This led to the following exchange (transcribed pretty much verbatim) starting at 21’26 into Part 2′s video:

BEE OTTINGER: I think time is – there’s just not as much time. That’s the bugaboo all of us have. It’s the Avid. The greatest thing in the world is the the Avid. I wouldn’t go back for anything, but it.. it… other people had more to say because it was easy to change. The ease of change you would think would make things more creative because you could try things and it isn’t that great.

DEREK MCCANTS (Editor Big Brother): I would agree.

BEE OTTINGER (Music Video): Time?

DEREK MCCANTS: Yeh, and because of that in reality there’s less ownership for the editor. It used to be that an editor would do an episode. Now there’s three or four editors – maybe five – are working on the same episode to get it done.

ANDREW SEKLIR (Editor Battlestar Galactica): And I think part of that is when you’re cutting on a Moviola it had one picture track, usually one soundtrack that was kind of keeping going. Now they expect you to have a completely temp’d version with every sound effect, leading to “I didn’t like the way that computer beeped”. We get these kind of notes from network. “I don’t like the ring of that cell phone.” And you go “OK, maybe that’s valid but it’s a temp mix”.  But also with music and everything and that adds on.

It brings up two “modern” pressures that were not part of the traditional editor’s life (pre democratization of video): the lack of time, and the expectation that the “rough cut” will have music, temp effects, etc. The pressure is on the editor (and assistant) to go much further toward the finished piece so that the network or other approver won’t have to use their imagination. (Of course, that’s the producer’s failing and their response to be giving notes on temp effects indicates that the production skills of the executives, or their understanding of their industry, has fallen.)

I’d like to address both, and suggest why I think Final Cut Pro X is heading down the right direction. (Seriously, stick with me for a minute.)

I haven’t been using Final Cut Pro X on a huge project (yet, check back with me late next year) but I follow a lot of people who are and they universally comment that Final Cut Pro X is “200 to 400% faster” for them. As near as I can tell these people are doing the same sort of work on Final Cut Pro X as they were on Final Cut Pro 7 and finding that they get to a result from twice as fast to four times as fast.

Twice as fast to four times as fast!

Apple understands the pressure that’s on all production folk – be they working in “Hollywood” (the metaphoric one) or in the wider world of production – need to produce faster but with a higher quality product. So they designed with the following goals in mind:

• Avoid workarounds
• If we can automate and make something faster, we will
• Keep the quality at its highest possible level
• Be fast and fluid.

Now, I’m not going to argue that Final Cut Pro X as it is at 10.0.2 is a perfect solution for everyone.  The lack of support for layered Photoshop files, and no selective copy or paste of attributes still get in the way for me, but they’re interim issues.  Rather than looking at what the current release might lack, I’m more interested in how in-tune with modern production needs across the spectrum of editing, not only for broadcast television or film editing, Final Cut Pro X really is.

Back in June I wrote about the process of creating Conquering the Metadata Foundations of Final Cut Pro X:

What’s interesting is it parallels what seems like a design philosophy behind Final Cut Pro X. From what I’ve done in Final Cut Pro X, it seems to me to encourage a much more polished project along the way. It’s as easy to add an animated, high production value title as it would be to add a placeholder to remind you to do it later, as I’ve always (previously) done.

With the way clips (and titles) stick to other clips, I feel we’re encouraged to add polish as we go, by making it no extra pain to add the polish: a little color touch up; maybe a reposition; animate some clips. These are all so easy in Final Cut Pro X that I have to think this is part of the design philosophy.

What’s that got to do with the book? Every other book I’ve written or attempted to write, the draft was written in a Word processor and careful track had to be kept, with strict formatting guidelines, of what images were being added later in layout. It’s not until much later in the process, after the text is finalized, that it goes to layout.

That process wasn’t going to work in this case, so as I wrote on my computer, I would have Apple’s loaner beside me, snap a screen shot with the built in tools that are not perfect but functional. Rename it, drag it to iChat and dropped it via Bonjour to my own laptop. Then dragged the imaged directly from iChat to Pages and into the layout. It turned out to be a very efficient workflow.

