Although Apple is now attempting to silence the week-old mutiny over its new Final Cut Pro X app, the release has spooked many video professionals in the industry and reopened a few old wounds -- including those of a former Shake product designer who claims the company doesn’t consider pros as its “primary business.”

MacRumors is reporting on comments made by Ron Brinkmann, the former product designer for Shake, the high-end image compositing software Apple acquired in 2002, only to kill off five years later. Brinkmann’s comments are noteworthy coming on the heels of last week’s Final Cut Pro X release, which has raised the ire of many video professionals over missing features and a completely overhauled user interface.

According to Brinkmann, at the time Shake was acquired by Apple the software was “entrenched in the top end of the visual effects industry,” widely used for any number of major motion pictures. The acquisition made these high-end users nervous at first, and sure enough, Apple squashed the product after five years.

“Back then the same questions were being asked as now: ‘Doesn’t Apple care about the professional market?’,” Brinkmann muses. “In a word, no. Not really. Not enough to focus on it as a primary business.”

At first blush, the reason for this attitude might appear to be financial -- after all, Brinkmann claims there are “maybe 10,000 high-end editors in the world,” while the consumer market is “at least an order of magnitude larger.” But the same high-end market also contributes 90 percent of the product requests, which doesn’t always sync up with how Apple works.

“After the acquisition I remember sitting in a roomful of Hollywood VFX pros where Steve told everybody point-blank that we/Apple were going to focus on giving them powerful tools that were far more cost-effective than what they were accustomed to… but that the relationship between them and Apple wasn’t going to be something where they’d be driving product direction anymore,” Brinkmann reveals. “Didn’t go over particularly well, incidentally, but I don’t think that concerned Steve overmuch… :-)”

While the former product designer touts Apple’s software as an “incredible bargain in terms of price-performance,” he cautions that true professionals may not “want to be reliant on software from a company like Apple.”

“Your heart will be broken [in the end],” Brinkmann concludes, “because they’re not reliant on you.”

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