Apple Announces New Pro Software 479
yroJJory writes "Apparently, Apple has just announced new pro software today. First off is the new app Motion, which is a new motion graphics program with real-time previews, procedural behavior animation and Final Cut Pro HD integration. Second, is Final Cut Pro HD, boasting the beauty of HD with the simplicity of DV. Capture DVCPRO HD over FireWire, edit using camera-native footage and output over FireWire with no generational quality loss. RT Extreme, now for HD, can deliver multiple HD streams, effects, filters and transitions in real-time to an attached Apple Cinema Display. Last, but most important to me, is DVD Studio Pro 3, which has slick new transitions, superb HD to MPEG-2 encoding, Graphical View, support for all professional audio formats -- including DTS -- (FINALLY!!), and integration with Final Cut Pro HD and Motion. Motion will be available this summer for $299. The Final Cut Pro HD update is available now for FCP 4 users. DVD Studio Pro 3 is expected to ship in mid-May." Reader green pizza writes "Apple today introduced Xsan, a clustered filesystem for Mac OS X systems."
Re:Amateur motion capture? (Score:5, Informative)
Not to be an ass, but this could have been cleared up by simply clicking the link in the article and reading the first sentence in the product description...
Xsan (Score:5, Informative)
Just look at Apple's Xsan home page [apple.com] and Xsan press release [apple.com].
Re:Wait ... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget Shake! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Amateur motion capture? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait ... (Score:5, Informative)
Been waiting for DTS support (Score:4, Informative)
This has been a requested feature since 1.0. Noce to see they finally got DTS support into the product.
Re:HDTV over IEEE1394 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:HDTV over IEEE1394 (Score:5, Informative)
Apple suggests that you have a 160MB(capital B)ps connection to do uncompressed (read: non DVCPRO HD) HD content, which requires a PCI-based solution, not firewire.
Re:Your cause and effect's all out of whack. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:HDTV over IEEE1394 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait ... (Score:5, Informative)
A CVFS client on Window, Solaris, whatever, will plug right into an Xsan network.
Re:What impresses me (Score:5, Informative)
One thing that I am pretty sure about, but not positive, is the cost of running a linux cluster node in the farm. I know the OS X licenses for a cluster node are free. However, I do not believe that to be the case with a Linux node. Again, further driving the cost way up. The most cost effective option for recent shake adopters are most likely XServe G5 Cluster Nodes. As they are relatively cheap individually (for the power they provide) and you do not need to pay a licensing fee for each node.
Re:Wow, how many companies can do this?!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. HD over FireWire is 100 Mbps. It's only after the program content has been sent to the transmitter that HD gets squeezed all the way down to 19 Mbps. In production, the bit rates are 50-100 times higher than that.
(Real men deal with uncompressed SMPTE-292, of course. Gigabit and a half per second, thank you very much.)
You shouldn't comment on what you don't know.
Right back atcha.
Re:What impresses me (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the media cartels are mostly using Avid (on both Mac and Windows), not Apple's FCP.
It's not in the high-end market they are competing (though that may change), but in the lower end where Adobe Premiere was not good enough and Avid too expensive. That's where everyone jumped on FCP and... bought a Mac. That's not to say FCP isn't good. It seems to be pretty good, and the editors I know tend to rather like it, even if it cannot (yet?) really compete with high-end Avids in some areas. But that seems to be the next step.
They have a very clear business model of providing (good) software to sell their hardware. (iTunes to sell iPods, FCP to sell Macs, what's next?)
Re:Interesting. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's things like this... (Score:1, Informative)
This is a problem that hasn't been a problem for years ... at least as long as OS X, and probably far longer.
Updated to FCP HD and looking at Xsan (Score:2, Informative)
Motion name already taken (Score:3, Informative)
In light of the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/Fire--- browser, and the mobilix.org forced name changes
it should be noted that "Motion" is a well known motion detection software.
http://motion.sourceforge.net/
Slight correction (Score:5, Informative)
==========
http://www.creativecow.net/forum/read_post.php?
Kathlyn and I remember when FCP was being developed on WindowsNT (at Macromedia and was known as Key Grip) and Media 100 had signed on with the Key Grip team to make it their front-end of choice for M100's soon-to-be Windows system. (It was Q3-1996 at the time.) At the Macromedia World Developers Conference in September 1996, we were guests of John Molinari (founder of Media 100) and he introduced us to Bud Colligan of Macromedia, Lauren Herr of Truevision (later Pinnacle), Peter Hoddie of the Quicktime team and many members of the Key Grip team.
Later on in October of 1996, I was asked to appear on a TV show as one of the panelists discussing digital video. The other panelists were Randy Ubillos (lead engineer of both Premiere and Key Grip (FCP)), Steve Whitney (then of M100 but later of Puffin Designs and then Pinnacle), and one of the key people from MicroNet (who then were key drive manufacturers in this marketspace).
I also quite well remember when Apple bought Key Grip and later rechristened it Final Cut Pro. I remember the chagrin it gave Avid and how that also intensified when Apple announced that they were dropping the six-slot PCI architecture of the old 9500/9600 design base.
I worked for Avid for 18 months under contract as a consultant to help reposition the marketing message of Avid after they made the ill-fated "We're going to be PC-only" at NAB and set their predominantly Mac-only user base on fire.
Apple did NOT develop FCP as an answer to Avid's announcement -- it was quite the opposite, really. Avid saw the writing on the wall and determined that they stood a better chance on the Windows-side of the aisle -- a move that would later prove a lapse in judgment and would require "a repositioning of the reposition."
Just to set the record straight,
Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net
Re:What to view it on? (Score:2, Informative)
The only incentive for them to make USB devices when the iMac came out was since Mac users have typically tolerated a markup on addons, they were able to charge much much more per unit made AND they were assured they'd be first to market if they got it done fast.
