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

Monty Python (perl?)

[MadKeithV]

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

No Worries

[donnacha]

With both companies held by Apple, who will fill the void in the Windows and Linux?

From the May story:

...in an email sent out to Shake users, Apple has declared that Irix and Linux versions will be developed at least through 2003.

No doubt they'll apply the same sort of schedule to Rayz and then stick both packages into some sort of suite, available on Windows and Linux in the same way that QuickTime is.

Or am I being ridiculously optimistic? Do I need to Think Different to understand Apple's financial decisions?

Re:No Worries

[ZaMoose]

There is no Quicktime for Linux.

Unless I missed some big story in the last week or so...

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.

Oops.

[echucker]

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.

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.

Interestingly enough

[Qwerpafw]

Though I don't think anyone as yet has made this point, it is (quite obviously) the crux of Apple's strategy with these software purchases.

Step 1: Purchase a company that makes widely used software and sells it for ridiculous prices.
Step 2: Make only minor changes to the software, and create a macintosh port.
Step 3: Release a very mac-optimized version, that takes advantage of everything macintosh. After a while, drop the price a whole bunch, and cut support for non-mac versions, or alternatively, just don't cut the price for the non-mac versions.

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?

Re:Interestingly enough

[donglekey]

You are damn right it is smart. I do 3D. If they bought Maya and dropped the price for the Mac version (even more) and also I could get a cheap copy of Shake, what would I be using ? A mac baby all the way. Actually if I did more compositing and they dropped the price of just Shake or Rayz that would be incentive enough to buy a Mac.

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.

Hi, I'm Steve and I bought two companies...

[feloneous cat]

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

Re:Some thoughts on Quicktime

[benwaggoner]

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?