Do you just need to edit down some video you have? NTSC video tops out at about 720x480 (that's also the resolution of a vanilla 4:3 DVD). Or perhaps you want to digitize and edit some film at a much higher resolution. Maybe some special effects.
Platform
If you have no limit to your spending, you're going to want the best. Using an Amiga would only be a solution if you're happy with 640x480 video and can afford acceleration boards (if they're still available). Jurassic Park was --not-- done on Amigas. Some of the dinosaur rough-up proof-of-concept animations were done on an Amiga with Lightwave, but all of the final work was done on high-end workstations and edited the old fashioned way on film. Silicon Graphics solutions do exist but will cost you a minimum of $10,000 for software, I am un aware of any freeware packages that with give you anything more than the common cut, paste, and a few overlayed titles and credits. Your best bet is with a Power Macintosh or Windows PC system. Consider spending plenty of money on a good disk subsystem (drives and a controller card) and RAM.
Capture
You need to get the video in there. If you're going to start from scratch, do yourself a favor and get a DV (digital video, Firewire/iLink/IEEE1394) compliant camcorder and a Power Macintosh G4, G3, newer PowerBook G3 or newer iMac DV as well as Apple's new Final Cut Pro software. Many of the pros are using this setup and aside from a minor luminance-clamping issue, it works like a charm and Apple is actually listening to its users.
If you're going to start with an analog source (VHS, Beta, Betacam SP, etc) then you're going to need a damned good capture card and some fast hard drives. Consider a mid-range Miro card, maybe an Avid or even a second-hand Radius if you can find the drivers. PCs and Macs are pretty equal, just be sure to get at least an Ultra/Wide SCSI card and plenty of drives. (maxing out your onboard IDE with 4 x 40 GB 7200 RPM IDE drives may not leave you with enough disk space).
Edting
There are several good software packages out there for editing. Don't look for feature lists or spec sheets, ask around, see what folks are using. Final Cut Pro is getting -A Lot- of users and awards. Many people are dissing Adobe Premiere, but the fact remains that it's still the most popular in its area (but even I will admit that it is aging). There are even plenty of consumer and even some free packages that may do everything you want. These would be fine as long as you don't need some of the higher-end tweaking and quality features, the most important aspect of editing video on a computer is Getting It In There, so spend most of your budget on a good capture system. Or, do yourself a huge favor and go DV, then you won't be digitizing, just transferring.
Bundles
Many camera and video catalogs offer preconfigured Power Macintosh and Windows PC systems, filled with RAM, drives, software, and capture cards or bundled DV camcorders. Some companies like Avid offer decked-out custom jobs with hardware and software for a highly-supported and highly-respected editing suite.
I've noticed this too. It's been a few years since I've been out ouf highschool, but the same thing was true between 1996-1998. For some reason the administration decided to buy a load of top-shelf Pentium 166 and 233 systems, decked out with 17" monitors, Windows 95 and Office 95 for use in word processing labs and to run the library's DOS-based card catalog software.
At the same time, they decided to install the very latest (and slooow) version of Office and MiniCAD onto several labs of 6 - 8-year old Macs. Macs that were running just great before, but couldn't handle this new software too well on their 16MHz 68030s and 8 MB of RAM.
Not too mention how an entire lab of 486's running DOS (for an ancient version of TurboPascal) were updated to beyond 16 MB of RAM for no real reason.
I never really understood the hatred for Macintoshes in my old school. Most of the 100+ Macs installed had done their jobs very well for 4 - 10 years with very few problems. Then all of a sudden, they're loaded down with new software with insane requirements, criticized for running slow, and replaced/suplemented with 60+ PCs, at a cost of almost $2200 per seat, half of which are so messed up right now that they won't even boot.
I never understood it, and from what I hear, this isn't too rare.
>A myth. At least today it is a myth. Apple has moved thier sales model to a 'forced churn' just like the PC makers.
Could you please explain this? The only thing I can really think of to support this would be Apple's move away from seral, ADB, and SCSI to USB, Firewire, and ATA/66. There has to come a time to move forward.
What turned Apple's sales model into "forced churn"?? Selling cheaper computers? (The Mac Classic was really the iMac of 1991) Requiring A PowerPC-based computer for the latest OS? (PowerPC-based macs came out in 1994).
I don't understand what your comment is based upon. Please explain it.
The 1990-era Macintoshes in our office work just great for the desktop publishing tasks they've been doing for 10 years now. No problems printing to the newest postscript printer, either. Acccess our OS X Server-based file server thru Appletalk quite well. Sure, we had to put NuBus ethernet cards in the older machines about 5 years ago, and bought some USB to Serial & ADB adapters to use our color calibration equipement on the newer G3s and G4s, but that's about it.
By the way, I just checked and my movie player claims that that MPEG-1 file has a bitrate of about 256 KB/sec... not too shabby considering it's of high quality.
I agree that MPEG-1 has a higher bitrate, but the MPEG-1 file I posted a URL to has about a 256 KB/sec bitrate, not too shabby for it's really high quality. Shame there aren't more and better tools to work with it.
As long as you have the rest of Quicktime 4 installed (the CODECs, the support files, libs, etc), just run some older app that supports Quicktime. I don't know how easy this is to do under Windows, but on the MacOS one can even use SimpleText to play Quicktime movies.
... and yep, Simple Text still plays Quicktime movies, all Quicktime movies (provided Quicktime 4 is installed). Maybe everyone needs a lesson about how Quicktime 4 is a framework and an engine, not a simple all-in-one-decoder-player app (kinda like Real Player).
I'm not saying "install Quicktime 2.5/3.0 atop 4". You see, Quicktime is a media layer, an engine, a framework. The default included Movie Player 4 is not the -end all, must use it- player. You can use any recent application that supports Quicktime (think Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, MovieShop, etc). What you need to do if you want to play Quicktime movies on Quicktime 4 without/the application/ Movie Player 4 is to find the "Movie Player 3" application and just run it rather than Movie Player 4.
Maybe I wasn't too clear. You certainly want to have all of the guts of 4 installed, but rather than use Movie Player 4 to play your files, use some other application. In this case, Movie Player 3.
By the way, you don't need any special files to run Movie Player 3 atop Quicktime 4. Just be sure you have Quicktime 4 installed, then just bring over the single Movie Player 3 app.
As far as the popups, it should get rid of those. The "Pro" version of Quicktime 4 just means "Pro" features for the Movie Player, image viewer, and Netscape/Internet Explorer plugins. There are no added features to the engine.
I use a variety of platforms on a regular basis, and Flash/Shockwave on Windows isn't without its own problems. I swear Macromedia updates it hourly, so it's hard to pinpoint certain exact problem areas.
MacOS Java has come a/long/ way, the latest version of Apple's MRJ Java VM, 2.2, is almost rock-solid, MUCH faster, and is even certified by Oracle for use with its Java developer tools.
Seeing how Apple is pushing Java as a lanuage for use for writting native Cococa MacOS X apps, I'd imagine future Java support won't be too much of a slouch, either.
MPEG-1, when properlly compressed, looks just fine for me, and I can play it all over. Don't let some hax0r3d home-brew Video CD let you think that MPEG-1 is pure crud... take a look at an example of/good/ MPEG-1:
I think you're refering to the default Quicktime 4 Movie Player interface, and yeah. it's a pretty confusing and wasteful UI. Quicktime is a whole media layer, not just an app. I personally use Movie Player 3.0 from the Quicktime 3.0 distribution (atop an install of Quicktime 4.1). It's not the kludge it sounds to be, I just copied the app off of a machine of mine running 3.0. Works great, clean simple interface.
Apple does have plenty of information available for those wanting to make their own CODECs. Not sure if it's on their developer website, but there are several lengthy PDFs on their monthly developer mailing CDs (Part of the Developer Connection, $99/year for students, $250 everyone else).
I never really understood why folks did that. One of the lab administrators here at my university does just that, he keeps the "Installer Cache" file. There's really no need for that, as Apple has always had "stand-alone" installers available (though sometimes a week behind the 'interactive install' version). I recently updated to Quicktime 4.1 on my PC and PowerBook, adds a few features, not much else. Here's a trick for Mac users (may work for Windows, but I haven't tried it): get a copy of the Quicktime Player from Quicktime 2.5 or 3.0 if you don't like the big, brushed-steel look of 4.0's default player. Works like a charm.
