2008 has finally rolled in and what better way to celebrate a new year than to talk, discuss, spread, and speculate on a crazy rumor; Avid is going to buy Final Cut Pro (and presumably the whole suite of Final Cut Studio) from Apple. Have a great 2008 everyone!!!!

OK really. Could there be any truth to such speculation? This rumor has been floating around since last NAB. I think it seemed to be more like bored editors (myself included) pontificating on what such a purchase might mean for our editing applications that really helped it spread. Fuel was recently added to the fire when Avid announced they were pulling out of NAB. While Apple hasn’t, to my knowledge, made a similar public announcement there has been a lot of talk around the web that Apple won’t be exhibiting at NAB 2008 either as they disappeared from the list of exhibitors on the show floor not long after Avid bailed. This brings up many questions. Does Apple not see a need to exhibit at such an expensive industry-specific trade show when their main rival isn’t going to be there? Is this some conspiracy between the two companies to merge their NLE product lines into a world-dominating platform that scales from an elementary-school-level-teaching-tool running on an old eMac all the way up to a 4K finishing system? Or does Apple just not have anything new to show since Final Cut Studio 2 was introduced at NAB 2007? Who knows.

But if you really think about the idea of Avid buying Final Cut Pro from Apple it doesn’t seem too implausible. These days Apple is a consumer electronics company and they are moving further in that direction. The iPod is a world dominating music player, the iPhone was the hottest product of 2007 and they have been consistently improving the iMac. With the focus on “digital lifestyle” these days the hottest computers (the iMac and Macbooks) can be seen more like a true consumer electronics device than just a word processor or web surfing station. This has to be where Apple is making most of their profit. What good does having a little niche product like Final Cut Studio really gain a big company like Apple? They can’t be making all that much money from applications like Final Cut Pro, Shake or Logic Studio when you consider the apps have development costs as well. Of course one reason to develop pro apps is to drive the sale of more powerful and more expensive desktop systems. In the early 90’s, with Apple in less than stellar financial health, they began developing many of the Macintosh’s most impressive applications in house. This helped sell the Macintosh and technologies of the Mac OS, like Quicktime. Today Apple is much more financially stable and the Mac OS has a growing market-share. Maybe Apple doesn’t feel it needs to spend as many resources on niche market applications like Final Cut Pro. They’ve already killed new versions of Shake.

With all that rationale, Apple unloading Final Cut Pro doesn’t seem all that far fetched. But who would buy? Of course Adobe wouldn’t buy FCP as they have new versions of Premiere Pro and the whole Adobe Creative Suite running on Intel Macs and they are damn good applications. A very competitive alternative to the entire Final Cut Studio. There’s a company like Boris, who bought Media 100, but they might be too small to continue proper development of an app like FCP considering there is such a large installed user-base who make their entire living relying on the application. There’s Quantel but they already have a software editing product. That pretty much leaves Avid.

But what would Avid do with Final Cut Pro? Integrate it with Media Composer? Kill one or the other entirely? It’s anybodies guess and that’s part of the reason things like this are just rumors as it doesn’t make much sense why a company would buy a competing product when they already make one that many people find on par or even superior …  unless they did plan to kill it. I think the more logical reason for such an acquisition would be for Avid to gain the Final Cut Studio supporting applications. The Avid Studio Toolkit has never really set the world on fire. It would seem that as post production has become more democratized (and editors are asked to do more) then a software company needs a fully integrated suite that allows for editing, effects, audio mixing, compression and dvd authoring in order to compete in corporate marketing departments and boutique post production shops. Of course Avid could just add Pro Tools LE to the Studio Toolkit and port it to Macintosh and then maybe it would compete more. I thought Pro Tools LE was a part of the Studio Toolkit but click on the link above and it’s not listed as being a part of the package anymore.

Rumors, gossip, speculation … that’s all any of the above is. It’s thoughts and ideas gathered from emails, forum posts and mailing lists. As people get talking, ideas get flowing. They may all prove right or may all prove wrong. But there’s more where that came from …..