The present and future of post production business and technology

Boy, it’s dusty in here!! Been busy with lots of things, including just this week releasing The Hd Survival Handbook, but there was one thing from WWDC that caught my eye.

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone™, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari® with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.*

Now, I’m surprised at myself for even bothering to attempt to second guess Apple by hypothesizing wildly, but that doesn’t stop my friend James Gardiner so it won’t stop me!

There are few clues and most of my usual sources are cold. There’s the rub, anyone who has Snow Leopard is under NDA and won’t talk. Anyone who is talking is guessing - we should keep that in mind.

Tim Robertson hopes that “modern codec support” would include .AVI, which is funny because .AVI has not been developed since being abandoned by Microsoft in 1996 - 12 years ago, just after QuickTime was introduced! James Gardiner thinks it might be a Flash/Silverlight competitor. Who knows they could be right as we’re all guessing wildly.

In Apple’s world “Modern codec support” means H.264 in .mp4 wrappers, and just maybe H.264 in .mov wrappers but that’s depricated as they say. (You can still use it but it’s not the recommended method.) Apple have totally moved away from all the rich interactive features that attracted me to the technology in the first place. (Much of what was added to Flash 9, was available in QT3 but never pushed by Apple.)

Then there’s this on Apple’s Snow Leopard page

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone…

The media playback support on iPhone is very basic: H.264 video, AAC audio, MPEG-4 Simple Profile video, mp3 in .mp4 containers with limited support for .mov playback of those codecs. That’s it. A simplified form of media player with none of the older codecs not supported by MPEG-4. None of the wired sprite features, no VT objects or panoramas. A simple, lightweight media player that developers can draw on. (I should note that Flash Player and Adobe Media Player now support those exact same codecs.)

Looking also at what Apple have been doing with Javascript, and knowing there’s already limited Javascript support in QuickTime, my further guess is that QT X will be very open to Javascript, Apple’s new favorite browser language thanks to Sproutcore and the new Webkit Javascript engineSquirelfish. It’s interesting that Apple announced QuickTime X and the new Javascript engine for Safari in Snow Leopard in the same paragraph. Other features went into separate paragraphs.

So my guess is that QuickTime X is a newly optimized media player engine with hooks to good Javascript for interactive programming. Perhaps even to Ruby/Ruby on Rails since Apple’s also adopting that.

But who knows for sure? Only those who can’t tell.

In case anyone missed it, there has been a war of words this week between Apple and NBC Universal that ended with Apple refusing to put any new NBC shows in the iTunes store because NBC are withdrawing from the store at the end of the year. That’s all we really know to be factual, although Apple asserts that NBC wanted to “double the price” of their TV shows to force a “$4.99″ per episode show, force bundling of shows, and insisting on beefed up DRM.

Could NBC be more idiotic and go more against the obvious trends? Is the management of NBC as Fake Steve Jobs points out:

They’re all buffed and polished and about a hundred and fourteen years old. They look like cadavers who’ve been done up by the world’s best funeral home makeup artist. A lot of them are just GE lifers who did time in plastics and then airplane engines and then somehow got dropped into the TV group.

That whole article, actually penned by Senior Editor at Forbes, Daniel Lynons who writes Fake Steve Jobs, is well worth a read. He says it better than I can. I think it’s reasonable to assume that none of the executives or board at NBC watch their own network as broadcast or have ever downloaded shows from the iTunes store and are really, really out of touch with changes in digital distribution. Otherwise they would not have moved 180 degrees contrary to every trend!

Let’s consider the three points that supposedly lead to the falling out between Apple and NBC. Because I want to address pricing in most detail, I’ll go in reverse order. It’s worth noting that NBC denied that they pushed the “$4.99″ pricing, but in a very carefully worded press release, that really does little to deny the accusation.

More DRM

Allegedly, NBC wanted Apple to “beef up” DRM beyond Apple’s Fairplay. Now, I’m no fan of DRM because the concept of “keeping honest people honest” is so stupid that no-one with intellectual integrity could possibly hold that thought in their head without it exploding. You actual, paying customers, are the very people who are honest: didn’t they just pay real money for the product? DRM does not prevent piracy (otherwise why would every NBC show, including those they don’t sell on iTunes, be available much more easily on bittorrent sites?). Even with free content available, customers chose to pay money, so why treat them like potential criminals?