You still have to fill out some information first, but it'll let you download the full, "real" installer (one that doesn't require an internet connection to install). This download is web-based, however... I'm not sure if they have it on their FTP site, I'll look into it.
I've been spending the past few days working with Maple in one of my university's Math labs... on a Sun Ray 1 terminal/network applicance. I've only read of these things up until now, works pretty much like an xterm, except I can "logout" mid session and login on the a different machine with my session exactly the same (great for power outtages, etc). Did some research, sun sells these in packs of 20, 50, and 100, server included, for about $290 - $300 seat to education cutomers. That's SunRay 1, keyboard, 17" monitor, and a server (20 = Ultra 10, 50 = Enterprise 250, 100 = Enterprise 450). Still have to wire them up to 100bt switch, but seems like a pretty good deal to me. Suppose there are some PCs now for $300/seat. Any thoughts on this?
Sun's ~$1300 Ultra 5 w/ monitor bundle will be making its way to my door soon (never believe Sun's "leadtime" estimates), and while I'm planning on running Solaris on it, I'll probably give linux a spin.
Yeah, something's a tad wrong when the only affordable way for me to use an office suite on my workstation (SGI), is to fire up Applixware on a linux box and DISPLAY it over. I haven't played with Star Office too much, is there a way to "break it apart"? I don't care much for its 'desktop' and that start button.
Beta 2 was sent to testers on Feb 23, I really wonder just how many of the bugs were fixed between then and this "final" release. Guess we'll be waiting for some patches or a service pack.
Slashdot Mirror
Needs
Do you just need to edit down some video you have? NTSC video tops out at about 720x480 (that's also the resolution of a vanilla 4:3 DVD). Or perhaps you want to digitize and edit some film at a much higher resolution. Maybe some special effects.
Platform
If you have no limit to your spending, you're going to want the best. Using an Amiga would only be a solution if you're happy with 640x480 video and can afford acceleration boards (if they're still available). Jurassic Park was --not-- done on Amigas. Some of the dinosaur rough-up proof-of-concept animations were done on an Amiga with Lightwave, but all of the final work was done on high-end workstations and edited the old fashioned way on film. Silicon Graphics solutions do exist but will cost you a minimum of $10,000 for software, I am un aware of any freeware packages that with give you anything more than the common cut, paste, and a few overlayed titles and credits. Your best bet is with a Power Macintosh or Windows PC system. Consider spending plenty of money on a good disk subsystem (drives and a controller card) and RAM.
Capture
You need to get the video in there. If you're going to start from scratch, do yourself a favor and get a DV (digital video, Firewire/iLink/IEEE1394) compliant camcorder and a Power Macintosh G4, G3, newer PowerBook G3 or newer iMac DV as well as Apple's new Final Cut Pro software. Many of the pros are using this setup and aside from a minor luminance-clamping issue, it works like a charm and Apple is actually listening to its users.
If you're going to start with an analog source (VHS, Beta, Betacam SP, etc) then you're going to need a damned good capture card and some fast hard drives. Consider a mid-range Miro card, maybe an Avid or even a second-hand Radius if you can find the drivers. PCs and Macs are pretty equal, just be sure to get at least an Ultra/Wide SCSI card and plenty of drives. (maxing out your onboard IDE with 4 x 40 GB 7200 RPM IDE drives may not leave you with enough disk space).
Edting
There are several good software packages out there for editing. Don't look for feature lists or spec sheets, ask around, see what folks are using. Final Cut Pro is getting -A Lot- of users and awards. Many people are dissing Adobe Premiere, but the fact remains that it's still the most popular in its area (but even I will admit that it is aging). There are even plenty of consumer and even some free packages that may do everything you want. These would be fine as long as you don't need some of the higher-end tweaking and quality features, the most important aspect of editing video on a computer is Getting It In There, so spend most of your budget on a good capture system. Or, do yourself a huge favor and go DV, then you won't be digitizing, just transferring.
Bundles
Many camera and video catalogs offer preconfigured Power Macintosh and Windows PC systems, filled with RAM, drives, software, and capture cards or bundled DV camcorders. Some companies like Avid offer decked-out custom jobs with hardware and software for a highly-supported and highly-respected editing suite.
I've noticed this too. It's been a few years since I've been out ouf highschool, but the same thing was true between 1996-1998. For some reason the administration decided to buy a load of top-shelf Pentium 166 and 233 systems, decked out with 17" monitors, Windows 95 and Office 95 for use in word processing labs and to run the library's DOS-based card catalog software.
At the same time, they decided to install the very latest (and slooow) version of Office and MiniCAD onto several labs of 6 - 8-year old Macs. Macs that were running just great before, but couldn't handle this new software too well on their 16MHz 68030s and 8 MB of RAM.
Not too mention how an entire lab of 486's running DOS (for an ancient version of TurboPascal) were updated to beyond 16 MB of RAM for no real reason.
I never really understood the hatred for Macintoshes in my old school. Most of the 100+ Macs installed had done their jobs very well for 4 - 10 years with very few problems. Then all of a sudden, they're loaded down with new software with insane requirements, criticized for running slow, and replaced/suplemented with 60+ PCs, at a cost of almost $2200 per seat, half of which are so messed up right now that they won't even boot.
I never understood it, and from what I hear, this isn't too rare.
>A myth. At least today it is a myth. Apple has moved thier sales model to a 'forced churn' just like the PC makers.
Could you please explain this? The only thing I can really think of to support this would be Apple's move away from seral, ADB, and SCSI to USB, Firewire, and ATA/66. There has to come a time to move forward.
What turned Apple's sales model into "forced churn"?? Selling cheaper computers? (The Mac Classic was really the iMac of 1991) Requiring A PowerPC-based computer for the latest OS? (PowerPC-based macs came out in 1994).
I don't understand what your comment is based upon. Please explain it.
The 1990-era Macintoshes in our office work just great for the desktop publishing tasks they've been doing for 10 years now. No problems printing to the newest postscript printer, either. Acccess our OS X Server-based file server thru Appletalk quite well. Sure, we had to put NuBus ethernet cards in the older machines about 5 years ago, and bought some USB to Serial & ADB adapters to use our color calibration equipement on the newer G3s and G4s, but that's about it.
Y'all are still using the old SGI logo. The new one suits both you and the current SGI better.
By the way, I just checked and my movie player claims that that MPEG-1 file has a bitrate of about 256 KB/sec... not too shabby considering it's of high quality.
I agree that MPEG-1 has a higher bitrate, but the MPEG-1 file I posted a URL to has about a 256 KB/sec bitrate, not too shabby for it's really high quality. Shame there aren't more and better tools to work with it.
Thought you'd like it :)
I'm looking around for some other good examples. Nicest thing about high quality MPEG-1 is a fella can play 'em anywhere.
As long as you have the rest of Quicktime 4 installed (the CODECs, the support files, libs, etc), just run some older app that supports Quicktime. I don't know how easy this is to do under Windows, but on the MacOS one can even use SimpleText to play Quicktime movies.
http://209.237.24.132/OnlineVideos/Myst/MystxM1M22 64.mpg
... and yep, Simple Text still plays Quicktime movies, all Quicktime movies (provided Quicktime 4 is installed). Maybe everyone needs a lesson about how Quicktime 4 is a framework and an engine, not a simple all-in-one-decoder-player app (kinda like Real Player).
I'm not saying "install Quicktime 2.5/3.0 atop 4". You see, Quicktime is a media layer, an engine, a framework. The default included Movie Player 4 is not the -end all, must use it- player. You can use any recent application that supports Quicktime (think Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, MovieShop, etc). What you need to do if you want to play Quicktime movies on Quicktime 4 without /the application/ Movie Player 4 is to find the "Movie Player 3" application and just run it rather than Movie Player 4.
Maybe I wasn't too clear. You certainly want to have all of the guts of 4 installed, but rather than use Movie Player 4 to play your files, use some other application. In this case, Movie Player 3.
By the way, you don't need any special files to run Movie Player 3 atop Quicktime 4. Just be sure you have Quicktime 4 installed, then just bring over the single Movie Player 3 app.
As far as the popups, it should get rid of those. The "Pro" version of Quicktime 4 just means "Pro" features for the Movie Player, image viewer, and Netscape/Internet Explorer plugins. There are no added features to the engine.
I use a variety of platforms on a regular basis, and Flash/Shockwave on Windows isn't without its own problems. I swear Macromedia updates it hourly, so it's hard to pinpoint certain exact problem areas.
