Two days too long and three nights too short!

Although for most people the show started with Apples Sunday morning announcements, by that time there were already conferences underway. The inaugural Post|Production Conference organized by Future Media Concepts in conjunction with NAB started on Saturday and continued with sessions all week. The tone of this year's NAB was probably telegraphed by Post|Production's advance notice that the Final Cut Pro sessions were likely to be the best attended by conference attendees, necessitating swapping the Final Cut Pro sessions into the largest available room.

Overall, Post|Production had a higher attendance than anticipated with great sessions. As just one of many presenters I was pleased with the professionalism from the organizers, down to small wallet-sized "cheat sheets" for each presenter showing the rooms and session time they were scheduled for. Post|Production sessions continued through until Wednesday.

Apple

The show kicked off with a bang on Sunday morning. Many attendees flew in Saturday night or Sunday morning so they could be at Apple's 'Special Event' - some sleeping on floors or lounges after making last minute changes to travel plans to a booked-out city. Apple worked the crowd of around 1000 people perfectly. Apple's VP Applications Ron Shoenben warmed the crowd with the Final Cut Pro user base numbers - 250,000 users worldwide and how 3rd parties were using the new XML features in Final Cut Pro 4. He singled out Discreet who have XML-based interchange with their high end products. Automatic Duck are working on an importer for Discreet Combustion, which doesn't appear to be connected to the new XML import. This should work well as Automatic Duck can add import capabilities from Avid as well since they already convert OMF and AAF to Final Cut Pro XML.

The presentation rolled into announcements of partnerships with Grass Valley (round trip file integration with Digital News Production systems) and BBC Technology (integration with their Colledia(tm) production system). While these announcements are relevant for a small percentage of Final Cut Pro users, they go a long way to increasing the credibility of Final Cut Pro in general. In particular the BBC announcement has already spurred a number of UK "fence sitters" to consider or reconsider Final Cut Pro. The message is clear: Final Cut Pro is ready for the big time, and that's exactly the message Apple planned to convey.

Final Cut Pro HD

With the crowd growing a little restless, Ron Shoenben started with the good stuff: Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 with native support for the DVCPRO HD (a.k.a DVCPRO 100) codec for 720 P and 1080i on a single FireWire connection. Stuart English, VP of Marketing for Panasonic Broadcast USA wowed the crowd revealing the AJ-HD1200A: a $25,000 DVCPRO 25, DVCPRO 50 and DVCRPRO HD compatible deck supporting all frame rates (including Varicam frame rates) with AC and DC power!

Final Cut Pro Product Manager Paul Saccone called Final Cut Pro HD's improved RTExtreme "unlimited creative exploration mode" with 4 streams of HD full quality and 10 in preview quality (presumably with a dual 2GHz G4) and significantly beefed up Standard Definition performance. Although the marketing hype has "HD at $5000 or less" using an Apple Cinema Display for video display, that doesn't include storage, $60,000 for the camera or $25,000 for the feeder deck! Still, it's a huge step in affordability for HD editing because those same storage and acquisition costs apply to more expensive editing systems.

Final Cut Pro 4.5 (a.k.a HD) also gained the ability to use a Cinema Display for HD video monitoring, but it is without any color conversion, so the colors would not be suitable for correction or critical viewing. Blackmagic were showing HD Link - a 4:4:4 to DVI converter for viewing HD video on a DVI monitor like the Apple Cinema Display. Although HD Link has a color lookup table for conversion, President of Blackmagic, Grant Petty, says it is not yet quite up to color correction specifications. An update is expected.

Apple and HDV

While it would be great if everyone doing HD would start with DVCPRO HD or HDCAM as their minimum standard, the cost of acquisition is going to be a significant barrier to entry for some time. With much of the focus on the much less expensive, and some suggest data-rate-compromised, HDV format it was good to read on Monday that Apple had joined the HDV Consortium promising native support "in a future version of Final Cut Pro".

Until they include the native support, Apple are recommending workflows from Heuris and LumiereHD. A quick explore of the LumiereHD offering at NAB (on the JVC stand) leads me conclude that it has the best price/performance ratio. If you want to edit HDV with Final Cut Pro now, that's the best solution. (On the PC platform there are many alternatives for editing HDV.) Although we can hope that Apple get native HDV support in the next major revision, reality suggests it may be longer unless there is some additional work already underway in QuickTime to allow for out-of-sequence frames (such as MEPG-2 Backwardly predictive frames - i.e. B frames).
Still, there is reason to be optimistic about QuickTime with the technology preview of H.264 in QuickTime shown on the Apple stand (more later).