I consider that to be a core strength with Final Cut Pro X – the ability to polish as you edit is much more fluid than in other NLEs of my experience. When you already have a searchable database of music cues and fx sounds, ready access to an Aperture photo library (or iPhoto), and hundreds of pre-programmed titles and looks, it’s much easier to approach finishing-as-you-go, and therefore fill that demand of modern production situations.

Now there are times when I don’t want to think about anything but story, and that’s just fine too. Final Cut Pro X gets out of the way there as well when all the finishing options just disappear from the interface when not needed.

While that’s great and I see how it fits with the ‘demand’ to see first cuts that appear finished from producers and executives, it’s the reported speed increases that fascinate me and tell me – for that reason alone – Apple’s bold attempt to redefine the NLE (as I had hoped) will be successful. In September last year I wrote an article What Should Apple do with Final Cut Pro:

What if Apple – since they have to rewrite much of Final Cut Pro – decided to not just do a “faster horse” rewrite but rethink what the NLE should and could be? The first problem with making major improvements is that it will involve change and we know that no-one likes change: they want things to get better but never change! So if Apple are re-imagining Final Cut Pro, it will be unpopular with “the pros”, at least until they give it a try. (And I can probably name those who will hate it among my acquaintances.)

Well, I did get the part about “the pros” hating it! And that some would come around when they gave it a try, but it was in a following paragraph that I asked them to:

Rethink the Interface. Reportedly Apple were looking to hire interface designers for the Pro Apps as recently as May 2010. I presume they’re hired by now, but you would expect a redesign to take at least a year to 18 months.

They rethought the interface according to the philosophy outlined above – faster and more automated – and we have Final Cut Pro X.  Let’s assume that it’s only twice as fast as Final Cut Pro 7. Some of that is simply because of a modern foundation that drops any requirement for transcoding or rendering effects, and that’s shared with other modern NLEs like Premiere Pro, Vegas, Media Composer and Edius. But some is because of the way the interface has been redesigned.

I noted when I first started using Final Cut Pro X how fluid it all felt and I expect that’s driving the “it’s faster” meme.

The thing is, if we have one NLE that’s noticeably faster in use, that word will get out to producers and, guess what? Producers and executives like things done faster because that’s the direction they’ve been pushing. (Oh, and faster is usually cheaper.)  If a two week job can be done in one, if a one week job can be done in three days, then whoever is doing it will adopt the tool that lets it be done in three days, or they’ll be looking for other work.

Now, I hope that there will always be projects that value the careful deliberation of the editor, where time for contemplation and reflection on the edit is expected, but if the panel at the Editor’s Lounge are to be believed – and they are – then these pressures are already part of their life.

It seems to me that if getting to a cut faster – and getting to a more finished cut while you do it – are the realities of a lot of editors lives, then Final Cut Pro X has been designed perfectly for the modern, professional edit environment. Even if it’s not there yet, the design intention and production reality seem destined to make Final Cut Pro X’s market share increase, even among the pros. (They won’t like it, but twice as fast can’t be ignored, let alone “four times faster”.)

As I’ve written before, AV Foundation is the modern media playback framework for OS X. Originally developed for iOS and OS X it came to OS X with Lion, but Final Cut Pro X uses it, even on Snow Leopard (where AV Foundation is installed as a private framework in 10.6.7 and 10.6.8).

I think Apple are sending a strong message that QuickTime – as a framework for applications to use to play media – is not the way of the future.  Particularly if you want a 64 bit application. While many parts of QT have been rewritten with a 64 bit wrapper as QTkit, the future is clearly away from QuickTime on OS X.

In fact, the use of QuickTime has been fading over the last decade as Apple moved to H.264/AAC in an MP4 wrapper for distribution purposes early last decade.

And now another of Apple’s media-rich applications appears to be built on AV Foundation now, instead of QuickTime, only falling back to use old QT codecs not supported under AV Foundation.

Since apparently the next update is coming “in a few weeks” according to the FAQ posted by Apple and will include the workflow/updated XML I wonder why it was released on June 21? What comes to mind is that Apple wanted to make it very clear that Final Cut Pro X will run on Snow Leopard (and uses Snow Leopard technologies like Grand Central Dispatch), even as the company prepares for the launch of the next OS – Lion – in the middle of July.

