Twitter and Facebook. It’s certainly a fun way to discover new content, but it’s not very intuitive. For one, the Boxee Box can only pick up video from certain sites (namely YouTube and Vimeo). Once I watch something a friend shared on Facebook, I can’t actually do much of anything from there. It’s not really “social” at all. The friend may as well have mailed me a list of things to watch, and in turn all I can do is hit a “Like” or “Share” button so someone can watch it again later.

There are many services that try to bring social to the media experience (Miso, GetGlue and Squrl come to mind, as do BD- Live Blu-ray discs) but they all suffer from this same short-coming: the experience itself isn’t social. The reason that no one has become a power player in this space is because it’s extremely difficult. Unlike location sharing apps like FourSquare, sharing the title of what you are watching most likely won’t spark an immediate reaction. It’s generally not relevant information right now.

If Netflix and Facebook were deeply integrated with one another, one could set up group-watching sessions through Facebook and chat alongside the film. This is something that happens now with hashtags on Twitter, but it’s clunky at best. Users start a film at the same time then type inanities like “15:42 OMG this is the best movie ever! #Ghostbusters2Tweet” flooding their feed with the experience. What if you could all watch the movie through Netflix while chatting with timestamps in a dedicated Facebook app? Better, you wouldn’t even need to be watching the film at the same time as one another. If the data could get logged alongside the film’s runtime, you could join in with notes a friend left earlier that day, or last week, or last year. Not only would your friends and contacts be curating the discovery process, they’d be curating the actual experience.

Online Microcinema

The old indie paradigm is dead. Play at fests, get picked up, do a theatrical tour then on to DVD is a plan from the past. It’s not that it doesn’t still happen, it’s that something better has been happening recently. For one, the growth of regional cinema, i.e. films made for and about a certain place, has helped foster whole communities of filmmakers that weren’t heard before. The other thing that has cropped up recently is the microcinema, small theaters that play niche films to audiences that otherwise wouldn’t have access to them.

Here in New York, a great example is ReRun Theater, a 60 seat screening room that plays films from the festival circuit that, for one reason or another, never landed a distribution deal¹ have generally gone unseen by a wide audience. Part of the success of ReRun is that these films now get a write up in most major New York publications, which then opens up the conversation about their quality and relevance to a huge audience. They are now part of the conversation on a large scale, even if only 200 people come to the film in the course of a week.

The mentality of the microcinema, curated content for and by tastemakers, is where I see online video headed. We want to see what people are talking about, but we also want to join the conversation. Films need an audience, and the audiences have all moved online. It seems only natural that filmmakers would too. Someone just needs to offer a compelling community for both makers and audience members. I think Netflix and Facebook are poised to do just that.

Evan Luzi:

If you’re new to the film industry, it can be confusing to hear someone call for a few “pancakes” well past breakfast time. And what purpose could a box of apples serve those trying to make a movie?

The origin of the term “apple box” is murky, but its modern incarnation is used to describe a standard size wooden box on film sets. They’re a common piece of grip equipment and are used for a wide variety of purposes.

I love the attention to detail over at The Black and Blue. Now could you stand on a half-apple and Hollywood it for me? Thanks.

Last night’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent sign off, just like the original Law & Order’s last year, was an understated end to the always understated show. It is the nature of the procedural to refrain from entering too deeply into the lives of its recurring characters. No series has exemplified this more than the various incarnations of Law & Order. The show is built for syndication, which is why it has found a home on a number of channels seemingly around the clock. Save for age, the first episode is indistinguishable from the last.

So the series finale wasn’t notable as an ending. Instead, the show’s writers brought in an odd plot not ripped from the headlines but ripped from the silver screen. Well, both, technically. The case involved the murder of two twins who were suing the CEO of a multi-million dollar social networking site called “Kismate”. Though the episode could seemingly based on the much publicised rose of Facebook and the ongoing disputes between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and twins Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, it’s lifted not from real life but from the film The Social Network.

Lifting a plot from a film based on a book based on a true event wouldn’t be all that interesting if it weren’t for how closely linked the film and the episode were. In particular, the character Rex Tamlyn, played by James Van Der Beek, is completely lifted off of Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker in the film. There is even a moment in which the detectives interview Tamlyn in a club that looks identical to the one used in the blaring, now iconic scene from The Social Network. I can’t tell if this is high art or high bullshit.

The episode is admittedly an homage to Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s film, but it begs the question, “Why?” Not only was the plot only ho-hum for this last episode ever, the cues going back to the film, save for the club scene, were scant and obvious. The showrunners weren’t taking the foundation of what we know about Zuckerberg’s exploits from the film and running with it. Instead they were taking familiar territory and using it to garner a few extra eyeballs.

