Aperture could have been amazing, but it was slow, buggy and suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to - just as Lightroom appeared.
FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.
I went all in on Logic, however, and that has proved a great buy, no subscription model, fantastic extras and works super well. If they can rebuild a enthusiast-targeted set of apps again, but stick with it, the future looks bright.
I cannot imagine Apple ever competing with Capture One or most of the other circle of RAW image processors, which have some rather niche features, but they might be able to take on Lightroom.
One of the senior Aperture team members went off to use the underlying OS RAW infrastructure in product called Gentleman Coders Nitro. It's a decent but little known Lightroom alternative with no subscription, albeit without all the recent Lightroom AI-infused features. It does have AI masking though.
I bought their previous software "RAW Power", because it was a one-time perpetual license. Then they rewrote the app (it's worse now BTW), rebranded as Nitro, and stopped updating the previous one to be able to charge again.
The Pixelmator team did the same thing with "Pixelmator Classic".
A fantastic product but the colour science does not look great from a first play, and I don't know if seven days is long enough to figure it out. If I had a job I'd pull the trigger anyway, but too much of a luxury right now. I can't believe I did not know about this application. Shocking marketing! :D
> FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.
I'm more of a casual when it comes to Final Cut Pro rather than a daily driver, but it does seem like the last year or two they've started to get back into the fight again. Some of the 360 VR/AI/multi-iOS camera changes seem to go more hand-in-hand with "Apple gives a shit about content creation again", buttressed by Apple Vision Pro and spatial photography.
As someone who's still eagerly awaiting like... any reasonable prosumer device to shoot for Apple Vision Pro, I think all of this industry is going to really ramp up in the next few short years very quickly. Gonna be interesting.
Yea, if Apple is going to want their VR products to succeed they're going to have to rely heavily on some vertical integration on video capture/editing software, and FCPX (and now Pixelmator for the spatial photography efforts) seems like the natural place to put those efforts.
It feels a bit strange though that they made FCP for iPhone/iPad a subscription, and completely separate one from the Mac App.
Like, Apple probably doesn’t even need to make money from any of FCP? IMO should be used for driving people to buy more hardware. It’s a little bit offensive for them to charge $5/month on top of a $300 Mac app.
On my Mac I have Davinci, and was considering perhaps trying FCP, but not at those prices / subscriptions.
Fair enough. I don’t use the iPad version of FCP or Resolve, but I’ve paid for both Mac apps and have enjoyed free updates from Apple and Blackmagic for close to 10 years.
Yeah this. Aperture was a mess. Some of the "full" edit tools from Aperture are actually lurking in Photos which is a fairly competent photo editor on macOS surprisingly.
I think they have a chance. I know a couple of professional photographers. One uses Capture One and only for tethering support. The other an ancient copy of Lightroom that was a one time purchase and use that for persistent contract work for one of the larger advertising companies in London. If the price is right and it's good enough, they are probably going to do fine.
I'm an amateur and I want to get off LR because I hate giving Adobe money every month and the damn thing is a fat pig compared to Photomator. Photomator is missing decent dehaze and because I have a shitty little DX mirrorless, I need the denoise and it's not as good as LR is.
I was quite surprised (pleasantly) with the editing features available in Photos. I rarely use it on the desktop, and primarily only use it on the device I took the image, but to see how much more in depth the editing was on desktop was one of those that I thought for a second might make me switch to using it for device captured image editing.
For non-device camera images, I still use full tilt apps as that's just my workflow and I do not ever see Photos working its way into that workflow
The no-subscription aspect is a huge differentiator IMO, and depending on situation is even worth trading off features. Losing access to your work because you stopped your Adobe subscription sucks, as does the eventual premium over single-purchase.
Logic is a weird one. It has really truly excellent included instruments (such as Alchemy) and effects, but the app itself feels rather outdated. The mixer, whilst having had some nice features added since Logic 9, is in dire need of an update.
I believe the Logic team are still based in Germany, where the original Emagic team that produced Logic were based, so it's not that they are languishing, but an intentional decision has been made (either by them or Apple) to keep this structure.
Logic has such a long history, it's not surprising that it shows it's age, and has 'weird' behaviour that you wouldn't choose today. It's got stuff in there from the early 90s, as it started out as a midi sequencer before pulling audio into the product.
All the AI hubris but Logic still does not do fades or zero crossings when cutting audio clips. And don't get me started on the audio zoom. This is basic stuff!
It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.
In defence of the AI hubris, I laid down a funky rhythm guitar track, verse and chorus, and then fiddled around with the AI bassist and AI drummer and blow-me-down-with-a-feather if the results weren't outstanding. Like a perfect demo. I was able to send that to my mate and say, here you go, here's a demo with guide tracks for the bass.
