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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?
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?
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
~~~
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!
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
...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