MacVideo Forums

Anyone attend the meeting at the Apple Centre with Paul Saccone?
Any reports? gems? surprises?

Thanks

Dave (who lives in Edinburgh and couldn't make it!!)

hey dave,

it was a full night both in attendees and the apps that were demo'd

Paul had to brave a typically frosty british audience - the brits certainly are hard to impress!!!

the new apps seem solid - multicam definetly worth the wait...so easy and elegant to work with.

soundtrack pro is the star of the package - unreal felxibility and creative control...lacks a few features that are probably coming in a future release (OMF)

many other features in development were hinted at including - distributed rendering

all round a great night - but of course things always work in the apple sanctioned demo's - it's the user experience that carries the most value and now as fcp is arriving in the stores and to many peoples homes - reviews on real world experiences will begin to trickle out.

Not an earthshattering release (apart from soundtrack pro and the ease of multicam) but solid all the same alot of work has gone on under the hood - well done Paul Saccone and the FCP development team!

Every member in the audience had their own reasons to cheer and cry, I guess.

For me, best was Compressor - it has a re-write and contains Shake's scaling and deinterlacing engine - claiming the same quality as proper broadcast hardware standards converters. Talk of network rendering, which I hope is far simpler than last I heard.

As well as Multicam, FCP5 gets antialiased edges on 3d distorts, better round-trip handling with other pro-Apps, native HDV (of course) BUT NOT ProHD which is very sad. Font handling remains the same (so LiveType remains a must - Paul sounded surprised when he mentioned 80% of FCP editors use LiveType). No batch rendering YET. Don't know if the RGB/YUV and copied-clip-with-transition bugs are cleaned up.

SoundTrack 2 is definately great. Rather than GarageBand's big brother, it's become the dubbing studio of FCP's edit suite. There's also compatibility with USB Control Surfaces, so you can twiddle real knobs and at last ride more than one fader at a time.

Motion 2 also has MIDI/USB sort of input, hinting at being able to play/modify a Motion project 'live' as a sort of performance spot, but the little MIDI keyboard wasn't plugged in to demonstrate.

Motion 2 is now 3D, but demo not quite as revealing as Apple's online stuff. I find Apple's live demos of Motion decidedly off-putting, but looking under the hood, I'm going to invest time learning v2.

DVDSP4 supports HD, but not much else - as was said, quite a lot of this was Fit and Finish stuff.

BTW, Apple showed a great reel - if only they'd take that apart and show how it was made in Motion.