Commercial piracy is a crime and deservedly so. Content creators need to be compensated for their work. That’s a given. What is fundamentally stupid is adding more and more egregious DRM that simply does not prevent piracy. See above - everything is already available free, and yet in 18 months NBC has taken $50 million in income from the iTunes store from paying customers. DRM does not prevent piracy. DRM causes all sorts of complications for customers and devalues the content. To even contemplate adding more DRM is counterproductive at best.

To do what NBC allegedly were pushing Apple to do - to ONLY allow DRM’d content on an iPod - is mind numbingly, absolutely, without doubt the most stupid idea to come out of a dinosaur’s mouth since the advent of mammals. Have these people not heard of “Fair Use Rights“? (BTW, Defend Fair Use is a new website by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which is backed by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others.)

What about family videos or personal recordings or podcasts? NBC would want Apple to ban all from iPods? Legitimate, legal rips of purchased CDs would also be banned? Yeah, right. If that’s what NBC were asking for, see comments above about levels of stupidity never before experienced by mankind!

Bundling

I guess I can understand why NBC might think bundling was a good idea. After all it’s the only business they know! They bundle shows together and sell advertising against it. That’s been the Broadcast Television model since it started. However, it’s over. Gone. Finished. The Television Mk II era of VCR/Tivo/PVR/many channels appointment television (watch it at our schedule or not at all) is going the way of the dodo.

Increasingly we’re moving toward a program-oriented model. I’ve said it before: people watch programs, not channels. At a time the FCC are pushing for unbundling of cable channel packages NBC wants to go the other way and push packages of programs when customers want their own choices?

See above comments on levels of stupidity!

Increased pricing for TV shows on iTunes

At least now we can get away from blind stupidity and get to egregious greed! At $1.99 per show Television shows are grossly overpriced. Even the season pass price is on the high side. If I were to buy all the programs we watch via the iTunes store, my TV viewing bill would be around $200 a month. Compare that to Cable or Satellite at $55 a month (my most recent Satellite bill.)

NBC are simply being greedy. Networks like NBC look to get 25-65c per viewer per show in advertising revenue. Even the most popular show on American Television, the Super-Bowl, brings in only about 95c per viewer. Let’s say the average is 50c per viewer (on the high side - my research suggests 35c per viewer is a more likely average) from advertising revenue. For the networks to receive the same revenue per viewer for their premium content sold through iTunes, then that 50c would translate to about 75c per show. That assumes that Apple make the same percentage gross margin on TV shows as they do on music, out of which they pay the credit card processing costs and the cost of bandwidth for delivery.

So, at $1.99, a TV show is already over-priced. There’s another benchmark to consider and thanks to John Gruber for pointing this out: TV shows released on DVD average out to around $2 an episode but for that you get a physical disc, packaging, liner notes, extra content and marginally higher quality. You also have a tradable asset thanks to the First-sale Doctrine. You get none of that with DRM-infested digital downloads, so the purchase is of much lower value.

Another way of looking at price is to compare buying two shows - The Daily Show and The Colbert Report - from iTunes on Season Passes (20 shows each) when the total for these two Comedy Central shows is $19.95 per month. Subscribe to cable or satellite and Comedy Central will get 60c to $1 from your Basic Cable subscription, at best. Sure, there’s advertising support but that Basic Cable subscription gets you access to view (and record) the entire month’s content on Comedy Central. Not just two shows! Sure, the Daily Show and Colbert Report are advertising supported on Comedy Central - not only do you have to pay to get the cable channel but you have to also pay with attention to commercials (or not).

What would be “fair” for those shows? Exact numbers are a little hard to come by, but even taking Jon Stewart’s reportedly $5 million a year salary, it’s hard to imagine that each episode having a budget over $60,000 an episode. (Mr Stewart’s salary breaks down to around $32K an episode based on 40 weeks of shows a year, 160 shows, New York studio with crew $10K a show and correspondents with production crews and writers account for the rest - feel free to correct me in the comments.)

At 10c per episode (this is disposable television - watch it once and it’s done) and an audience variously estimated at 1.3 to 1.7 million (1.5 used for simple math), that’s $150,000 an episode. Bandwidth and Apple’s margin might add another 10c to that (although 20c is incredibly hard to charge using conventional methods, allow me the conceit for the moment) for a retail price of 20c that would return the producer (or Comedy Central) a very tidy profit over the current budget and cost less than 1/3 the cost of a season pass.

Does NBC need Apple more than Apple needs NBC?

