I recently wrote an article about why video editors should give FCP X another chance and had the opportunity to ask Randy Ubillos some questions. Randy was lead developer behind the first version of Premiere, the first version of Final Cut Pro, iMovie '08, and FCP X. He worked for Apple for 20 years before retiring in 2015. The interview took place over e-mail. Here is the transcript:

David:

What was the inspiration for the development and workflow of Keygrip/Premiere v1? Why did you feel the need to rewrite FCP X from the ground up? I’m specifically wondering about your ideas/philosophy on digital editing that led to the shift. It seems to me, based on what I’ve gathered, that you built Keygrip/Premiere off of the 3/4” tape editing process and that by the mid 2000s you felt that this approach to editing was outdated and that editors would benefit from software that was inspired by the digital world and not the analog world.

Randy:

- Premiere originally started as an editor to test the capabilities of the Digital Film video capture card that SuperMac was designing in 1990. I based the interface on editing I had done with 3/4” tape decks in high school. At the time it was pushing the boundaries of what could be done on a desktop system (at 640x480@30fps!).

- Final Cut Pro started as DV was becoming a standard and allowing direct digital in/out. The main refinement to the interface was going from three separate tracks for A/B/Transition to several tracks that incorporated this directly into each one.

- The standard at this point was that the sync relationships between the various items in the different tracks was all basically in the editors head. Even the relationship between the audio and video from a single clip was somewhat “squishy” at times.

- If you look at L and J cuts, those didn’t exist because that’s how you really want to cut audio, it was because the audio for the A/B clips lived in the same track and so could not overlap. “Tracks” were actually an implementation detail at the low level of the software being exposed to the user at a high level.

- FCPX broke away from the idea of specific tracks and just allowed audio to overlap as needed, letting the software figure out the details of how to mix it. The magnetic timeline made the temporal relationships between items explicit so that you could hand projects over to a second editor, and you could move groups of clips around easily without worrying about the relationships being disturbed.

- The other big change for FCPX (which actually debuted first in iMovie ’08) was skimming. Instead of only seeing an icon for a video clip and having to manually select it and scan though to find material, skimming allowed all of the video content to be shown simultaneously in strips of thumbnails, making it _much_ easier to find specific sections of content amidst a sea of material. This feature in particular was made possible by the huge improvements in processor and hard disk speed.

One of my biggest goals in the software I worked on was always to reduce the amount of time spent in the mechanics of editing, allowing editors to concentrate on telling their stories. I was very fortunate to have been able to work with some of the most talented engineers and designers in the industry over the years. :-)

David:

I want to focus a bit more on tracks. What did you see in tracks that made you want to abandon them and what inspired you to create the magnetic timeline? To me it seems that you could have innovated the organizational aspect of the software (metadata tagging, skimming, etc) along with faster rendering, simplified exporting process, etc and kept tracks as they were. I can see what you are saying by the sync relationship being “squishy” and I see the advantages to the magnetic timeline…. I’m very curious about this one because I think that if you had kept tracks in tact that there wouldn’t have been as much of a controversy over the release of FCP X. So what was it about tracks that motivated you to rethink them?

Randy:

Tracks really come about from the way the hardware underneath operates; you have to allocated memory, decoders, etc for each stream being dealt with. And the number of conceptual “tracks” that you have in a project varies from one part to another. You may have 1 layer or audio track at the beginning, three in the middle and five at the end. In a track based system the layers at the beginning, middle and end all share the exact same tracks and you’re always potentially disrupting things in other parts of the project when you make changes in another area. One of the most common things I heard from editors was that as a project progressed the likelihood of a change in one part of a project having an unintended effect somewhere else in the timeline went up dramatically. Tracks implicitly put a relationship between all of the items in that track, even though they may be actually completely unrelated. Visually track based systems tend to get much “taller” because of all of the wasted space from reserving certain tracks for certain sections of a project and then having to stay out of them anywhere else in the timeline. In general I find that people who have never been introduced to the concept of tracks have a much easier time staring with FCPX than with an editor that uses them.

David:

Did you design FCP X with any sort of specific editor in mind? Documentary? Short-form? Narrative? Hobbyist?

Randy:

FCPX was designed to scale to almost any sized project.

David:

Are you happy with FCP X? Any regrets besides how Apple chose to roll it out?

Randy:

I’m very happy with FCPX. I use it all the time and find it to be very fast and efficient, allowing me to finish projects in a short time. The introduction could have gone better; we probably should have done more to have some success stories ready at launch but Apple’s secrecy policy didn’t allow for that.

(I took an adventure film school class a couple of years ago and they were using Premiere; I opted to use FCPX (obviously :-). They spent a day going over importing and logging and how you had to choose how you wanted to organize your material because the folder structure would determine how you looked for things later and you had to get it right from the start. I just used keywording to have several different ways to organize the source material without worrying about where it was stored. I used the rest of the day to edit while the others were still organizing. While we were reviewing material I was able to keyword specific sections as I went. They were cutting the sections they thought they might use into one giant timeline, planning to cut things down later. When we were doing cutaways and audio mixing, I was able to move things around in the timeline much more easily, letting me focus on getting the story right, rather than fighting the app. In the end I was able to complete many more polishing details in the time that we had than anyone else was. By the end of the class the instructors were all ready to give FCPS another chance because they had seen it in action, rather than listening to a bunch of people who had never actually used it.)

I’m still believe that the leap to FCPX was the right thing to do. There was always going to be a bunch of flack from existing users, it was too big a change for there not to be. I knew that two years before we released it. But FCPX is being used by more people for more projects than FCP7 ever was, and that’s a good thing.