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I really wish I'd pirated a copy of MacBasic instead of buying Microsoft's lame BASIC for Macintosh ( http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt ).

Every time I pick up my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, I wish it were running Go Corp.'s PenPoint ( http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan/dp/0140257314 http://www.amazon.com/ThinkPad-Different-J-Gerry-Purdy/dp/0672317567/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368791379&sr=1-1&keywords=thinkpad )

It kills me that I can't buy Creaturehouse Expression for a new version of Mac OS X ( http://www.creativemac.com/article/Microsoft-Buys-Creature-House-Assets-21443 )

Or that I can't upgrade my copy of Altamira Composer or that the plug got pulled on Altsys Virtuoso for Windows NT.

&c.

To get a series of frames in FCP, you have to add them to a Quicktime Reference file:
http://www.creativemac.com/2003/02_feb/tutorials/f cpimagesequence030204.htm

Then you can pull them in to FCP and edit to your heart's desire.

As stated elsewhere, FCP is an editing tool. There are many others out there for animating. Either way, for longer animations you'd usually do each shot in your animation package and then edit it together with something like this.

As the replacement for Apple's consumer-level iBook line, the new 13-inch MacBook isn't being marketed toward creative professionals. Nevertheless, packed with one of the most powerful mobile processors on the market--a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo--this little notebook offers amazing rendering and encoding performance. But is it good enough to compete with the MacBook Pros and with desktop G5 systems? Surprisingly, yes, it is.

Mornin'

Actually, Media100 came out with this several years ago, http://www.creativemac.com/HTM/News/07_00/media100 i.htm
. It was QT based and not that difficult to define and use. It did add to the post production, but you could do some swanky interactive stuff with online video. Too bad it never really took off. Twas fun stuff.

oh yeah, almost forgot, "But think of the children..."

Ah, Steve said it's true, it must be so.

Except...it's not true. Rosetta on a dual-core iMac G5 runs core "pro" apps just fine, and as fast as a dual-core G5 2ghz. Oops:

"The big question at this point is how well third-party applications will run on the new machines, particularly pro-level applications. I had a chance to spend some time on one of the new 2.0 GHz versions of the Intel-based iMac in Apple's booth on the show floor this morning. While it was far from fully loaded with third-party software, it did have Adobe Photoshop CS2 running on it. Several quick tests showed that the software, running in emulation via Apple's Rosetta technology, performed adequately in processor-intensive tasks. For example, resizing a 4,000 x 4,000-pixel image to 16,000 x 16,000 took fewer than 10 seconds to complete, and resizing back down to 4,000 x 4,000 took fewer than five seconds. Various filters performed pretty much the way they perform on dual G5 CPUs. On a 4,000 x 4,000 image, Filter Gallery filters operated without any lag, as did various blur and render filters (Lighting Effects , Fibers and the like). We will, of course, perform much more extensive tests when we have the new hardware in our own hands. But the limited Photoshop tests showed that, at least for 2D graphics, the Intel-based iMacs seem to be a match for pro-level PowerPC hardware, even when the test software is running in emulation mode."

Sure it is. Apple doesn't want "pros" to go out and buy 20" iMacs, hook up a second 20" display for dual-head (YES, it does this) and be happy campers, since the iMac runs photoshop et. al. at the same approximate speed as dual G5 powermacs...not to mention, enjoy the self-service program for iMacs so they can get back to work faster. Then they wouldn't run out and place orders on "Mac Pros" or whatever Apple calls the G5 replacement, and sales of the current G5 dualies would be hurt more than they already are. Who wants a 2Ghz Dual G5 for $2k, when you can have the same speed AND a 20" display, for $1700? $300 comes within $50-100 of buying you an on-sale Dell 20" second display, or extra ram, or a big fat fast firewire drive, or or...

Hence the "not really useable yet for pros" comments from Steve. When universal binaries come out(prediction: Apple has told Adobe + others not to do so until the "pro" intel macs come out), intel-iMac pro users will be laughing, while other "pros" are waiting 2-3 months for their ordered machines to show up. The G5 replacement will be faster than a current iMac, but it'll also be noisier, 2x-3x the price, and with no huge display built-in...

Umberto Eco wrote an enlighting essay on PC's being Protestant while Macs are Catholic. While neither Gates nor jobs produced their respective operating systems or GUIs - at least Gates partially paid for his (although it was peanuts). Jobs is "smart" in terms of having figured out - that "coolness" can be marketed and sold (read The Tipping Point) - due to the fact that "lemmings" follow easily. But when it comes to Usability - Jobs has not interest - futher monopolizing the "lemmings" is his only concern - iPods that only play Apple codecs - Imacs that can't be expanded with 3 year old technology inside etc. The fact is that G5s can't even come close to Intels or AMDs that are $1500 cheaper - when it comes to producing media of all kinds. Check out http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436 and http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.js p?id=32620

I agree with the grandparent post that the linked article is more of a blog comment than a review. In sum, I think he probably got it as a "Microsoft rip-off of Photoshop" not to be taken seriously.