I’m certainly not claiming that Apple would be happy losing 30% or so of their iTunes TV content, and at least one analyst thinks it will hurt Apple more than NBC. Given the general level of accuracy of analysts in the tech sector, I’m always skeptical of such “analysis”. Almost all the rest of the writing on the subject reflects my own feeling that “NBC Could Not Have Screwed This iTunes Thing Up Any Worse“. Do they expect that the unreleased hulu which is also touted as a competitor to YouTube, or are they relying on the spectacularly unsuccessful Amazon Unboxed?

My prediction is that within 18 months NBC will be back in the iTunes store, with much less favorable conditions than they have now because they’ll have come back with tail between legs.

And here’s some other opinions. I think the headlines alone will give you a feel for “the wisdom of the crowds”.

From Cnet - NBC says bye to iTunes, hello to piracy and lost revenue

After this new PR campaign is complete, NBC executives–obviously without any grasp on reality–will sit there and expect their assistants to bring them financial numbers that show exploding growth in programming sales. With cigars firmly in place, the big shots will open up the revenue reports and come to one damning conclusion: revenue from programming has gone down, yet piracy has increased tenfold.

From iLounge - An Open Letter to NBC re: Leaving Apple’s iTunes Store

Let me explain something to you, because you don’t seem to understand it already. Your TV shows are available every day, every week, and every month of the year for free. They fly through the air (and travel through cables) at no a la carte charge to customers.

From blogger Thomas Hawke - iTunes Store To Stop Selling NBC Television Shows, Who the Hell Cares (not safe for those of delicate dispositions)

Who in the hell would pay five bucks for a TV show? Especially when all you have to do is hop on over to that old bittorrent thingy and just borrow a copy for free. …Nice move NBC. Way to go from being mostly irrelevant to entirely irrelevant.

From Podcasting News - NBC Betting On Losing Strategy

Proprietary portals, like Hulu, also have a long history of failure. NBC would be better off keeping its content in iTunes and working with other networks to create open standards for commercial video downloads. This would create a competitive environment for digital video sales and increase competition among portable media manufactures.

For a very satirical view, Phil Ryu describes an alternative universe: Zuckerland! - bizzaro reverse world where NBC’s decision makes sense.

In Zuckerland, customers on iTunes pay $4.99 per episode for NBC shows, which, though it may sound ludicrous at first, actually makes perfect sense within this fantasy world, because in Jeff Zucker’s mind, this is war with Apple, and wars cost a lot of money. So he’ll need some funding from all those hardcore customers on iTunes for the effort.

And someone should perhaps remind Jerry Zucker that, according to Angela Bromstead, Executive VP, NBC Studios, (yeh, she works for Zucker) The Office should have been cancelled but thanks to sales through iTunes it’s now a hit for NBC. Likewise sales through the iTunes store probably gave 30 Rock an extra season, and influenced the extension of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip to a complete season. Would that have happened if “Studio” didn’t have just the slightest traction on iTunes? (Four episodes placed recently in the iTunes top 50.)

Perhaps it’s true, as Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research (yes another analyst so treat with caution) says:

Sometimes I think God put video content guys on the planet to make the music guys look progressive and visionary.

The last word goes to some intrepid photoshop artist who previews how NBC shows are going to be distributed in the future.

One of the currently popular memes is the “wisdom of the crowds” and if by crowd we mean a lot of people then there’s a lot of wisdom at CreativeCOW.net. Trouble is, it’s spread across a whole bunch of their forums so it takes a smart writer to take that wisdom and filter it down into something much more useful.

Well, the Cow’s Tim Wilson has done just that in two excellent articles:

Apple’s ProRes 4:2:2 Codec, Part 1 and
Apple’s ProRes 4:2;2 Codec, with a splash of Color, Part 2.

Highly recommended and well worth the read.

Ken Stone has released an article I wrote on XML in the Final Cut Studio. The article is What is XML and what does it mean for Final Cut Studio users?

Also, Steve Douglas reviewed my company’s Pro Apps Tips, also at KenStone.net in the Pro Apps Tips Review.

Just thought you’d like to know. Oh, and in 2007, I’ll be posting more regularly as I evolve some of the thoughts around a book I’m working on, tentatively titled “Television 3.0″.