Motion

Final Cut Pro HD demonstrated and immediately available Apple wowed the crowd with a preview of Motion - a new motion graphics design tool for release late summer at $299. You'll need at least an 867 G4 and a really beefy graphics card to run Motion because they have harnessed the power of the Graphics Processor to give real-time and near-real-time performance while manipulating onscreen elements.

The demonstration showed about 12 layers of text and graphics previewing in real time over a 720 P HD shot. Nothing slowed down as more layers were added. Finally, OS X OpenGL performance has improved so that it can support enhanced graphics performance like this. Hopefully it suggests continued improvement of high-end graphics card support in the Mac product range, something PC users have enjoyed for many years.

Motion isn't a direct competitor for Adobe After Effects, Discreet Combustion or even Boris RED: each of those applications has features not present in version 1 of Motion that makes them more compelling for serious motion graphic or effect design. What Motion does do, is support Final Cut Pro editors with the sorts of motion graphic design tools that editors need, so it will take "mindshare" from the more serious tools. Final Cut Pro editors will see Motion, buy it at that price, and not look any further. And realistically, most will never notice the lack of 3D space or motion tracking, or any of the other features not present in Motion.

Users will love the keyframeless animation created with behaviors. These give natural physics simulation and multi-layer interactions by changing a few simple parameters in the semi-transparent "Dashboard" controls that appear over the workspace. Dashboards are far more elegant and functional than endless floating palettes that clutter even the biggest screen. Behaviors like gravity, attraction, wind or even collisions between screen borders and layers can be applied. Users can modify motion's Behaviors and create new Behaviors by combining existing Behaviors, including combining "elemental" building blocks. Motion also supports traditional keyframe tweening.

As well as Behaviors Motion will ship with a suite of designer created templates and 90 accelerated filter effects. Despite the lack of information on Apple's Motion web page, it does support Blend modes - composite/apply/transfer modes by (yet) another name. Motion is expected to support most 3rd Party (non-Adobe) After Effects plug-ins. Motion apparently supports a much more recent version of the After Effects API (version 5) than Final Cut Pro (Version 3). This should improve compatibility with plug-ins.

Motion, like LiveType 1.2, supports far better integration with Final Cut Pro than ever before. Motion (and LiveType) project files open in Final Cut Pro without any pre-rendering. If they need rendering it's done in the timeline in Final Cut Pro after compositing with Final Cut Pro created elements. Full round-trip production is now supported for both applications: send clips from Final Cut Pro for Motion to composite; return the Motion project as a clip.

Motion should have been at least $499 to keep parity with other applications! One can't help being drawn to a comparison between the Pro Applications group's $299 products: Final Cut Express has a Pro older brother. Will we see a Motion Pro in 05 at $999??? (That, my friends, is pure, unadulterated speculation on my part with no basis in fact or even rumor, just an interesting observation of pricing which most probably means nothing.)

DVD Studio Pro 3

DVD Studio Pro 3 got shafted in the event demonstration! After the enormous upgrade that was 1.5 to 2.0 it seemed that 3.0 was nowhere near as dramatic and perhaps not truly deserving of the 3.0 moniker. Certainly the Sunday demonstration didn't do the feature set justice. A full number upgrade should show new interface features and significant improvements.

DVD Studio Pro 3 re-introduces the Graphical View dropped at 2.0, but in a new, souped up, expanded version with features never present in DVD Studio Pro 1.5. Not only does it significantly enhance navigation but it's also there to do drag and drop menu linking and ability to selectively view and preview from any tile or check backward for all connections from a tile. There is also the ability to print or output the graphical view as a pdf. Significantly under-demonstrated in the meeting.

Apple did feature "Revolutionary Transitions" in the demonstration and again under-demonstrated the function. (There's only so much time to get through everything in a 75 minute meeting, so it's not entirely surprising that some features of these deep applications got glossed over. Shake 3.5 didn't even rank a demonstration.)

Transitions are very, very cool and for many people would be enough to justify the $199 upgrade price without argument. Previously motion transitions between menus or menus and tracks required the footage to be created elsewhere with the complicated mixing of MPEG-2 motion footage and still frames. DVD Studio Pro's transitions will reduce the hours of cursing authors previous had in matching exact menu positions between square pixel Photoshop files and non-square MPEG-2 motion assets and in matching between RGB and YUV colorspace. Instead, in DVD Studio Pro 2 simply apply a transition and all the hard work is done when the project is built. Naturally transitions preview.

