Stages of Grief: Using the Final Cut Pro X Crash Report Comment Form as Therapy

When Apple unleashed the latest update to Final Cut Pro X a couple of months ago, it was met with two basic responses:

1) It’s great that Apple is changing the video editing paradigm and going after a larger market than just professional video editors!

2) Are you shitting me? This is iMovie Plus or at best, Final Cut Express Deluxe. Dumbing down an app I use for business is going to send me to a competitor. I’m done.

And I was somewhere in the middle. People hate change, and I was willing to give this latest version of Final Cut Pro a chance. And another chance. And still more chances. It has not gone well. I’ve seen a lot of this window:

110920 01 crashreporter

I wanted to share some of the “feedback” I’ve left Apple via the above Problem Report window that pops up whenever an application crashes. I should add that in my nine years of using Mac OS X, I’ve never seen as many of these as I have with Final Cut Pro X. It crashes all the time. My stages of grief using the software that has caused the world so much pain:

1. Helpful and in Complete Denial

110920 02 helpful

2. With Humor and Some Denial

110920 03 funny reopen2

3. Terse

110920 05 crashreporter clickedabutton jpg

4. More Terse

110920 06 crashreporter really jpg

5. Angry

110920 07 effingjoke

6. Angrier

110920 08 holyshitballs

7. Trying to Talk Myself Down With a Long-Winded Essay

110920 13 planeticket

8. Didn’t Work

110920 10 listenmofos

9. Declaration of Independence

110920 11 reopen

10. Desperation

110920 12 srsly pc trucks

11, Psychosis

110920 13 planeticket

12. Resignation

110920 14 adobenumber

I hope this is helpful for others.

  • http://www.ryanwaddell.com Ryan Waddell

    Hopefully this is just a one off.  I’m currently a Windows guy, switched back to Windows 7 after my Macbook got stolen a couple years ago, but the one thing I loved about my Mac when I had it was the stability.  I wonder if this is a sign of how big Apple is getting, that quality is starting to slip a little bit in some of the products?  As far as I can tell, the hardware is still unstoppable (for the most part)… But with a few of the Lion quirks I’ve heard about, and the gutting of Final Cut… It’s a bad trend.  I’m still going to consider a Mac for my next machine down the road (in particular, I’m looking at the Macbook Air… Mmm so light and fast!), but that’s still a year away so hopefully things will be trending back upwards at that point.

    • http://blurbomat.com blurb

      I think that 10.7 is an attempt at unifying some of the iOS features that people clearly love into a desktop OS. Some of the gesture stuff is great. In particular, swiping to go back in Safari is fantastic. However, Apple has completely  mishandled the launch of Final Cut Pro X. A lot of production folks use older hardware and software because it works. They don’t dink around with their systems because that means down time. In the case of Final Cut, I think that Apple should have done a bit more hand holding and had a clear migration path. They should have waited three months and included the stuff that was in the recent Final Cut Pro 10.1 update. 

      I’m going to do the upgrade, because my heavy duty video work is done for a time. But this is no way to handle a new product migration. It’s interesting because I loved Aperture 2 when it came out. Loved it. And then I started to hit the ceiling after about a year. Decided to move back to Lightroom.

      I may have to look at Premiere Pro and After Effects if things don’t improve for the pro video line. I’m terrified of what Apple is going to do to Logic Studio. TERRIFIED.

      That said, I’ve had fewer kernel panics since the Lion 10.7.1 upgrade. I also did a deep clean of my caches using Onyx. That seems to have made things more stable. 

      • http://www.ryanwaddell.com Ryan Waddell

        Well, yeah, it’s more of a case of instability issues in Lion that I was hearing about, as opposed to the actual feature changes (which I think look kinda neat).

        I followed the Final Cut Pro X stuff for a while when it first released, even though I’m not really a video guy, I’ve started shooting more stuff of my son and have another on the way, so I want to start figuring out editing workflow a bit more.  From what it sounds like, Apple maybe got a bit ahead of themselves in terms of “we redefine things, it’s what we do, now let’s do it for video workflow” — worked for them in the past, maybe not so much this time around.

  • Brian Brewer

    I feel the pain of my Apple friends in the video world.  Apple obviously saw a larger financial audience in a dumbed down and cheaper priced video NLE.   A shame since they basically owned the “pro” world for NLE with previous versions.  I almost shed a tear when I heard it can’t handle multi-cam editing.  What year is this? 

    I am on the Windows side and have been happy with Sony Vegas Pro and all it’s newer releases.   I doubt that is an option for you,  so I can only offer my condolences. 

  • http://twitter.com/nr23derek derek

    I manage a media centre in a college. We were migrating away from Avid toward FCP and then Apple dropped this unwanted bombshell.

    Aware of the problems I bought one suite of X and tried it out. Maybe if I unlearned everything I know about video editing it might make sense, but I had video tracks jumping around all over the place without being told to and much more besides. It seems to do far too much “automatically”, which is something I simply do not want a software to do. If I put a video clip on track 2 I want it on track 2 and I want it where I put it thank you very much Apple.

    After fighting with it for several days I gave up and for now I’ve gone back to FCP 7 and all new edit suite purchases are on hold.

    Thing is this means more than saying goodbye to FCP, once bitten twice shy and I’m very unlikely to buy into anything Apple again because of this madness. Avid or Premiere Pro on Windows  7 is, I think, the way to go.

    Apple, you messed up big time. Unless you admit your mistake and give us what we want then sorry, but it’s goodbye across the board — video editing, graphic design and music recording.

    What we wanted was a 64bit version of the real FCP, not this micky mouse overblown pile of consumer crap. You stand to lose much more than just the pro video editing industry, Apple, I hope you realise that.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jonathan-Walley/780902718 Jonathan Walley

    I feel you I get the same error message ALL the time in FCP X. If it stopped crashing i would be really happy .