Back from the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention. Ellen Hancock gave a keynote speech on the state of the Macintosh and why Apple continues to be a platform of choice for creative professionals in the broadcast industry. The focus of her presentation was the announcement of QuickTime 3.0, due out this quarter. "Today's announcement is significant as it marks the first time the full power of QuickTime -- including the ability to capture, edit, compress, and playback digital media -- is available for all major personal computer platforms, including Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, Mac OS System 7, and Mac OS System 8."
Ms. Hancock sure is a dull speaker. But she made her points well and turned most of the presentation over to Apple's young QuickTime guru who demoed some of the new features, Randy Ubilos (of Adobe Premiere fame), who demoed his Final Cut nonlinear editing software which he is developing for MacroMedia, and the guys from Avid who showed off their digital, tapeless camera and QuickTime's 3.0's ability to instantly playback their OMF files. OMF is a universal, high-end professional format. The related press release for QuickTime 3.0's new OMF import extension is: biz.yahoo.com
Since QuickTime 3.0 is being released simultaneously for both Apple and Wintel platforms, Hancock argued that there are still advantages to remaining on the Apple platform, chiefly that the PowerPC processor speeds are and will continue to be faster than those offered by Intel. I wish she had punched this point a lot more. I can tell you that cutting rendering time by a factor of 2 or more is significant when you are waiting for a composited effect to render over many minutes or hours.
In a nutshell, QuickTime 3.0 supports scalable processing of just about every digital video file format out there, including the newer Digital Video (DVCam) formats. The NAB demo showed how it will be able to directly address the real-time effects capabilities of some of the higher-end digital video boards on the market, like Truevision's Targa RTX. We watched wipes and dissolves happening in real time, without rendering, in the QuickTime playback window. Even Adobe Premiere can't do this yet. I can see that as we move to 300MHz and beyond, we'll be able to use real-time high quality video on our desktop without needing expensive add-on cards for acceleration. And that's the beauty of QuickTime, because it will run (albeit at a slower frame rate) on less-capable CPUs, scaling its playback and quality automatically.
QuickTime 3.0's features are too long to list here, but clearly it will remain the best tool for cross-platform and file compatibility of digital media files. QuickTime has been called the crown jewel of Apple's software assets, and 3.0 will prove to be even more so. Developers who use native QuickTime files in their digital video desktop products will see their program's capabilities extended and advanced automatically as QuickTime continues to evolve.
Read the entire QuickTime 3.0 press release at: biz.yahoo.com
D. Kuspa |
