FCP 7 is a very powerful tool that many editors used for many years. It’s not like they edited Parasite in iMovie.
If anything, this shows how important good tools are for a professional. The filmmakers presumably didn’t “upgrade” to FCP X because part of experience is mastering your tools and knowing what you can get out of them. I’m sure the FCP codebase was ancient and becoming difficult to maintain (it used to run on Mac OS 9!) but the wholesale rewrite they did meant that professionals now had to throw out a lot of their tool-specific knowledge learn a brand new editor, whether that editor was Apple’s initially buggy and feature-incomplete one or Adobe Premier. Premier had its own issues, but it was already proven usable in industry, had been around long enough that switching meant you weren’t as much of a Guinea pig as you were going with FCP X, and unlike FCP 7 was actively maintained.
If Apple had gone for a modular rewrite of components of FCP 7, gradually modernizing the code and the interface, they could have avoided alienating a lot of their user base. I haven’t used FCP X so I can’t say if the end result was “worth it” but FCP 7 (and the prior versions) were such a dominant force in the industry, and now FCP X is just another player.
You can’t disrespect your core, dedicated audience.
Apple slapped every serious, dedicated, industry director and editor in the face who used Final Cut with the release of FCPX.
The incompatibility of plugins was one thing. That we couldn’t - for the first time ever - open project files from a previous version into the new version, made it further useless for folks who would be looking to ‘upgrade’. Then there was the staggering lack of basic features.
One had to wonder what the hell Apple was thinking. There are easier ways to shoot oneself in the foot.
> That we couldn’t - for the first time ever - open project files from a previous version into the new version
They put the time and effort at the time to allow importing of iMovie Projects though... Just that was a massive slap in the face of all professionals.
Apple bought FCP from MacroMedia, and its internal design was a mess. You can see amateurish data-structure blunders if you look at FCP XML files.
The UI also suffered from the asinine floating-window fad that afflicted the Mac for much of its existence, being a glued-together mass of individual windows that prevented you from minimizing, resizing, or moving the FCP UI.
That was far from the only UI gaffe. Remember when footage would go missing, and you were presented with "Find" and "Locate" buttons right next to each other? WTF.
But... you could get work done with FCP 7. No doubt about it.
Apple cleaned up the floating-window mess with FCP X. But it failed to fix fundamental mistakes from the earlier version. Most crippling is its continued failure to distinguish between clips (media files, which reside in bins) and timeline events (sections of the clips that are used in the timeline).
An event should always point to a clip. That makes it easy to (for example) apply an effect to all the uses of a shot, or to just one instance of it in the timeline. If you want to apply an effect to all uses of a shot, you apply the effect to the clip. Otherwise, you apply it to one or more tineline events. Easy, right? But you still can't do that in FCP X.
To make matters worse, Apple misuses the term "event" to mean... I don't even know. Some kind of dumb iPhoto-like auto-organized group of media by date, I think. That's ignorant of industry standards and definitely not professional.
Also unprofessional is FCP's overly "helpful" timeline. It's a chore to edit your footage with frame-level precision, which should NEVER be a problem today.
And I have no idea why you couldn't open old FCP projects in X. Plenty of other vendors (and even other groups at Apple) wrote parsers to ingest that poorly-conceived XML schema and turn it into something useful.
Anyone familiar with the disastrous history of Final Cut Pro X will simply say ‘well, that makes sense’.
Final Cut Pro X’s initial release could not be interpreted as anything but completely disrespectful and ignorant of the needs of 7’s extremely loyal user base.
Directors and editors would potentially lose hundreds to thousands of dollars on invested plugins for 7 only to find none of them would work for this ‘upgrade’.
Previously existing project files from 7 no longer worked with X, meaning there was no way to take advantage of any of the ‘new features’ (everything was a downgrade, realistically) with old projects.
FCPX is one of the biggest black marks on Apple’s long history of dealing with the creative market they claimed to prioritize.
The introduction was shameful at best.
It’s alright now, but they’ll never recover in the industry. We’re over it.
I have industry friends who still did the same (using FCP7) for years before eventually just switching to DaVinci or Premiere.
There are also serious issues with FCPX and the broadcast standard - meaning using FCPX in broadcast television, etc - a lot of industry standards - is a lot tougher. This issue was only acknowledged this year.
