As last year, the Macworld Expo occupied one hall of San Francisco's Moscone Center, but a glance told you it was more packed, and I would not be surprised to see it spill back into the North Hall next year, especially now that MacWorld Boston is sadly gone. 

Final Cut Pro editors who attended the Expo might also have been in town for a sold-out midweek Final Cut Pro User Group Network SuperMeet a few blocks away, featuring celebrated editor/sound designer Walter Murch.

The Keynote

Apple CEO Steve Job's keynote was satisfying and nothing misbehaved. He disclosed the new iLife 6 "iApps" suite. GarageBand 3 for example sports podcasting, and features a track volume ducking feature under voiceover tracks which Steve demo'd live, very Apple-cool, based upon "applause."

And there's a new iApp: iWeb, which allows you to rapidly create web pages, blogs, podcasts and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. 

Intel CEO Paul Otellini suddenly appeared from hissing white smoke in a clean room bunny suit, clutching a Core Duo chip biscuit for the newest Mac engine, to pledge allegiance to Our Side. Steve then revealed the first Intel iMac, which had been smoothly running the stage demos all along.

And then, one more thing... 

A slim new 15.4" Macintosh Intel Core Duo laptop called the er... MacBook Pro. This model will be offered at 1.67 GHz or 1.83 GHz speeds, contains a 4X SuperDrive, 512 (up to 2GB) RAM, SATA drive, one FireWire 400 port, along with USB 2.0, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and built-in iSight- a first! This (and the Intel iMac) seems to have forgotten about the more reliable FireWire 800, but the crowd went fairly wild. The patented "Mag-Safe" AC plug is very useful-- if you trip on the cord the laptop stays where it is.

Steve emphasized "Universal Binaries" as the key to the future-software which runs either native under the Intel engine or in emulation under Apple's "Rosetta" translation software; either way, software will "just work." It wasn't mentioned, but Classic OS9 mode is dead on Intel machines.

The Show Floor

This is by no means a complete picture, but a good taste of exhibits relevant to media content creators. 

You could not get near the new Apple machines for the first two days, the lines were 4-5 deep. But there was plenty else to take up your time. I played with an Intel iMac and Photoshop, which in emulation felt pretty crisp.

Adobe (www.adobe.com) has returned to the show floor, joining Microsoft, Quark, and other usual suspects. Adobe's newest digital asset manager, LightRoom, competes with Apple's new Aperture product. Mac users now have choices in how they wish to manage, sort, tweak, compare, rotate hundreds of thousands of photos. But even Apple's own iPhoto from its iLife package now handles 250,000 photos!

Curiously, After Effects 7 was announced after the Expo closed. It's major. A sharply redesigned interface, friendly new timeline Graph Editor, the new app's Pro Bundle now supports HDV import and 32-bit HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging without a plug-in; its capabilities are amazing.

Canon introduced its first HDV camera, the XL H1. The new camera records 60i, 30F and 24F, supporting HDSDI output, with a bevy of pro features.

Mini-training sessions were a feature of Peachpit Press, O'Reilly Press, Adobe, FileMaker, Microsoft and other pavilions. Steve Martin (www.rippletraining.com) conducted Final Cut Pro Power Tools sessions, which as always were held in quiet off-floor classrooms.

AJA (www.aja.com) chose MacWorld Expo to introduce the Kona 3 HD PCI-Express card (US $2999.00) and optional K3 breakout box ($299.00). The Kona 3 is the first in the line with a live hardware keyer, supports 12-bit and 10-bit HD and SD, 8-channel 24-bit AES and SDI embedded audio, RS422 machine control. It supports 4:4:4: colorspace; it captures, plays back, up-and-down-converts all HD and SD flavors...almost everything you'll need for the rest of the decade.  

The revolutionary 3D drawing application SketchUp (www.sketchup.com) had a solid presence. It's now used in film production for 3D scene setup previz and walkthroughs, and at version 5, it sports a huge library of real-world film and video equipment components which are easily placed and manipulated. 

The show floor contained a larger Special Interest forest of kiosks, with new players such as Miraizon LLC's Cinematize, (www.miraizon.com) which allows outrageously easy DVD segment ripping, and the return of older players with new acts like Equilibrium (www.equilibrium.com), famous for its DeBabelizer document and image conversion software, now at version 6 and also available as part of Equilibrium's new patented image server/batch processing solution for large publishing houses. 

