Final Cut Server

» see apple.com/finalcutserver as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

final cut server sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. i was never in a post house. my closest brush with professional video tooling in the late 2000s was a friend doing freelance edits in adobe premiere on a mid-range laptop, which is to say not the world final cut server lived in. final cut server lived in the room with the fibre channel switch.

apple bought proximity group in 2006 for their artbox media asset management tool. the product was announced as final cut server at nab in april 2007 and shipped in early april 2008 at $999 for a ten-client license and $1999 for unlimited. it was the workgroup tier of the final cut studio family, the piece that handled metadata and approval workflows for editors moving raw footage through a pipeline.

version 1.5 in july 2009 cut the pricing tier and shipped at $999 unlimited. it added active directory integration for the broadcast newsrooms that asked for it. then two years of silence. on 21 june 2011 apple announced final cut pro x at the supermeet event in las vegas. the new application did not import old final cut pro projects and did not have a server piece. on 30 june 2011 the entire final cut studio went off the price list with no upgrade path.

~ the record ~

~ the actual end ~

the june 2011 fcp x launch is the cleanest single-day product death in apple's pro lineage. on the same morning the entire final cut studio family stopped being for sale, including final cut server and three of its sibling pro apps. the post-production world reacted, which is the polite description of what actually happened.

the cnn promo department had thirty seats of final cut server and had to migrate to a competitor over the following year. small post houses that had bought into the workgroup story in 2008 or 2009 found themselves running an unsupported asset server on increasingly old hardware. apple posted a support article in november 2011 explaining that final cut server would receive no further development and no migration tool. the artbox brand had been bought and shut down inside seven years.

~ the next chapter ~

the workgroup gap took years to fill. cattdv and ftrack picked up the editorial asset-management slot. apple's official answer was to not have one. fcp x added libraries with metadata in 2013, that was the official line on collaboration. the proximity team behind the original artbox dispersed across the next decade. one of them ended up at adobe working on bridge.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »