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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?"
Or am I being ridiculously optimistic? Do I need to Think Different to understand Apple's financial decisions?
Here's what I think will happen :
Apples not going to cut of a revenue stream, so clearly they'll keep Windows / Linix / other versions. Its in their best interests to allow these acquisitions to generate revenue, if for no other reason than to mititgate acquisition costs.
Intermediate term, I wouldn't be surprised to see "enhanced" versions on OS X only, followed by a longer term retirement of Windows / Linux / other versions.
This way they entice folks over to their high margin platform (Mac), while not pissing them off and giving them adequate time to retire the older hardware gracefully.
Now, what this effectively does is make it so that the people who used to shell out big bucks for the software product now have two choices: find a new piece of software, or spend less money than they priviously wold have spent on an upgrade, and buy a powermac and the mac version of the software.
This is actually quite a brilliant strategy. Think of it this way: I use product x. Product x costs $20,000 and an upgrade costs $5,000. Product x is the core of my business. I use windows PCs to run product x. Now apple buys company x, who makes product x. Nothing changes for a few years. Product x's windows support is phased out, and the mac version's price is dropped to $2,000 for a new product, and $999 for an upgrade. I can now purchase a powermac for $5,000 and a product x upgrade to mac for $999 and end up spending only slightly more than I would have otherwise. Furthermore, in the future, upgrades will be very very cheap. Or, if I don't like apple, I can stop using product x, and instead use product y, which, since I never used it before, now costs $20,000, and has an entirely different interface...
See why Apple's strategy is smart?
** Please note that the following is purest, purest speculation. **
It is my personal theory that one of the big reasons we will not be seeing a linux version of quicktime is because apple simply does not have any linux skills in-house.
What i would suppose is that apple developed quicktime for windows because they just absolutely had no other choice. They needed windows support for their technology, thus they went through the bother of training and/or hiring people until they had people on staff capable of writing to the Windows API. Apple would have to do this again if they wanted to port quicktime to Linux-- i.e., they would not just have to deal with the non-trivial task of porting Quicktime (At this point, you may almost almost call Quicktime a full fledged operating system. The thing is such a beast that i have heard it said that Apple does not actually port Quicktime to Windows-- that instead, they wrote a limited Wine-like "emulation" layer translating all the parts of the Macintosh APIs that Quicktime uses into the equivilent parts of the Windows APIs), they would also have to train and hire people capable of performing this mammoth task on Linux-- a harder task than doing the same for Windows, because when Quicktime was ported to Windows apple already had some windows-skilled employees, for example in the Claris division.
From this, i would say that the absence of Quicktime for Linux does not reflect on whether Apple's newly aquired video production software companies will continue to release UNIX versions; after all, these companies already have employees with Linux experience, so apple's reasoning in not bothering with Linux does not matter there. They have a successful product, and it would be monetarily advantageous to just continue as is, especially given that dropping out of the windows and linux markets would create a vacuum that some new company could step into and possibly grow large enough as a result to threaten Apple's worthfulness in the video editing market.
That being said, Quicktime is apple's crown jewel. So, my question is this: Why on earth would Apple not want to immediately integrate its new video editing holdings into Quicktime as completely as possible as immediately as possible? And if Apple does want to have its products integrate with Quicktime, then how is this going to effect the Linux/UNIX version?
One possibility-- although this is mostly just useful thinking-- is that one big side-effect of apple buying up Shake and Silicon Grail is that apple will at some point assign the linux-savvy employees of its new holdings to port Quicktime to linux in the interest of using it as a base for the next version of the Shake and Silicon Grail products. It is, at the least, an interesting thought.
Of course, we must always keep in mind the possibility that Apple is only grabbing these companies up because it is somehow strategically useful for Pixar for Jobs to have indirect control over these companies, and so Jobs manipulated Apple to buy these companies up..
--super ugly ultraman
Why not follow the same couple/pros doing their video editing on a Mac throughout their entire marketing campaign?
Jon and Jen use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio to make their DVDs for clients. They use MPEG4 to stream content using an approach like you outlined here. Then the couple's kid uses iMovie to make presentations for her class project.
Not as obnoxious as Dell's Steven, you identify with real users and can target specific markets for ads. Heck, you could even have XServe in there somewhere.
I'd prefer replies to Karma. I have plenty of Karma.
Though, truth be told, Discreet did recently shut down their entire Combustion development office...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Actually I was thinking more about AMD than Intel. As someone said, the P4 lets programs run faster if you optimise the code for SSE2. The Athlon XP made existing code run about 15% faster without having to re-write anything.
The Athlon's FPU is much, much faster than the P4's.
And optimising for SSE2 or Altivec will only take you so far. 3D Studio MAX has recently been optimised for the Pentium 4 (by Intel programmers) and it still runs faster on Athlons. Some algorithms are simply not suited to vector optimisations.
Apple may be moving to DDR266, but x86 platforms are moving to DDR333 and DDR400. And the Athlon also benefits a lot from faster memory (the P4 has RAMBUS, wich is even faster). Anyway, 3D rendering for example doesn't depend too much on memory performance; it depends on pure FPU power.
If the Xserve was cheaper and / or faster, I could see it as an alternative to dual Athlons / Xeons. I guess it'll depend on the performance of the G5 and how it compares to the x86 alternatives (the Hammer seems to be coming along nicely, and the P4 can probably be pushed up to 3 / 4 GHz during the next 12 months).
RMN
~~~
From an article located at creativemac.com (from the same publishers as digitalvideoediting.com):
Maybe that's why Apple made this purchase, so that they can become a source for compositing software that takes advantage the G4's attributes.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.
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Keying is another matter. It's quite difficult to do good keying, even when the background is a nice, uniform, unique shade of colour, which it never is. You have noise, transparency, fringing and spillover to deal with. That's why Ultimatte etc devote their whole companies to the subject. Buying keying technology makes more sense, but you wouldn't pay many millions of dollars to buy a company that just licenced a keyer, you'd licence the keyer yourself, or you'd buy the keying company.
But to separate talent from background when there's no blue or green screen behind them is much harder still. You can do a difference key, if the background is completely still, but the results usually need manual cleanup. Otherwise, you have to rotoscope each frame - "cut out" the talent from the background by hand. It takes ages, but it's often the only way. Shake, Chalice, Digital Fusion etc, are good for doing this, but they don't do it for you, not by a long shot.
The "digital lifestyle" you describe has no relationship to this article. Not unless you want Granny to paint her computer room blue & build one of these into her iPod-camera, or hire a team of high-speed rotoscopers.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The G4 is slower than the Intel / AMD alternatives (see this test [digitalvideoediting.com], for example)
It actually depends. On code that takes advantage of Altivec, you can see dramatically faster performance on the Mac. For instance, we have custom code here running on a dual 800 Mhz Mac that blows the doors off of an Intel P4 at 2.2Ghz.
and PCs are cheaper than Macs (especially if you run Linux and thus save the "Windows tax").
Actually, check out the latest Gartner group study on the total cost of ownership between Macs and PC's. They found that Macs are about 36% cheaper to run than PC's. And as for the user tax, check out Apples new OSX Server Xserve. No user tax!
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...it's not going to be as fast. In fact, MacOS slows some things down for some reason. Mandrake PPC on the G4 I have at work here does slightly better (15% or so) on distributed.net's client than my PIII-600- and it's got a 500 MHz processor. The MacOS version of the cruncher that uses the Altivec is nearly 3.5 times faster than that.
It's all in what you're using of the CPU.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Okay, not all of Hollywood and not just Hollywood but you get the idea.
Apple has the editing and they've just bought the compositing. What's left? Well, there's 3D. There has been talk of Apple buying Alias|Wavefront. What about NewTek to get LightWave?
Don't forget that Pixar has RenderMan. Pixar used to want to get out of the software business. What about selling RenderMan to Apple?
What about spinning all that stuff (editing, compositing, 3D, RenderMan) into it's own company, like Apple did with FileMaker? That way Apple can make sure the Mac is very well supported and the company can continue to support other platforms such as Linux (witness FileMaker on Windows)?
Wild speculation, of course, but that is the funnest kind!
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