There are two types of transitions. A set of 30 out of the "regular" transition box - wipes, dissolved, motion transitions - all tastefully done that can be used between any elements, even stills in a slideshow. Alpha transitions have two elements: a motion image elementthat forms the overlay across the transition, and a black and white transition that determines where the outgoing shot transitions to the incoming shot. As well as the set of alpha transitions included with the upgrade they are quite easy to create in other applications for inclusion into projects.

DVD Studio Pro 3 includes enhanced integration with other applications including automatic updating of elements after updating in Photoshop or Motion. These enhancements also mean that updated assets (like MPEG-2 files) relink correctly in DVD Studio Pro 3.
Add to these features the ability to do automatic SD MPEG-2 encodes from HD source using advanced optical flow image analysis for best results, and DVD Studio Pro 3 may not be quite as dramatic an update as version 2 was, but it's still well worth the $199 Apple are asking when it ships later in the year.

Shake 3.5

As I mentioned earlier in the article, Shake 3.5 was mentioned but not demonstrated. The crowd in the room was definitely more Final Cut Pro than Shake! Shake 3.5 is shipping now for just $2999 on OS X with unlimited free render nodes.
New features include warping and morphing, improved DPX support and dual processor optimization. Qmaster - the network rendering application - adds support for Maya rendering.
Probably the best news was support for 10 and 16 bit QuickTime codes. Hopefully this means that the problems previously experienced with QuickTime source have also been addressed in this upgrade.

XSAN

I'll admit, I was the guy who gave a huge cheer when xSAN announced "File Level Locking"! While most people using Final Cut Pro won't ever need xSAN, it fills an important role in Apple's product line-up and is crucially important if Apple's Pro Apps suite is to be fully accepted in larger facilities. While that's a relatively small percentage of the total user base, they are an important segment for marketing purposes which helps all Final Cut Pro/ Pro Apps users: when "the big guys" accept Apple's products it becomes a non-issue for other users.

xSAN is an impressive piece of engineering. It's a SAN file management system (sort of an Operating System really) that works at the file level. That's the big news because other SAN networks, other than Unity, have operated at the Volume level. With Volume level locking, one user gets read and write privileges for a volume while everyone else gets read only. If a volume has media for a project only the designated user can write a file back to the volume while all other users have to save their work to a different volume, spreading the parts of a project across multiple volumes. With xSAN the limitation moves down to the file level: all users can read all files and write to the volume - only one file is locked out to a specific user at a time. At the file level any user can access any file on the volume to read. Unless someone else is specifically working on a file, they can save back to the same file, or same volume. (Assuming the specific user has permission to work on the file or volume- xSAN includes some powerful user management features.)

File level locking moves xSAN about 95% of the way toward Avid Unity. The other 5% requires changes in the specific applications so that multiple users can work on the same project. However, the practical reality is much simpler: it's quite easy to work on multiple projects with the same Bin structure, and then merge Sequences into a master project. This is the workflow Walter Murch used for the Cold Mountain edit.

xSAN includes all the "good stuff" a SAN needs - Metadata controller fallover (redundant backup of the controller so if one dies, the other takes over) combined with file journaling means no hiccups if the server fails; mixed storage options, Fibre Channel multipathing (two cables so if one gets pulled out or damaged the other takes over, or both can be used for higher bandwidth). 64 concurrent users can billions of files per 16 TB volume and naturally, Apple's take on management software - easy. There's a lot more good stuff on Apple's xSAN page.
xSAN will ship "summer" and comparable setups (with the caveat noted above) will be about 1/3 the cost of Unity.

Apple summary

And that was Apple's meeting and the first hour and a quarter of my "official" NAB program. Apple certainly know how to work a crowd. With extreme secrecy ahead of the revelations, the announcements generated excitement in the room and at the reception following. In contrast to the more private press events held later in the day by Avid and Adobe, Apple also started the show with more than 1000 people excited about the product announcements and who reinforced each other's excitement in the reception.
Because I had teaching commitments in the Post|Production conference, I wasn't able to attend either Adobe or Avid's announcements, catching up with them later.

Adobe

After Effects 6.5

As expected, Adobe announced After Effects 6.5, a $99 upgrade from After Effects 6.0. Adobe have further stacked the product line in favor of the Pro Version so as to make the small saving from purchasing the Standard Version a very bad decision. In addition to the existing Professional Version features, in 6.5 you get Synthetic Aperture's Color Finesse ($570 MSRP) and Visual Infinity's Grain Surgery ($399 MSRP) included for the upgrade price for the Professional Version. This is after adding Keylight in the last release which had been selling for over $1000 on other platforms. Not to forget the other Professional Bundle only items like Motion Tracking (enhanced again in 6.5), Network Rendering, an advanced particle system, advanced warping and distortion tools, the ability to import 3D camera data from 3D applications, 16 bit support and now native import of Premiere Pro timelines using AAF, or Avid timelines using OMF. All this for a price difference of only $300 and I can't imagine why Adobe continue to offer a Standard Version - for those creative-types who can't do math I guess.