I don’t think it’s co-incidence that the first update release appears to be timed for Lion. Before I get to the topic of the title of this post, a little context. As I wrote a while back in Why we want Final Cut Pro rewritten to Cocoa, when you program to OS specific frameworks you get a lot of benefits “free”. In fact, what happens is that Operating System upgrades often bring new features to existing applications, just because the OS changed, and the application was written to take advantage of them.

Lion, I think, is a very important update for Apple. I harmonizes their two Operating Systems to a much greater degree than before. For a better understanding of the harmonization, you’ll need to sign up for a free developer account and watch some of the WWDC 11 videos. (But note, like me, signing up for that will put you under NDA so neither of us can discuss specifics.)

It seems to me that Final Cut Pro X, although written on Snow Leopard and released so that it’s obvious that it runs well on Snow Leopard, is clearly designed with a look toward a Lion future. Right from AV Foundation – the underpinnings of the media engine in Final Cut Pro X – to the single window(ish) interface, to the autosaving documents.

So, I fully expect that a small update (or not even an update) to Final Cut Pro X on Lion, will give use two Lion features immediately: versioning and a single window interface, Lion style. The latter is clear in the way the window operates. The former, not quite as obvious but the versioning features comes automatically with Cocoa’s NSDocument in Lion.

Versions would go a long way to alleviating the issues surrounding duplicating Projects to lock off certain states or to perform versioning. (The issue is that render files are duplicated.) To be able to go back to any earlier state of a Project will be helpful. And thanks to Lion it’s a feature provided by the OS rather than added to the application.

So, that brings me to the topic. Final Cut Pro X does not seem to have the same architecture as Final Cut Pro 7 and earlier, where external monitoring “hooks” were in the app for third parties to link to and send signals out to standard video signal formats – Component analog or SDI (or HDMI). AJA has announced a Final Cut Pro X solution that is effectively a mirrored desktop. Many find this unsuitable for color grading because of quality issues.

My first thoughts were that Thunderbolt equipped broadcast monitors might be a solution, but last night it struck me that the solution was really obvious and totally OS dependent but would give Final Cut Pro X a “real” video output: AirPlay.

AirPlay has been expanding under iOS to include video features, and it’s my expectation that it will also come “back to the Mac” with Lion although it’s not an announced feature that I can find.

So, Final Cut Pro X gets an AirPlay output option in Lion so that the video and audio can be streamed wirelessly to an AppleTV (hocky puck version) and now theres a real HDMI connector with the signal from Final Cut Pro X’s Viewer. For SDI there are HDMI to SDI converters available from AJA, Blackmagic Design and others. (Sorry if this blows a nice big surprise Apple has cooking for us, because this would be an amazing feature.)

And that’s how the Operating System solves a real problem for Final Cut Pro X.  I wonder if there are solutions at the Operating System level for sharing projects?

[UPDATE] I clarified and expanded my thinking on monitoring.

The posts in bold are the key ones.

• June 2009: What about Final Cut Studio and Snow Leopard?
• January 2010: What about 64 bit support in Apple apps?
• March 2010: What is Apple doing with Final Cut Pro?
• May 2010: Pro Apps Interface update?
• May 2010: Why Apple Insider couldn’t be more wrong!
• June 2010: Randy Ubillos, Chief Architect of Video Applications at Apple
• June 2010: Why Apple should drop Log and Capture from FCP
• August 2010: Introducing AV Foundation and the future of QuickTime [Updated]
• September 2010: Final Cut Studio 4: The Inside Scoop (from MacSoda)
• September 2010: What should Apple do with Final Cut Pro?
• October 2010: Apple Keynote – Back to the Mac: Implications for Final Cut Pro
• November 2010: What would a 2011 Final Cut Studio look like?
• November 2010: So Final Cut Pro 7 was to be the 64 bit release?
• January 2011: Why are we all worried Apple will abandon Pro Video… [Updated Jan 16]
• February 2011: Why we want Final Cut Pro rewritten to Cocoa!
• February 2011: A new 64 bit Final Cut Pro?
• February 2011: What is Apple doing with QuickTime?
• March 2011: What would a new editing interface be like?

