Have you seen this? Apple Event at NAB on Wednesday

Apple Event at NAB - 9to5mac.com

Final Cut Studio for iPad of course

The pic shows Final Cut Server so it might be something along those lines.

I'd wish for Motion to become close to the Shake replacement they promised, DVD Studio starts to take on at least simple Blu-ray authoring, Final Cut Pro needs to ring some bells and blow some whistles. All this will be running on a 12 core MacPro with Apple's equivalent to Premiere's Mercury also a chunk more 64bit support.

Not to be negative, but?

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I'd wish for Motion to become close to the Shake replacement they promised

I think it's safe to say that Phenomenon is dead. There's already a Shake replacement; it's called Nuke, and nothing Apple releases could come close to it. Between After Effects for low-end compositing and Nuke for high-end compositing ? with some bleed-through from both directions ? there's hardly any middle left.

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DVD Studio starts to take on at least simple Blu-ray authoring

My understanding, and I could be wrong about this, is that there's really no such thing as simple Blu-Ray authoring. Blu-Ray authoring has been described to me by people who know better than I do as hellishly complex. I think the lesson that Apple learned from DVD Studio Pro is that their customers don't need high-end authoring tools, because high-end authoring is done by the high-end specialists. I don't see Blu-Ray being any different; in fact, I think it's going to be even more of a niche thing.

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Final Cut Pro needs to ring some bells and blow some whistles

The obvious thing is 64-bit. I used to be quite down on 64-bit for low-end applications, but Intel's systems seem to be highly optimized for the 64-bit ABI. You really do get significant performance boosts across the board just by going to 64-bit.

But beyond that, there's Quicktime X to contend with. It's not just a player application; it's an entirely new API (QTKit). Under the hood, it's full-64-bit, with GPU acceleration hooks for decoding and playback. It's a pretty massive undertaking, and frankly, it's not at all clear whether the new code is sufficiently full-featured and robust to be used in a hypothetical Final Cut Pro 8 yet. There's little sense making major changes to Final Cut until Quicktime is in a stable place.

And the other elephant in the room, obviously, is OpenCL. Apple's done a very good job for the last several years making sure their high-end creative clients didn't have to care what kind of graphics boards were in their workstations. OS-level abstraction of all major graphics-board functions has meant that while some configurations could certainly be faster, the differences were relatively modest. There were edge cases, to be sure ? Final Touch was targeted to specific graphics boards, so when it became Color there were some rough edges that needed smoothing out. And Smoke 2010 is absolutely, irrevocably tied to the Nvidia Geforce line of boards, because of some highly specific frame-buffering functionality. But generally speaking, Apple has insulated its customers from the appalling mess that is workstation graphics.

OpenCL has the potential to both improve and worsen that situation. On the one hand, the whole point of OpenCL is to make sure developers, and by extension end users, don't have to care what graphics board is in the workstation. But on the other hand, when you start squeezing out every possible erg of power from GPGPUs, a dramatic performance gradient begins to congeal. Which means if Apple wants to leverage its own core technology in Final Cut (and especially in Compressor), then to keep the customers from dying from sticker-shock, it's got some work to do with Nvidia. The Mac Pro is going to need better graphics-board options and more of them, and that means Apple needs to partner closely with Nvidia to make it happen.

All that is just my way of saying that I absolutely do not expect to see or hear anything official about Final Cut Pro 8 until 2011 at the earliest. There's just too much foundation work that needs doing before the product's ready to take its next big leap.

I would love to be wrong about this. But I really don't think I am.

Motion replacing Shake? LOL...that's a good one. Shake has been EOL for what, over 2 years now? Nuke is the logical next step.

Wouldn't be surprised to see DVD Studio dropped altogether. I personally use iDVD for one-offs. DVDSPro is overkill for me personally.

Anyway, FCP requires a complete makeover and I would think that since Adobe is announcing CS5 / 64-Bit and some pretty spectacular upgrades to the package that Apple will follow suit with SOMETHING (even something under-the-hood). Avid is throwing down the gauntlet...let's see if Apple steps off or steps up. This NAB will be one of the more interesting gatherings to say the least (IMHO).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Ahh - please don't drop DVDSP. Ever try adding 12 language versions in iDVD?

I agree it's time for a major bump in FCP. We all know it.

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Motion replacing Shake? LOL...that's a good one. Shake has been EOL for what, over 2 years now? Nuke is the logical next step.

Apple doesn't make money selling After Effects on the low end or Nuke on the high end. What's logical is for Apple to have integrated suite. Motion has to get a lot better or a stagnant product will die as better suites (Adobe) or separates come along (Nuke).