FCPX is one of the most baffling, poorly-thought-out product launches Apple ever attempted.
Similarly, at the time; iMovie’s release after ‘iMovie HD 6’ was as feature-rich as driving through the Canadian prairies. I really couldn’t understand the direction.
This type of discussion comes up every once in a while and there are always a couple points that circulate in the discussion:
1. "It's not the tools, it's the artist."
2. "But tools matter."
I would love it if we could skip rehashing the obvious stuff. Yes, obviously, tools matter. However, there are a lot of loud people online (and lout people you meet in person) who spend hours hashing out the pros and cons of different tools, why tool X is awful, why tool Y is underrated, why "pros" use tool Z, tool W is overpriced and outdated, and tool Q is missing features A and B which should really be considered "standard" nowadays.
These discussions are valuable because tools matter, but people will also lose sight of the fact that tools are only one part of the picture. Novices, especially, sometimes focus on getting better tools or working on their tools instead of working on their craft. It's nice to see examples of very successful projects made with simple tools on a low budget to remind us that we can work that way too, and remind us that our low-end tools aren't really holding us back--that much.
Some examples of films shot on small budgets:
- Blair Witch Project ($60k)
- Clerks ($28k) (B&W not because the film is cheaper, but so they don't have to get lighting equipment)
- Primer ($7k)
I'm just hoping we can skip the "tools don't matter" "yes they do" back-and-forth. Nobody really believes that tools don't matter at all, people just get caught up in arguing about how much tools matter, or what the right way to communicate that is.
Same thing also happens with photography. I recently saw a photography exhibit where all of the photos were shot on an iPhone. Same thing happens with music. Some famous artist recorded an album with a Telecaster and a Supro because they were cheap and sounded decent. Some of your favorite songs were recorded out of the back of a van.
As someone who worked for over a decade in post-production, I can tell you this was most likely edited on FCP 7 because it was considered the better tool and not because of cost considerations (FCP 7 was actually much more expensive than the newer version). When Apple released Final Cut Pro X, they re-worked the whole app (I think it was a complete re-write) and based it more on the iMovie interface, which a lot of editors considered less that professional. All the shortcuts and controls were completely changed as well, which made it hard for editors to transition over. A lot of people migrated to Avid or Adobe Premiere. Some just kept using FCP 7 because they considered a superior tool.
In any case it was most likely the offline edit that happened on FCP 7, which could have been done on any working editing station from the last 30 years or more as it just exports the metadata when it gets onlined and mastered.
Familiarity with a tool is also important. If you're comfortable using a 10 yo version of Final Cut Pro and it does everything you need it to do then you're going to be more effective with it than you might be trying to use a new version. (I have never used Final Cut Pro so I'm not sure how much the UI might have changed over the years, but extrapolating from other software that has changed a lot of the years)
>> If you're comfortable using a 10 yo version of Final Cut Pro and it does everything you need it to do then you're going to be more effective with it than you might be trying to use a new version.
This epitomizes the point, I believe.
There are high level hip hop producers who are still using, say; an MPC-2000 mk2 to produce top ten hits.
Let’s say Dr. Dre, or DJ Shadow, etc - with decades of experience with this tool, suddenly try to move to newer technology. Nothing can trump their experience with that. Dre is going to be better on a decades old piece of hardware than almost anyone, because he’s had all those years of phenomenal experience.
It took me forever to swap to Logic Pro X. For years and years I primarily used (and released my 2019 mixtape, with half a million listens on Spotify, produced with) Logic Pro 9 and an ancient version of Pro Tools, both of which I had legit licenses for. I have a quad core G5 with 16GB of RAM and 2 1TB SSD’s whose performance easily matches my 2016 15” MBP for producing.
I finally moved to Logic X during the pandemic. I still am not sure it’s the better tool; but having portability is so key for me.
Point is - you nailed it. Your experience with the tools you use is way - way - more relevant to how well you will do than the features of the tools.
Hand Van Halen a sitar. See how well he does. Hand him even the shittiest guitar ever and watch him fly.
One of the nice things about Logic Pro is that you could keep all your EXS24 instruments across, like, 20+ years of history. I still use Logic Pro with some outbound rack synths like Roland JV units--it's still a damn nice experience working with a Roland JV + a MIDI sequencer, even if it doesn't "sound modern".