The native AAF/OMF support in version 6.5 Professional Version is an important development for AAF and for Adobe. Not only does it very closely link Premiere Pro and After Effects - even to the point of being able to copy and paste keyframes between applications - it gives hope that open standards like AAF are going to be adopted across a broad cross-section of the post-production industries and forever lay to rest the EDL. Although I suspect the EDL, like a vampire, needs both a silver bullet and stake to the heart to kill it! Unfortunately for small developers, like Automatic Duck, as companies add native standards support, it lessens the opportunity for 3rd parties to add value, although every indication is that Automatic Duck's AAF importer for After Effects will provide features not in the native version.

In addition to the great value added to After Effect 6.5 with Color Finesse and Grain Surgery, Adobe now bundle in 60 of the original Cycore (Final Effects) filters. These are the original 8 bit filters recompiled for speed and dual processors but not 16 bit. For After Effects owners this is a welcome alternative to Final Effects Complete as sold by Media 100, although to use the filters in any other host will still require purchasing them from Media 100. Such is the nature of software licensing and sales that the original developers of the filters ended up with the rights to them while Media 100 also have a valid license for the same filters.

After Effects 6.5 adds enhanced paint and clone tools and FireWire out on Windows (already available on the Mac version). Many users will love the ability to customize interface colors (particularly darkening them) while others won't even find that enhancement.

Not much has been written about the GridIron X-Factor integration announced months ahead of the release. X-Factor (tm) is a plug-in that uses the power of grid computing to speed preview processing and rendering. "It lets you preview process-intensive effects and high-resolution compositions much faster, allowing you to focus on being creative..." According to the FAQ available from Adobe's After Effects area, X-Factor takes advantage of unused processing power on any computer in your local network. X-Factor is a $99 per CPU add-on from http://www.gridironXfactor.com. The X-Factor basic edition allows two machines to work in concert and is a free download when After Effects 6.5 is shipping. X-Factor is available for OS X and Windows 2000 or XP.

Adobe After Effects 6.5 is a great value and After Effects remains in the lead for fine motion graphic design, with a strong and growing user base. Version 6.5 is expected to ship around the middle of May.

Encore DVD

Version 1.5 of Encore was announced and is shipping. Adobe highlight 10 new features including custom workspaces and a Styles palette. No doubt the most important improvement - stability - is also part of the update. Dot 5 releases, particularly 1.5 releases, are much better choices for stable applications.

Another new features in this release is better round trip integration between Photoshop CS and Encore. When menus are edited in Photoshop the changes show immediately in Encore plus there's support for nested layer sets and non-square pixels. Improved QuickTime support means there is a broader choice of import options, particularly for background transcoding - another new feature in 1.5.

The ability to lock out viewers remote control in specific sections of a DVD, Marker support from Premiere Pro 1.5 and After Effects 6.5, support for Photoshop CS guides to aid layout, and a check project feature (to locate navigation or bit rate problems anytime in the process) round out a credible update.

Premiere Pro 1.5

As expected Premiere Pro moved forward to version 1.5. This was an open secret having been posted around the Internet the day before. Premiere Pro's feature enhancements can be summarized around two key areas for editors: workflow and HD.

Premiere Pro 1.5 gains support for HD production in conjunction with Adobe's hardware partners: Bluefish444, Blackmagic Design and Matrox. Expect to see bundled systems from ProMax, Boxx Technologies and 1Beyond in the near future. Premiere Pro 1.5 also gains support for Advanced Pulldown removal for the Panasonic 24P format.

In project management, new consolidate features have been added as well as the ability to move media into one location for archiving.

Integration with Adobe After Effects includes the aforementioned copy/paste clipboard support between the two applications and support for After Effects plug-ins directly inside Premiere Pro. You can now, from Premiere Pro, create a new image in Photoshop CS with the resolution and pixel aspect ratio of your Premiere project.

Add in effects favorites, auto-color adjustment and it's a very credible 1.5. What is slightly unusual about this release is, because Premiere Pro has always supported AAF, this release backs up a step and adds EDL support! Needed, probably, but a step backward in the march forward to new, modern, interchange standards.

End of Part 1