Surfing through Macrumors today got me agitated for a bit.

One of the topics wrote “Apple Refocusing Final Cut Pro? Jobs says “Next Release Will Be Awesome”, seemingly to suggest that Apple will dumb down Final Cut Pro to sell more copies of it.

I seriously doubt that is true, since anyone involved in doing video knows that while most video schools package Final Cut Express with their Mac bundles for sale, anyone actually buying video software from Apple often get Final Cut Studio instead.

Nevertheless, Apple is known for making improvements to their software to make it more user friendly, and FCP is way overdue for a rewrite to Cocoa, as it is currently in Carbon.

What got everyone nervous was the iMovie 8 experience, I think. The first public appearance on a Macworld stage for the legendary Randy Ubilos was the demostration for iMovie 8. Since iMovie 08 was so different from iMovie HD a lot of people weren’t pleased with iMovie 08, not to mention a lot of functions that existed in iMovie HD never made it to iMovie 08, and only came back in iMovie 09. The changes in iMovie 08 were so huge that many fans of iMovie HD still refused to use iMovie 09 today.

And thus many ignorant people thought that Randy Ubilos is just some random new guy that Apple brought in to “destroy iMovie”.

And that is what I took issue with.

Some guy on Macrumors posted the following;

“Randy Ubillos, the developer who completely redesigned iMovie in 2008”

That should read the guy who totally screwed up a nice clean program, made it a confusing mess, “integrated” it so deeply with iPhoto that the slightest problem causes it to lose its references to the movie files, has an ambiguous and strange method of defining what you can safely “delete” etc.

This guy should embrace his destiny, which is to write dumbed-down but ultimately confusing Windows “Wizards”.

First on Windows we saw “Hi. I am the MS Word Wizard. I noticed you are typing a letter …”.

What is this guy go to do as an encore to screwing up iMovie …… “Hi. I am the FCPro Wizard. I noticed you are making a movie. Can I get in your way?”

Seems to suggest that he thinks Randy Ubilos is just some idiot who has no idea how to properly make a decent video editor.

The truth, however, is something close to this;

For those who aren’t aware, Randy Ubillos is the guy who led the team that first created Premiere, then he left Adobe and led the team who created what is now FCP. He is not some hack who wandered into Apple circa 2007 fired all the old iMovie people, and made iMovie ’08, then had to fix his mistakes after everyone whined. In fact, I suspect iMovie’s Cocoa rewrite with ’08 was a dry run of sorts for when they inevitably had to do the same for FCP.

Translation: He was probably the most important person in the creation of a whole new non-Avid turnkey, computer-based video editing world/industry – a legend.

Ignorant idiots piss me off.