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."

Comments

Not OS X Only

[Anonymous Coward]

Shake is NOT OS X only. There are still other versions for linux/irix... there ARE some Mac OS X only features however (Rendezvous enabled Distributed computing). also - the Mac OS X version is $5000 cheaper.

Hah!

[dirkdidit]

Who needs fancy smancy tools to do video editing on the Mac? Real men use iMovie! Right? Right? That's what the salesman told me!!! He wouldn't lie would he?!?!

Re:Hah!

[inburito]

Real men edit movies with scissors and scotch-tape. Anything else is just fancy gimmicks.

three-button mouse

[mz001b]

It is amusing to see that a 3-button mouse is listed under the requirements for the Mac version of shake.

Rendezvous Clustering

[dhovis]

The really cool feature Apple introduced with Shake 3 is automatic clustering with Rendezvous. From Apple's Shake page:

Because with the inclusion of unlimited network render licenses and render management software on Mac OS X, visual effects artists can now distribute rendering tasks across multiple PowerPC G4-based Macintosh computers.

...and from a press release...

New Shake Qmaster network render management software included with Shake for Mac OS X uses Apple's Rendezvous(TM) networking technology to automatically identify available render nodes and clusters on a network while load balancing optimizes usage across each machine in the workflow. If one Xserve or Power Mac G4 goes offline, built-in fault tolerance allows Shake Qmaster to re-route tasks to other render nodes in the cluster, so the project gets done on time. As Shake Qmaster is based on an open architecture, it can also provide distributed rendering support for many leading third-party applications, such as Alias/Wavefront's Maya.

Point and click clustering, courtesy of Apple. Looks like a good way to sell Apple's new XServe Cluster Node config.

Re:Rendezvous Clustering

[mistermund]

Point and click clustering, courtesy of Apple.

Very worthy to point this out. I'm working on a new lab for a visual effects pipeline. In the arsenal are a handful of dual athlon linux workstations, a terabyte fileserver, and licenses for Maya Unlimited, Shake, and Renderman. We have a bucketload of licenses for the last two, and plans to use them on a 128-node athlon cluster (also running Linux) to experiment with real-time Renderman work, etc.

We are at the stage where the workstations are up and running and we are getting ready to tackle clustering. /me thinks Rendezvous enabled Renderman would come in handy! It seems like the best solution I've been able to find for using these types of apps across a cluster is OpenMosix. Anyone have experience with it?

Props to Apple for adding these features for their platform - Just like Final Cut Pro brought Avid-level power to the masses, Shake might be bringing this type of previously studio-tech level compositing to smaller effects houses as well.

Re:FCP3 = 5uX0R, I think not...

[melorama]

Just what were the problems with FCP3?

Lemme tell you...

1. Horrible Media Management

The FCP2/3 Media Manager works ok with simple projects (i.e. no nested timelines), but once you get even a tiny bit more complex than that, the thing just stupids out and completely disregards references to subclips, nests, etc. This basically makes it worthless for media consolidation, which sucks ass when you need to free up a large chunk of diskspace for more clips or projects. Another annoying thing is that once you drop a clip from the bin into the timeline, it totally loses all relationship with the master clip in the bin. This problem is ostensibly because FCP3 lacks any sort of internal clip database system, as is standard on Avid systems. The FCP4 feature list on the Apple site appears to give no indication that these problems have been resolved, but the addition of XML interchange is a nice touch. Although the damn thing should support the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) natively, it appears that it didn't make this release :(

2. "RealTime" performance was a joke

All my smug Apple-fanatic friends sent me countless emails regarding FCP3's supposed software-only "realtime" support back when it was first released. Well, anyone who uses FCP3 professionally knows very well that the its "realtime" capabilities are nothing more than PR hype. Realtime dissolves work nicely, but do anything more complex than that, and it's "Command-R time" (i.e. Render....Render...Render).

It's even more irritating how the most insignificant change to an effected clip's attributes will force you to rerender the whole damned clip, even if the change only affects a few frames of it.

It must have been very embarrassing for Apple when just a few months after the release of FCP3, Avid released XpressDV 3.0, which completely blew away FCP away as far as native realtime effects were concerned. Seeing XDV 3.0 perform a chroma-key with titles, color-correction and a superimposed 2nd clip--all simultaneously in realtime gave me an extremely large erection when I demo'ed it.

FCP3 also did not have the ability to perform realtime effects output to NTSC through the Firewire port, unlike Sonic Foundry Vegas, on Windows. Then again, to be fair, almost nobody's products except for Sonic Foundry offered this ability either.

3. 8 bit-per-channel color processing

Simply put, color correction and compositing in 8-bpc sucks ass. 10-bpc is quickly becoming a required feature in all professional video and compositing apps. In very happy that FCP4 now supports float space...this will definitely expand the product's acceptance in high-end circles.

4. Extremely poor audio features

FCP4's new 24-channel output is great fucking news. Up until now, people using FCP had to lay off multi-channel audio masters in multiple passes...that is so 1990's.

5. Lame-ola MPEG2 export

FCP3's MPEG-2 export used the native Quicktime MPEG-2 plugin, which works okay for simple stuff, but offered hardly any control over compression parameters at all. The new FCP4 export features will hopefully obviate the need for annoying and slow compression sessions using Cleaner6

6. No clip-context in the 3-way color corrector tool

The 3-way color correction in FCP3 was a great addition, but it still lacked the clip context features that are standard in the color-correction tools found in systems like Avid XpressDV 3.5 and Symphony. It's really difficult to color match a show from shot to shot without a side-by-side reference.

7. No time-remapping

Creating that annoying, herky jerky stop-start, MTV "Cribs" speedramp effect is a pain in the ass in FCP3. There's no builtin feature for remapping time, like in Adobe AfterEffects.

8. No user-definable keyboard shortcuts

Self explanatory. Some of FCP3's keyboard shortcuts are really dumb (the shortcuts for

New Apps....

[Brat Food]

Just a note so people know where these apps fit in to workflows: (feel free to correct any innacuracies)

FINAL CUT PRO 4

Non Linear Editor. Now works with DV, DV-Pro(more bandwidth, better resolution/quality), film, and aparently anything in between. Other things to note are a new Title generator, audio mixer, and lots of tools (color correction, various video analizers). If you dont work in video production, the reasons for choosing an Avid over FCP might not seem readily apparent, especially considering the potential cost difference, but it mostly has to do with what you can do in real time(rendering effects and dissolves in software can get tedius with hi rez footage)

SHAKE 3

Compositing software. NOT a direct competitor to combustion or after effects. They all have their place in the workflow, and it would do a potential buyer well to know which tool will fulfill the requirements of their project. It is not for special effects so much (by itself, though you would composite them in on it), and dos not have the 3d support of combustion. It does however work very well for film resolutions, and has a very powerfull workflow.

DVD STUDIO 2

DVD Studio offered the most accessable way to profession DVD authoring I had found (compared to the products for windows, which had potentially more power, but were messy at best to work with). Looks as though ver.2 will up the flexibility while improving the workflow. Also, big tools that were missing from ver.1 are better compressors with more granular control, timline for integrating various video, audio, and subtitles, and better integration with final cut pro.

All in all, Apple is offering a very compelling set of tools for a wide subset of motion media production. Ugg dont want to sound like an ad, but do yourself a favor and look in to an apple solution if your going to buy tools to work in video.