Easter Egg in Final Cut Pro 4?

That's so cool of you to tell us this Max. We don't get much
in the way of development stories. It's not the same as a
docu about how a movie or a TV series came to be.
You guys don't get written up much, so thanks again.

Dan

Just a little clarification from one of the original team members:

The quotes are interesting or funny things we collected from the various FCP development team members during various late night meetings and early morning coffee runs. It was actually a follow up to the "transient witticisms" that were part of an Easter Egg in Photoshop (several of the original FCP team were from Adobe).

Why a yak? Well, FCP was a long and arduous development process and we were nearly shut down several times. During one of the more miserable schedule meetings, we were each asked if we could meet the latest schedule being handed down from Macromedia brass (yes, we were still at Macromedia at the time) and one of the engineers remarked that "if we can't make that schedule, we might as well give up and go herd yaks." Sadly we missed that schedule deadline (and several more after that) and so we became known as the "yak herders" and there were many references to yaks in the various internal group names, etc. And so, along the way, we invented Bruce.

I don't know if this still works, but the original idea was that if you left FCP running for something like four hours, Bruce would peek out from the side of the screen and then run away. Then, after another four hours some grass grows in the timeline, and Bruce comes out and eats the grass, and as he does, he randomly utters the "witticisms" you found in the resource.

Of course, it was too annoying to wait four hours to show off our secret "feature" to our friends, so we implemented a secret way to "induce" bruce. With each version, that shortcut has changed (usually associated with one of the new features).

I'm a little disappointed to see that they haven't changed where he's hidden since V 4 (when the button bar was introduced). I would have expected to find him hidden somewhere in the Multicam feature (maybe he's there too.)

Anyway, there it is, from one of the Yaks' mouthes.

I just called up the Yak using the button method in 5.0.4. Each line of that stream of conciousness is a 'pearl of wisdom' that bruce says in a bubble.

I think the Yak appears if you leave the app idle for 12 hours. I used to test FCP at apple and after a 12 hour render session, our little friend would show up.

What makes this easter egg even weirder is that the yak would appear without being invoked. Typically if FCP was left idle for long periods of time. I would often sit down at my computer in the morning after letting a sequence render overnight only to see the yak "chewing" on my timeline. The instant you touched the mouse it ran off the screen.

Needless to say, the first time I saw this I thought I was losing my mind.

You know... I'm not sure about an 'easter egg' as such. Most easter eggs I've seen have some meaning or inside joke. This, rather, seems to be a random assortment of nonsense phrase blocks. I would bet that this text is, instead, filler text to be used in some specific function of the software. Think: subtitles? credits? I don't know but it seems a little too nonsense/wierd to just be someone's message.

That's what happens when you work your programmers too hard.

Remember the Royal Anthem of the Kilted yaksmen!

"Our country reeks of trees,
Our yaks are really large,
And they smell like rotting beef carcasses.
And we have to clean up after them,
And our saddle soars are the best,
We proudly wear women's clothing,
And searing sand blows up our skirts!"

Probably a touch of space madness, don't you think?

The Yak still appears in 5.0.4.

Brought him up with the same method used in HD.

I suppose I should mention that Bruce's current easter egg in FCP HD is:

Opt+J (to bring up your button list)
Type Bruce (you will have to use your arrow keys to delete the shift symbol)
Drag the button to your button bar, press, and enjoy