Boston Macworld 2005 (July 11-14) was an amazing show. It had one negative event attached to it, the notable absence of Apple Computer Inc., but it had many exhibits and courses targeted toward those in the film industry.  Last year, I wrote that Macworld was a “disappointment” for the film community, this year I have to say there was a vast improvement in film-related exhibitions.

Max Lewontin edits his film in the Tech Superpowers’ Lexus during the Geek My Ride II video editing contest. Photo by Max Lewontin	The Lowel Ego light illuminates a digital photography setup. Photo by Max Lewontin

As in last year’s show there were many Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro courses (but none on Apple’s new Motion which was unfortunate).  There were also many returning exhibitors including Hash, which again demonstrated the new version of Animation Master. This product has many capabilities which aid in animating character and landscapes in 3-d. Animation Master has a low price of $299. Another returning exhibitor was DiscMakers, which I didn’t cover in last year’s article. They introduced the DiskMakers Reflex Series Tower Duplicators, which permits a master disc to be duplicated very quickly using very fast, new 16x DVD +R or CD-R drives.  The drives are also occupied with dual-layer burning capabilities, allowing a disc to store up to 8.5 GB, instead of the usual 4.7 GB.  Also of note, a faculty member from Berklee College held a lecture on digital audio recording that featured the Berklee Dream Studio, which is a full-featured digital audio recording studio powered entirely by Macs. Also at the Berklee booth, they offered free tickets for concerts held at Berklee throughout Macworld, and offered free music downloads from artists performing at these concerts.  

There were also many other new exhibitors, some of which were film-related.  At a large booth near the entrance, a company called Supacam introduced the DV6, a tiny palmcorder that records MPEG4 quality video onto a 2GB memory card (though I doubt it comes with the card because cards of this capacity are still expensive). The camera also plays Mp3s, shoots photos and records audio. When I passed by the booth, a salesman in a white lab coat was very energetically hawking the product “…All this for $288, direct from the factory! Y’know cause soon it’ll be in Circuit City, Best Buy, you know, for much more. So here it is for $288, it has all these features…” Frankly, from the talk of the salesman, it seemed a bit shady to me. This is mostly because it has no name brand at all, and also because the claims that “The days when palmcorders shot only low-quality video are over!” seem ridiculous. I’d really have to try the camera out and see if it lives up to the hype. Another new (and noteworthy) exhibitor was Lowel Lighting, which demonstrated its new, lightweight Ego light, which is designed for digital photography. The light uses two 27-watt custom fluorescent lamps, which are rated at a temperature close to daylight. The lamps are enclosed in a diffused plastic structure but also include a separate reflector for additional light control. The light is designed for tabletop photography and portraiture but probably could be used for filmmaking.

I haven’t even mentioned Tech Superpower’s amazing portable editing setup. Last year they fit 3.5 terabytes of storage, a 2 GHZ G5, a 19” monitor and a 42” plasma screen in a Lexus IS300. They also held a video-editing contest to produce a Macworld-themed video in 90 minutes in the car. This year they were back with Geek My Ride II, a new video-editing contest with the same 90 time slots and basic rules. The car had really been revamped, though. The new specs are an Apple Xserve RAID with 5.6 terabytes of storage (a gain of 2.1 terabytes) and two 2.3 GHZ G5s, two LaCie Photon 19” monitors, a Sharp 37” LCD screen and a LCD projector protruding from the moonroof of the car.  The car was the same Lexus IS300. This means two editing stations so two editors can work on the same project together. The editing station on the left projects the Final Cut Pro project onto a screen via an LCD projector protruding out of the moonroof. The editing station on the right shows the movie being edited on the LCD screen. Editing in the car was intensified by its popularity. Macworld wasn’t that much bigger this year but the Tech Superpowers booth was twice as big and, consequently, twice as hectic. I was the first of four editors to edit in the car (down from five last year) and, believe me, concentrating on the task of editing was very hard. The actual system worked beautifully but the problem was the people storming the booth to spend a minute sitting in the car. I occupied one editing workstation located in the driver’s side back seat and hordes of people sat in the other. The constant stream of people (I estimate about 200-250 people got in and out of the car during the hour and a half that I was editing) taking pictures of the car (and of its current occupant) and provided many interesting bits of conversation. I heard things like “…Hey, you know, now I heard that they’re going to put TVs in cars so if you get bored looking at the road…” [This was a woman who barely looked at the car, got in, said this to her companion and got out]. This was just a bit of the many conversations I heard. A teenager got in the car, opened up Final Cut Pro and talked to me a bit about the car and if I knew how fast it went, etc. That ended up being a very interesting conversation. Then someone else got in, immediately opened up a title program, started using it for what seemed like 15 minutes and then almost lost the mouse.

In the contest itself only one of the four films made use of the dual workstations and had two editors working jointly on the same movie at the same time. My own use of the editing system went more smoothly because I didn’t have the capture problem I had last year. I think this made the quality of my own film improve a lot. This year I decided to do something longer, more ambitious in scope and included a score. Tech Superpowers projected all four movies on Thursday July 14^th and will post them on the Tech Superpowers website (http://www.techsuperpowers.com/pages/geekmyride 2005.html) soon.

My opinion of the entire Macworld Expo changed quite a bit this year. I felt that even though Apple was absent from the show, there were many film related exhibits to choose from, some computer-related and some not.  This made the show more interesting than last year’s show. Macworld 2004’s location (The Boston Convention Center) was a more exciting venue than Macworld 2005’s location (The Hynes Convention Center) but that didn’t stop this Macworld from being great place to be for Mac technology and beyond.

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