In the early 2000s, people were still cutting on Avid ABVBs (based on PCI Power Mac 9600s running Mac OS 8.6, usually). They'd even cut HD by treating it as film and generating film cutlists.
All the way through the 2010s, Avid Meridiens (based on Power Mac G4s running Mac OS X 10.2.x) were used with Avid Unity shared storage for features, and it wasn't about money - it was because every new generation of Avid anything really, really sucked and had tons of new bugs, and people cared more about being able to work reliably and with consistency than they cared about new features.
One of the first feature length documentaries shot on RED was transcoded to ProRes and edited on a Power Mac G5 running Final Cut Pro 6. Sometimes it's about money, but more often it's about an editor's ease and comfort sitting down in front of a machine and simply getting to work with the least distractions possible.
"It's not about the tools" isn't a great way to put it. It's more like, "Don't choose tools that slow down the editor".
"Funny" story - I sometimes watch Drawfee on YouTube (who do live illustrations).
They recently had a guest on (and one of the host did the same) that basically said "I'm drawing on a aging piece of hardware from like 7-10 years ago using Photoshop CS6, because if I switch any hardware or update the version, I have to pay $X and get a version that requires steady internet access and it's completely not worth it".
I recall seeing an Instagram(?) post from Kanye West where he’d had a tab open in the background for the Pirate Bay, I believe searching for a fairly common plugin. (EDIT: I confirmed this, link at [0])
The reality is - a lot of us pirated software to get by, and potentially to learn; especially as younger folks.
But as we grow in our industry and career, (especially if you work in software!) I believe supporting software by buying it is important.
For myself - I justified pirating software that I used virtually every day as ‘when I make enough money from it, I’ll buy a license’.
Old habits die hard; though, and I’ve only recently turned that around.
Great example: for years and years I’d used a MacOS independently developed FTP client called ‘Fetch’, but each time I’d either just used the trial and kill the plists to reset it or found ‘some alternatives’, when available.
I’d got a tax refund recently, I was dealing with the expired trial prompt, and this time I decided to just finally drop the…$25(?) it was to buy a license. It felt good, and I’ll never have to deal with that minor annoyance again.
As I get older, and my careers are going well; the inconvenience of keeping an up to date pirated version of software, blocking IP addresses, etc; becomes more annoying than it is just to throw some cash at a license.
I just want the tool. I want it to ‘just work’ - and if it doesn’t - it’s nice to have the potential option for support.
That being said, I do refuse to pay for some software out of principle, namely those that charge subscription fees.
A lot of professional software has a hard plateau. One problem is that FCP 7 stopped working with macOS High Sierra.
Even if the software plateaus, they need to keep up with the incremental changes around them; newer codecs, integrations (software and hardware), and other tools.
I'm going to take a guess and say there were movies cut on Final Cut Pro 6, 5, 4, etc. It takes a lot of skill to be a good editor but I would bet most professional editors could edit a movie on an iPhone with iMovie if they had to.
Bong Joon Ho is one of the coolest directors alive. I remember first seeing his stuff in every frame a painting vids before parasite came out. The parasite shot of the girl smoking on the overflowing toilet was the most painting-esque frame I've ever seen if one had to be described as such.
FCP 7 is a very powerful tool that many editors used for many years. It’s not like they edited Parasite in iMovie.
If anything, this shows how important good tools are for a professional. The filmmakers presumably didn’t “upgrade” to FCP X because part of experience is mastering your tools and knowing what you can get out of them. I’m sure the FCP codebase was ancient and becoming difficult to maintain (it used to run on Mac OS 9!) but the wholesale rewrite they did meant that professionals now had to throw out a lot of their tool-specific knowledge learn a brand new editor, whether that editor was Apple’s initially buggy and feature-incomplete one or Adobe Premier. Premier had its own issues, but it was already proven usable in industry, had been around long enough that switching meant you weren’t as much of a Guinea pig as you were going with FCP X, and unlike FCP 7 was actively maintained.
If Apple had gone for a modular rewrite of components of FCP 7, gradually modernizing the code and the interface, they could have avoided alienating a lot of their user base. I haven’t used FCP X so I can’t say if the end result was “worth it” but FCP 7 (and the prior versions) were such a dominant force in the industry, and now FCP X is just another player.