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Apple Updates Professional Video Lineup
BlueGecko writes "Amid surprisingly little fanfare, Apple today updated their entire professional video lineup, including DVD Studio Pro 2 (including a greatly improved menu editor and improved compression abilities), Final Cut Pro 4 (enhanced real-time editing, more customizable workflow, and an improved titling interface), and Shake 3--the first version of Shake to be Mac OS X-only and now sporting enhanced rotoscoping tools and the ability to work directly with Photoshop layers. Combine this with Logic and you've got an entire professional movie studio on your Mac."
Only Windows 2000/XP support has been dropped.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I know you're just joking, but you probably shouldn't knock to hard on iMovie. For a free video editor (how free is it when you pay $3000 for the machine? SHUT UP U!) it is suprisingly powerful. It handles a fair number of video effects, as well as a fairly powerful yet mind-numbingly easy to use Title Generator. It also sports a variety of transitions. But most importantly it is easy to use and can produce some really nice results without forking over thousands for software. Of course, you could knock on it for being some lame peice of shit with only one video track and two audio tracks, as well as its inability to slow down audio without horrible "shutter-voice," but let's just look at the competition. The most recent release of Windows movie maker finally added Transitions to its tool-box. Nuf sed.
Of course, real men edit movies using text editors under the command console!
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Why, you could buy a kickin' Mac with that price difference!
:-)
Go on, tell me Apple isn't a hardware company. Someone tell me that Apple is destined to release Mac OS X for beige x86 boxes!
Thatr may be true of FCP2 and FCP3, but did you even read the list of what's included with FCP4?
I didn't think so, Mr. Lost-My-Train-Of-Thought-While-Rambling-Barely-Co
Hmmm... I'm still waiting for Microsoft to port their games portfolio to mac.... Now ALOT of home games users are FORCED to buy expensive Wintel hardware to play games... seems like something Apple would do in their strong suite...
C'mon, Apple bought the company, if they force you to use a mac, so be it... I have to use Windows for stuff that microsoft doesn't port (cough cough... Access)...
As long as Apple adds value and develops the software, then users are better off upgrading anyway... just because a new ver is out doesn't mean the old stops working... if the Apple added value isn't worth it; then keep using the old... simple as that...
_CMK
Bad spellers of the world untie!
The people this stuff is aimed at are ones who aren't computer geeks. They want to use the stuff to make video, not hack around with computers.
You can get a Mac and the software, plug it in, install the programs, and be making video in two hours. Try that with OSS.
Intelligent minds aren't opposed to spending money if the result is making them more productive. If the goal is to be a computer geek, use Linux and open source software. If the goal is to make serious video, then even $10K for a set of tools tou can plug in and run right away with no hacking needed is well worth it.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
When an article is posted on a PRO
PRO
P r o f e s s i o n a l
PROFESSIONAL audio/video tech, could you guys who are still running Linux on a 286 give us all a break? These are cheap, cheap, cheap everyday tools by every measurable standard in our industry, and they are top-quality and they actually work, and they work for a living. They pay for themselves very quickly.
I hardly ever rent out studio time anymore because my demo studio just got better and better until it turned into a project studio, primarily thanks to Apple and a handful of other brilliant companies in the pro audio market. We used to have to go to hundreds of dollars an hour to get the quality and utility I get now from two Macs and maybe $10,000 to $15,000 in additional instruments/hardware/software that I can even admin and run myself (I'm a singer for chrissakes), and we don't count the studio hours anymore except to say that it's Wednesday so we might want to take a break and sleep a bit.
"Masses" is very much appropriate, because this really is about the workers owning the means of production. Fuck the rhetoric and think about what that really means: the tools go away and there is just communication, art, culture, business, etc. I don't have to become an indentured servant in order to make art.
Others have talked and talked because our industry is sort of sexy, but decades later it is still Apple doing it for us in 1000 ways. The promises have only been fulfilled by Apple.