The confusion and furor surrounding Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ announcement at the WordWide Developers Conference that future Mac, after Jun 2006, will use Intel processors inside is totally unfounded. Nothing changes now, very little changes in the next year and longer term the future for the Mac got a little brighter. Although the decision caught me by surprise, as I thought about it, and listened to what was said in the keynote, I could see why it made sense.

If we look short term, the decision makes little sense. Right now a G5 (Power PC, aka PPC) PowerMac has very similar performance to the best workstations on the PC/Intel platform running Windows and the G5 will cost less than a similarly performing PC workstation. At the low end the Mac mini is competitively priced to a cheap Dell or other name brand. (Macs are not price competitive with off-brand PCs, the so called “white box”.) So, why put the developer community, and developers within Apple, through the pain of a processor shift?

For the future (”we have to do it for the children”) and because it’s really not that painful for most developers.

Right now a G5 PowerMac is very performance competitive with the best offerings from Intel. What Apple have been privy to, that rest of us haven’t, is the future of both Intel processors and PPC processors. Based on that future Apple decided they had no choice but to make the change. In the future, the performance-per-watt of power of a PPC chip will be “15 units of processing” according to Mr Jobs. The same watt of energy would give 70 units of performance on an Intel processor. Without knowing exactly how those figures were derived, and what it means for real-world processing power it seems like a significant difference. It was enough to push Apple to make the change.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the PPC architecture: IBM continue to develop and use it at the high end and PPC chips (triple core “G5″ chips) will power the Microsoft XBox360. The sales of chips to Microsoft will well and truly outweigh the loss of business from Apple. It is, however, a crazy world: next year will see a Microsoft product powered by PPC and Macintoshes powered by Intel!

Steve Jobs demonstrated how easy it will be for developers to port applications to OS X Intel. In fact, he confirmed long-term rumors that Apple have kept OS X running on Intel processors with every development on OS X - Mr Jobs demonstrated and ran his keynote from an Intel Macintosh. For most applications a simple recompile in the Xcode developer environment will suffice - a matter of a few hours work at most. Moreover, even if the developer does not recompile, Apple have a compatibility layer, called Rosetta, that will run pure PPC code on an Intel Mac. Both platforms are to be supported “well into the future”.

During the keynote Mathematica was demonstrated (huge application, 12 lines of code from 20 million needed changing, 2 hours work) as were office applications. Commitments to port Adobe’s creative suite and Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit software were presented. Apple have been working on Intel-compatible versions of all their internal applications according to Mr Jobs. [Added] Luxology’s president has since noted that their 3D modelling tool modo took just 20 minutes to port, because it was already Xcode-based, and built on modern Mach-0 code.

Remember, these applications are for an Intel-powered OS X Macintosh. No applications are being developed for Windows. In fact, after the keynote Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of Windows. Although it would be theoretically possible to run Windows on an Intel Macintosh it will not be possible to run OS X on anything but Apple Macintosh.

Apple’s Professional Video and Audio applications might not be as trivial to port although most of the modern suite should have no problem. LiveType, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro and Motion are all new applications built in the Cocoa development environment and will port easily. Final Cut Pro may be less trivial to port. It has a heritage as a Carbon application, although the code has been tweaked for OS X over recent releases. More than most applications, Final Cut Pro relies on the Altivec vector processing of the PPC chip for its performance. But even there, the improvement in processor speeds on the Intel line at the time Intel Macs will be released are likely to be able to compensate for the loss of vector processing. At worst there will be a short-term dip in performance. However with Intel Macintoshes rolling out from June 2006 it’s likely we’ll see an optimized version of Final Cut Pro ready by the time it’s needed.

[Added] Another consideration is the move to using the GPU over the CPU. While the move to Intel chips makes no specific change to that migration - Graphics card drivers for OS X still need to be written for the workstation-class cards - Final Cut Pro could migrate to OS X technologies like Core Video to compensate for the lack of Altivec optimizations for certain functions, like compositing. Perhaps then, finally we could have real-time composite modes!

Will the announcement kill Apple’s hardware sales in the next year? Some certainly think so but consider this: if you need the fastest Macintosh you can get, buy now. There will always be a faster computer out in a year whatever you buy now. If your business does not need the fastest Mac now (and many don’t) then do what you’d always do: wait until it makes sense. The G5 you buy now will still be viable way longer than its speed will be useful in a professional post-production environment. It’s likely there will be speed-bumps in the current G5 line over the next year, as IBM gets better performance out of its chips. We are waiting for a new generation of chips from Intel before there would be any speed improvement. If Apple magically converted their current G5 line to the best chips Intel has to offer now, there would be little speed improvement: this change is for the future, not the present.

