and of course the guys who originally designed the software will be able to continue working on it with familiarity of the code, vs. new hires who'd have to spend lots of time getting up to speed.
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Apple Acquires Video Asset Management Software
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and of course the guys who originally designed the software will be able to continue working on it with familiarity of the code, vs. new hires who'd have to spend lots of time getting up to speed.
I have a friend that uses FCP as well as a suite of tools for VFX. He is looking forward to FC-extreme so 4k content can be manipulated for theatrical release. Aparantly they "save to film" for release after an all digital caputure and editing process. Makes them compatible with common legacy projection systems. Reminds me of saving digital QT videos to VHS tape!
Shake was price reduced dramatically.
I suspect this content asset management software will be separately priced as it is now, and a service plan offered comensurate with TV stations and movie studios. That way if you are a guy or a small team using it you need not pay a king's randsom, but if you are an enterprise who needs assistance, with real-time problem solving, and management of huge mountains of content, that service is also available. This is enterprise level software, after all.
There has been a FCP update since the last NAB, and this one wil likely really work toward the market Avid holds. The technology for image capture at theatrical resolution is sufficiently mature and cost reduced through CMOS pickup, mass-media capture, and high speed local storage network, it is nearing microcomputer practicality.
4520x2540 dpi at 60-120 fps is considerable data or 1,377,696,000 bits per second. About 200 megabytes per second. You need a modern leading edge RAID to do that.
ONE camera (www.red.com).
The speculation is Apple will offer an end to end solution with a 4K 4520x2540 display, a bundled Red brand camera, a couple of RAID's and a couple of X-serve's. FC-extreme suite, content management software, and a couple of third party utilities and equipment elements.
I for one hope the speculation is correct.
Rocketman
Shake was price reduced dramatically.
I suspect this content asset management software will be separately priced as it is now, and a service plan offered comensurate with TV stations and movie studios. That way if you are a guy or a small team using it you need not pay a king's randsom, but if you are an enterprise who needs assistance, with real-time problem solving, and management of huge mountains of content, that service is also available. This is enterprise level software, after all.
There has been a FCP update since the last NAB, and this one wil likely really work toward the market Avid holds. The technology for image capture at theatrical resolution is sufficiently mature and cost reduced through CMOS pickup, mass-media capture, and high speed local storage network, it is nearing microcomputer practicality.
4520x2540 dpi at 60-120 fps is considerable data or 1,377,696,000 bits per second. About 200 megabytes per second. You need a modern leading edge RAID to do that.
ONE camera (www.red.com).
The speculation is Apple will offer an end to end solution with a 4K 4520x2540 display, a bundled Red brand camera, a couple of RAID's and a couple of X-serve's. FC-extreme suite, content management software, and a couple of third party utilities and equipment elements.
I for one hope the speculation is correct.
Rocketman
They're going to have to get out their Blu-Ray drives too. Preferably ones that can write to multiple layers, in order to take advantage of TDK's 200BG 6-layer discs (if they ever materialize in the retail market), or you're still going to have problems with digital format distribution. Anyone know off-hand what the size of a 90 min 4K movie w/ H.264 compression would be?
Superman is out on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (and DVD) now.
I might have misstated the needed bandwidth.
I said: "4520x2540 dpi at 60-120 fps is considerable data or 1,377,696,000 bits per second. About 200 megabytes per second. You need a modern leading edge RAID to do that."
But it may require 1,377,696,000 BYTES per second being color or 1.4GBytes/s throughput. I know Red uses a solid state drive to capture 60-120GBytes of data but as you can see, that is only a few seconds of capture. If you have to capture MINUTES of content you need a really awesome RAID to capture RAW 4K.
From there you can save as H.264 or 1080p or 720p or whatever.
Rocketman
I was actually thinking you were talking about outputing at full 4k for theater projection (not HDTV 1080i/p or 720p). From what I understand there are currently two theatrical 4k formats:
Digital Cinema 4K
4096x1714 (2.39:1 aspect ratio)
3996x2160 (1.85:1 aspect ratio)
Academy 4K
3656x2664 (1.37:1 aspect ratio)
If these are being shown full size, and not down sampled, the bitrate and file size go up exponentialy.
Point.
And from Apple's Fibre Channel website:
"400MB/s throughput
Each 2Gb Fibre Channel port offers 200MB/s bandwidth for a total throughput of up to 400MB/s. Fibre Channel is the only storage connectivity technology that provides guaranteed bandwidth, so the host computer receives data at the same high speed as the RAID system sends it out."
Not fast enough! Not even dual channel FC!
The red camera actually captures something like 4.2K so tags can be put on the edges for editing.
This is an application that needs some Apple-ification!
Rocketman
Apple is going after Avid marketshare. Oh, this will be interesting for NAB 2007.
