Where'd all the (Apple) hype go?

Apple's much anticipated "event" at the Venetian Hotel on the Sunday just prior to NAB gathered the usual Apple/Mac devotees in record numbers. I was told by one Apple employee that they had a waiting list of over 400 people who weren't even able to get in.

Their list of announcements were wrapped up in this summation: a new version of Final Cut Studio with a new color grading application simply named, "Color". FC Studio 2 will include a version step-up for every application in the suite as well as inclusion of the new "Color". The features of note (that I noticed anyway) of each app were:

Final Cut Pro 6: Can support multiple resolutions and frame rates on the same timeline and play out in realtime with no tedious rendering required. ProRes 4:2:2 - Apple's answer to Avid's DNxHD video codec. This codec allows high-definition video to be captured and compressed at standard definition data rates while maintaining a full raster image (1920 x 1080) within 4:2:2 color sampling and still keeping an impressive claimed visually lossless picture. Apple's own information shows that an hour of uncompressed HD video will consume a whopping 1TB of disk space, while the same hour of HD compressed in ProRes will eat a meager 160GB. This also opens up the door to no longer needing full-blown high-transfer-speed RAID arrays to edit in high quality HD on a desktop system. FCP is still lacking full-blown (or even decent) media management, and several Apple employees acknowledged to me that they are aware of this, and are working on it.

Motion 3: True 3D workspace. Previous versions of Motion worked in pseudo-2D/3D which meant that particles and other effects could not be manipulated in true X, Y, Z dimensions. A very powerful new feature within Motion also allows for templates to be created that can then be dropped into Final Cut and the individual elements edited directly within Final Cut. This would allow for example, an animated lower-third title to be created once and then dropped whenever needed onto the Final Cut Pro timeline. The actual text of that fully-animated text could then be edited simply by re-typing. Very powerful - now if there were just a good list of freelance Motion artists out there.

Soundtrack Pro 2: Vastly improved sound editing application. They took the familiar context-cursor controls from applications such as ProTools and Sony's Vegas. These allow editors to place the cursor at the end of a piece of audio and depending on where it is in relation to that audio, drag/extend the audio, create fades, or create crossfades. A new spectrum display allows for audio to be looked at in a whole new way and visually manipulated. Apple's demo showed a low-frequency bump (likely caused by someone touching the mic during production) which showed up visually and could be removed without effecting the dialogue happening at the very same time. A seemingly revolutionary new "conform" feature allows for an edited Soundtrack project to be conformed against picture changes made in Final Cut automatically. I haven't been following the feature set of ProTools close enough to know if they have something like this, but it's something many audio/picture editors have been wanting for years. Finally, they implemented full surround panning on all tracks.

Compressor 3: A re-written and completely rebuilt application according to Apple. They didn't really spend that much time demonstrating any specific new features, but it appears to be much more like Sorenson Squeeze or Cleaner in it's support for multiple target codecs/bitrates/etc. Now supports H.264 directly. One interesting feature of note - the ability to "automatically" detect other Compressor render capable/installed machines on the network and batch queue to them to speed up processor intensive renders.

DVD Studio Pro 4: Big disappointment here. Any new features are almost totally unknown to me. Apple spent no time talking about any new features, and I did ask - no BluRay support in this version. They still support creating HD-DVDs - I have no idea whether they support VC-1 or H.264 encoded video for those authored HD-DVDs.

Color: This has to be the biggest news for most users of the Final Cut Pro suite of applications, and really anyone else interested in a decent color correction/grading application at a low cost. Apple acquired a little-known company last October called "Silicon Color" which made a fairly high-end desktop color grading application called "Final Touch". Apple has now renamed that application to "Color" and included it in the FCP Suite. It brings fairly sophisticated color grading tools to the desktop at a price never seen before (essentially free as part of the FCP Studio). This includes primary color correction, 8 inside/outside secondaries, custom geometry for creating selection masks and a basic image tracker used to track the underlying image to apply masks to it. There are some other tools that are fairly unique to this product including a color display that shows color and luminance values in 3D space with the pixels showing up as spots around a 3D "pole".

Where do all of these features lead for Apple? They made a fairly big point in saying they now have 800,000 Final Cut Pro users worldwide. Doing quick math, at an upgrade cost of $499 per user, that's nearly $400M in potential revenue for Apple - just from their current users. Not bad for a software application that would have been considered a small vertical market just a few years ago.