So, I don’t think it will affect hardware sales significantly. As a laptop user I’m not likely to upgrade to a new G4 laptop, but then there will be little speed boosts available there in the next year anyway. But as a laptop user, I’m keen to get a faster PowerBook and using an Intel chip will make that possible.

Although I have to say I initially discounted the reports late last week because, based on current chip developments, there seemed little advantage in a difficult architecture change. With the full picture revealed in the Keynote as to the long term advantages and the minimal discomfort for developers, it seems like a reasonable move that will change very little except give us faster macs in the future.

How could we have any problem with that?

[Added] Good FAQ from Giles Turnbull at O’Reilly’s Developer Weblog

iTunes has been doing movies for some time now - trailers from the Apple Movie Trailer’s website have been passed through iTunes for full screen playback, leading many to believe that Apple were grooming iTunes for eventual movie distribution.

Well, iTunes 4.8 will do nothing to dispel the rumor mongers - in version 4.8 iTunes gains more movie management and playback features, including movie Playlists and full screen playback. Simply drag a movie or folders of movies (any .mov or .mp4 whatever the size) into the iTunes interface and they become Playlists.

Playback can be in the main interface (in the area occupied by album artwork otherwise); in a separate movie window (non-floating so it will go behind the iTunes main interface) or to full screen. Visual can be of individual movies or of playlists - audio always plays the playlist regardless of the setting controlling the visuals.

If one had to speculate (and one does, really in the face of Apple’s enticement) it certainly seems that Apple are evolving iTunes toward some movie management features. The primary driver of this development in version 4.8 is the inclusion of “behind the scenes/making of” videos with some albums. For example, the Dave Matthews Band “Stand Up” album in the iTunes Music Store features “an (sic) fascinating behind-the-scenes look at band’s (sic) creative process with the bonus video download.” The additional movie content gives Apple the excuse to charge an extra $2 for the album ($11.99 while most albums are $9.99).

There is a lot of “chatter in the channel” about delivery of movies to computers or a lounge room viewing device (derived from a computer but simplified). Robert Cringely, among others, seem to think the Mac Mini is well positioned for the role of lounge room device. Perhaps, others like Dave TV think a dedicated box or network will be the way to go. Ultimately it will be about two things: content and convenience.

Recreational Television and movie watching is a “lay back” experience - performed relaxed on a comfortable chair at the end of a busy day with little active involvement of the mind. Even home theater consumption of movies is not quite the same experience as a cinema (although close enough to it for many people.) It will take a major shift in thinking for the “TV” to become a “Media Center” outside of the College Dorm Room. We’re still many years from digital television broadcasting being the norm, let alone HD delivery to in-home screens big enough to actually display it at useful viewing distances. (If you want the HD experience right now on a computer screen Apple have some gorgeous examples in their H.264 HD Gallery. QuickTime 7, a big screen and a beefy system are pre-requisites but the quality is stunning.)

Apple do not have to move fast, nor be first, with the “Home Media Center” to ultimately be successful. Look at what happened with the iPod and iTunes in the first place. The iPod was neither the first “MP3 Player” nor some would argue “the best” but it had a superior overall experience, aided by a huge ‘coolness’ factor. So, even if Apple are planning an ‘iTunes Music Store for Movies” some time down the path, it’s not something I’d expect to be announced at MacWorld January 2006 or even 2007!

In the meantime, the new movie management features in iTunes are great. This is not a professional video asset management tool, we’ll have to look elsewhere for that (something I hope the Pro Apps group would be working on) but it is a tool for organizing and playing videos. I have collected show reels and other design pieces I look to for creative inspiration but until now there was no way of organizing them easily. Now I can import them all to iTunes, create play lists for “titles”, “3D”, “design”, “action” and so on for when I need inspiration. Movies can be in multiple play lists, just like music.

I can wait to see what Apple have planned in the future, in the meantime, I’m happy with a new tool in my toolbox.

Although no new applications were announced, Apple upgraded all the Pro Video Apps with new versions of Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Compressor 2, Motion 2, LiveType 2, DVD Studio Pro 4 and Shake 4.