Will it be integrated into Final Cut Pro itself? Tune back tomorrow for all the latest developments...
Previous stories included the Silicon Touch acquisition and rumours of FCP Extreme that didn't quite materialize this year.
Do you ever hear any inklings about FCP6, or Extreme? I am a video hobbyist and not part of the professional circle. Other than the thread you linked to, I have not heard a thing in nearly a year.
A cursory glance at the artbox web page gives me hope that Apple will improve FCPs multi-user experience.
This sounds great! Now if Apple would only just get into the "enterprise" market and take on Active Directory, Exchange, Office, Outlook, Sharepoint, etc. Currently OS X can't begin to touch the enterprise market because it doesn't have answers to these Microsoft technologies. Not only does Apple not have the solutions to compete in this area, but OS X can't even integrate very well with Microsoft's solutions, which is a huge reason Apple needs to play catch up in this area.
Oh, one more thing... a polished and unified GUI for OS X! The current UI is very lacking.
I'm a long-time Apple fan.
Oh, one more thing... a polished and unified GUI for OS X! The current UI is very lacking.
I'm a long-time Apple fan.
Shake was a standalone program and still is. It has never been a part of Final Cut Pro. In fact, it's rumored that Shake is being dropped for Phenomenon, which apparently will use Motion's engine and Shake's interface.
I find it interesting that Apple bought artbox and artbox enterprise. I agree that the shared project experience is a hack and doesn't always work as expected. Utilizing Xsan is not enough. Problems arise when copy and pasting sequences from project to project. There are other weird bugs too. Apple really needs to take a page from Avid and make projects bin based. This is one of the beauties of Avid and its shared storage, Avid Unity MediaNetwork. You can have the same project open, but not the same bin open at the same time. It'll be interesting to see how Apple uses this product. I'm hoping it makes it easier to share projects amongst several users. Furthermore, it looks like this software is very similar to a product that Avid just came out with -- Interplay, which looks to be even more powerful than Artbox. I'm going to hazard a guess that Apple's price of admission will be a lot cheaper though. So we'll see what happens.
~Mullet
Just take the fist format 4096x1714 is 7 megapixels. At 24 FPS this is 168 MP per second. But each frame is compressed using JPG 2000. So you can have almost any data rate you want. JPG 2000 is nicer than JPG. The compression artifacts don't look as bad and the files are smaller. I'm thinking about 1.5 megabytes per frame or about 36 megabytes per second. Maybe I'm wrong and it is 100MB/sec or 24MB/sec but either way any reasonably high end RAID could handle 4K Digital Cinema
Another way to think about these data rates is to look at how the movie is distributed. They are typically shipped on a hard drive. They don't ship a four foot tall fiber channel SAN system, just a disk drive.
What if Apple needed to hire 20 or so software engineers who know about digital cinema and they needed office space for them? Buy the company and you get not only the people and equipment but a product that will cover their salaries. It's a way to grow Apple's capabilities and have the growth pay for itself.
It is actually cheaper then hiring new people to make a new product because you have to pay them, their management, rent on the building, and someone to clean the carpet and answer the phones while they work for a year or so before they have anything to sell. Buy a company that already has the product pipeline filled and you can use the product already on the market to pay the engineers to build what you really want.
We see the same exact thing happen in the aerospace business. A couple years ago Northrop bought TRW. Do you think they wanted some TRW product? No way. They wanted the people and the facility. Buying TRW was the cheapest way to grow the company buy abut 7,000 people. It would have taken years and years to hire them or just write a check and you have them now. AND they come with contracts to cover the cost for the first year you own these new people
Apple has answers to all that - every Server version has had something like Active Directory. Leopard Server has something like Exchange. Office - that's a client app that Microsoft makes for Mac so we're good there. Same with Outlook. Sharepoint - yep, Leopard has that too.
The fact is that a lot of things OS X Server has had or will have in Leopard, but Apple does not want to compete against MS in that space.
100000000% agreed, ive been trying to push apples in our bank here ( Kuwait ) so far 3 macs in the bank and im trying hard to push more. but there are alot of problems with Active Directory and way things and security policies and what not. cant wait till them 100% compatible
I know we're getting off topic, but Have you ever administered or used a Windows XP with Active Directory environment, or Exchange, or Sharepoint? Apple's answers to these technologies don't even come close! Oh, and Office for Mac... it's a good product but doesn't come close to the features and UI of the Windows version.
I agree with you when it comes to Active Directory, even though I personally dislike AD a lot. But what features do you specifically miss in office for Mac?
Touche! I wasn't hip to that.
I'm officially old now; I turned 30 this year. I've become one of 'them'.
Of course, it has grown quite a bit since version 1.0.
It would be interesting to know how much SoundJam code still exists in iTunes 7. (But I'm sure this is something we'll never know....)