For making demos and filling-out sketches, I'm thrilled. Here's the audio, and all rough playing, bum notes and general incompetence are my own.
Huh. Doesn't return to the one, ever? You've got sort of a I - III - IV thing going on, and it just goes to IV and stays there forever. Did you think that was the root?
Fun toy, though! I take it you extended it backwards into an intro, or you have playing it can read that you muted, leading into your guitar stuff. Did you play to a click or is it reading your tempo too?
I think I played straight into Logic with the metronome on, two sections and then pushed that forward to create some blank bars for the intro and then added the drummer on multiple tracks and same for bassist, then fiddled with some of the settings for each section.
I was pretty impressed, though, for approximately ten minutes start to finish. I should probably go recall what I played so I can try and finish the riffs off or something.
An actual competent musician ought to be able to make the most ridiculous demos with this thing.
This seems like a very weird hill to die on, specifically concidering this is a feature I would want explicitly off and wouldn't care about existing.
It's editing 101, check your cuts are at a safe boundry of put in a fade. I've never seen an auto feature do what I want though and need to redo it anyway, so just doing nothing is half as much work.
I would much rather complain about lack of AAF support in logic but then again I would never recommend logic to anyone other than for music production work purely because that's the only use case the devs seem to care about.
You might be diligent to check your cuts in Sample Editor.
However when you zoom in in the Arrange the way the waveform is rendered it seems like you are cutting on a zero crossing when in fact you are not.
It lies to you and leads you to believe you've done the right thing.
I have had the pleasure of working on tracks with dozens of clicks that I had to remove thanks to the laziness of Logic developers, pardon me for dying on the hill and spoiling your view.
I don't use logic. I find it to be no good but regardless I still wouldn't die on that hill.
There's many things I disliked about logic when I tried it and that led to my opinion on its only useful for music production, I would probably not even say editing...
More on the composition level. If I'm tracking it's into Pro Tools, any edits happen there too. I personally don't move out but other's do really prefer to do more production work in Logic so I would happily bounce out tracks for them. Ironically AAF would solve that problem too...
Regarding cuts on zero... I basically never do so all my cuts will have a crossfade, generally the real world is just a little too chaotic to have a zero crossing just about where I would prefer the cut...
Unfortunately I am in position where I have to master mixes done in Logic and this backwards crap can easily add up to half an hour onto every track. Sick of it. Dying on that hill!
I mean put it in your requirements and reject the mix if it contains pops and clicks... Whoever did the mixing has the original with cuts so can add fades much much quicker than you can.
And if they don't well, more work for them.
Or just add it to the bill, if you are clear upfront that it will add $$$ there's no issues there.
I've had sessions rejected by mastering engineers for stuff that I've had to correct, why make this your problem.
There was the SQLite database that was run on its own thread, and regularly synced to disk, the hard-sync that waited until the data had flushed through to the disk platters.
In addition to that there was a whole structure of plist files, one per image, that meant the database could be reconstructed from all these individual files, so if something had somehow corrupted the SQLite database, it could be rebuilt. There was an option to do that in the menu or settings, I forget which. The plists were write-once, so they couldn't be corrupted by the app after they'd been written-and-verified on ingest.
Finally, there were archives you could make which would back up the database (and plist files) to another location. This wasn't automated (like Time Machine is) but you could set it running overnight and come back to a verified-and-known-good restore-point.
If there was a catastrophic data loss, it's (IMHO much) more likely there was a disk failure than anything in the application itself causing problems - and unless you only ever had one instance of your data, and further that the disk problem was across both the platter-area that stored plists and well as database, it ought to have been recoverable.
Source: I wrote the database code for Aperture. I tested it with various databases holding up to 1M photos on a nightly basis, with scripts that randomly corrupted parts of the database, did a rebuild, and compared the rebuilt with a known-good db. We regarded the database as a cache, and the plists as "truth"
I'm not saying it was impossible that it was a bug in Aperture - it was a very big program, but we ran a lot of tests on that thing, we were very aware that people are highly attached to their photos, and we also knew that when you have millions of users, even a 1-in-a-million corner-case problem can be a really big issue - no-one wanted to read "Aperture lost all my photos", ever.
I personally witnessed one incident I mentioned, and for my sins tried to help my panicking classmate, I think we reached a good-enough outcome. On the subject of raw files processing, I have yet to find an ideal system, if it is even possible, where edits to get a RAW photo to its final state are handled and stored in some deterministic format, yet somehow connected to said image, in a way that allows the combination of the edit and raw to travel around.
Everything I've tried - let's see, Aperture, Lightroom, Capture One - have to use some kind of library or database and there's no great way of managing the whole show. The edits ARE the final image and the only solution I had that ever works was to maintain a Mac Pro with RAID and an old copy of Lightroom, and run all images through that.