In their Sunday morning presentation at Paris, Las Vegas, Apple announced upgrades across the their Pro Video line, consolidating the tools in the $1299 Final Cut Pro Studio. With Final Cut Pro alone priced at $999, the Studio becomes the purchase option of choice if you want Final Cut Pro and any of the other applications. In depth articles will follow, but here’s the 20,000 ft view.

The suite features improved integration across the suite with automatic asset updating from application to application but no dramatic changes to workgroup editing.

Final Cut Pro 5
Key new features are Multicam, Multichannel audio input and support for HDV and P2 media natively. Multicam allows up to 128 angles to be switched in a Multiclip. 4, 9 or 16 angles can be displayed and switched at a time. Final Cut Pro 5 supports tapeless media from Panasonic’s P2 and native IMX support (and keep an eye out for Panasonic’s new camera - P2 media and DV tape for the best of both worlds). MXF media from XDCAM is supported with a 3rd party plug-in from Flip4Mac (Telestream). Final Cut Pro HD works seamless with almost any type of media. HDV media is supported natively. It’s not clear whether or not media can be mixed in a Sequence without rendering. Since it’s not featured, probably not.
RTExtreme has been extended with a new Dynamic RT architecture that adjusts the amount of real-time according to the processor and graphics card speeds - as speeds increase, more real-time will become available. During playback Dynamic RT looks ahead in the timeline and dynamically adapts rather than suddenly stopping playback. Real-time speed change with frame blending is new to version 5.
Final Cut Pro now allows simultaneous import of up to 24 channels of audio. Final Cut Pro audio can now be controlled on any control surface that supports the Mackie Control Protocol meaning that Final Cut Pro mixing can be done a hardware mixer.!
Motion 2
Motion had the most dramatic update with new features that bring the application up to a truly material application for motion graphic design. New interaction techniques - including controlling parameters with a MIDI controller (did anyone say VJ?) - and Replicator for building patterns of repeating objects like flocks of birds. Replicator gives more control than a particle generator and comes with 150 patters with controllable parameters.
Rendering depth has been beefed up to 16 and 32 bits per channel float for those who need it. 32 bit processing is done on the CPU. Motion on Tiger supports more than 4 GB of RAM.
Motion also gains the third dimension with a new 3D distortion filter that allows pseudo 3D with beautiful transparency and effects in real time. A new GPU accelerated architecture lets 3rd parties access the GPU acceleration so Boris, Zaxwerks and DV Garage plug-ins now display in real time.
Soundtrack Pro
Although it shares part of a name with Soundtrack, Soundtrack Pro is far more positioned for a "regular editor" replacement for Pro Tools than simply for scoring music for video. Soundtrack Pro retains the loop editing functionality of Soundtrack, but adds waveform editing, sound design (including a library of sound effects) and includes more than 50 effects from Logic.
Soundtrack Pro comes complete with "search and destroy" tools for most common audio flaws - clicks & pops, AC hum, DC offset, phase and Clipped signal, plus tools for ambient noise reduction and automatically fill gaps with natural sound.
DVD Studio Pro
With an upgrade to version 4, Shake is HD ready with built-in support for H.264 encoding (adopted by both Blu-ray and HD DVD camps) and direct encoding from HDV without intermediate format conversion. Distributed processing using Qmaster for encoding and built-in AC3 encoding (no need to use A.Pack) and enhanced transition support headline DVD Studio Pro’s new features.
On the technical side, DVD Studio Pro 4 supports VTS editing for greater playback performance by allocating menus throughout VTS folders to overcome 1GB menu limitations. GPRM partitioning enhances the scripting options for highly interactive DVDs, for example jumps to motion menu loops to avoid repeating introduction transitions.
LiveType remains part of the Final Cut Pro package and is at version 2. Visually the interface does not appear to have changed. Most of the changes are under the hood with changes to the LiveFont format to support Unicode and vector fonts.

More soon.

Why does the Apple rumor mill get so frantic coming up to NAB? It’s not like we don’t all know to delay purchases until after NAB unless you can get a pay back in the months between now and then. So what is it that makes us frantically review rumor sites and set the forums and email groups buzzing when ThinkSecret purported to leak (yet again) from within Apple?

Nobody can confirm or refute the rumors until Sunday April 17th, and in reality the rumors don’t do much more than supposedly “confirm” what can reasonably be inferred from existing public announcements (HDV support in FCP “next version” is an announced feature); known intentions to meet customer desire (heck there was even an obscure reference to Multicam in the FCP 4 manual suggesting it was, at one time, proposed for that version); or reasonable inference (CoreVideo technology in the OS would enhance FCP’s real time). New applications for sure - that’s called progress and until Apple have a full and complete set of professional tools in the Pro Apps product lineup then they’ll keep announcing new tools.