A personal favorite, the auto-expansion utility TypeIt4Me (www.typeit4me.com) was showing the newest OSX version with spell as you type features, and a new exhibitor, Memory Miner, (www.memoryminer.com) a family-history media scrapbooking and connections utility, stole the show prize for originality.

Another legendary favorite, QuicKeys (www.startly.com), showed the newest version of its full-featured macro-making utility which saves tons of typing and repetitive tasks, and Trans Lucy, a utility which allows you to watch a DVD through a transparent window, even over another application. Possibly a useful video transcription tool.

Digital asset management and remote web review are features offered by SeeFile, (www.seefile.com) a Boston startup which already has fans.

HD networking over 10GB copper Ethernet PCI-X cards comes from Small Tree Communications (www.small-tree.com). Small Tree became known for its Xserve work at the University of Virginia G4 Supercluster.

Editor Walter Murch showed up at the FileMaker (www.filemaker.com) pavilion with his associate Sean Cullen to reveal how they build the entire production master log codebook in the app. Walter has been a Mac user since 1986 and a FileMaker user since the beginning.

Drive manufacturers such as Huge, G-Tech (a Rhode Island Company), LaCie and WeibeTech were also on the floor, showing SATA storage, with many new RAID solutions.

Gefen (www.gefen.com) was on hand with every possible display connector and adapter you could possibly need, such as from VGA-to-DVI and probably DVI to tree bark to tap maple syrup-just name it, they have it, including home theater connection products.

This was also an auto show. Several shiny cars were tricked out with a variety of iPod playback solutions. And dominating one corner of the hall was the John Lennon Tour Bus, the vision of musician Brian Rothschild, supported by Yoko Ono, Apple and others, tricked out with an onboard music video studio promoting production skills and competitions for inner city kids. 

Music was a major player this year. Boston's Berklee College of Music (www.berklee.edu) had a floor booth, a Dream Studio pavilion exhibiting state of the art music hardware and software systems presented by working pro's and teachers; and David Mash, Berklee's "Vice President for Change" conducted Power Tools sessions in Logic 7.

Lighting giant Lowel (www.lowelego.com) showed its very portable and ingenious Ego soft-lighting system for tabletop photography.

The FCP Supermeet

Co-produced by the major User Groups from Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, the FCP User Group SuperMeet was sold out weeks in advance, drawing over 600 attendees, held as last year at Mezzanine Club a few blocks from the Expo. 

The usual array of big sponsors included Northeast-region GenArts and Contour Design parked on the mezzanine itself, a nice layout. Boston-area Boris FX (www.borisfx.com) was a Super-Raffle sponsor.

The evening began with demos of the new Panasonic HVX 200 HD camcorder and Soundtrack Pro's impressive capabilities to clean and shape sound.

We learned Final Cut Pro is no longer available for purchase as an individual application; you'll be able to upgrade your current edition to FCP Studio (retailing at $1300.00 total) at a reasonable cost, depending on the version you own. The newest "universal binary" versions of these will be revealed in the Spring at NAB.

After an intermission, LAFCPUG's chair Michael Horton introduced "rockstar editor" Walter Murch, and the crowd agreed with applause. Walter took the stage with his PowerBook.

Walter is an industry veteran going back to the late 60's, collaborating with USC student filmmakers George Lucas on THX 1138, Francis Coppola on THE RAIN PEOPLE, and performed both sound design (a term he coined) and picture co-editing on THE CONVERSATION, a murder mystery classic starring Gene Hackman as a haunted and obsessive electronic eavesdropper faced with an audio puzzle. Walter is the only editor to win dual Oscars for both picture and sound editing, on THE ENGLISH PATIENT, and the first editor to employ Final Cut Pro (4 workstations plus laptops!) on a major studio feature, COLD MOUNTAIN, assisted by Sean Cullen. Walter showed alternate cuts of sequences from JARHEAD, an extremely intense war movie directed by Sam Mendes, and Walter's most recent work on Final Cut Pro. The scenes were suggested interpretations for the director's consideration. Those which don't appear in the film will be included in the DVD "extras" when released.

He followed up with a good Q&A session, and graciously did significant overtime by calling out the super-raffle tickets, in a deep booming voice, and eliciting shrieks of joy from winners. After many book signings, photos and chatting, he was one of the last to leave the hall. 

All agreed it was an evening well spent, and a MacWorld Expo highlight.

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Loren S. Miller is an award winning editor, filmmaker, digital media writer, and KeyGuide(tm) developer. Reach him anytime at lormiller@mindspring.com.