No doubt there’s some things I’ve written that are just plain wrong. But I’m expecting that on Tuesday night we’ll see the 64 bit Cocoa Final Cut Pro (using AV Foundation) that I wasn’t initially expecting until 2012, with a complete rethink of the NLE interface for the future.

iMovie for iPad seems like the realization of Randy Ubillos’s vision for movie editing software. Seldom does an app as popular and useful as iMovie get a genuine “let’s just start over from scratch” redesign like iMovie did on the Mac several years ago. And the current Mac version is, without question, a major improvement over the initial redesigned version. This iPad version, though, feels like the real deal, and makes the Mac version seem like the imitator. The concept, visual layout, and intended workflow are naturally suited to touch. This is what the new iMovie is supposed to be.

Randy Ubillos designed Adobe’s Premiere; then Macromedia’s Key Grip/Final Cut (which became Apple’s Final Cut Pro); then iMovie ’08/’09/’11; then iMovie for iPhone; and now iMovie for iPad. Do you think this year we’ll be able to say ‘Seldom does an app as popular and useful as Final Cut Pro get a genuine “let’s just start over from scratch” redesign like Final Cut Pro did this year’?

Read into it what you want.

It’s been a very long time since QuickTime was seen in Apple’s view as a distribution format. Apple threw its weight behind MP4 (largely based on the MOV container, but NOT the same) some time before the release of QuickTime 4 in 2002. Since then, distribution has been via MP4: originally using the MP4 Simple Profile, and at QuickTime 7.0.2 with the H.264 codec.

The focus on QuickTime spun around to the use in the OS X ecosystem. There’s unlikely to ever be a 64 bit “QuickTime for Windows”: MP4 is for distribution.

Most people think of the QuickTime Player as “QuickTime” but if you look carefully it’s a very small application for the power it has. That’s because “QuickTime” is really a series of system-wide event-based media handling routines. Your Mac won’t even boot without QuickTime!

The other thing that most people don’t know is that QuckTime handles way more than just “video” playback. It was planned as a very powerful multi-media tool. In many ways it took Flash until version 8 to reach feature parity with QuickTime 3. Most of the features I’m talking about – beyond playback of diverse codecs and formats – are for interactive media:

• QuickTime Vector Graphics (yes like Flash vectors)
• Wired Sprites (clickable interactivity – used extensively in our “Intelligent Assistants” of early this century)
• Sprite tracks (that can be animated around the screen)
• Flash Media (since removed for security reasons when Adobe didn’t “fix” security on older versions)
• Transitions (still available in Final Cut Pro 7)
• Filters (still available in Final Cut Pro 7) including filters like Clouds and Fire that required no media
• Text tracks (although most developers used Flash for text because QT Text didn’t cross platforms well)
• HREF tracks
• Media free color source
• SMIL – the basis of our 2001 technology demo that led eight years later to First Cuts.
• Streaming Track (RTSP)
• VR – both objects and panoramas
• Movie within Movie loading, which we used extensively in the Intelligent Assistant for Adobe After Effects – when you drilled down for more detail, that movie loaded within the parent movie.

It was all this functionality that attracted me to QuickTime as a technology, and as a company we certainly took advantage of these features in our Intelligent Assistants. For part of 1998-99 my email sig line included “Accidental QuickTime Evangelist”.

All in all, “QuickTime” – the original 32 bit C API (Application Programming Interface) – had more than 575 Classes and more than 10,000 Methods. (Although you don’t need to know what that means, for simplicity think of Class as a related collection of Methods, while Methods are the actual functions you would use when writing code.) But sadly, 32 bit APIs have no future in Apple’s world, and Apple changed their mind on developing 64 bit Carbon APIs at in 2007.

During the development of Tiger, Apple started work on a Cocoa version of QuickTime with a new Framework (a collection of Classes) to replace the old C API. There have been few additional Classes and Methods added to the QTKit Framework, which allowed QuickTime 7 to talk directly to Core Audio and Core Video. (These are the very low level Frameworks to handle video and audio media.) The primary benefit was to allow graphic card acceleration through Core Video.