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Wouldn't be surprised to see DVD Studio dropped altogether. I personally use iDVD for one-offs. DVDSPro is overkill for me personally.

A good portion of my clients ask for DVDs and iDVD is limited. DVD Studio doesn't have much more to add for DVD authoring in its target market and while "real" Blu-ray authoring can be tough there's a need for some Blu-ray authoring targeting the "corporate" world as such players become more common as a device to feed their HDTVs in the board rooms.

I don't think it's all going to happen for FCS at this NAB but just as FCS3 (or 2009 or whatever it is), this may be the second wave of improvements.

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Apple doesn't make money selling After Effects on the low end or Nuke on the high end.

Apple doesn't really make money selling Final Cut Pro either, when you consider it as a fraction of their overall revenue.

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What's logical is for Apple to have integrated suite.

What's logical is for Apple to cut bait. Consider the history:

DVD Studio Pro started out as not one but two third-party products that Apple acquired and merged. They sold it as a standalone product, but it was discontinued due to low demand, and rolled into Final Cut Studio.

Soundtrack started out bundled with Final Cut Pro, but then spun off into a standalone product. Discontinued due to low demand. Soundtrack Pro, nearly a ground-up rewrite, was introduced as a standalone product as well as being part of Final Cut Studio. Discontinued due to low demand.

Motion started out as a standalone product. Two years later, it was discontinued due to low demand, and shoveled into the increasingly overfull Final Cut Studio box.

At least they had the brains never to try to independently productize Final Touch.

And of course we don't really even have to talk about Shake. For a decade, it was the industry-standard compositing package. And Apple, god bless 'em, managed to run it right into the ground. Pretty much the only smart move Apple made with Shake was to license out the source code for a one-time fee.

Apple's history with non-Final Cut Pro Final Cut Studio applications is consistently tragic. It's been failure after failure after failure.

Meanwhile, the Mac continues to perform extremely well in post despite Apple's wrong moves. Linux owns the market, but the Mac is a strong second-string player. Nuke runs on the Mac, Maya runs on the Mac, obviously Media Composer and ProTools run on the Mac, the Mac is absolutely essential for Red workflow. You know what the near-universal reaction was to the Mari announcement as far as I could tell? Call us when the Mac port's done.

Apple is not a major vendor of solutions for post production. They're a platform vendor. Their best move would be to stop investing in crappy little applications targeted toward hobbyists and concentrate on making their platform as strong as it can be. The guys writing the applications are the ones who understand their needs better than Apple ever can. Apple just needs to make the Mac the most attractive platform on which to build those applications.

That means stuff like getting OpenCL and Quicktime X mature, and working incredibly closely with Nvidia to get the graphics board situation to a place of sanity.

It also means, in my opinion, that it's time for Apple to finally release a rackmount form factor for the Mac Pro. But that's a whole 'nother rant entirely.

Ha. And while I was typing all that noise, I got an email from a friend at NAB saying that Blackmagic has announced a software-only version of Resolve for Mac OS X. For $995.

Platform, man. Platform.

Rightly or wrongly Apple learned a lesson years back they will not let go of . . . and I can't blame them.

At various times major third party software was the reason professional bought Macs. At various times those developers dropped or slowed their Mac development. When Avid made their "quasi" dropping the Mac platform announcement, Apple saw the potential hit in sales to their desktop line. In fact Apple's main approach to sustaining all their hardware products is by building their own software product infrastructure.

As iTunes is to the iProducts, Final Cut Studio is to their computers. It's a significant motive for many in buying a Mac CPU. There's iWorks, iLife on the low end and to push the higher end CPUs there' FCS. They simply will not trust MacPro sales to third party products alone even if any number of individual products are better than components of FCS. It is a fundamental part of their business strategy.

If you actually feel this way why are you here? I'd assume you'd be using Avid or Adobe products (and other higher end 3rd party products) to the exclusion of FCS.

In fact every single component of FCS may have a better competitor but that's exactly why Apple realized the "component" model wouldn't work for them. iWork and iLife are suites for the same reason too. Apple sells "integrated" software to sell hardware. The model works and they have no reason to give that up.

FCS has a large market share despite the fact that there are better individual component programs from other developers on the market. Of course if FCS falls further behind certainly those looking at an integrated may look to Adobe but if history has taught us (me at least) anything, Apple isn't ever going to count on Adobe (or Avid or . . . .) to keep selling MacPros or MacBookPros. Even if FCS is only a "safety net" just in case some better third party product product pulls out of the Mac market, that safety net will continue to be developed and will hold on to significant market share even if it falters for a time.

