HD For Indies

Further thougths on today's announcements

1.) I'm glad I'm not a Final Touch HD based shop right now - it's for free to all the owners of next Final Cut Studio, most of whom will consider it good enough to do themselves

2.) So therefore I should be putting out some training materials toot sweet, right?

3.) ProRes 422 - hard to get a clear story on it - is it wavelet based? An optimized PhotoJPEG? I don't know, but I want to know more.

4.) ProRes 422 will be a big, Big, BIG deal for us FCP folk - consider it DNxHD at a fraction of the price

5.) I had been wondering about ProRes support in Color for output to a "real" monitor - one of the MAJOR shortcomings of Final Touch was that it was fine realtime on your computer display, but not the case out HD-SDI due to bus speed issues - but AJA's new I/O HD has HDMI in and out - perhaps we'll be able to connect HDMI to the DVI port on computer that is GPU accelerated and it'll handle conversion to component or HD-SDI for professional monitoring....but it'll only be 8 bit.

6.) I'd love to see AJA I/O with a PCIe interface on it so I could shoot baseband uncompressed video around - think of Kona3 and I/O HD mashed into one product. It'd solve some other issues. I/O HD only talks to computer via FW800, which has a very definite bandwidth limitation. What about apps trying to feed it? Rather than providing baseband uncompressed to a display, with this new box you have to compress to ProRes before sending out - thus stealing cycles from CPU if you were generating new footage, such as anything that renders on the fly - be in realtime FCP timeline stuff, or Motion, or After Effects, etc. - there's a CPU load "tax" on compressing this stuff.

7.) Just how long does it take to compress to/from ProRes 422 if you don't have the hardware available? If you have to transcode? How slow is it?

8.) Color really is a major, major thing. I'd used Final Touch, the basis of Color, extensively for about 7 months from fall 2005 to spring 2006. While the coloring tools were excellent, it had MAJOR workflow issues (getting in and out of Final Cut). The analogy I used today - "That bird soars beautifully in the air, but just don't ask it to (or watch) it take off or land." Since they were a niche 3rd party app, Apple wasn't too motivated to solve all their problems. Now that they've bought it, that makes them MUCH more interested in solving the to/from Final Cut issues. The other issue was realtime performance out the HD-SDI ports - again, gotta learn more. I had problems over a year ago with the Geometry stuff as well - Final Touch was really a FRAME coloring tool, there were problems when working with interlaced footage, such as for rotations and scaling. Presumably they've fixed all that.

9.) I got into a debate with a buddy about ProRes and cross platform issues - I was arguing that unless that was what they were using for small proxies in Final Cut Server, there was no way ProPres was going to be a cross platform codec - it'd be like the DVCPRO HD codec, only delivered on Macs running Final Cut Studio.

10.) No mention was made of Leopard or PPC during the preso today concerning Final Cut - my guess is that all that nifty realtime goodness will require an Intel box. How much runs on PPC will be a very interesting question.

11.) No mention of the RAID! Rumor has it that product is in trouble for internal reasons, so it may be QUITE some time before we see it.

12.) DVD Studio Pro is still alive, but literally only mentioned, no demo, no improvements. Will there be a sizeable upgrade once Blu-ray spec is finalized and Apple an code to that target? Or what is the holdup? I was surprised that NOTHING was mentioned other than "It's in there."

13.) Compressor launching instances is clearly a hack to solve the poor threading control in Tiger until Leopard ships. Hey, if it works to launch 2/4/8 instances, that is fine, but I'd like to see it run right on ONE instance. In time - Leopard and then a 3.1 rev or somesuch.

14.) As I'd guessed, this version of Final Cut Studio not officially supported on integrated Intel graphics stuff - aka Minis & my MacBook that I'm typing on. Final Cut runs on those machines (I captured the Ted interview in FCP 5.1.4 from HVX200 footage in the booth, thanks to Bart & Brian for shooting and assistance!). So will it install, what will/won't work? Gotta wait until it ships. In the meantime, FCS wasn't officially supported on this box, but I can still do useful work even though some things (like full screen playback) don't work.

15.) I'm curious how far the support for all the new stuff goes all at the same time - I noticed that Open Format Timeline was one timeline, and they said "switching to a ProRes timeline" - so it SEEMS THAT Open Format timelines are "special" and not the standard deal. I could see how Open Format timelines would have less realtime performance than others, since they are doing extra work to scale and 3:2 pulldown and all that stuff. But, for instance, can you use Redcode 4K RAW in Color? Can you use ProRes in there? Can you ProRes and output to I/O HD in Color for realtime HD-SDI playback? Or will this be like when they said it does 8 bit, it does 10 bit, it does realtime, but only 8 bit realtime not 10 bit?

16.) As someone pointed out in Comments, whither Spotlight searching in Browser? That would have been super-nifty-keen. Maybe is there, but I didn't see...

17.) Drat - no new GPU or optical drive options. We were all caught up in the other stuff. As I suspected, what we got last week was the "hide in shame" release that underwhelmed. Unless they are going to spring it on us in the AM, which I doubt, since I was walking through the Apple booth today, which is Red Drive throwing distance from Red's booth (AJA is inbetween).

18.) ProRes - support for alpha? Somebody asked in comments, good point.

19.) Final Cut Server IS Proximity that Apple bought last year. Minimal visible differences, akin to what was done with Final Touch/Color.

20.) No mention of Media Manager or other fixes, but they did say they listen and fixed a bunch of stuff, those aren't the kinds of details they give us in teh big overview - gotta get an engineer in a corner and drill, drill, drill...

21.) Whither 4:4:4 in the new version? Final Cut Pro 5.1.x only halfway supports 4:4:4 - you can use an AJA or BMD 4:4:4 10 bit codec, but all RGB processing delivers 8 bit back to timeline. 10 bits is 4:2:2 only. Has that changed? Unknown.

-mike

Labels: Apple, NAB