Even with the additional Methods added to QTKit in Leopard and Snow Leopard (with apparently more to be added in Lion) the QTKit Framework has 24 Classes with around 360 methods, mostly covering relatively simple media playback. Anything not covered uses the older C APIs for backward compatibility.

(Many thanks to Chris Adamson’s excellent Mastering Media with AV Foundation for the comparison of Classes and Frameworks. I’m a regular reader of his blog, and follow him as @InvalidName on Twitter.)

I’ve covered before why Final Cut Pro couldn’t continue on the C APIs as it needed to go to 64 bit, and that the QTKit Framework didn’t yet have all the functions that a 64 bit Final Cut Pro would need, particularly since so little work had been done.

Then I discovered that Apple were building a new framework on the iOS for handling media called AV Foundation, which seemed to handle the requirements of a professional NLE in 64 bit quite well. This seems to be the basis of the announced-but-not-seen Final Cut Pro 8 (or Final Cut Pro 2011), and that’s good. But even AV Foundation, as of iOS 4.2, has 56 Classes and 460 Methods. That’s more than double those in QTKit but a long way short of the QuickTime C API’s 10000 plus Methods!

Most importantly for our purposes in professional video, AV Foundation is time based. QuickTime is event based. It’s an important distinction for when you media playback timing has to be within video tolerances. (On a computer 29.97 or 29.99 doesn’t much matter!)

I was resigned to the fact that all the interactivity, filtering, transitions, etc, etc, from QuickTime were gone. At least those parts not appearing in AV Foundation. Then I discovered Quartz Composer!

I had been vaguely aware of Quartz Composer in the past – after all Noise Industry’s FX Factory and CHV’s QC Integration FX are for the sole purpose of wrapping a Quartz Composer Composition inside an FXPlug plug-in for Final Cut Pro or Motion.  But beyond that, I didn’t know much.

Then, as part of our regular evening entertainment of watching Apple Developer videos (yes, we are that geeky) there were some introductions to Quartz Composer! That’s when I realized that yes, those QuickTime technologies were dead, but that there was a much better replacement in Quartz Composer. Even better, Apple supplies an authoring tool.

There was a time when choosing the preferred interactive authoring environment was a sufficiently close call that GoLive had an Interactive QuickTime authoring tool when Adobe purchased it. I believe that one of the reasons Flash got traction over Interactive QuickTime was because Macromedia had a business model in selling the tools. For Interactive QuickTime, it was left to Totally Hip with their LiveStage Pro, Electrifier Pro and GoLive. (All of which we used.) There wasn’t a business model for QuickTime within Apple, and no authoring tool officially sanctioned by Apple.

So Interactive QuickTime clearly faded in Apple’s attention during the transition to OS X, getting enough development to maintain compatibility but no new features. On Apple’s website, Interactivity is via Javascript in the browser, not via QuickTime Sprites and Wired Sprites.

But with Quartz Composer, Apple supplied a development tool. You do need to download the free Developer Tools. Quartz Composer is amazingly powerful. It’s node based and reasonably accessible to non-programmers. (You don’t have to write any code of any kind, except for custom expressions.) It can take data input and manipulate visuals. It can mix all types of media, including text (and generate text dynamically based on data inputs). It can be used in Applications or stand-alone compositions or saved as a movie from QuickTime Player 7.

There are standard compositions that are shared system-wide for use in any application. Pixelmator’s filters are Quartz Composer Filters in the standard System location.

In iMovie ’11, all the filters, transitions and templates are all Quartz Compositions! Each Trailer Template is a single Quartz Composition. They are very cool.

So, two conclusions. Clearly the features not already added to QTKit for Lion will never be part of QuickTime moving forward. In its place is a much more flexible and powerful technology called Quartz Composer, integrated at the System level.

My other conclusion. I would be very, very surprised if – in addition to FXPlug – Final Cut Pro 8 (or 2011) did not support native Quartz Compositions as filters and transitions.

So, goodbye the QuickTime I fell in love with in 1997, and hello to a new world populated by QTKit, AV Foundation, Javascript and Quartz Composer.