/long/ way, the latest version of Apple's MRJ Java VM, 2.2, is almost rock-solid, MUCH faster, and is even certified by Oracle for use with its Java developer tools.
MacOS Java has come a
Seeing how Apple is pushing Java as a lanuage for use for writting native Cococa MacOS X apps, I'd imagine future Java support won't be too much of a slouch, either.
MPEG-1, when properlly compressed, looks just fine for me, and I can play it all over. Don't let some hax0r3d home-brew Video CD let you think that MPEG-1 is pure crud... take a look at an example of /good/ MPEG-1:
http://209.237.24.132/Onli neVideos/Myst/MystxM1M2264.mpg
Now the question is, what are the best Linux tools for working with MPEG-1?
I think you're refering to the default Quicktime 4 Movie Player interface, and yeah. it's a pretty confusing and wasteful UI. Quicktime is a whole media layer, not just an app. I personally use Movie Player 3.0 from the Quicktime 3.0 distribution (atop an install of Quicktime 4.1). It's not the kludge it sounds to be, I just copied the app off of a machine of mine running 3.0. Works great, clean simple interface.
Apple does have plenty of information available for those wanting to make their own CODECs. Not sure if it's on their developer website, but there are several lengthy PDFs on their monthly developer mailing CDs (Part of the Developer Connection, $99/year for students, $250 everyone else).
http://www.apple.com/developer
I never really understood why folks did that. One of the lab administrators here at my university does just that, he keeps the "Installer Cache" file. There's really no need for that, as Apple has always had "stand-alone" installers available (though sometimes a week behind the 'interactive install' version). I recently updated to Quicktime 4.1 on my PC and PowerBook, adds a few features, not much else. Here's a trick for Mac users (may work for Windows, but I haven't tried it): get a copy of the Quicktime Player from Quicktime 2.5 or 3.0 if you don't like the big, brushed-steel look of 4.0's default player. Works like a charm.
Huh? Apple has always had a stand-alone installer available. Qucktime 4.1 for Windows and MacOS is available here:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/dow nload/support/
You still have to fill out some information first, but it'll let you download the full, "real" installer (one that doesn't require an internet connection to install). This download is web-based, however... I'm not sure if they have it on their FTP site, I'll look into it.
the new one fits Linux and Slashdot better.
I've been spending the past few days working with Maple in one of my university's Math labs... on a Sun Ray 1 terminal/network applicance. I've only read of these things up until now, works pretty much like an xterm, except I can "logout" mid session and login on the a different machine with my session exactly the same (great for power outtages, etc). Did some research, sun sells these in packs of 20, 50, and 100, server included, for about $290 - $300 seat to education cutomers. That's SunRay 1, keyboard, 17" monitor, and a server (20 = Ultra 10, 50 = Enterprise 250, 100 = Enterprise 450). Still have to wire them up to 100bt switch, but seems like a pretty good deal to me. Suppose there are some PCs now for $300/seat. Any thoughts on this?
j html
http://store.s un.com/docs/specials/education/startsmart_common.
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray1/ index.html
...is the .edu price (students, instructors, administrators, schools, and research), $2000 is the Joe price.
http://www.sun.com/edu
Personally, I'd probably use a K6 or Athlon system with a decent disk subsystem as a server unless I could afford something like an Enterprise 250.
Sun's ~$1300 Ultra 5 w/ monitor bundle will be making its way to my door soon (never believe Sun's "leadtime" estimates), and while I'm planning on running Solaris on it, I'll probably give linux a spin.
Have them work with Solaris 8 x86. Need a faster box? Upgrade to an Ultra 80... or an Enterprise 10000! =)
Yeah, something's a tad wrong when the only affordable way for me to use an office suite on my workstation (SGI), is to fire up Applixware on a linux box and DISPLAY it over.
I haven't played with Star Office too much, is there a way to "break it apart"? I don't care much for its 'desktop' and that start button.
I've always liked the Motif interface to Applix, and the news of a GTK-based, overhauled version (possibly 5.0) coming soon is very welcome.
Beta 2 was sent to testers on Feb 23, I really wonder just how many of the bugs were fixed between then and this "final" release. Guess we'll be waiting for some patches or a service pack.