Interestingly, Law & Order: CI performed something of a televised coup last week when the episode revolved around a “Spder-Man: Turn Off the Dark”-like Broadway show in which a cast member was murdered. That, at least, was ripped from the headlines and brought some interesting subtext into a highly publicized event. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the episode “said” anything, but it certainly was a fun watch and about an event, a point in history. The finale? Not so much.

Still, whoever was able to convince the network they could shoot the exact same club scene from an Oscar-winning film for an episode of a cable television procedural deserves an award all his/her own. Looks like it was a blast to recreate the thing.

Susan Saladoff’s Hot Coffee may be 2011’s biggest “issues” documentary thus far. The title comes from one of the most notorious civil lawsuits in recent history, the 1992-1994 case of Stella Liebeck, then a 79-year-old woman who sued McDonald’s after she spilled hot coffee on herself. Liebeck became a punchline after a court awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. The case brought so-called “litigious lawsuits” to the national stage and set off two decades of reform which have in many ways crippled our access to the civil courts. Collectively, we all bought into the story that Liebeck took advantage of the system, but did she?

Hot Coffee is not an exposé into the heat of McDonald’s coffee. In fact, the Liebeck case is only covered in the first 20 minutes or so of the film. That’s all it will take to convince viewers that the case was far from litigious. Liebeck required skin grafts on her upper thighs and racked up medical bills in the tens of thousands of dollars. As it turns out, McDonald’s training materials instructed employees to keep the coffee at 180 to 190 degrees. Worse, the company had received about 700 complaints about burns from their coffee and had done nothing about it. So Liebeck took the company to court and won. The jury decided punitive damages would act as a warning to the corporation to change its practices, which they ultimately did. Saladoff starts from the beginning and reexplains our justice system to audiences. This may seem like overkill but it’s vital to the point of the film. Our opinions about the civil court system have been tainted so severely that most viewers will be mystified by how it works and how it could work.

The film is broken up into four sections. Part one ,of course, is about Stella. The second section is far more heartbreaking. It revolves around the Gourleys, a Nebraska family who was awarded $5.6 million in a malpractice case. Due to their doctor’s negligence, one of their twins was born with severe brain damage. Once the jury awarded them the amount, which would have covered their son Colin’s care. The problem? Nebraska had caps on lawsuit damages in place set at $1.25 million. Ironically, unable to afford Colin’s medical bills, the Gourleys had to apply for Medicaid. In the end, the taxpayers are paying for a doctor’s gross negligence even though a jury decided otherwise.

Next up is the story of Oliver Diaz, a Mississippi Supreme Court justice who was considered anti-business (by businesses). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce ran a massive smear campaign against Diaz, spending untold amounts of money to get him booted from the court. When that didn’t work and he actually won the election, they drowned him in lawsuits, charging him with accepting bribes and tax evasion. He was acquitted on everything they threw at him, but not only did it mar his reputation, it also kept him from serving on the bench. Around three years of his term had been spent defending his name instead of serving the people of Mississippi. All because he wasn’t considered friendly to big business.

Finally, the most heart-wrenching story of the film involves the ongoing case of Jamie Leigh Jones, a former Halliburton employee who was drugged and brutally raped while working for the company in Iraq. When she arrived there, she found she was to be living in a barrack full of men instead of with other women as she was promised. When she complained the human resources department ignored her. After the rape occurred, Halliburton moved her to a storage container with armed guard outside while they could, presumably, figure out their stance. The story seems almost unimaginable, but what is worse is that Jones’ contract with Halliburton stipulated that any complaints against the company could not be brought to court. Instead she could go to mandatory arbitration. The arbitrator found in favor of Halliburton, which meant that she would have no justice for the incident.

Senator Al Franken of Minnesota took up Jones’ plight and introduced an amendment to a 2010 defense appropriations bill which restricts the kinds of situations in which defense contractors can use mandatory arbitration. The bill passed, and shortly thereafter it was decided that Jones could in fact seek her day in court. The civil lawsuit is now underway. The senate hearings, which appear in the film, are some of the most compelling footage I’ve ever seen from within the Capitol. It is relatively simple cinematographically, but the angle cinematographer Martina Radwan chooses is far more interesting than those normally used by C-SPAN and the like. Editor Cindy Lee, whose biggest claim to fame is editing the 2007 documentary No End in Sight, deftly slices the scene as Jones appears before the Senate. It’s the kind of thing we almost never get to see: plainspoken heroism in Washington. If we could see our goverment from this angle all of the time, perhaps far fewer people would feel disaffected about the system.