Light Peak is an interesting technology and one I want to see sooner rather than later. Essentially it’s one connector for all purposes: peripherals (storage, i/o), networking (short distances in first release, longer later) and a replacement for the connectors we use now (which will largely work with adapters. The only protocol that may not run over Light Peak is USB 3, but USB 1 & 2; FireWire 400/800, eSATA, SAS ethernet and Fibre Channel could all be replaced with a single Light Peak connection at 10 Gbits/sec.

By comparison:

FireWire 800 is nominally 800 Mbits/sec

USB 2 is up to 400 Mbit/sec

USB 3 runs at 3 Gbit/sec, the same as a single lane of PCIe internally.

Ethernet runs up to 1000 Mbit/sec and

eSata connects at 3 Mbit/sec.

So, with a single 10 Gbit connection we could run a couple of FW drives; mixed with some USB (power permitting) and an Ethernet connection simultaneously with only a single connector on the host computer.

Robert Cringely may have inside information – note how he swaps from the generic Light Peak (Intel’s name for the technology) to LightPoint. Apple are expected to brand the connector with their own branding as they did with FireWire (IEEE1394) and AirPort (for 802.11).

Xgrid has been built into OS X for years, offering some nice loosely coupled multiprocessing capabilities that few people have taken advantage of. Grand Central dispatch is now built into OS X that allows high efficiency task scheduling not just on the local multi-core machine, but down to individual program threads between tightly coupled machines (think FiberChannel). But LightPoint makes FiberChannel look slow, is inexpensive (FiberChannel is not), and is super easy to set up. And don’t forget Apple has invested gigabucks in that huge North Carolina data center — a data center that is schedule to open very soon.

Start with a Light point-equipped Mac Mini. Need more horsepower? Just get another Mini and connect with LightPoint. Grand Central will automatically distribute the load across multiple devices. A 2U rack will hold EIGHT Mac Minis that, tightly coupled, will run rings around an Xserve. Better yet, given a good high bandwidth connection, OS X will be able to access applications and data in the cloud as though it were local.

[Update] All reference to LightPoint has been removed from the Cringely article.

So Light Peak was going to be all Fiber but delayed, so now we “only” have a copper version that puts 10 Gpbs. To put that in context:

eSATA is 3 Gbps

Fiber Channel is evolving from 4 to 6 Gbps

FireWire is currently at best 800 Mbps

USB 3 – still becoming established – is 3 Gbps.

A single Light Peak connector could cary the same data as three USB 3 connectors, while carrying the data from a FireWire 800 interface as well, because Light Peak has been designed to carry all these (and Ethernet) data types (apparently simultaneously).

And suddenly you no longer need a tower model in your lineup that has space for internal cards: now everything connects via one or more Light Peak connectors. Imagine a future laptop that has a single Light Peak connector with optional adapter or break-out box to whatever connectors an individual user might need. I’d take an adapter that gave me a USB 3 for storage, another for HD-SDI  ingest and a couple of FW 800 ports. Someone else might just want to run a 6Gbps adapter to the current Fiber Channel storage network.

It really doesn’t matter whether you”re using a laptop design with 2 or 4 cores, or a compact box housing two six-core processors and attendant RAM, once you add one or two Light Peak ports to the host design (and power) you like and you have access to faster-than-you-need connectivity, whatever connectivity you need.

And you have a very, very elegant laptop with only one or two very small connectors. What company is it that really likes simplicity and elegance in its designs?

Seems like all Apple’s Apps – pro and not – that have QT dependencies are 32 bit. Just because most of QuickTime (other than fairly simple playback) is still based on 32 bit C APIs and Apple haven’t worked on QTkit (the 64 bit Cocoa version of QuickTime) since the release of Tiger OS X 10.4 some three years ago.

So it’s not just Apple’s Pro Apps that are having trouble moving to 64 bit Cocoa – it’s any of their apps that have a heavy dependency on QuickTime.

I haven’t bene able to confirm, from the tiny amount of information that was given at the show yesterday, whether or not AVFoundation has come to OS X but the introduction about bringing technology back from iOS to OS X desktop certainly augers well.