Since I am only guessing and have no knowledge, I won’t be publishing my guesses here or on DV Guys but ask me privately and I’ll make my guesses. Even though I think I’m as good at guessing as the next person I still expect to be surprised and impressed come NAB.

But that’s not the point - lots of opportunity for rumor mongering all over the place. It doesn’t do any good, it doesn’t influence business or buying decisions so why is there this intense speculation about what Apple might be going to announce? And why mostly Apple? Avid haven’t pre-announced their NAB releases. There’s the same level of secrecy going on but not the speculation.

Is this some bizarre desire to be “on the inside”? A sort of technological one-upmanship? It’s not like knowing there’s a new version of Final Cut Pro coming sometime (probably) in the next 2-3 months makes editing any easier today, or eases the pain of any “undocumented features” currently existing.

Until this last year or so I was as keenly interested in listening to, and spreading, any rumors I could find and yet now I find myself strangely disinterested. Curious yes - I’ll go read the rumor and consider whether or not I think it’s reasonable - but I find myself not as interested in spreading the guesses and inference.

I wonder why that is? Is it finally maturity, or is it finally evidence that I am, officially, jaded?

Update March 1 - there’s just been a purported “leak” of Avid’s NAB announcements. While the leak is almost certainly bogus, this type of malicious leak can be very damaging. The supposed prices are way below what is reasonable for Avid (although if true, would be a real change of direction) and there are other key giveways for the educated reader, that this is not a real release. But now, whatever great announcements Avid had for NAB will be compared with a totally unrealistic, bogus release setting up expectations that were never reachable.

At least that’s my take. If not and Avid do announce $5000 Unity and open interoperability with AJA and Decklink on April 16, then that paragraph will have never happened

I’ve just added a comprehensive briefing paper to the Pro Apps Hub on HDV called, as the title of this post suggests, “Is it something or is it nothing?” Bottom line, it’s something all right and it’s going to be the final factor that drives production inexorably to HD.

Here’s the introductory paragraph:

“It’s hard not to be caught up in the HDV hype but is this 19/25 Mbit High Definition format going to take the world by storm, or does the heavy compression make it unworkable? This briefing paper takes a look at:

• the format and how they fit an HD signal on a DV tape,
• how it looks in practice,
• how HDV can be edited,
• distribution HDV, and
• how it is likely to fit into, and change, the production and post-production industries. Particular attention is paid to working with HDV with Apple’s editing applications.”

You can access the briefing paper by downloading the free Pro Apps Hub software and following the link to download. The Pro Apps Hub is the most up to date, no time-wasting news for Apple’s Pro Apps users, daily productivity tips, briefing papers, the only index to the best of what’s free on the Internet - tutorials, articles, resources, forums so you don’t waste time with what isn’t great, and an online catalog. (Did I mention that I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve created with the Pro Apps Hub?)

Check out the HDV article and follow the link at the end of the article back here to comment. This entry will load directly in the Hub.

With the news today that Matrox had announced a dual-link PCI graphics card designed to power dual-link monitors like Apple’s 30″ Cinema Display I was once again prompted to ask why there are no workstation class cards for OS X. The Parhelia card is a good graphics card but not a workstation-class card but even so, the nearest equivalents for OS X do not have the complement of output options that the Parhelia card does. Pity there’s no Mac drivers for it.

But it still begs the wider question of why none of the high end graphics cards, like 3D Labs Wildcat Realizm aren’t available for Mac - with increasing demand from applications like Motion, and in the very near future CoreVideo and CoreImage on OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac users need the power of these graphics cards to get the most out of the applications.

Of course, ATI, NVIDIA and Apple tend to point fingers at each other, although to the best of my understanding the hold-up is in the drivers and apparently Apple write the drivers for OS X. Perhaps there’s a great push to get these cards into Macs when Tiger ships - we can only hope so at least, but in the absence of hard information I vote that we in the post production industry let Apple know that we want these cards supported so we can have better performance from Avid Adrenaline on OS X, Apple’s Motion, anything CoreVideo coming up (NAB is only 12 weeks away), Boris Blue, Combustion and more.

Until we get support for these tools, there remain good reasons to go with Windows for true power graphics users.