[Frameworks] FInal Cut Pro X

[David Tetzlaff]

> ethically speaking they are not the best company
> as they stole everything from avid anyway

Ok, I'm going to have to ask you to explain what exactly Apple 'stole' from Avid...

Apple bought FCP from Macromedia where it had stalled due to corporate fumbling. Apparently, Macromedia had lured Randy Ubilos, the original author of Premiere, away from Adobe without realizing that it had a licensing deal with Microsoft that prohibited them from developing an app employing Quicktime, thus putting the kibosh on the project they had hired Ubilos to develop. So basically, they just shifted focus to Dreamweaver and Ubilos was sort of alone in his office for a couple years, working on this app his employer could never release. Everybody in the Mac video world had heard about FCP and wondered when it was going to arrive, but if you went to a trade show and asked someone from Macromedia about it, they were like "Huh? Final what?"

According to Wikipedia, when Macromedia finally got around to putting the project up for sale, Apple bought it as a 'defensive move' when no other buyers could be found. I have no idea how that's 'defensive' if nobody else wanted to buy it. And what would Apple have been defending... Anyway, Wikipedia goes on to state that Apple initially had no interest in developing FCP itself either, and only went ahead with it after also trying to sell it and failing to find a buyer. So they basically stumbled into FCPs success. Ubilos is still with Apple, and now in charge of all their video products. He wrote iMovie 9, and is the guiding force behind FCPX and it's iMovie-ness. But he did create the FCP everybody seems to love in the first place, so it's not like he's a clueless noob.

Googling 'Randy Ubilos' I found this article about FCP development by Phil Hodgetts written last September. It details where he thinks Apple should go with FCP and the technical reasons why, and his suggestions are pretty much exactly where they went... http://tinyurl.com/2g4y5jz

So where Avid fits into this story is beyond me.