QuickTime has been one of our biggest success stories: powering not only iTunes but our professional video and audio applications as well. With 10.6 Snow Leopard we introduced QuickTime X, built on what we’d learnt from playing media on iPhones. Since that time we’ve learnt a lot more. In fact we’ve built a powerful new media foundation in iOS that we think takes QuickTime to a whole new level in media creation, playback and management power.

Or something like that. It’s very consistent with the way QuickTime X was pitched for Snow Leopard and Apple’s self congratulatory style.  If I hear any words vaguely like that, I’ll be cheering.

Let’s guess: announced October 2010, finished 10.7 at WWDC 2011, Final Cut Studio <next> sometime thereafter? I think this makes the 2012 timeline seem reasonable: announcing OS X 10.7 in July would have made it difficult.

Dubbed “Back to the Mac,” the invite’s image shows a slightly rotated Apple logo with a lion peeking through it. In the invite, Apple says “come see what’s new for the Mac…” and adds that it will present a preview of the next major version of Mac OS X—which I think we can now safely presume is Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. The company will also be providing a café breakfast and a coffee bar—isn’t that nice of them?

Peak, premium, the best there is, content on major networks gets between 25 and 65c per viewer per show in revenue. That’s the top, highest end. So yes, the top of the top could conceivably rent for 99c, but the lesser shows? No way I’m spending 99c to watch a Daily Show (10 to 25c tops).

Last October I did a detailed tracking of what we watched and priced it out in the Apple store of the day. We watched that month an average of an hour and a half a day and the “best price” (taking advantage of Season Pass discounts) was $112.55. With rentals that would drop to $85.14.

Now, Dish (or Cable or whatever) 100 channel plan is around $65 a month, but I can watch up to 640 hours in that month (or record it for time shifted viewing). That’s about 10c an hour, not $1 per show. Of course, no-one can watch or record 640 hours in a month. The American Average is 135 hours a month of viewing (depending on who you ask, this is the conservative, lower end) or around 43c per hour, not per show.

An HBO subscription, with 32 hours of original programming a month equates to about 31c per hour, not show.

Part of what I find egregious about Apple’s new pricing is that it’s 99c for a 22 minute show, 99c for a 44 minute show or 99c for an extended episode. No allowance for the fact that some shows are worth more than others.

I’d cheerfully pay 10c per Daily Show. If I did and Apple took their 35%, that’s roughly 6.5c per show per viewer by 2 million viewers or $130,000 revenue per episode against approximately $35,000 per episode in cost. That’s an improved deal for the Daily Show producers and a fair deal for viewers.  The absolute maximum I’d pay for a Daily Show is 25c and at that I think it’s a rip off.

Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Burn Notice et al. I’d be happy to pay 50-65c but not 99c. Even at that these shows would be better off with this revenue model.

So, nice try Apple but until watching 4-5 hours a day, every day for a month has to be under $60 a month in total for it to be considered a cable replacement. Of course, this may not be Apple’s doing at all. It’s much more likely that the content owners have some ridiculously outsize estimate of the “value” of their content.

And yet, people think it can be done on an iDevice and even want it!

While in theory Flash video might be a competitive advantage for Android users, in practice it’s difficult to imagine anyone actually trying to watch non-optimized web video on an Android handset, all of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.

So, to be clear. There is no working version of Flash running on any smartphone, but somehow Apple should magically make it work on their devices with no access to the source code? In what reality is that reasonable?

It seems increasingly likely that the reason that QTkit hasn’t had much work, is because the focus has gone into recreating what QuickTime does, in iOS, with a plan to move it back to OS X with 10.7.

Remember, Final Cut Pro can’t be “Pure Cocoa” and 64 bit before “QuickTime” is.

Right now it’s a single-source rumor so it can hardly be taken seriously, but the price point is “right”: about the same net revenue to the network as from advertising. We watch about 10 shows in any typical month, and $10 would feel very right to me.

I guess we’ll know next week.

Steve Jobs, uncharacteristically in shorts, presenting to what seems like a mostly in-house audience in the Campus Town Hall space discussing what Apple stands for.

It’s very, very valuable to understanding the mind of the man who runs Apple and turned it around from near-death to “bigger than Microsoft”. A focus on people rather than MHz and the like, right back then.