There is no question that Hot Coffee is an emotionally charged film. Its title is provocative enough, but it doesn’t do the film justice. This isn’t about one case but many. Moreover, this isn’t about the plight of few but the suffering of us all. As the film points out, the justice system in this country is the only branch of government that every American has access to. You can write to your senators and congresspeople, or to the President for that matter, but it is only within the courts that the average American can take on an insurmountable force like McDonald’s and win. For a brief period, the pendulum swung on the side of the citizens. Was that such a bad thing? Now, we find ourselves in a time when corporations have begun shutting down our access to the courts.

Whatever your stance on perennially hot button issues like tort reform or caps on damages or even the temperature of a cup o’ joe, Hot Coffee is a film that all Americans should watch. It will start out by changing your mind about Stella Liebeck, and then it will open your eyes to a host of other issues. Hopefully, this can be the kind of film that moves people to action. If Super Size Me could eradicate the phrase “Super Size” then surely something could from Saladoff’s film.

Hot Coffee premieres tonight, Monday, June 27, 2011, at 9 p.m. on HBO. For more information visit the film’s official website.

The California law would have imposed $1,000 fines on stores that sold violent video games to people under 18. It defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that was “patently offensive,” appeals to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacked “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

Rightly, the justices recognize that the government isn’t built to determine what is of “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” This is an issue that will, apparently, never go away.

Although FCPX was built from scratch, and not from the iMovie codebase, it’s clear that Randy [Ubillos]’s vision for a revolutionary new way to manage media (and find the right clip), as well as edit video footage, is at the very foundation of Final Cut Pro X.

So, the people calling Final Cut Pro X “iMovie Pro” are wrong…

Phenomenal read from DVcreators.net’s Josh Mellicker. It’s long but every single paragraph is some of the most cogent writing on the subject of the new Final Cut available.

The biggest scoop in there is Ubillos’s “First Cut” software idea which later became iMovie ‘08:

So Randy starting writing an app: “First Cut”, a professional-level “feeder” app for Final Cut Pro. You would launch First Cut, import all your raw footage, then quickly skim through, keywording, organizing, marking as good or rejecting, and finally building a rough edit.

This actually sounds like an incredibly useful app, especially if this were to exist on the iPad. A lot to think about…

Friday night, on my way home from a night on the town, I boarded an uptown express train around 9:30pm. It was a moderately crowded car but I found a seat right away, right by the door. I like sitting there because then I only have to sit next to one (potentially stinky) stranger instead of two.

After I’d been happily riding the train for about five stops, listening to music on my iPhone and clacking away on my iPad, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and there was an NYPD officer trying to get my attention. I took out my headphones to listen. He told me that I was in the worst possible seat to be using a tablet (“You’re in the wrong seat for that.”) because someone could just poke their head in the doorway and yank it out of my hands. I nodded and went back to my writing, to which I got a real nasty look from the officer, who indicated I really better put it away that instant.

Erring on the side of “I don’t need this right now,” I tucked my iPad into by bag and started typing out this piece on my iPhone. Initially, I was a bit indignant at the suggestion that using an iPad in public was inviting thieves to take my stuff, but I understand where the NYPD is coming from. They’re simply trying to preach good preventative measures so that there is less crime, thereby less headaches for them. This is the same police department that [discouraged people from wearing Apple’s iconic white headphones](http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/10/nypd-sez-dont-wear-those-ipod- headphones/) as it is indicated the wearer was using an iPod, thus making them a worthwhile mugging target. It makes sense, but only to a point.

Personal safety and security is always going to be a concern, and not just for technology. What I find confusing about the NYPD’s logic here is that one may as well not sit near the door at all. Couldn’t someone pop in to take your bag, your wallet, your watch? Are you actually safer further inside the car or is there another set of survival rules one must abide there? I’m not trying to be funny here, I’m just trying to follow the NYPD’s thread. Is the issue that using technology in public is an obviously stupid move? Or is it that riding the subway at all is something of a free for all?

An iPod at least is small enough for a pickpocket to take without your noticing (although if you’re listening to it and you don’t notice it’s gone, there are other issues) but an iPad is bulky enough that you could at least report it or cause enough of a ruckus to get an officer involved. Anyway, I’m not discouraged from using my iPad or reading a book or holding anything in my hands while I stand near the door.