AND, if you are not a pro and would like to get your feet wet in media creation, you can get an iMac and you are DONE. And that is also from Apple. They are anything but the elitists that Bill Gates and Michael Dell would like you to believe that they are because they want to sell you something that looks like a Mac but is still really just a typewriter. Audio and video are full of people who glow when they get close to an Apple logo because they did their first album or movie 5 years earlier than they would have otherwise simply because Apple made it affordable for them to have their own systems.
If I sound emotional about it, it's because I am. I don't think I can stand to hear from another teenager about how their fucking MS Windows is crashing and how to we handle that in a real studio? "Get a Mac."
All pro Macs have had Gigabit Ethernet for over two years now. Even the notebooks. There isn't a Titanium PowerBook anywhere in the world that doesn't have Gigabit Ether. There are only a handful of very early Power Mac G4's that don't have it. So, your network of Macs IS a big disk array with like 12 Altivec units per CPU. And, you're not going to send uncompressed video ... even plain DV has built-in compression ... it is ALWAYS compressed.
... sheesh. These aren't throw-away machines like many other PC's ... they are actually built with an eye on the future and obviously Rendezvous and Gigabit Ethernet and Mac OS X just fucking love each other.
... it paid for itself so long ago but after 3 years the warranty is up and we consider them retired and we either repurpose them or sell them and this one always found some use due to having a complete feature set that was forward-looking and media-oriented. It's got 300GB of disk space or something and it plays DVD's, too, and it still updates its own software automatically and there are no known viruses for it or any of its software.
If I had a penny for every time some bullshit PC Magazine nerd reviewed a Mac and dismissed Gigabit Ethernet as an irrelevant feature (along with FireWire) and then proceeded to compare with some Dell that's good for MS Office (maybe) and has probably long-since been retired
I have an old Power Mac G3 from early 1999 that is now an iTunes jukebox in my house. It is 4.5 years old but it has a flat-panel display, FireWire, 1.5GB RAM, and runs iTunes/Mac OS X like a champ. Even the Mac OS X was free because we had an extra license in a multiple pack. Every day we use this Power Mac G3 (people LOVE it at parties) is all gravy
I already replied, but I have to say one more thing ...
... don't make it a hurdle when a used iMac with iMovie and a FireWire port can be had for paper route money. Seriously. Easy desktop video on the cheap is news in 2000, maybe. It's 2003 and we expect a cheap system to also have iDVD and a DVD burner, because you can get those systems for $50/month assuming a three-year working life and they don't even need IT staff.
> In some ways this is a good thing - there is nothing
> wrong with high schoolers coming away with a little
> technical knowledge.
By technical here, you mean CS-technical, computer-technical.
Video is a technical field, but students who want to make movies or TV have their own universe of technical details to master. Like cameras, lenses, light, colors, composition, DV, MPEG-4, audio sampling rates and bit depths, color depths, narrative, storytelling, dialogue, theme. Go to an Apple Store and just look at Final Cut and imagine that all the things you don't understand about its dials and buttons and meters and functions were a penalty you had to pay just to program a computer.
The attitude that it's "good" for students, in addition to the subject their studying, to also get a castor-oil like lump of computer science medicine is really, really educationally damaging. When a kid who lives and breathes MOVIES shows up at a VIDEO LAB, do not teach them CS. Do not require them to jump CS hurdles. You didn't start programming by being force-fed movie-making so why should they know UNIX to make movies. iMovie is free and it runs on a UNIX that doesn't require any admin.
There is a ridiculous bigotry amongst CS-types that somehow the computer is the only technical thing in the world and everyone has to get a taste of it. It completely ignores that a doctor or lawyer or architect or movie maker has their own technical world to master. Just because a computer is general purpose and can be used to instantiate a video-editing system at will, that doesn't mean that video editors will want to learn to work a command line. Maybe they will, maybe they won't