Eventually, if the device wasn't compliant with both the iMac and Win98SE, the device wasn't going to sell.
HD editing and output,DVD authoring,1394 export... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow, how many companies can do this?!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Ce n'est pas correct, mon petit frere. Regular DV/DVC/DVCAM/DVCPRO is approximately 25 Mbps. There's a 50 Mbps variant called DVCPRO50. (The 25 Mbps variant is 4:1:1; the 50 Mbps variant is 4:2:2. If this means nothing to you, don't worry about it.)
There is no 720p variant of DVCPRO-HD. The DVCPRO-HD format anamorphically encodes either 1280x720 or 1920x1080 into 1280x1080 with 8-bit samples (4:2:2) at 100 Mbps.
I suppose you work with 1.5 gigabit digital video streams, then? I doubt it.
Sure. HD-SDI, i.e., SMPTE-292. Look around on the back of your HDCAM or D-5 deck. See that coaxial port? That's what it is. That's the transport for uncompressed HD. That's the video signal we use to get HD into our Smoke and our Fire.
If you've got enough disk bandwidth, it's trivial to export uncompressed HD from Smoke as a QuickTime and bring it into Final Cut. I've done it several times, when circumstances demanded it; I did not have enough disk bandwidth, but I wasn't working in real-time, so it didn't matter.
Sorry, I do know what I'm talking about.
Not from where I'm sitting, bud. No offense, but nope. Not from here.
Re:Xsan (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe you should read inbetween the lines. It sounds like special software along with fiberchannel. It's much much more than "regular san". You ever tried to mount san read/write onto several systems? It will cause errors and problems all over your filesystems. XSan allows you to mount multipule systems read/write onto the same fiberchannel san system. This requires special software way beyond regular san. People have been looking for solutions like this for years. The closest thing to it is gigabit NFS, but NFS is intensely CPU intensive. I'd be curious to see how well this handles.
Re:Is there a MacOS layer like Wine? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Xsan is a preannoucement. And that's Good! (Score:2, Informative)
You're missing the whole point of SAN... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, Xsan lets several Macs and Xserves share files, but it does so through Fibrechannel, not through a LAN. Several machines can share files and/or cluster their storage together without having to rely on a fileserver. Each machine has direct access to the storage via the fibrechannel switch. No filesharing or networking protocols to get in the way of good perforamnce. Now without some sort of controls in place, this could quickly become a huge mess, that's where the Xsan software comes in. It handles things like connect/disconnect and access privleges.
$999 per machine sounds steep, until you compare that to similar software offered by Veritas and SGI (SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS). Apple's is a bargain.
Re:Your cause and effect's all out of whack. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Your cause and effect's all out of whack. (Score:5, Informative)
Apple did not "come up with Final Cut Pro." I worked at Macromedia when Randy Ubillos (of Premier fame) started creation of Keygrip. The product was 2 or more years in development and quite behind schedule. It was done out of the Macromedia offices near Oracle in the mid 90's. Macromedia sold this technology to Apple and the development continued to become Final Cut.
Re:Your cause and effect's all out of whack. (Score:5, Informative)
Avid dug their own grave on this one, and all Apple did was see an opportunity and fill it.
Re:Your cause and effect's all out of whack. (Score:5, Informative)
They projected well into the future what it could and couldn't do and suggested that folks could even build sherlock plugins based on this. Someone took these specs and made another software and released it before Apple released their much more refined version.
Moded +4 Insightful at the moment. Maybe these people don't know the true story. Or maybe you are the developer of Watson and pissed off Apple didn't buy you off like a few others had been paid off when they had done this isame thing in the past.
Re:Wow, how many companies can do this?!!! (Score:3, Informative)
The SANs system will be a boon to production companies. The biggest issue with working with video is disk space.......you need LOTS of space.....
Re:Unix makes it easier (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What impresses me (Score:3, Informative)
As far as cost in many situations in high end VFX the cost of the software is not that important considering the cost of the artists and technicians. And even at the end they didn't have to worry too much about infrastucture costs as New Line Cinema ponied up the money to upgrade the renderfarm for return of the King if I remember right.
Re:If microsoft made software like apple (Score:1, Informative)
Apple does not have a near monopoly, the rules change when you have. When you have a monopoly you may not enter a market in which you did not have a presence before using you monopoly as leverage. That is the whole point. The reason is that we need to protect the open and free market which means that there has to be a level playing field.
Law aside, the USA missed a chance to keep domination the software market. If MS was split up it would van created 3 or 4 very large companies which would be free of moral and legal problems. Microsoft needs to split up and differentiate it self.
MS has a chance now to learn how to function while it is still the default choice of many people. It still has the chance to show that it know what people want. If they wait -- they will loose to alternatives and local initiatives.
Re:Your cause and effect's all out of whack. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Your cause and effect's all out of whack. (Score:2, Informative)
Well, AFAIK it was the only one in the $500-$1000 price range.
Media 100 and Avid systems were aiming at quite a different market, in Mac OS 7.x-8.x times. With quite a different set of features & options. Premiere 5.x couldn't even copy-paste sets of multi-track edit sequences (not sure whether later versions can do that now). As someone once told me (in pre-FCP days), Premiere is like the pico of video editing compared to Avid being the emacs of video editing
Re:Your cause and effect's all out of whack. (Score:2, Informative)
Particularly since Quark just outsourced all it's management to India (I, for one, wish more upper-management would have the balls to do this, since they're fscking worthless anyway) and they're in a virtual death-spiral with Quark 6.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OS licenses for Xserve nodes (Score:3, Informative)
Render nodes are free for Shake on OS X, but not for Linux.