For what it’s worth I generally feel very safe on New York City subways, safer than I ever felt on Philadelphia’s subway. I suppose that’s why I’m surprised that this officer went so far as to draw attention to the fact that I apparently would get mugged if I kept on writing on my iPad.

I’m posting to see if any other readers have had an experience in which the police suggested having an electronic out in public was asking for trouble. Worse, has anyone actually had anything stolen in this manner? It has to be a problem if the NYPD has come up with a plan, right?

Khoi Vinh:

Two years ago, in a post about “The Dark Knight,” I compared the contemporary super-hero actioner to the Hollywood western. Like that once-dominant genre, super-hero films get little respect today but, I argued, they’ll one day become a routine vehicle for serious artistic ambitions.

I think Vinh’s got things a bit backwards here. In the past decade this genre has wielded more respect than at any point in its history. Most of the big action directors today came from small, independent backgrounds. Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Bryan Singer, Christopher Nolan and even Jon Favreau didn’t exactly seem like obvious choices for their respective blockbusters. It’s not that the day for artistic super-hero films is coming, it’s that it has come and gone.

Plus, there are a lot of shitty westerns.

Midnight in Paris is yet another example of Woody Allen’s uncanny ability to balance romance with cynicism, the magical with the realistic. Magic is almost a religion in his films, a cosmic force against which his characters are seemingly powerless. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Scoop, Melinda and Melinda and even Match Point rely on the metaphysical for a narrative push. The list goes on (Deconstructing Harry, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Mighty Aphrodite, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Interiors and more), but we have a film to discuss.
Here we have a writer, Gil (Owen Wilson), on vacation in Paris with his fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her wealthy parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy). Each night he wanders the streets alone only to be wisped away to Paris of the 1920s, where he rubs elbows with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody) among others. Trying to give up being a Hollywood hack and move into novel writing, Gil latches onto his heroes during his late-night transdimensional excursions after being accepted into their inner circle. He also gets close with a mysterious Parisian, Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the pursuit of apparently every artisan of the day.

Back in the modern world, where Gil spends his days, he and Inez are trying to enjoy their privileged life as tourists in France, though it grows increasingly difficult once they run into American friends Paul (Michael Sheen) and Carol (Nina Arianda). Paul is an expert on everything, even things he knows very little about. He may or may not be Gil’s intellectual superior, but Inez is clearly convinced his words hold more weight than Gil’s prattling. He tries to bring Inez with him to the 1920s, but is unable to and so he is stuck with her as she is in 2010, cynical, bored and unappreciative of walking in the rain.

The smarter-than-he-realizes-out-of-work creative and the hardbodied- overbearing-unsupportive girlfriend may be Allen staples (see: Josh Brolin and Naomi Watts, Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet) but Owen Wilson brings something different to the table than the rest of Allen’s male protagonists. He is, well, he’s stupider but more virtuous than the others. His romantic view of the world makes him seem like a child, a quality that also allows him to recognize, unlike most Allen leads, the difference between right and wrong (for the most part).

I’ve heard idle chatter that this is a breakout performance for Wilson, but I think that’s patently false. He explored vacuity brilliantly in Ben Stiller’s Zoolander as Hansel, the idiotic male model who is enemy-cum-sidekick to the title character. Gil and Hansel are more similar than they are different; Allen simply helps hone Wilson’s likable silliness into something a role eminently more interesting than, say, John Beckwith of Wedding Crashers.

Many would like to categorize Allen’s work, perhaps saying he’s a comedian first and a dramatist second. Midnight in Paris doesn’t really fall under either, or at least benefits from his experience in both worlds. He trusts his audience enough to enter another era without having to explain the science behind time travel. He is also able to imbue the four epochs he enters with enough charm to not feel the need to overdo the “now we are in the 1920s” effect. I wouldn’t call it subtle, but it is far from over the top a la Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things. Whenever we approach cliché, Allen capitulates to the audience that they are experiencing a plot point, winking at us as he follows sometimes damning conventions so we know it’s part of his scheme.

At its core, this is a film about nostalgia, its values and its pitfalls. Woody Allen fans may be even more nostalgic than the director himself, often clambering for him to return to the form that he is best known for from the 1970s and 1980s. Even though the bulk of his films share the same aging Windsor typeface (which has virtually no other purpose in our era than for his title cards) and soundtracks of classical and golden age jazz music, he has never stopped moving forward. Midnight in Paris is on track to become Allen’s most successful box office take ever, an indication that his audience is growing instead of depleting as is often assumed. That feeling that he should go back to making films like the ones he is best known for is driven by an unshakable nostalgia for bygone days. In actuality, he continues to make great work. How long until we look back on 2011 and wonder whether Allen will make films like the good old days again?

