HD For Indies

Hey all -

well, it was a looooong day over at Moscone Center in San Francisco today. It is 9pm, I just got back to the hotel and caught up on 90 new emails since this morning. I have TONS of notes, pictures, audio recordings (great note taking methodology), and thoughts in my head about all that has happened today. Whooof! Too much.

I'm beat, I've had minimal sleep for three nights in a row now, I've been madly on the go since 6am, and tomorrow on the plane I'll be doing a full write-up of all that has transpired. But for tonight, just a few thoughts, based on thoughts during the day and notes from commenters (thank you all!) to the keynote notes I posted. So here's a bunch of random thoughts:

-no FireWire 800 in the MacBook Pro (and boy, that is NOT as graceful and elegant a name as PowerBook), nor in the iMac. Why not? For one, there never was FireWire 800 on iMacs, that's pro feature, so that's OK. But what about the 15.4" MacBook Pro? (God, it's going to take a while to get used to saying/typing that.) Some I spoke to today guessed it was because Apple is moving away from it, but I'm more inclined to think it had more to do with Intel motherboard designs that Apple may have been working with to make this motherboard, and getting this product to market. This new ExpressCard slot (and I'd never heard of that until today) is, according to some reader comments, good for 250 MB/sec - plenty fast enough for SATA and FW800 and whatever you want. I'd expect to see

-Final Cut Pro is no longer available as a standalone thing - just Final Cut Studio. I don't feel too bad about that, because clients used to get just FCP and then realize they needed the rest. But what if I want X # of seats of DVD Studio Pro or compressor? Can't be done any more (OK, you couldn't license Compressor individually, but you get the idea).

-Final Cut Studio cross grades are $50 in March. Good deal, that's reasonable for the Intel and PPC version. You just have to trade in your Final Cut Studio installer disks from the older version. Fair enough. That to me says that that will be for Final Cut Studio with Final Cut Pro 5.0.4 or later. Note that NAB will be the next month - if you've just paid to get the Intel compatible version (a universal binary actually for PPC as well), you'll be primed to pay again for another upgrade if they should introduce it at NAB. But will they? I talked to Brian Meanie, product manager (I think that's his title, he's The Guy for FCP) and he said they are happy with the performance of Intel so far. Actually, he didn't - he gave perfectly political answers, and did a perfect job as project manager - durn him! I was asking about a substitute for Altivec and....ah hell and drat it, I'll have to refer to my notes since he phrased it so carefully and well. He's really good at the political side of his job, and it can't be easy. I'll write about the perils of Intel migration later. The point of all this is that there might not be a brand new, feature laden version at NAB if they've been swamped with Intel porting and optimizing. But somebody else pointed out that those are two different teams potentially - new version folk and porting folk. We'll have to wait and see, too many variables and I could believe either side as being reasonable and believable.

-some sources said current FCP will not run at all (crash/fail to launch) on Intel Macs, others said only DV will work at all, and poorly, under Rosetta. I'll have to confirm myself.

-MacBook Pro and iMac Intel Dual Core - what lumpy, inelegant names! Now that we have Intel chips inside, this seems to start a trend of, well, lumpy and inelegant names. May this get fixed as soon as possible - I'm not happy with these names. I understand Apple's desire to rebrand and clarify the distinction, but bleargh...not easy names to say or deal with.

Went to dinner with Andreas Wittenstein of BitJazz, maker of the Sheer codec - damn he is smart. I'm going to do an interview with him and lay out the benefits of his Sheer codec as soon as possible, like next week or so.

Saw lots of cool stuff today - Kano, Sonnet, Firmtek, G-Tech, and others all had cool new storage stuff, the new Macs, new iLife 06 (and I think I'm going to look into migrating HD4NDs over to it, and it does NOT have to use .mac I found out - hooray! Can publish to another location, like my server.

OK, my eyelids are literally drooping - expect a huge update tomorrow night, but probably nothing until then since it is a travel day for me.

-mike