Wednesday, April 27, 2005
We blew them away at NAB 2005!
This is a long post, so to sum it up, NAB was incredible. Apple dominated the event by shipping many, many incredible products. The competition had NOTHING, and they lied to their customers, telling them Apple was making stuff up. "There's no way Apple can be doing that." The users will see it when it's in their hands next month.
On April 17, Apple announced Final Cut Studio, which includes a number of applications. One of these is Final Cut Pro 5, which I have been working on for the past year. The main features in this release are native HDV editing, Multicamera editing, and Dynamic RT.
HDV is a new camera format that should take over for DV. It's high definition, and records to the same mini-dv tapes. It's able to do this by compressing the video in mpeg 2 long gop. Final Cut Pro 5 can capture, edit, play, and output this format natively, *without coverting it to another video format first*.
Multicamera editing means you can shoot a scene with a number of cameras simultaneously. From within Final Cut, you can play up to 16 angles at once (in a 4 X 4 grid) and switch to the angle you want to see live by using the keyboard. It's like an old video switching board, except it's all in software and works for every video format in FCP.
When you are playing back video with a lot of effects applied, we don't make you stop and render first. Dynamic RT Extreme adjusts image quality and frame rate on the fly for optimal playback and scales performance as CPU power increases.
For this release, my manager and I re-wrote the entire playback engine from the ground up. He did most of the work involving scheduling, reading, and decoding the video frames. I worked on the effects architecture and video pipeline. This is what allowed us to do the HDV playback and Dynamic RT.
Peter Chou and I wrote all the code that takes the HDV movie you have edited, and conforms it to the HDV mpeg standards so you can send it back to the camera. Mpeg is long gop, which means certain frames depend on other frames. If you cut some important frames out, you can't play others. Peter and I wrote a lot of very complicated code that goes through your movie and only re-encodes the bare minimum for output to the camera. Other software forces you to re-encode everything, but we only encode around your cuts. This is the part our competition doesn't believe we can actually do.
Besides Dynamic RT and HDV conform, other things I worked on for this release include: a system for XSan admins to define a maximum data rate for each Final Cut station, and a mechanism for our realtime playback engine to get video frames from the render engine when it can't generate a frame. This isn't fast, but it at least provides some basic playback of Motion and LiveType clips in a sequence. I also made improvements to scrubbing, including a low quality scrub for increased performance.
We blew everyone away at the show. The Apple areas at NAB were overflowing, from the press conference on Sunday, to the last shift Thursday afternoon, with people sitting at the neighboring companies booths, and watching our demos. People were amazed. We got great reactions from people. "Is this really native?" "I can't believe you guys did this." "My business wouldn't be where it is today without Macs and Final Cut Pro." And I heard that an engineer from Avid (our big competitor) came by to see if we really were editing native mpeg. He left very sad. Everyone thought we would be taking the easy way out and converting to another format, like they are. We aren't.
I LOVE to demo. You all know how passionate I get about Apple and Macs, and so it's great to be out there on the show floor and really tell people why Final Cut Pro is the best way to edit. Plus i'm showing off my work, so it's even better.
I went around the show a little during the week and no one else was doing anything interesting (on the software front). I was amazed at how boring everyone else's products were. Instead of editing HDV natively, like we are, everyone else was converting the mpeg movie to another format and editing that, taking the easy way out. We didn't settle for that. We set the bar high, and we did it right.
I watched the demo of Adobe Premiere to see what they were up to. They were demoing HDV editing by converting it to another format, which means it takes a lot longer for import and export, and you lose quality. And they were lying to their customers. "Look at how well it scrubs." Well no shit it should scrub well, you converted it away from mpeg 2. Final Cut Pro stills scrubs well, but that's actually an interesting demo for us since we are editing mpeg and it's actually a big deal that our performance is so good.
The Premiere guys would lie to the people there about what their product was capable of, and how people should be using it. I had several people come to my booth saying the Adobe guys said Final Cut Pro couldn't do this or that. All lies. Apple has a policy to not talk about other companies. Adobe doesn't seem to have that much class. I hope the customers do their own research.
Overall it was a great show for Apple. We released a huge number of new applications that address all of the complaints our users have, and add many features.