Instead, I suggest you look at the following list. They are more professional and in-depth reviews of Microsoft Expression (formerly Creature House Expression - the basis of Acrylic) by various magazines online:

• Graphics Unleashed
• All 'Bout Computers
• creativepro.com
• Designer-info
• Creative Mac
• Applelinks
• MacWorld
• About.com

Notice that Mac version has always been available except for this Beta Acrylic release. So I bet Expression was designed to appeal to artists among the Mac community to begin with.

Expression has made use of a unique technology called Skeletal Stroke (the review by creative.com has some explanation), which adds substance & complexity of raster graphics along vector paths. So I believe this vector drawing & painting package, while not as popular as Adobe Illustrator, has always been targetting a niche market with its own appeal.

In fact, it can produce some of the amazing effect found in Chinese water painting and other fine art drawing handily, even easier than you can do with Illustrator. The downside is a steeper learning curve to tap the full power of this unique & different app.

You can find more tutorials & resources on Expression at Wikipedia

--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien

Yes. Some class snippets in his own blog:

What you probably do not realize is that Acrylic is based on Creaturehouse Expression 3.3 which is generally regarded to be a pretty good, innovative graphics app. http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.js p?id=15353 Read that review in which a graphics pro a) takes the time to learn it and b) does a critical analysis of the app. Yes it's different than photoshop. It is different than Illustrator. It is different than [insert other graphics app here] It is a unique product.

It's obvious you have NO CLUE about this app or how to use it. And no, you can't save only as an XPR file type. Why don't you go back to the drawing board and pay attention. And finally, this isn't competing against your Adobe product, so you might as well take THAT out of the equation. PS...read the release notes about performance...THEN post a real blog.

Your extreme anti-MS bias destroys what might otherwise have been a useful overview. You 'reviewed' only the pixel editing half of this program -- to the point that one wonders if you are even aware of its vector-editing features. You completely miss the unique strength provided by integrated vector and pixel editing which is the basis for its claim to fame. You compare it soley to Photoshop yet it compares much more directly to Macromedia's Fireworks, a pixel & vector editor. Incidentally, Fireworks is seldom seen as a Photoshop competitor nor visa versa.

This is what is wrong with the blogging world. There is no way to keep people like you from making complete fools of themselves. Your review is total garbage. You have not gained the right to review anything other than the smell of your own farts. Stop being such a troll...you retard.

I would be ashamed at having such valid points in my own blog.

Agreed, as many advocates of free software point out continually:-

a) It's free

b) It's beta

It's also based on Creaturehouse Expression 3.3 which is generally regarded to be a pretty good, innovative graphics app.

A review

Yeah, they do make commercial verisons of this. Well, not Sony, but there are plenty of cheapo handheld cantilever camera platforms for sale. They're useful, but not all that useful.

If you REALLY want to impress people, try building your own camera crane, bonus geek points for computer motion control.

"We like the Mac, but Apple currently has three [video] editing applications shipping.... It just didn't make sense for us to keep developing for the Mac when the Mac is well served by Apple." here

Translation:
Adobe Premier is Mickey Mouse BS when compared to FCP - we just could not compete. It is a good thing FCP is not available for Windows - we still have those Users under our finger.

Prediction:
If Adobe does not kick it into high gear and start making some changes (start with the interface which looks like it was designed by a focus group comprised of accountants, librarians, and lawyers) they will end up losing a good amount of their After Effects customers to Discreet' Combestion. Combustion rapes AE - hands down.

The upcoming AE 6.0 is heralded as:
"After Effects 6.0 Professional adds motion tracking and stabilization, advanced keying and warping tools, more than 30 additional visual effects, a particle system, render automation and network rendering, 16-bit-per-channel color, 3D channel effects, and additional audio effects."

Combustion had these 'new' features in late 2001 - only difference is that then it costs 4,995 and now you can get it for $995 - bye bye AE. Only advantage that AE has is all the plugins that are now being written to be combustion 2 compatible. Combustion 2.1 is available for OS X and Windows XP.

Hey - but they will still have Photoshop, right?

AE 6 is not amazing - I have the seen latest beta build.

"After Effects 6.0 Professional adds motion tracking and stabilization, advanced keying and warping tools, more than 30 additional visual effects, a particle system, render automation and network rendering, 16-bit-per-channel color, 3D channel effects, and additional audio effects."

Same dog with a few more tricks. The interface still looks like it was designed by a focus group made of lawyers and accountants. Discreet's Combustion rapes AE. Combustion had these 'new' features in late 2001 - only difference is that then it costs 4,995 and now you can get it for $995 - bye bye after effects. Only advantage that AE has is all the plugins that are now being written to be combustion 2 compatible.