Perhaps when I said the [release of Final Cut Pro X felt botched](http://www.candlerblog.com/2011/06/21/final-cut-pro-x-doesnt-do- what/), I was jumping to a specific conclusion because of the way I use FCP today. In my day to day work, I require high-end tape-based input and output from Final Cut. I’m an edge case and FCP X might not be for me, but who is it for?

I think the price tag says everything you need to know about who Apple sees as its core market. At $299, it’s no longer the high end niche product it was when Final Cut Studio cost $1000. When I postulated that [FCP would take most of its cues from Aperture](http://www.candlerblog.com/2010/11/17/final- aperture-pro-an-idea-for-whats-to-come/), I never considered price tag or target markets; I was only thinking in terms of interface and usability. The bigger picture, from Apple’s perspective, is how many units they can move, and there is a much bigger market for non-professional filmmakers than there ever will be for full time editors. Much in the same way that Aperture appeals to photographers of all levels, Final Cut Pro X is meant to be accessible to folks who are unfamiliar with the antiquated ways of tape-based workflows. It is for the casual editor.

Defining Casual

The term “casual gamer” has become relatively commonplace over the last few years, best exemplified by the runaway success that is the Nintendo Wii. Debuting in 2006, the Nintendo gave up on the processing arms race its two biggest competitors, Microsoft and Sony, had been engaged in. Instead, they released a lower-powered machine with an innovative interface. The Wii remote represented a paradigm shift in gaming). This was a videogame system that grandma could play. Nintendo discovered an untapped market and used it to bludgeon the competition. The casual gamer wasn’t just born, it became the market to go after.

I believe that Apple is looking to sell Final Cut Pro X to casual editors, people who now lug around video in their phones and their still cameras, unaware of what to do with it. Filmmakers who would rather just jump in and start cutting without taking the time to learn the historic language of film; who will never have to understand what a “bin” is. They just want something that will let them get creative with their footage to an extent that iMovie can no longer handle.

Apple isn’t coming out of left field with this move. Look at the way professional video cameras have progressed over the last 20 years. They have dropped in price and compromised classically professional features in order to get them in the hands of consumers. The result has been a revolution in independent cinema. Panasonic in particular has aggressively gone after the “prosumer” market and won over many filmmakers even though many of their products have been technologically inferior to the competition. Apple is trying to bring the accessibility and availability revolution of film production tools to post production. The casual editor is tomorrow’s filmmaker and Apple is looking to that future.

What About Hardcore?

In the gaming analogue, hardcore gamers are the ones who drove the market back when gaming was something of a niche. They desired better graphics, more power, more buttons, more intense gameplay. Sony and Microsoft engaged with them, but Nintendo sidestepped them completely. The accepted knowledge at the time was that you didn’t want to irk the core; they’re the audience who spends money on consoles.

As the Wii reached ubiquity, hardcore gamers felt like they had been abandoned by one of the progenitors of their obsession. But did Nintendo abandon them? For all its blemishes, the Wii was still able to run great titles that even the most cynical hardcore player could find enjoyment in. It became commonplace for gamers to have more than one console in their house, and that was okay too. They could get their fix on the XBox and then goof off with the Wii.

Following that thread, perhaps Final Cut Pro X is a new tool that can be used for some projects but not for all of them. You can ruin¹ run an install of FCP X alongside FCP 7, so it’s conceivable that one will be used for tape-based workflows while the other is relegated to low-end tapeless projects. Where Apple made it’s biggest misstep was in replacing FCP 7 with FCP X (you can no longer buy FCP 7) when really, it apparently is a different toolset.

A Final Word on Fear Mongering

Editors whose livelihood depends on Final Cut have plenty to think about at this juncture, but I think it takes it too far to say FCP X kills the product altogether. Editors are talking about moving to another NLE, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t seem fair to treat FCP X as unusable. It will find its footing and, hopefully, become the best available editor for most projects out there.

Final Cut Pro 7 still works today and it should work for a long time to come. Of course, one never knows when Apple will start phasing it out. Since it is based on legacy code, support could be dropped in a future version of OS X, but it will still work in 10.7 Lion and that should take you a few years into the future. By the time support is dropped, FCP X should be up to snuff.

Or not.

My point is that you shouldn’t whine about Apple selling editors up the river (the didn’t). Go find a tool that works for you and make great work. You can bet the casual editors of the world will.