By Oliver Peters, January 25, 2007
Any video professional these days knows of Apple's Final Cut Pro, and if you are an FCP editor, you've most likely moved over to the full Final Cut Studio suite. Apple's family of professional applications doesn't end there, though, with additional programs designed to meet the needs of other creative professionals, such as musicians and audio engineers (Logic Pro), photographers (Aperture) and compositors (Shake). Many of the elements of the Final Cut Studio bundle, as well as the other members of the Pro Apps family, were acquired and then further developed by Apple. That trend hasn't ended, with Apple's acquisition in late 2006 of the technology and intellectual property of Silicon Color (makers of the FinalTouch color-correction system) and the Proximity Group (makers of Artbox asset management software). Whether or not these products continue on their own as distinct applications within the Pro Apps family is a question that will have to wait until at least this year's NAB.
Apple Aperture
Although the $299 Aperture is marketed to professional photographers, it can also be an ideal companion for the documentary filmmaker or video editor who must tell a story largely through still photos. In that workflow, Aperture becomes a post tool designed to help organize and prepare materials prior to video editing.
Aperture is intended as a companion to and not a replacement for professional image editors such as Adobe Photoshop. While applications such as Photoshop remain a photographer's "digital darkroom," Aperture may be thought of as a "digital light table" that lets users import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish and archive large numbers of images. In fact, Apple has been playing a bit of cat-and-mouse with Adobe in this market space, when you consider that the development and introduction of Apple iPhoto, Adobe Bridge, Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom form an intertwining timeline. Despite this apparent competition, Aperture works well with Adobe Photoshop. You can even assign Photoshop to be an external editor within Aperture for tasks that are more complex than can be achieved in Aperture's toolset.
The Aperture interface looks and feels a lot like iPhoto. It is one of the few Pro Apps that was developed from the ground up rather than enhanced from acquired technology and products. The team that developed Apple Motion was responsible for the interface development of Aperture--hence the similar features, like non-destructive filter layers and floating HUDs (head-up displays).
One of the biggest strengths of Aperture is its facility for working with camera RAW files, a file format generated by many digital still photo cameras. RAW images are recorded directly from the image sensor without in-camera processing such as white balance, color saturation, sharpness and contrast. Rather than comprising RGB-based pixels like other image file formats, RAW images use a pixel matrix that is only later converted to RGB, by the imaging software. Many photographers prefer recording RAW images because the format bypasses all in-camera processing and allows greater control of images in post. Naturally, not all camera manufacturers use the same RAW format, so part of the technology built into Aperture is support for the various RAW formats used in various models of digital still cameras.
The typical workflow for a photographer would be to connect his or her camera and import the images from the camera's memory card directly into Aperture. These master images (RAW, TIFF, JPEG, etc.) are saved to the Aperture Library location on the computer's hard drive.
An editor usually receives files differently. Images might be provided by the producer on hard drive or disc; the editor would copy these files to a separate folder on his hard drive. These folders would then be imported into the Aperture project as an Album. An important point is that the images show up within the Aperture interface as high-res JPEG proxies created by Aperture for preview purposes. Files can be stored in the Aperture Library, or the editor may choose to link to a folder on the hard drive outside of Aperture so that master images remain safe from accidental alteration or deletion.
Once your photos are in Aperture, you can add and search metadata, organize photos and apply filter effects. Remember that this is a photo-centric application, so the filters adjust characteristics such as size, crop, rotation, color correction, color effects (monochrome, tinting, sepia) and fixes (sharpening, noise reduction, spot patches, red eye reduction). Anything involving compositing or painting requires a trip to Photoshop.
A handy tool in Aperture is the Loupe (named for a photographer's magnifying glass), which allows you to closely investigate areas of a photo. Aperture's Loupe always links back to the master file, so you are looking at defects in the original file and not the proxy. All filter effects are added as non-destructive layers much like in Motion or Soundtrack Pro. These alterations are saved as metadata in Aperture. When you are ready, the files can be exported using any of a variety of built-in or custom presets
. During this process, the effects are applied to the master files and the resulting image is saved as a flattened file.
