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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?"
What... is your name!? Steve Jobs.
What... is your quest!? To buy the Silicon Grail.
What... is the average performance of a Dual G4 when compared to an Intel Pentium 4? What, Rambus, or DDR powered?
I don't know that... AAAAAAAAARGHHH!H
Here's what it is.
Better writeups, please.
I have been pwned because my
There are no shortage of video editors out there and a quick search of Sourceforge for "video editing" shows a good chunk of projects rolling along.
No Zen is good zen
Yep. Dude, it's redundant to demand better writeups. You've been here how long?
Or am I being ridiculously optimistic? Do I need to Think Different to understand Apple's financial decisions?
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.
I read that as "composting software", and was trying to figure out why Apple people would buy special software for recycling waste files into free space.
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
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
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 $20,000, and has an entirely different interface...
See why Apple's strategy is smart?
Let's not think too inside the box about Nothing Real and Silicon Grail. Apple's also aggressively going into the MPEG-4 market. Now, MPEG-4 has a wonderful feature, foreground and background separation. As I understand it, you can send the weather map once, and then send just the weatherman moving in front of it from then on. As they'd say up here in New England, you get wicked-good compression that way.
What's the killer application for automated background separation? Video-conferencing, of course, or what Apple might call iTalk. Video-conferencing has not been well received, largely because of bandwidth problems. MPEG-4 gives you really nice full-frame compression, but add in the automated layer separation, and it gets way better. It might even be good enough to do on a GSM phone. Cable modems are definitely more than good enough.
So, who has the technology for separating people from their backgrounds? Hollywood, of course - that's what they use for putting live actors into special effects. Who's considered the best by Hollywood? Nothing Real and Silicon Grail, of course.
So, Apple builds this into the January version of OSX and shows an ad with the couple who got married in Hawaii last year; they've got a kid now, and Grandma gets to watch him take his first steps live because she's got an iMac that's on the cable modem 24/7. Digital lifestyle.
I expect the QuickTime team are the guys waving the landing lights for the Nothing Real and Silicon Grail tech. Even if I'm wrong about the application, there's no better place in Apple to absorb the technology.
There's probably more going on here besides just beefing up up Final Cut Pro.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This was received from an anonymous source...
Now everyone is going "ooooo, what does that mean for the rest of us"? Meanwhile, my ex-friend Bill, buys up companies left and right and there is barely a ripple in the Linux and Apple community. So why do I seem more threatening?
Personally, I think it is my turtle-necks. See, I learned from Grace Slick that nothing hides the look of age than a turtle-neck. Especially black because it a) looks cool b) hides that extra "executive weight". But it threatens people that I can look cool AND youngish at the same time. Bill looks like someone's Grandfather - or Mr. Burns from the "Simpsons". "Smithers, buy up Freedonia" - see how that would just seem natural coming out of his mouth?
But I buy two companies and BOOM I'm killing babies and eating their entrails.
My point is that first, Apple is a business and as a business it attempts to stay in the black, much like my turtlenecks. Second, get a grip. Mergers happen all the time. Some are good and some are bad. Third, I'm still cool, right?
Your Pal,
Steve
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
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"?
Apple purchased Nothing Real in February 2002
But I thought they bought that company in February what does it mean they purchased nothing? Oh wait the name of the company was Nothing Real? Ohh!
I stole this Sig
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
~~~
Everything you said is wrong :).
QuickTime 2 was the first version for Windows. It was playback only - authoring required a Mac. It wasn't really a port, just a player library that could do QT files.
QuickTime 3 for Windows was a ground-up new version that supported Authoring. Since QuickTime for Mac had huge dependcies on the underlying MacOS "Toolbox" for QT3 for Windows they actually ported over a huge portion of the MacOS APIs so it could run. It was complete enough that Apple had to specifically request software vendors not use QuickTime as a Mac to Windows porting library. And some still did, like Media Cleaner Pro 4.
QuickTime is a whole media architecture. It does compression, sure, but lots of other stuff. It is a major enabling technology for video editing, and also does panoramas, audio playback, etcetera. Its complexity is on the same order of magnitude as the Linux kernel.
Apple doesn't get any money from QuickTime licenseing. While you need to license the installer from them, it is free as in beer. You just need to send them two copies of your disc for regression testing against new versions of QT.
QuickTime for MacOS X is Carbon, which means it uses the port of the Mac toolbox for MacOS X (in the same way it uses is own internal port on Windows). Porting it to Linux would require porting this as well. This is far from trivial - QuickTime needs to talk directly to low level hardware like sound cards, clocks, video cards, etcetera. This aren't things that are well unified under Linux. QuickTime is extremely heavily tested by a large testing team. So even if they did it, they'd have to pick a few Linux flavors to test against. The kinds of things QuickTime does are the kinds of things that break on random distributions.
I've heard that the Windows port took something over 100 engineer years, and I imagine Linux would take at least as many. That's, VERY rough ballpark, $20M.
Think Apple could see an additional $20M in net revenue from having a Linux port?
My video compression blog
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
So their web page design is copyrighted by Apple. That still doesn't mean Apple bought the whole company.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?