[Ed Dooley]

Sure, if you did a search of the posts you’d find Episode, Procoder (on PC), Bitvice, the new CinemaCraft, and more. Take a look in the Compression Techniques forum. BitVice is better than Compressor, and CC is really good on PC, so it probably is great on Mac too.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

I also have the stand-alone, so I can’t help about the plug-in more than pointing you to other resources. Go to the BIAS site, that’s where I got what I did.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Right you are:
Common file formats and their endian order are as follows:

Adobe Photoshop — Big Endian
BMP (Windows and OS/2 Bitmaps) — Little Endian
DXF (AutoCad) — Variable
GIF — Little Endian
IMG (GEM Raster) — Big Endian
JPEG — Big Endian
FLI (Autodesk Animator) — Little Endian
MacPaint — Big Endian
PCX (PC Paintbrush) — Little Endian
PostScript — Not Applicable (text!)
POV (Persistence of Vision ray-tracer) — Not Applicable (text!)
QTM (Quicktime Movies) — Little Endian (on a Mac!)
Microsoft RIFF (.WAV & .AVI) — Both
Microsoft RTF (Rich Text Format) — Little Endian
SGI (Silicon Graphics) — Big Endian
Sun Raster — Big Endian
TGA (Targa) — Little Endian
TIFF — Both, Endian identifier encoded into file
WPG (WordPerfect Graphics Metafile) — Big Endian (on a PC!)
XWD (X Window Dump) — Both, Endian identifier encoded into file

Ed

[David Heidelberger] “Doesn’t endian-ness just refer to the order bits are stored in memory? As a general rule, one doesn’t retain more information than the other, but I could be wrong about this implementation. As a very simplified description, if you had the number 256 (pretend it’s in binary), on a big endian system, it would be stored highest significant digit to lowest: “256.” But on a little endian system, it would be stored lowest significant digit to highest: “652.” It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea.

Endian-ness is processor-dependent. Intel-based computers (Mac or PC) used to be Little Endian, PowerPCs (G5, etc) were Big Endian. But I think for quite a while, both have been able to read both file types.

And, incidentally, I learned in my computer science class a few years ago, the big/little endian thing is a reference to Gulliver’s Travels.
“

[Ed Dooley]

Did you by any chance look in the BIAS site?
Ed

SoundSoap 2 can be used as an Audio Unit plug-in within Final Cut Pro, however you won’t see Sound Soap 2’s easy to use custom user interface because Final Cut Pro doesn’t support custom Graphical User Interfaces.

To use SoundSoap 2 in Final Cut Pro:

In the Browser window, double-click on the noisy file to open it in the Viewer window.
In the Viewer window, click the Filters tab.
In the Browser window, click the Effects tab, and in the Audio Filters section, open the “BIAS Inc.” submenu.
Drag the SoundSoap audio filter into the Filters section of the Viewer window.
Set the playhead in the Viewer window to a section in the file where there is just unwanted noise. (If it is a very short section, you may want to engage loop playback mode so that SoundSoap’s Learn Mode can repeat the very short section a number of times – until it has analyzed enough audio to create a noise profile).
In the Viewer window’s Audio Filter section, Set the Broadband pop-up menu to “On” and set the Learn Noise pop-up menu to “On”.
Start playback.
After the noise profile has been created and you hear the noise being reduced, switch the Learn Noise pop-up menu to “Off”.
Adjust the Reduction slider and the Noise Tuner slider to your desired settings.
In the Viewer window, click the Audio tab.
Use the drag hand tool to drag your cleaned clip into the Browser or directly into your Timeline.

[Ed Dooley]

Il était mon plaisir.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Just like that, drag it into Bitvice. I personally usually do a self-contained QT, which I keep for the archives, but occasionally do a reference file if I don’t have the time to wait for a full self-contained file. And some folks swear by reference files instead of self-contained.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

As for the CinemaCraft plug-in. It’s pretty expensive. I would first compress in Compressor, build the DVD in DVDSP and burn it in Toast. If you don’t like the quality of Compressor, then spend the money on CinemaCraft or BitVice, both of which will look better than Compressor.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

And you might want to post your web compression questions next time in the Compression or Web streaming forums because that’s where the compression guys hang out.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Other than general rumors about the next great leap forward, that’s all you’re going to get. They’re telling you when updates have come, the average time to an update, and when it’s close or far away they tell you “buy now” or “wait, it’s at the end of its product life”. The neutral thing means its in the middle of its lifespan. If you need a computer, buy one, if you can wait for months, then do so.
Ed

[Jason Flor] “Hi Ed, yes I went there but they just said that the Mac Pro is in the middle of the product cycle and their buy recommendation is “neutral”. Interesting site though, I’ll keep an eye on it.”

[Ed Dooley]

You never know when is the right time, but there are a few on-line buyers’ guides, which use the historical product life of Mac models to suggest when to buy. macrumors.com has one, go to their home page and there’s a buyers guide tab or button at the top of the page
Ed