Friday, April 5, 2002 |
17:46 - Well, would you look at that...
http://www.apple.com/cinematools
|
(top) |
Aha... so this is why Apple bought Filmlogic last year: it's now Apple-ified, integrated with Final Cut Pro, and released as Cinema Tools-- the "last mile" part of digital-film editing, which is what digital video editing wants to be when it grows up.
Until now, if I'm very much mistaken, filmmakers shooting 35mm or 16mm film who wanted to digitally edit it had the option of converting it from the 24 frames-per-second of film to the 29.97 fps of NTSC or the 25 fps of PAL, edit it in Final Cut Pro, and then... well, print it to videotape or DVD. Which is nice, but it's not film. If you digitize your film in order to run it through the digital processor, you then had to either use expensive third-party or homegrown tools to print it back to film at 24 fps, or simply accept that digital editing was a commitment to video or DVD finals-- not an attractive prospect.
Well, now Apple has released Cinema Tools, and now there's no need to be constrained to a frame rate. You can work with material at whatever frame rate your equipment uses, then convert it to 24 fps for printing back to film, and interpolate back and forth at full HD resolution-- which if I'm right means that the last hurdle keeping people from going all-digital in the editing process has now been removed and democratized into the $1000 price target. And thus the conquest is complete. No more $80,000 Avid systems; no more massive studio-owned entrenchments. Now it's all available to anybody, and the most expensive single part of an editing rig is no longer the software-- it's the computer and the camera.
When one considers that Apple is supposed to be a home-computer company, the degree to which they're committed to delivering a revolution to the professional film industry is rather revealing. I guess the money that filmmakers and studios are flinging into Apple's coffers is encouraging enough that Steve realizes this market is poised to explode, even if it isn't what Joe iPod or Bob EverQuest find interesting in their daily computing lives.
I'll have to ask Paul what he thinks of this development...
|
|