MoneyWatch Tech

Apple Goes Mainstream: Shift on Final Cut Software Will Leave Old Pros in the Lurch

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: May 20, 2010 / 11:00 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

I've said for some time that Apple (AAPL) has begun to change its identity and shift from its traditional markets to a more general consumer focus. A report, if true, provides another indicator: Apple plans to retarget its Final Cut video editing and post production tools from a professional audience to a more mainstream-focused line.

Final Cut has been a standard tools suite in the video production field for years. The latest version of Final Cut Studio, released about a year ago, includes video and soundtrack editing, video compression, special effects, and color management. Production companies create mainstream movies and television programs using the software. According to Apple, some of the titles that use Final Cut include Everybody Hates Chris, Leverage, Tetro, and Benjamin Button.

A report from AppleInsider states that Apple plans a "significant makeover" to shift the target market from professionals to prosumers, jargon used in the photo and video industries to indicate a combination of cost-sensitive professionals and advanced amateurs.

According to a person with knowledge of Apple's internal Pro Apps plans, the company has shuffled around management within the Final Cut team in order to retarget its efforts to more closely match the needs of the majority of its customers. Apple's Mac customer base has steadily shifted from desktop models to notebooks, while also broadening out from a high end creative niche to a wider installed base that includes more prosumer and advanced home users.

Apple had foreshadowed its intention when it only released a 32-bit version of Final Cut, as professionals would prefer 64-bit hardware and software to speed production.

Any shift of Final Cut applications toward a broader audience is bound to reduce the capabilities professionals need, but that would be overkill for a more mainstream market. A couple of current Apple job openings, including one for a senior visual interface designer for the company's professional applications group, indicate potential major changes in the interface. Although there may be better and simpler designs possible, professionals become attached to what they've learned and tend to resent the imposition of another learning curve.

Apple has denied that intends to move away from the pro audience:

Final Cut Pro is the first choice for professional video editors and we've never been more excited about its future. The next version of Final Cut is going to be awesome and our pro customers are going to love it.

Granting the best of intentions, prosumer products deliver less than what many professionals require, because amateurs don't need the bells and whistles and generally shirk from the accompanying price tag. Even with the assurances, I wouldn't take comfort. Apple's future is with the consumer, not with the professional, as its product strategies have shown. AppleInsider captured the competing interpretations in part of a follow-up article:

The fact the Apple's Professional Applications Design Group is still hiring a Senior Visual Interface Designer and Senior Human Interface Designer to help design future iterations of its "high-visibility applications that are used daily by creative professionals working in post-production," as reported by AppleInsider last week, makes it clear that the work on Final Cut's future direction is both still under way and still targeted to serve the needs of professionals. At the same time, the role of Final Cut Pro to sell high end Macs or to earn substantial software revenues is clearly changing, both as high end Mac sales remain largely static and as the price of Final Cut Studio has dropped.

Should video professionals feel themselves shorted, chances are they would move to products from Avid Technology, which has a big share of that market. Although Adobe (ADBE) has video production products, it doesn't have the same prestige in the pro market. In fact, Adobe apparently didn't appear at the most recent National Association of Broadcasters convention.

Related Coverage:

Image: stock.xchng user LeoSynapse, site standard license.