Although reduced to one giant hall at the Moscone
Center, the MacWorld Expo show floor was busy and
packed. Attendance was a moderate 32,000, according to
show developer IDG, not including 50 million media
people. The ritual Steve Jobs keynote was overbooked,
but IMAGINE’s ace special event photographer Mike
Pliskin made the “yellow dot” list to get a great
SJ shot!
The main entries from Apple this MacWorld were
consumer products: the Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle. It's
significant that both products appeal to and can be
deployed across Mac and PC platforms. Mac’s
professional digital video hardware and software are
now held for events like NAB in spring, although the
show floor yielded some surprises.
Steve discussed the upcoming OSX Tiger and it’s cute
lil “dashboard widgets” add-ons; QuickTime 7 with
added media capabilities; announced HDV support
for Final Cut Express HD and iMovie HD, and
photographed Sony’s CEO with their own new HDV
camera.
On
the Expo Floor
The Mac Mini is essentially a screenless Mac PowerBook
folded in half, available in two processor speeds and
some useful options. This will grab PC users because
it's designed to plug into their existing peripherals:
VGA screens, mice, the works. They'll want more than
the default 256MB of RAM, of course. This item is only
half the size of the old Cube. At $499.00 for a G4
1.25Ghz or $699.00 for a 1.42 Ghz box, that old price
barrier argument is gone!
The new iPod Shuffle is Apple’s first
flash-memory-based music player, a standout in pure
lightweight design and function, with no moving parts
and surprisingly good amplification. It doubles as a
neat USB 2.0 fast storage device at a decent price: $99
for 512MB or $149.00 for 1GB. Techolust captured many
of us. The nearby Apple Store sold out its first
shipments immediately, although its employees were
instructed to wear Shuffles around their necks just to
taunt us.
Incidentally, Drivesavers (www.drivesavers.com) on the
Expo floor was offering data recovery from flash
drives at a straight $200/per unit. You know the
future has arrived when Drivesavers offers a fix for
it. These are the folks who recovered Sean Connery's
Powerbook a few years back. I always visit to see the
latest Mac disaster on display, usually a fried,
charred or blobular mass from which the team has
rescued all the hard drive data.
The Special Interest pavillion was a fun forest of
distinct stations of interest to disparate Mac users.
Some products, like Ricardo Ettore’s TypeItForMe,
(www.typeit4me.com) an amazing macro utility going
back to OS9, also offered excellent chocolate. There
were special services like Beezwax (www.beezwax.com)
for folks needing custom Filemaker solutions – of
interest to filmmakers in all phases of production.
Mark/Space (www.markspace.com) showed special missing
conduits to synchronize Palm OS smartphones with new
Mac apps like Address Book, iCal, and iPhoto—Palm
doesn’t offer these.
The floor revealed some pro players, as always. The
Expo was the debut for Final Touch HD for QuickTime,
from www.siliconcolor.com, offered through Red Giant,
a video software tools company. This is not a hair
conditioner. Final Touch is a full featured video
colorist’s toolset, very expensive (over $4K),
designed for serious vision engineering of standard
and high definition QuickTime Media in a Shake-like
interface. It looks to be a knockout.
Also on the pro video front, AJA, manufacturer of
handy conversion boxes, was on the floor using the new
HDV format. They showed a Sony HDR-FX1 camera-- same
one Steve Jobs demo’d on stage —taking the
camera’s component output to its YUV-to-SDI
transcoder box, and from the SDI out straight into a
Kona 2 SDI capture card in the G5 tower; audio brought
in separately. For playback, another AJA box displayed
excellent quality full screen on Apple's Cinema
Display.
Related MacWorld events included several useful Pro
and User Conferences, reflecting changing technology:
a new conference on web “blogging” attracted a
crowd, as did Bruce Nazarian’s DVD Studio Pro
conference. Bruce is a former feature film sound
editor and knows his subject well enough to become a
DVD guru (www.recipe4dvd.com).
The
Final Cut Pro Supermeet
Also on the plate were a round of offsite parties both
public and private and of course, the annual FCP
User Group Network SuperMeet co-developed by SF
Cutters, LAFCPUG, CHIFCPUG and BOSFCPUG, with support
from groups as a far away as Knoxville and Atlanta.
The FCP UGN Supermeet was staged at Club Mezzanine a
few blocks from the Expo, open to users of all
products.
Apple's Bill Hudson, a Pro Apps Senior Manager,
introduced XSAN, Apple’s new multi-seat fibre-channel
(that's "real fast through a 2GB/second optical
pipe") storage-sharing solution. It works
seamlessly with their XServe and RAID products already
offered and becomes Apple's answer to Avid's Unity
solution. Perfect for collaborative workgroups such as
commercial post houses.
Many of us have been waiting for an FCP live
angle-switching solution—Avid’s had one for
many years. Suddenly two have arrived for FCP! A
software shootout was conducted by Phil Hodgetts of
ProApps Hub fame, (www.intelligentassistance.com)
comparing LiveCut and MultiCam Lite. These are
standalone export/reimport XML solutions: LiveCut, the
peashooter, (http://livecut.sourceforge.net) is an
freeware open source project originated by Swiss
performance artist/programmer Michael Egger. The .44
Magnum is the $295.00 MultiCam Lite from UK-based
Digital Heaven (http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk),
who've already given FCP users the world's first
field-addressable DH_Dropout repair filter, along
other useful and affordable filter tools.
In its favor, the free LiveCut offers 4 streams of DV-only
video -- when it synchs them correctly (currently at
version 0.9.9-- still a beta). Other than that, the
shootout put MCL ahead by a length, with support for
Photo-JPEG offline or DV online formats, refined
interface, feature set and solid performance. So
there's finally a couple of workable multi-camera
choices for FCP, and the upcoming MultiCam Pro will
offer more streams and higher-bandwidth formats than
either. Even when Apple debuts built-in FCP MultiCam
capability, folks may prefer to use a standalone.
Friendly Club Mezzanine staff, cash bar and free
catered finger food rounded out the FCP Supermeet.
On-site sponsors who demo’d on the actual mezzanine
included Boston-area Boris FX (www.borisfx.com) and
GenArts (www.genarts.com), both big players in the
post effects world.
Look ahead to Boston’s next MacWorld at the Hines
Convention Center in July, and to the related Final
Cut Pro User Group SuperMeet for the latest in Mac pro
media developments.
Loren
S. Miller is a writer, prizewinning filmmaker and
editor working in Boston and LA, and who also develops
KeyGuides™ for professional media applications.
Visit www.neotrondesign.com or reach
him anytime at
lormiller@mindspring.com
