Filed under: Software, Odds and ends
Easter Egg in Final Cut Pro 4?
I don't have a copy
of Final Cut Pro, so I can't confirm this. Resexcellence
forum user BK (the king?) was poking around the STRL resources in Final Cut Pro.rsrc and found what appears to be
the ramblings of an overworked programmer. It reads, in part:"If we can't ship this puppy by then, we might as well be herding yaks.
I'm glad it's getting weird again. I didn't understand it when it wasn't weird.
The little cartoon man is messing with my head!
Many Yaks were exploited during the creation of this product.
I'm concerned because the cow sounded pretty threatening.
When you have a car that's that uncool, you just gotta drive stupid.
Don't look at me. They're not my flying monkeys.
The disco ball is spinning, but no one's home.
Cows didn't have dynamite and steam shovels.
There exists, but you can't get there from here."
It goes on (and on, and on) from there. If anyone can confirm this for us, we'd appreciate it.
Update: Reader djones has offered up this confirmation. Thanks!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
max whirl said 9:23PM on 3-01-2006
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.
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Dan Riley said 10:20PM on 3-02-2006
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
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djones said 4:44PM on 2-02-2006
I no longer have version 4, having moved on to Studio, but I can at least confirm that tidbit. It circulated quite a bit a couple years ago, though the only reference I could find via Google was here, in Sept of 2003:
http://www.chaosmint.com/macintosh/articles/easter-egg-final-cut-pro.shtml
As it mentions, it was part of a more elaborate Bruce the Wonder Yak easter egg.
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Jasontho said 4:46PM on 2-02-2006
This was posted on Choas MInt awhile ago. I don't have pro either so I can't try this but Chos Mint's article say this at the end:
Apparently, from an old 2-pop blurb, this is part of an old Final Cut Pro Easter Egg that you can invoke yourself:
"If you want to see Bruce the Wonder Yak for yourself, go to "About Final Cut Pro" in the Apple Menu, let the splash screen scroll through the credits a few times, and in after a moment or two hell come out to graze on your desktop. Let him stay a while and he might even impart a few pearls of wisdom!"
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djones said 4:50PM on 2-02-2006
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
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mhill said 5:26PM on 2-02-2006
The Yak still appears in 5.0.4.
Brought him up with the same method used in HD.
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Wheels said 6:08PM on 2-02-2006
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?
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Justin Bell said 3:05AM on 2-03-2006
That's what happens when you work your programmers too hard.
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quibbler said 9:57AM on 2-03-2006
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.
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Shawn said 10:07AM on 2-03-2006
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.
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Muller said 7:18PM on 2-03-2006
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.
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Daniel Murphy said 3:14AM on 2-06-2006
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.
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