There's worms in that Apple

Following my post about Microsoft's Windows Media Player, I thought it'd be a good time to bring up the frustration that Apple has been giving post-production professionals in the past 18 months. Sure, they've enabled people to edit P2 media on Final Cut Pro like no other system, but at the expense of being locked into an Apple Mac OS system for their media. While P2/MXF is platform independent, the first step to work with it in Final Cut Pro is to convert it to the Apple (only) proprietary DVCProHD codec.

In order to take the finished footage (that averages out to be less than 1GB/minute in DVCProHD) onto a PC platform, it must first be converted to another codec - presumably an uncompressed one so that further quality loss isn't introduced which results in files that are ~7GB/minute or more. What's even more irritating is the conversion to another codec introduces the very likely possibility that there will be a colorspace conversion or other change which will result in even more headaches.

Now Apple introduced another "Apple only" codec in ProRes 4:2:2 at this year's NAB. It gives SD-data rate for HD footage with nearly no visual loss. A dream come true for most editors trying to edit on a small system with no expensive dedicated RAID array. Too bad that dream becomes a nightmare when they want to give some footage to their After Effects guy who might just so happen to be using a PC - or when they need to create a Windows Media file in HD.

Hey Apple - just because I can't use footage created in FCP on a PC doesn't make me say, "hey, I better get myself another FCP system." Instead I'm thinking, "You f*!#ing bastards, you're making my life difficult for no reason." The ability or inability to use DVCProHD footage on a PC that was created on a Mac has no relationship whatsoever to the end business and financial results for Apple. They're simply being bastards for bastards sake - to say, "look how cool we are because we have this, and the PC doesn't."

Kudos to Apple for taking themselves from having no editing product to having the best selling editing platform on the planet and in the process creating a very profitable base of users to milk on every upgrade. Shame on Apple for sticking out their tongue at the rest of the industry now that they've arrived.

Just because Apple is viewed in a much more positive light than Microsoft,
that doesn't mean their end-goals or means to achieve world domination are any less evil than Microsoft's well documented abuses of their monopoly position. I'm pretty sure I haven't heard Apple mumbling Google's mantra of "do no harm".

Take iTunes as another example Apple's near-monopoly exclusion. Where are the indie films on the iTunes store? Or fair negotiations with those poor and defenseless record labels who are nearly bankrupt these days?