Thursday, August 07, 2014

Final Cut Pro X: What’s Next [10.1.3]

We’re about a month out from the release of FCP X 10.1.2, so I thought I’d just throw out some quick thoughts on the what and when of the release of the next update 10.1.3.

Based on any reasonable expectations, and 3 years worth of update stats, 10.1.3 will be a fairly minor, but much needed maintenance update.  As with any feature release, FCP X 10.1.2 brought new bugs that need to be sorted out, and a relatively quick turnaround maintenance release has been standard practice after every feature update since Final Cut Pro X launched in June 2011.

Those looking for another big feature release should keep their expectations in check until later this year, after the release of OSX Yosemite sometime around late October.  At some point after that, we could see an other feature update that could include a visual overhaul to bring Final Cut in line with the flattened look of OSX 10.10, or new features that Yosemite enables like Extensions or iCloud Drive support, or just general improvements we're all waiting for that aren't OSX related at all.

But let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill here.

4 for 4, FCP X has had a maintenance update following a feature releases.  The timing for these is as follows

10.0.1-10.0.2   57 DAYS
10.0.3-10.0.4   70 DAYS
10.0.6-10.0.7   44 DAYS
10.1.0-10.1.1   28 DAYS

That gives us a nice range data to work with, which led me to throw together this quick chart [updated August 18th to add average info & update "TODAY" date]-

click to enlarge



So basically, applying the intervals for the 4 post-feature maintenance updates so far, we have a range of 28-70 days after a feature release for the next maintenance update.

Meaning that with the June 27th release of 10.1.2, we could expect 10.1.3 to come anywhere between July 25th [28 days] and September 5th [70 days].  We’re already 41 days past 10.1.2 [now 52 days as of editing August 18th],  so hopefully we’ll be seeing this update within a month of this writing.

Up to relatively recently FCP X updates were pretty consistently launched on Tuesdays, but that seems to have been falling by the wayside recently- with updates scattered across the whole week.  It was nice while it lasted, but the “Rule of Tuesdays” seems to be a thing of the past.


-MRM

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I sure hope we don't have to wait another month to get a fix for the "Paste Attributes Bug" this one is killing me and I know about it, I can't imagine the havoc it's causing for those that aren't aware of it!

Hoverboy said...

The one bit of info I didn't include in my chart was the average update- which is 50 days. Hopefully we'll be closer to that than the outside of 70.