IIRC, I never understood the Aperture filesystem, probably not meant for humans, which didn't help. Does that sound right?
Adobe have (had?) a DNG file-format that encompasses the RAW data, JPEGs and the changes, but by the simple fact that adjustments are application-specific anything you do to modify the image won't be portable. It's basically a TIFF file with specific tags for photography.
The thing is, if you want any sort of history, or even just adequate performance, you want a database backing the application - it's not feasible to open and decode a TIFF file every time you want to view a file, or scan through versions, or do searches based on metadata, or ... It's just too much to do, compared to doing a SQL query.
The Aperture Library was just a directory, but we made it a filesystem-type as a sort of hint not to go fiddling around inside it. If you right-clicked on it, you could still open it up and see something like <1>
Masters were in the 'Masters' folder, previews (JPEGs) inside the 'Previews' folder, Thumbnails (small previews) were in the 'Thumbnails' folder. Versions (being a database object) had their own 'Versions' folder inside the 'Database' folder. This was where we had a plist per master + a plist per version describing what had been done to the master to make the version.
We didn't want people spelunking around inside but it was all fairly logically laid out. Masters could later be referenced from places outside the Library (with a lower certainty of actually being available) but they'd still have all their metadata/previews/thumbnails etc inside the Library folder.
Yeah, even DNGs don't really work because as you say, the edits are application specific. My entire workflow converted everything to DNG for about 15 years but now I don't bother.
The thing that Lightroom really got right was not trying to mix all this stuff and organizing the master files well, so it was extremely clear where source material lived. I certainly don't want to root around thumbnails and previews in randomly-named folders.
Aperture's interface could have been great with some decent performance, and some of those decisions seemed to have survived with the iPhoto Library. Perhaps one big-ass ball of mud works fine for consumers with small file sizes and no archival strategy, but it's too prescriptive for me. If they brought Aperture back, and incorporated Photoshop-like features, that would be interesting and cool, so long as they left photo management alone.
The lesson I took a long time to learn was to not have the RAW processor import your files and instead get Photo Mechanic to do it instead, because it does a better job, and just use the RAW processor to process RAWs.
XMP/ITPC has been around longer than I've had a digital camera, do you know why Aperture didn't make use of those?
Aperture always (I think, definitely by 1.5) extracted the IPTC metadata, along with other vendor-specific data from photos. I think (hey, it's almost 20 years ago..) it was 2.0 when we supported XMP. It definitely came in at some time, but it wasn't there at the start and I can't recall exactly when.
Going back to 2007, so can't remember super clearly, but IIRC the db was a sqlite like thing and all info about everything was stored in this, and it was vulnerable to corruption, plus all versions and thumbnails were mixed together with original image files - a total mess. The digital photo management landscape wasn't so mature then, and some people trusted Aperture with their original images whereas later versions allowed or encouraged people to keep their "masters" elsewhere.
Because the whole thing was as slow as a slug dragging a ball-and-chain, pre-SSD, issues with that filesystem or master database were sometimes mistaken for just general slowness. I jumped to Lightroom faster than you could say Gordon Parks.
Aperture 1.0 was very slow. The stories I could tell about its genesis...
I came on board just before 1.0 release, and for 1.5 we cleaned things up a bit. For 2.0 we (mainly I) completely rewrote the database code, and got between 10x and 100x improvements by using SQLite directly rather than going through CoreData. CoreData has since improved, but it was a nascent technology itself back then, and not suited to the sort of database use we needed.
The SQLite database wasn't "vulnerable to corruption", SQLite has several articles about its excellent ACID nature. The design of the application was flawed at the beginning though, with bindings used frequently in the UI to managed objects persisted in the database, which meant (amongst other things) that:
- User changes a slider
- Change is propagated through bindings
- CoreData picks up the binding and syncs it to disk
- But the database is on another thread, which invalidates the ManagedObjectContext
- Which means the context has to re-read everything from the database
- Which takes time
- By now the user has moved the slider again.
So: slow. I fixed that - see the other post I made.
Thanks for the lovely insight, super interesting - I don't think I made it to Aperture 2 - but sounds like some unusual decisions made in that editing process. I suspect, based on my own history with disk problems, that the filesystem issues that would regularly pop up and not dealt with by your average technically-over-trusting student were the root cause, but exacerbated by the choices of image management and application speed.
FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.
I went all in on Logic, however, and that has proved a great buy, no subscription model, fantastic extras and works super well. If they can rebuild a enthusiast-targeted set of apps again, but stick with it, the future looks bright.
I cannot imagine Apple ever competing with Capture One or most of the other circle of RAW image processors, which have some rather niche features, but they might be able to take on Lightroom.