Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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Get it while it’s hot indeed.
From their email today:
“We are unable to provide support at the same level as we have over the years, but we didn’t want these plug-ins to go away while they remain useful. So if you can make use of these plug-ins in your projects, enjoy!”
From the looks of it, Adobe did not buy Automatic Duck the company. They just bought (hired) Wes which effectively ends the company.
Best,
Andy -
[Mark Suszko] “The footage needs to be kept forever, it may need to be accessed by three or four editing rooms, on very short notice, hen again, footage might stay there for years until needed again. So: SAN, NAS SOTWAN? (Some Other Thing With a Nickname) I gather you don’t think we should bother converting footage, just store the native files, whatever flavor they are.”
[Bob Zelin] “A shared storage envoirment is not for archiving. Archiving is done with LTO Tape, or with cheap individual SATA drives. People edit from their shared storage enviorment, they do not “archive” on it. “
Like Bob said, LTO is the archiving champ. There are good solutions out there from Cache-A, Tolis, StorageDNA, Archiware, and Atempo. SAN and NAS are for what you are working on now, archive products like the ones listed are the best way to store data long term.
Best,
Andy -
[Jim Giberti] “A few years ago even the 10 minute commute seemed unnecessary and I bought the old farm across from ours and built all new facilities up here surrounded by hundreds of acres of mountain forest and pasture. We also have a horse farm here so it enables me to be around it all (and our 8 yellow labs).”
That sounds awesome!
Best,
Andy -
Is this because you need to deal with on-the-fly interactions with other track-based tools like DAWs and their operators? For instance, do you need to be able to reference spatial equivalence when passing work back and forth with others?
Best,
Andy -
[Lemur Hayop] “Automatic Duck threw a wrench into the debate my killing off its apps. It’s been a month or so since they were gobbled up by Adobe and closed their website so it seems there’s little hope that OMF export will be available in FCPX by anybody.”
Reportedly, they are just building a new website and Automatic Duck is still a separate company from Adobe. Certainly smells fishy though. Why couldn’t they work out their business dealings and website changes prior to announcing Wes’ move to Adobe? Why suspend all business if you are still in that business? Very strange.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “What’s the “player” for av foundation?”
QuickTime Player 10.1 (Lion) uses AVFoundation.
The thing about AVFoundation is that it is just one part of handling media in OS X. QuickTime used to be the one-stop shop for media handling, and now Apple has divvied the work up among several frameworks. So a player like QuickTime Player will call upon AVFoundation to deal with playing and encoding assets and maybe QTKit to deal with MOV wrapper data.
[Jeremy Garchow] “So why is everything still wrapped in QT in FCPX?”
I’m not sure. I can’t find any definitive statements in the dev docs about wrapper support, MOV or otherwise. Perhaps the private Camera I/O SDK that Apple has shared with the camera folks will answer that question.
[Jeremy Garchow] “If someone wanted to build what used to be a QT component to send non QT wrapped media to be available to the OS, how would one do that in AV Foundation?”
QT Components still seem to have a place in the new order. Again, I can’t locate definitive statements in the dev docs, but Apple still distributes them as the ProApps codecs and Telestream’s Flip4Mac components work for playback in QTP10.1. Those both use .component files stored in /Library/QuickTime. The common theme here is that the APIs for old QuickTime are deprecated, but the wrapper and the plugins live on.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Like, ready. For primetime. QT as it standa now is going to be no longer, developers are unsure of what the path to AVFoundation truly is. So, when will it be ready, Siri?”
It isn’t ready now? I found you this information.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “When AVFoundation is going to be ready?”
Aside from going public for OS X in Lion when it was released (after being a private API in 10.6.7+), what do you mean by “ready”?
Best,
Andy -
[Chris Harlan] “Make it sassier, but a little more withdrawn. I mean, hold it back a bit, but really–give me some salsa.”
“Can you make that cut faster?”
“Faster than one frame? No.”
“Can you make it cut harder?”
Best,
Andy -
I think Siri points to some future features from Apple in its other products, but not with voice recognition. Here’s why.
Siri was acquired by Apple, but Siri was licensing its voice recognition from Nuance. So what did Apple actually buy? Semantic search. Siri was born out of a DARPA-funded AI project at the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center. The technology that project produced is similar to the technology in IBM’s Watson. Semantic search is also what makes Google so good at knowing what you mean when you search.
Apple reportedly had a lot of negotiating to do with Nuance in order to actually use Siri in iOS as the voice-controlled assistant it was as a third party app. Nuance’s voice recognition is what turns speech into text, Siri’s own tech is what interprets that text and “understands” what you mean when you use plain language to ask it questions.
Apple would need to license much more from Nuance to bring its speech recognition to more than Siri (and maybe it has), but the cool thing that Apple owns in Siri is semantic search. Semantic search holds powerful potential for any application that has a lot of metadata to search. What you might see more likely than voice controlled editing, is semantic search in FCPX and/or other Apple products. Maybe it even becomes part of the CoreData API.
Maybe voice controls will take on a more significant role for accessibility for OS X in general and FCPX in particular, but I’m much more intrigued by the semantic search angle, where searching your content won’t have to happen with syntactically correct search terms, but natural language.
Best,
Andy