He’s leading into the launch of the “Think Different” campaign, which moved me even at this distance.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

I still think it ‘s a mistake to try and put interface on the same screen as the display.  Put the controls on a second touch device! Works great with an iPhone.

UPDATE: Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, agrees with me. Check out his last point.

And yet, if we look at the most recent work of the Chief Video Architect (apparently for both pro and consumer applications) Randy Ubilos we see that Location metadata is a requirement for the application. According to Apple’s FAQ for iMovie for IPhone if you don’t allow iMovie for iPhone to access your location metadata:

Because photos and videos recorded on iPhone 4 include location information, you must tap OK to enable iMovie to access photos and videos in the Media Library.

If you do not allow iMovie to use your location data, then the app is unable to access photos and videos in the Media Browser.

You can still record media directly from the camera to the timeline but, without the Location metadata, you’re pretty much locked out of iMovie for iPhone for all practical purposes.

There is no location metadata from tape capture! There’s not much from non-tape media right now, although some high end Panasonic cameras have an optional GPS board. However P2 media (both DVCPRO HD and AVC-I) as well as AVCCAM all have metadata slots for latitude and longitude.

Now, I’m NOT saying that Apple should force people to use metadata – particularly if it’s non existent – and this type of restriction in a Pro app would be unconscionable. I merely point out that this shows the type of thinking within Apple. In iMovie for iPhone they can create a better user (consumer) experience because they use Location metadata for automatic lower third locations in the themes.

Where I think it’s a little relevant is in counterpoint to some of my commentors: building an app that’s reliant on metadata is a different app than one relying on simple reel name and TC numbers.

First off iAds go in Apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad – or they will from early next month – and are an integral part of iOS 4. Any developer can add ads to their App simply and 60% of the revenue from ads goes to the App developer (or owner). That’s $36 million that’s going to be paid out to someone, why not your independent project?

I’ve long thought that the future of programming was Apps. An App, like a website, gives a single place for everything about your project: blog, previews, special content, upcoming events, merchandising etc. The advantage of not only having a website, but wrapping it an App is that the App will be a better fan experience, and it’s easy to add in-App purchasing of digital goods.

So, create an App for your project. This App will have:

• An area where you can read the production blog;
• Forums and chat around your project;
• The Twitter feed from your project;
• Connection into your Facebook presence;
• Previews of scenes or trailers of movies;
• The full project, with a little in-App purchasing (or not).
• Calendar for screenings, parties and other events around your project, including signup (filtered for just the geography of the fan if they want, thanks to GPS on most of the devices)

Having everything to do with your project in a mobile app on iPhone or iPad makes it much easier for your fans, friends and followers to stay involved and participate. Involvement will improve. (Connecting with Fans and giving them a reason to buy is a basic tenet of independent production in the digital era.) Plus fans will likely be clicking on some of those ads if they’re well targeted, bringing revenue to the project.

Plus, there a minor security advantage. There’s no download function in Mobile Safari and Apps can’t download very much. Plus there’s no way to actually get anything downloaded within an App out of the App to a computer. That means your finished, high quality version could be viewed in the iDevices without much risk of it being distributed without authorization. (Recognizing though, that it will get distributed unless you project just plain sucks!)

Who’s going to be the first to give it a try?

At 58 minutes into the keynote, Randy Ubillos is demonstrating adding a title to the video he’s editing in iMovie and iMovie automatically ads the location into the title. Not magic, but it’s simply reading the location metadata stored with images and videos shot with an iPhone and using that to generate part of the title. This is exactly how metadata should be used: to make life easier and to automate as much of the process as possible.

Likewise the same metadata draws a location pin on the map in one of the different themes. Exactly like the same metadata does in iPhoto.

In a professional application, that GPS data – which is coming to more and more professional and consumer video camcorders – could not only be used to add locations, but also to read what businesses are at the address. From that source and derived metadata (address and business derived from location information) we can infer a lot.

Check out my original article on metadata use in post production and for a more detailed version, with some pie-in-the-sky predictions of where this is going to lead us, download the free Supermeet Magazine number 4 and look for the article (featured on the cover) The Mundane and Magic future of Metadata.