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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

> final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them.

They're professional tools. For use by people who are paid to use them. You don't want there to be buzz, you want them to just work.

Buzz is a godawful metric for useful software.

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people who work in jobs tend to talk about their tools. i worked in tv for a while a couple decades back, i went to school for film, and thus i have many friends who do creative video editing and professional video editing and still follow the industry closely. i'm not talking about typical social media buzz, i'm talking about "companies moving on to the product" or even "companies continuing to use the product," or professionals choosing to invest in the tool for their work.

i've only seen businesses and creatives i know moving their workflows away from FCP and Logic. i've not talked to friends in the industry who are moving on to them. buzz may be a poor word to choose, but for example i have a friend who does a lot of in-house editing for a massive, national company that owns many local TV stations and they're moving from avid to _premiere_, of all things, which really feels shocking given that premiere for a long time felt like the hobbyist tool.

a good example of a tool that has industry buzz lately is davinci resolve, which has had a meteoric rise in prominence. i don't think that it's the same thing as the average person talking around the water cooler but more and more of my friends who work at networks or in production are starting to use resolve in their color and editing workflows, and it's a topic of discussion.

My mistake then, I thought you meant a more general social media kind of buzz.

Logic and Final Cut did at one point have that kind of buzz when they were a part of Apple's "wow look at all the pros using macs" Mac OS X comeback story.

one hundred percent - and i felt like when they initially launched garageband they were doing a great play to get people (particularly folks who dabble and school kids) invested in the logic-style workflow to build up their familiarity so that folks entering the industry would demand it in their workplaces... and then it all just fell off. they actually seemed to want to have that kind of flow in place for basically every kind of professional tool! imovie->FCP and garageband->logic being the prime examples (or maybe only, I guess) that I can think of.

I assume there was some shift in how they thought about serving professionals and where apple's place in the work ecosystem was because the beginning of the end for apple pro software in terms of prominence aligned roughly, it seems, with things like the discontinuation of the xserve line (which itself wound down as apple seemed to rebrand itself as a consumer device company first on the heels of the iPhone's success.)

There was also a shift in greediness, because all those prof software have pretty good hardware requirement linked to them precisely in the place where Apple extract the most money with their absurd margin.

So even if in theory a Mac could be good for video editing because of its software, for a young person, a Mac with enough storage to make this endeavor worthwhile pursuing is entirely out of his budget. In the meantime, this person can settle for a still pretty good PC that may not be as great but will allow him to have multi-terabytes of storage at a palatable price and he can just use DaVinci or a pirated copy of Premiere.

In some ways macOS has more users but they all tend to be for the "basic" consumer type which are OK with the base configuration Apple offers that are not completely out of whack from a value standpoint.

Apple may be realizing a bit late that while it does seem alright for money making, it doesn't make for halo products that give status and are aspirational. But then again Apple seems to be content just being a luxury brand that primarily gives status by making people appear "rich".

To the contrary, you want there to be buzz around their new features. As a professional, you need to keep up, and you want new features to reduce your busywork in the app.

Buzz is actually a pretty good metric, because it means the product is being maintained and improved, and you want to be investing in tools that will continue to meet your needs over the next 10 years rather than become stagnant, and then you have to re-train on a competitor.

I suppose we need to be more specific about what we mean by buzz.

I mean "buzz" to be a general enthusiasm about the software even among non-users. I recall times when there was quite a lot of this kind of buzz about both Logic and Final Cut, in part I think because they were a part of Apple's Mac OS X comeback story.

I suspect you mean "buzz" to be enthusiasm in the community of users of the tools. I know software I've worked on in the pass, the general public couldn't care less about our product, but new releases always got a lot of buzz in our forums. This kind of buzz might actually be a pretty good metric.

I dunno, I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a version of Photoshop CS1/CS2 that runs on modern operating systems where all development effort goes into fixing bugs and improving performance instead of something like current Photoshop CC, where the focus is on gee-whiz gimmicky features. Plugins can fill in for the gee-whiz stuff without turning the core app into a cosmically bloated mess.

10-15 years ago most of the videography freelancers I worked with were on FCP. A few used Premiere. Today, almost all of them are on DaVinci.

My sample size here is small, but yeah, from my horizon FCP is starting to look abandoned.

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