As an anonymous coward pointed out in the other forum: Check out the comparisons between a 933 MHz and a dual 1 GHz mac w/ AE--they are very close, indicating that AE isn't utilizing the second processor at all.

Also, I do not believe AE is altivec enabled.

So, in short, it was a single 1.25 GHz G4 without any help from AltiVec.

Next, I don't trust any benchmarking review which reads like an advertisement for Dell--which the original article does.

Yes, it could very well be that. Specifically, it could be that most Adobe programs don't know what to do with a second processor. Check out this article, Apples to Apples, which compares a single-processor 933 MHz G4 to a dual-processor 1GHz G4. Most of the benchmarks don't show any more improvement than you'd expect comparing the 933 MHz machine to a single-processor 1GHz machine.

With this in mind, it's no wonder that a 3 GHz P4 is going to run rings around a dual processor 1.25 GHz G4--in most of those real world tests, the G4 is behaving like a single processor machine. No matter how much one fervently believes the "megahertz myth" (which gets vastly overstated these days anyway), that much of a speed difference is going to win. If anything, it's a testament to the good processor design in the G4 that it's only get trounced by that much.

It'd be nice if OS X did more to automatically take advantage of multiple processors the way BeOS did, but it clearly doesn't--and in any case coders need to think about how multithreading across processors could be used to dramatically increase performance. They're not. That isn't Apple's fault, although unfortunately, it is their problem.

yeah, and then there are other times in which patents just make things stupid. hehe

_
click here for cool windows cursors

The G4 is slower than the Intel / AMD alternatives (see this test [digitalvideoediting.com], for example)

From an article located at creativemac.com (from the same publishers as digitalvideoediting.com):

You might have read an article recently published by our company in which a dual 1 GHz G4 gets "toasted" by a dual 1.533 GHz Athlon running After Effects. You're about to find out why; After Effects does not take significant advantage of the Mac's second processor.

Sorry, but your original message reads like a troll. It has little to do with the subject at hand, yet takes every opportunity to bash the overall subject matter of this category.

Movie and TV studios are worried not because of what you're doing now, but because of what you might do in the near future: grab digital content with your computer and rebroadcast it online.

With radio broadcasting, a station spends a fortune on:

• Spectrum rights (FCC)
• Broadcast equipment
• Content Broadcasting rights

With Internet "broadcasting" a site needs to buy:

• A domain (equiv to spectrum rights)
• A fast server/server farm (broadcast equip)
• A fat pipe (because streaming music, video or trading files takes a lot of bandwidth)
• Content Broadcasting rights (hopefully)

The costs of truly "broadcasting" over the Internet are prohibitive even for large companies and will never be economical for the average Joe sitting in his den, no matter how fat consumer bandwidth gets. File swapping is not broadcasting -- anyone who thinks it is has obviously never waited two hours in the server que for a download slot or tried to download a 20MB file at 0.8kbps.

I ordered my G4/733 (educational) with CD/RW last week. Turns out the SuperDrive is a Pioneer DVR-103. Pioneer has recently put out the DVR-A03, which is exactly the same drive, but marketed towards PCs. I picked one up online (check Pricewatch) for over $100 cheaper than what the Apple SuperDrives are going for on eBay. Cool! The machine should arrive tomorrow and hopefully the drive soon after...

This page even shows all the steps one G4 owner took to install the thing in his machine (pretty easy).

This is old news for these two companies...

They have been sueing and counter-sueing for quite a while, i.e.:

Macromedia filed a countersuit against Adobe in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware that alleged the invalidity of Adobe's '528 patent, and claimed that several of Adobe's software products infringed upon Macromedia patents.

Macromedia's countersuit alleged that Adobe infringed three Macromedia patents:

5,467,443: "System and method for automatically generating derived graphic elements"

5,151,998: "Sound editing system using control line for altering specified characteristic of adjacent segment of the stored waveform"

5,204,969: "Sound editing system using visually displayed control line for altering specified characteristic of adjacent segment of stored waveform"

And so on...

Some good info:

www.cptech.com has some good info and links on the two sueing and counter-sueing.

macweek.com seems to indicate the the whole thing is over the fact that 'that Adobe Premiere violates two patents related to visual display and editing of soundforms. Macromedia also contended that Adobe's patents in the case are invalid and thus unenforceable.'

This seems to be a defense patent battle, in that both sides are trying to invalidate the other sides patents...

A few more links...

www.creativemac.com says 'Macromedia Fires Back at Adobe'

And an editorial by WebDeveloper.com... and I quote:

Adobe and Macromedia have been fighting for Web designers' patronage for years. Now that battle will be entering the court system, as Adobe accuses its rival of patent infringement.

Ultimately, I would say this a standard battle of patents. Such things have taken place many a time, this time it just happens to involve software patents, and thus happens upon the radar of geeks and slashdot...