Dear Apple,

There was that old saying in college that went "second best ain't good enough", and you need to know this- we very badly want to give you our money, but just give us a really good reason to.

For a while, Final Cut had it, all the way until ProRes and the integration of Color. We could easily ingest tapeless media, cut HDV natively, do a pretty damned good grade and color correction, work with RED footage, cut multi-cam, author DVDs. All great stuff, but now we need more.

For my current project, a lot of stuff is done in CS4, same as my last project and the one before. In fact, I can't remember a single project in the last few years that didn't go through either Photoshop or After Effects. I'm excited about CS4 today, as I was last year, and I can't wait for CS5. After Effects CS4 has that Project Working Space, they have a built-in de-grain plug in, shot stabilizing, good point trackers, shape tracking, Keylight, Time Warp, and it can work with multiple processors easily.

Avid now can work with multiple formats, including frame rate and frame sizes without having to have to spend hours converting footage. Script Sync is cool, along with the audio transcriber. Did I mention working with tapeless formats is a breeze since the post-Adrenaline days?

Nuke is nice to, especially for the ones who love working with nodes. They have even more keyers than After Effects. I wish I could learn what happened to Shake since she went into hiding on your Apple website. We need some of the bells and whistles that the other packages now offer, because we love to work on a Mac, and it's hard to convince the finance department to buy those new Mac Pros.

Love and kisses,
G

P.S. That Avid round the corner is looking more and more attractive. As soon as Avid figures out what we can do with our Blackmagic and AJA cards, she'll be very hard to resist.



www.strypesinpost.com

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As soon as Avid figures out what we can do with our Blackmagic and AJA cards, she'll be very hard to resist.

Not happening. I already went there in the other camp...Avid is staying with their own very expensive hardware.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

>Avid is staying with their own very expensive hardware.

I see the MXO2 Mini to be a very good first step. Once Avid supports 3rd party cards that do HD-SDI monitoring, it's going to be huge. Because that brings down the cost for most guys to switch over. Most of us don't need to go to tape for offline cutting. We just need to monitor without having to splash out more on cards just to get an NLE to work with our existing setups.

The MC5 and the software-only Resolve offers significantly more features than FCS the film/tv set-up. I would definitely look forward to getting a gig on that rig.



www.strypesinpost.com

Unfortunately iDVD cannot make a 24p DVD. It adds very bad stuttery pull-down upon encoding and messes up the whole works. I love iDVD for sending cuts out, but I have to use DVD Studio Pro to make a real 23.98 DVD.

Yep, Adobe is pushing the limits and doing a very good job promoting this release with follow-up events coordinated worldwide. It's quite amazing. They've called in the cavalry, heavy artillery and the marines on this one. Taking the lead. Setting the standard. Showing Apple how it's done, and taking the user very seriously with a strong focus on perfomance. The new specs and tools in Premiere alone are scary, not to mention some very cool things in Photoshop, Illustrator and AE.

Adobe is well on track to pull ahead of FCS guys imho. Lots of catching up now if FCS is to remain competitive. I'm seriously looking at a new 2-Brain setup, which used to be FCP and Avid, but is now starting to look more and more like FCS and CS5.

Off to see an Adobe all-day free event on Production Suite on the 30th. Maybe taking the checkbook.

Clay

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Adobe is well on track to pull ahead of FCS guys imho.

Adobe is not in the same class so it can't "pull ahead". Adobe Production Premium CS4 and now CS5 is in a class by itself...it has no competition. Premiere has always been a throw-away app...but THAT IS WHAT IS CHANGING. With Avid's changes as well, Apple looks to find itself on the outside of the Candy Store with it's nose pressed up against the window.

The reality is that Apple does not need us (Pro Apps Users). They are still gonna sell massive amounts of machines with these new offerings from Adobe and Avid (probably more now than ever before). Everyone reading this should be ready to open your mind (and your wallets) to another NLE app unless you want to be left behind.

I saw this coming...which is why I have CS4 PP (Premiere) on all my systems

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

There's just one thing I don't understand. Final Cut Pro uses ancient technology and a 64-bit port will require re-doing the entire GUI in Cocoa, as well as replacing non-64-bit APIs such as QuickDraw (which was deprecated 5 years ago). It would be a massive undertaking.

But the other applications in the suite (Color excepted) are far more modern and use Cocoa for the GUI already. So why haven't these become 64-bit? It would require far less work.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
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