GUEST POST: Peter Wiggins is the former webmaster of FCP.co and currently an active developer of Mac applications.
Well, it does seem like déjà vu all over again. Apple has bundled six professional apps (including Final Cut Pro) together into Creator Studio, throwing in some AI features for its workaday productivity apps. The package is yours for a subscription of $12.99 per month or $129 a year.
Those of us with a long history of working with Apple Pro Video products will remember 2005 when Apple bundled Final Cut Pro HD, Motion, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and the rather excellent but now defunct LiveType into Final Cut Pro Studio. It came with a hefty purchase price of $1,299 plus a free bad back from lugging home the box of discs and instruction manuals. The launch of Final Cut Pro X blew the collection apart again into discrete apps. The blast pushed the new apps onto the Mac App Store for download only.
So why has Apple done this? Is it more of a marketing exercise designed to re-group existing apps into a more appealing package? Maybe. After years of glacial progress while Adobe and Blackmagic dropped frequent feature updates, they’ve at least done something large and positive. And that’s good, as was the enthusiastic press coverage it received. But it doesn’t erase the years of frustration.
But let’s focus on the good. The cost to access these apps is now the lowest it has ever been. And that even beats the quietly retired Bundle for Education that gave a $400 saving across the previous versions.
That has to be encouraging for creators to get started on the relentless hamster wheel of creating and publishing video content. It makes Adobe’s $264 yearly cost for Premiere alone look expensive.
The latest acquisition here is Pixelmator, which offers Photoshop-level image manipulation – perfect for adding your shocked face portrait to every YouTube thumbnail that’s visually fighting for clicks. It was the obvious missing piece in the jigsaw.
No credible article about a bundle of apps can be written without using the word ‘interoperability’ multiple times. Interoperability (that’s two and counting) means bouncing media between apps for a specific task that the second app is good at. That’s where I’m not seeing any PR from Apple, and the website doesn’t mention that word once. You can imagine the questions starting to stack up on the forums.
Apple needs to get the plumbing between the apps sorted so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. They could do great things, and since I never miss a chance to show one of my videos, here’s a full workflow showing the potential. It starts in Claude, goes through Pixelmator, onto Motion to be built as a template for FCP.
Click to view video.
Apple does go heavy on PR for the AI updates to the apps. But have they gone far enough with AI incorporation?
Searching for words or phrases in FCP’s browser is clever, but nowhere near the level at which Adobe Premiere can make and handle transcripts. It’s progress from just making captions, but as this second video, which I’ve sneaked in shows, Apple could do so much more. They are chasing Adobe in the race, and they’ve already been lapped.
Click to view video.
But maybe Creator Studio V1 is just that: the first collective umbrella of all the Cocoa apps running on Apple Silicon seasoned with a pinch of AI. Now that everybody has inexpensive access to them, future versions could improve interoperability between all (that’s 3). How great would it be if you could build funky bullet points in Keynote and drop them straight into FCP without exporting?
Sadly, my perusal of the Apple positions vacant page didn’t show any opportunities for a Pro App integration engineer, otherwise I’d be in there applying tomorrow. My dream of a central LUT and look library will have to wait, along with Logic round tripping from FCP timelines, sorry, projects.
Let’s finish by mentioning what’s not in the bundle, and to me there are two large omissions. The first is a comparable photo handling app to Lightroom. Yes, Aperture went the same way as Shake, Color and some of the other great apps that Apple should never have euthanized prematurely. But when Apple purchased Pixelmator, they also got a BOGO deal and Photomator ended up in the basket.
Learn more about Photomater here: https://www.pixelmator.com/photomator/
On Apple’s page they call it ‘The ultimate photo editor for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro.” Sounds perfect! So why isn’t it included in the bundle? Is it going to get more development love as a standalone app, or is its sell-by date coming soon?
And lastly, one app that could have propelled them to having the perfect creator toolkit would have been live streaming for Mac and iOS. Hit a button and get your face live on YouTube, the gram, or your streaming outlet of choice. Or all of them at once. This is such a missed opportunity. Video creators want to broadcast live, not just edit.
Couldn’t Apple have found a few more dollars to purchase Ecamm Live or Prism Studio? I bet they could have assembled a MVP app in a weekend if they wanted to. They already have all the bits and all the frameworks needed.
Reading this back, it seems to be a disparate collection of thoughts making good points but no clear overriding direction or outcome. Which is exactly how Creator Studio feels. Good apps, good price, but lacking the cohesion that would make them genuinely powerful together. More interoperability (that’s 4).
2 Responses to Apple Creator Studio – A Good Move or Clever Marketing?
All these points to a broader and long-standing problem of being opaque about a roadmap. This becomes even more significant with a subscription. Aksing us for ongoing payment without disclosing ongoing development.
Regarding streaming, perhaps you’re old enough to remember QuickTime Broadcaster. You mention ECAMM but perhaps StreamYard might be an alternative, depending on whether they want an app or browser-based interface. The latter means a commitment to a backend, which would be a great value if they’re going to offer cloud features.
Also, to make subscriptions valuable, their premium content might be closer to what MotionVFX offers. That might move one time purchaseres of the FCP, Motion, Compressor into the subscription model, given how some are paying a fortune for MotionFFX subscription. For me, it’s odd to subscribe to an app collection and then have to buy or subscribe to a bundle of plugins on top of that for things that should be included in the subscription.
Of course, we can speculate and suggest, but all that is because of the frustration due to a lack of transparency about the roadmap. With a subscription, I’m paying for an unknown future, and that’s not a good sell.
If the future of “premium” isn’t expresed there’s little reason for us to move from one-time payment apps.
Craig:
I like your comments.
Larry