Apple Shake
Apple acquired the technology of Nothing Real, which had developed Shake as a high-end, film-oriented, cross-platform compositing tool. Under Apple's continued development, Shake gained support for Mac OS X, additional video-oriented tools, like deinterlacing filters, and a substantially altered business model. Shake had been sold at a premium price with additional maintenance support contracts, something most effects houses are used to. Unfortunately, this model limits the size of the market, so by Q3 of 2006, Apple had decided to freeze development of Shake at 4.1 as a Mac OS X Universal application that runs on both PowerPC and Intel Mac processors. The biggest news was that Shake dropped to $499 (and no support contract), pricing it in the range of many Final Cut Pro plug-in packages.
Aperture is a typically intuitive Apple-style program. Apple Shake is the exact opposite. If you've looked at various 3D modeling and animation applications or compositors, such as Eyeon Software's Fusion, you see a similar approach in Shake. The software uses a GUI driven by a series of icons reminiscent of Caligari trueSpace. Until you learn what each of the icons means, you will flounder.
Like all node-based compositors, Apple Shake is a lot different than timeline compositors, such as Apple Motion, Adobe After Effects and Boris Red. Although you can slide and trim clips in Shake, it is easier to do clip syncing within Final Cut Pro and then use the "send to Shake" function to open the selected FCP clips in a Shake project. Alternately, you can start in an empty Shake project and import files.
An important distinction is that Shake projects are considered scripts. You can have only one project or script open in a single instance of Shake. When more than one project is opened, you are actually opening multiple instances of the application at the same time. This approach stems from the 3D/VFX origins of Shake. The adventurous editor/compositor can dig into the bowels of OS X and apply many Shake functions as scripts that run at the command line level of the OS. In other words, you can choose to run Shake scripts from within the UNIX kernel instead of the OS X user interface. That's a powerful capability, but it's something the average video editor will choose to avoid.
Users apply effects by adding nodes and then linking or patching the nodes together. Each effect and each composite of various shots with their effects requires a node. The result is a node view that resembles a flow chart. At any point, the compositor can click on a node and adjust it or send it to the viewer to see the results. This way, it's possible to adjust filters interactively and see the interim results at any point in the series of cascading effects. The final result passes through a FileOut node, which gets rendered when the script is exported. Most editors probably won't want to get too deep into Shake, but for many individual functions, Shake offers a great option for the price. It's resolution independent and ideal for handling large files. The processing for painting, keying, warping, deinterlacing, etc. is of a higher quality than you typically achieve in Final Cut Pro.
Summary
@Body1Both Aperture and Shake offer tools that make great additions to an editor's arsenal at a not-too-prohibitive price. Aperture's performance relies on the OpenGL horsepower of advanced graphics cards, but Shake works best with a fast processor and doesn't depend on the display card too heavily. Most of the Radeon and Nvidia cards will work with either application, but a number of the MacBooks and Mac Minis don't cut it, so check Apple's tech specs before purchasing. The good news is that most older G5s and some PowerBook G4s are okay, too.
I'm running both apps on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 with 2GB of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 display card. Both Aperture and Shake run fine if I don't go crazy with effects. In the case of Aperture, I can add nearly every effect to a preview and the system doesn't get sluggish until I load up on spot patches, which involve non-destructive blur layers. Shake actually works a bit better on the PowerBook as I'm applying effects but gets sluggish when I try to play the video. Of course, the Shake projects I tested used standard-definition DV media (720x480), whereas my digital stills are 2288x1712 pixels.
Editors working with tons of stills or who are amateur photographers shouldn't overlook the elegant features of Aperture. It becomes an ideal stage prior to working with stills inside any editing or compositing application, regardless of whether that's Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer, Adobe After Effects or Autodesk Flame. Shake might be a harder sell, but despite a somewhat foreign-looking interface, it's easy to learn the basics. As a world-class compositing program, Shake lets you use the same tools that helped bring The Lord of The Rings and King Kong to the screen.
.
|