Apple Acquires Silicon Grail

mac writes "Silicon Grail's web site has an interesting update: it has been acquired by Apple. Their product RAYZ and Nothing Real's Shake are the two major products, as far as compositing software goes. Nothing Real was bought by Apple also back in February. With both companies held by Apple, who will fill the void in the Windows and Linux?"

Comments

Will these be Apple-branded?

[Nomad7674]

While it makes sense for Apple to buy these packages, it may not make sense to immediately assume the company will make them MacOS-only in either the long or short-term. There are a number of Apple technologies including AppleWorks (Formely ClarisWorks) and FileMaker Pro which continue to have Windows versions produced to this day. Rather, these purchases simply let Apple showcase the advantages of the MacOS X platform by *forcing* a port of these products to MacOS X and making sure that port takes the fullest advantage of the MacOS X toolsets.

At least that is my take.

Following in MS' footsteps

[eMilkshake]

A long time ago, a desktop operating system company wanted their platform to be recognized as one for high end CGI, so they bought Softimage. Anyone see parallels here?

Actually, this is cool for Apple, because years ago you could refute those who said Apple was the graphics platform by pointing out the lack of CGI and high end compositing software for the platform (Premiere isn't high end before someone says that), but it appears Apple is attempting to remedy it.

The real question is, how long after they force developers to poorly port things will they sell it to Avid? ;)

Apple's Digital editing Hi-end cabal

[Erik K. Veland]

It all is starting to work out now.

They already have the best video editor in Final Cut Pro. Then they released Cinema Tools to help convert between film and video, easing the editing process for cinema features. Then came the Xserve, paving the way for the server / heavy workstation in the creative business. Now by combining the best of the two leading technologies in the high-end compositing market Apple can take over the entire movie business by simply being the best choice.

Sneaky, but I like it ;)

Re:What Void for Windows?

[EnVisiCrypt]

Mark this down as "Flamebait" if you want but:

Those OSS projects are to video editing what the GiMP is to Photoshop. I think you'd better keep looking.

Don't get me wrong, I like GiMP, but I don't think you'd want to use something with it's level of polish for professional projects, which is the segment Apple is after.

Yes, but why compositing companies?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Let's not think too inside the box about Nothing Real and Silicon Grail. Apple's also aggressively going into the MPEG-4 market. Now, MPEG-4 has a wonderful feature, foreground and background separation. As I understand it, you can send the weather map once, and then send just the weatherman moving in front of it from then on. As they'd say up here in New England, you get wicked-good compression that way.

What's the killer application for automated background separation? Video-conferencing, of course, or what Apple might call iTalk. Video-conferencing has not been well received, largely because of bandwidth problems. MPEG-4 gives you really nice full-frame compression, but add in the automated layer separation, and it gets way better. It might even be good enough to do on a GSM phone. Cable modems are definitely more than good enough.

So, who has the technology for separating people from their backgrounds? Hollywood, of course - that's what they use for putting live actors into special effects. Who's considered the best by Hollywood? Nothing Real and Silicon Grail, of course.

So, Apple builds this into the January version of OSX and shows an ad with the couple who got married in Hawaii last year; they've got a kid now, and Grandma gets to watch him take his first steps live because she's got an iMac that's on the cable modem 24/7. Digital lifestyle.

I expect the QuickTime team are the guys waving the landing lights for the Nothing Real and Silicon Grail tech. Even if I'm wrong about the application, there's no better place in Apple to absorb the technology.

There's probably more going on here besides just beefing up up Final Cut Pro.

Re:Some thoughts on Quicktime

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Some answers.

• QuickTime was ported to Windows very early, maybe version 1, but I'm quite sure about version 2. This was in the early 90's and Linux was not important at that time.
• QuickTime is media compression framework. IMHO it does not rely a lot on the Macintosh Toolbox, its more the reverse: the Macintosh Toolbox (QuickDraw most notably) relies on the QuickTime framework.
• Apple never ported QuickTime to Linux because they never had a reason to. Basically Apple gets money when either somebody uses or licenses QuickTime for their application or when somebody buys a Mac.
• This does not mean that porting QuickTime for Linux would be difficult. They basically ported it to BSD (Darwin) - the only significant difference would be the frame-buffer interface.

Re:No Quicktime for Linux?

[pelorus]

Why do you need it? Apple is ..more or less...deprecating Sorenson anyway in favour of MPEG4 and you can't say that Linux doesn't have any access to that.

Everyone would then be on an even playing field.

But...jeez...who has time to waste on Linux.