When you hear people in the tech world talking about “consumerization,” they’re usually referring to complex business software that’s been overhauled to look and feel more like personal technology. But consumerization is washing over other parts of the software market too.
One of them is professional media creation and editing.
Photoshop is a great example. If you don’t want to drop $700 on the professional version of Adobe’s flagship photo editing program, you can get a $10 version for your iPad that has many of the core features of Photoshop CS 6. Similarly, Autodesk, the maker of 3D design software for engineers and architects, has been busy releasing cheap yet professional-grade mobile apps like the $5 Sketchbook Pro app for Android and iOS.
Overall, it’s astonishing how much power software makers have put into the hands of amateurs over the last few years, while asking a fraction of the prices they charge for their high-end applications. Yes, these consumerized apps come with a few compromises, but they also include user-interface improvements—especially on the tablet versions—that make them a lot easier to use than their full-priced counterparts.
Then there’s the contentious case of Final Cut Pro and iMovie.
Final Cut Pro is Apple’s professional non-linear video editing program. It’s been used to create dozens of major feature films, from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to Eat, Pray, Love and John Carter.
| The Top Video Editing Programs | ||
| Amateur | ||
| Adobe Premiere Elements | adobe.com | $80 |
| Apple iMovie | apple.com/ilife/imovie | $15 |
| Corel VideoStudio Pro X6 | corel.com | $60 |
| Pinnacle Studio 16 | pinnaclesys.com | $60 |
| Professional | ||
| Adobe Premiere Pro | adobe.com | $800 |
| Avid Media Composer 6.5 | avid.com/US/products/media-composer | $1000 |
| Final Cut Pro X | apple.com/finalcutpro | $300 |
| Sony Vegas Pro 12 | sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro | $600 |
Apple didn’t really need to consumerize Final Cut Pro, since it already had iMovie, a desktop editing program aimed at home videographers. Yet over time, Apple has simplified Final Cut Pro in ways that put it within reach of the amateur. The most drastic overhaul was the introduction of Final Cut Pro X in 2011. Besides remaking the user interface to resemble iMovie, Apple chopped the price for the program from $1,000 to a far more affordable $300.
Media professionals were initially irate about many of the changes, and some longtime Final Cut Pro users defected to competing programs from Avid and Adobe. But Apple has restored many of the features that were missing from the first version of FCPX, such as multi-cam editing. The upshot is that Final Cut Pro is still the leading choice of professional editors.
Now it’s consumers who have a tough decision to make. Let’s say you need to produce a video, and it needs to look good, and/or it’s going to be seen by a lot of people. Should you choose the easy path and use iMovie, or should you take the time to learn FCPX, now that it has a more consumer-friendly price tag?
I’ve shot and edited plenty of my own news-related videos in iMovie. It’s good for short interviews where you just want to give readers a sense of somebody’s personality. (You can check out some of these videos of Doximity’s Jeff Tangney, GiftRocket’s Kapil Kale, and HealthTap’s Ron Gutman.) And iMovie is also a fine choice for people like YouTube personality Shane Dawson. For video bloggers, humor and brevity are paramount, not production values.
My own position on Final Cut Pro has evolved quite a bit. Back in 2011, when Apple released an iPad version of iMovie, I wrote that the app “clears the crucial good-enough bar for anyone doing amateur or even semi-serious videography.” I even wished that iMovie had been available on the iPad a year earlier, in the summer of 2010, when my friend Graham Ramsay and I made a series of videos chronicling our cross-country trip from Boston to San Francisco. We shot those videos on a Canon camcorder and edited them in Final Cut Pro 7, and the technical hassles involved were so major that personally, I would have been happy to sacrifice the control and precision of Final Cut Pro for the ease of shooting and editing entirely in iMovie.
But Graham always disagreed about that. His feeling is that iMovie gives “quick and slick but limited results,” to quote from one of our e-mail debates. And sure enough, when the time came to produce my own video, without Graham’s help, I came around to his point of view. I’m now convinced that the results you can get with Final Cut Pro X or a comparable program such as Adobe Premiere CS6 or Avid Media Composer make the time investment worthwhile.
Here’s what changed my mind. Back in February, when we were getting ready to unveil Xperience—the new consumer section of Xconomy, which you’re reading right now—I decided we needed a 1-minute explainer video for marketing purposes. There are plenty of production studios around San Francisco that specialize in such fare, but Xperience is a lean operation, so I knew I’d need to shoot and edit the video myself.
Once I wrote a script and started storyboarding, it became clear that this video was going to have a lot of moving parts. I wanted to use some old clips from my archives, plus some new shots that I could only get with the zoom lens on my Canon camcorder. I wanted some animated titles. There would have to be