Apple's official pictures from the show
This is a long post, so to sum it up, NAB was incredible. Apple dominated the event by shipping many, many incredible products. The competition had NOTHING, and they lied to their customers, telling them Apple was making stuff up. "There's no way Apple can be doing that." The users will see it when it's in their hands next month.
On April 17, Apple announced Final Cut Studio, which includes a number of applications. One of these is Final Cut Pro 5, which I have been working on for the past year. The main features in this release are native HDV editing, Multicamera editing, and Dynamic RT.
HDV is a new camera format that should take over for DV. It's high definition, and records to the same mini-dv tapes. It's able to do this by compressing the video in mpeg 2 long gop. Final Cut Pro 5 can capture, edit, play, and output this format natively, *without coverting it to another video format first*.
Multicamera editing means you can shoot a scene with a number of cameras simultaneously. From within Final Cut, you can play up to 16 angles at once (in a 4 X 4 grid) and switch to the angle you want to see live by using the keyboard. It's like an old video switching board, except it's all in software and works for every video format in FCP.
When you are playing back video with a lot of effects applied, we don't make you stop and render first. Dynamic RT Extreme adjusts image quality and frame rate on the fly for optimal playback and scales performance as CPU power increases.
For this release, my manager and I re-wrote the entire playback engine from the ground up. He did most of the work involving scheduling, reading, and decoding the video frames. I worked on the effects architecture and video pipeline. This is what allowed us to do the HDV playback and Dynamic RT.
Peter Chou and I wrote all the code that takes the HDV movie you have edited, and conforms it to the HDV mpeg standards so you can send it back to the camera. Mpeg is long gop, which means certain frames depend on other frames. If you cut some important frames out, you can't play others. Peter and I wrote a lot of very complicated code that goes through your movie and only re-encodes the bare minimum for output to the camera. Other software forces you to re-encode everything, but we only encode around your cuts. This is the part our competition doesn't believe we can actually do.
Besides Dynamic RT and HDV conform, other things I worked on for this release include: a system for XSan admins to define a maximum data rate for each Final Cut station, and a mechanism for our realtime playback engine to get video frames from the render engine when it can't generate a frame. This isn't fast, but it at least provides some basic playback of Motion and LiveType clips in a sequence. I also made improvements to scrubbing, including a low quality scrub for increased performance.
We blew everyone away at the show. The Apple areas at NAB were overflowing, from the press conference on Sunday, to the last shift Thursday afternoon, with people sitting at the neighboring companies booths, and watching our demos. People were amazed. We got great reactions from people. "Is this really native?" "I can't believe you guys did this." "My business wouldn't be where it is today without Macs and Final Cut Pro." And I heard that an engineer from Avid (our big competitor) came by to see if we really were editing native mpeg. He left very sad. Everyone thought we would be taking the easy way out and converting to another format, like they are. We aren't.
I LOVE to demo. You all know how passionate I get about Apple and Macs, and so it's great to be out there on the show floor and really tell people why Final Cut Pro is the best way to edit. Plus i'm showing off my work, so it's even better.
I went around the show a little during the week and no one else was doing anything interesting (on the software front). I was amazed at how boring everyone else's products were. Instead of editing HDV natively, like we are, everyone else was converting the mpeg movie to another format and editing that, taking the easy way out. We didn't settle for that. We set the bar high, and we did it right.
I watched the demo of Adobe Premiere to see what they were up to. They were demoing HDV editing by converting it to another format, which means it takes a lot longer for import and export, and you lose quality. And they were lying to their customers. "Look at how well it scrubs." Well no shit it should scrub well, you converted it away from mpeg 2. Final Cut Pro stills scrubs well, but that's actually an interesting demo for us since we are editing mpeg and it's actually a big deal that our performance is so good.
The Premiere guys would lie to the people there about what their product was capable of, and how people should be using it. I had several people come to my booth saying the Adobe guys said Final Cut Pro couldn't do this or that. All lies. Apple has a policy to not talk about other companies. Adobe doesn't seem to have that much class. I hope the customers do their own research.
Overall it was a great show for Apple. We released a huge number of new applications that address all of the complaints our users have, and add many features.
Apple's official pictures from the show