Scott Thomas
4
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Jason J Rodriguez] “Yes, it was called Shake
It was created by a company called Nothing Real, and then Apple bought Nothing Real, dropped the price by 10x so anyone could afford it, and then mercilessly killed the product. How amazingly productive.
I’m aware of what Shake is, and that wasn’t the only compositing app that Apple bought. There was also Silicon Grail’s Chalice and RAYZ.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I was talking of a node-based compositor and *editor* like Softimage DS or Autodesk Smoke or Flame.
My feeling is that the retraction of the Final Cut Studio from the market and the introduction of Smoke on the Mac are not coincidental, but I don’t have any facts to back that up, but I do think it’s interesting.
Apple isn’t the only company that buys products and disappears them. How about Puffin Designs Commotion? Matador? Altamira Composer?
IMHO Apple is not interested in Pro’s … at least not when they don’t need us anymore.”
Sadly, that may be true, but I look up to the TV and see an ad for the new iPad, and at least don’t worry about Apple’s future anymore.
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[Alan Okey] “AE is good, but probably its main advantage is its ubiquity. In my opinion, AE still has a ways to go to catch up to the late Autodesk Combustion, at least in terms of its utility as a compositor.”
I owned and worked with a couple of different versions of Combustion. I thought the Keying and Color Correction were great, but man was it ever flakey.
I also seem to recall issues with the ever-fun non-integer frame rates. I think 23.98 or 23.976 was in question. (The recent Premiere Pro bug issue reminded me of that)
A node based compositor from Adobe or Apple has been an oft talked about holy grail. There were talks that a Softimage DS like Final Cut Studio was in-the-works. The rumor mill called it “Final Cut Extreme”. Then there was the rumor of a “Gentleman’s Agreement”. All hopes have since been dashed.
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How about an Immix Video Cube?
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[Craig Seeman] “Then the following should be iMacMini, IMacPro. Easy enough to be consistent. This would be especially so if the claims that the next major OS after Lion will “unify” iOS and OSX.
“OK, to take your argument to the nth level… Why wasn’t the iMac called the “iMacintosh”? All of the previous machines were known as “Macintosh”. Wait… the original iMac was PowerPC based. It should have been named the “Power iMacintosh” or perhaps the “iPower Mac Macintosh Plus SE”.
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Perhaps Apple will take over the event and announce Final Cut Pro XI.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
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[Craig Seeman] “It may be that Avid is risk averse. Apple is in a better position to take risks. It doesn’t mean Apple made a better decision it does mean the two companies have very different business models.”
I’ve heard different stories over the years. One that comes to mind is one that deals with politics.
Avid had bought SoftImage and with it the DS product. My understanding is that the engineers in Tewkesbury were none too happy about this arrangement. So the development of DS languished for many years, and any interesting hardware got moved over to the Media Composer. (i.e. Symphony Nitris) But fix the bugs in the DS’ 3D DVE? Why, there’s no money left in the budget.
While I’m no fan of FCPX in it’s current form, I can appreciate the intestinal fortitude required to sever the ties to the elder product and with that, any inclination a software engineer may have for self preservation. That cannot be easy.
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Thank you for sharing. I find this kind of historical info fascinating.
Wasn’t it around this time that Robert Abel was working on interactive laserdisk? I’m assuming they had their own tools for authoring?
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I was wondering if Apple had recently hired Medhi Ali and Irving Gould from the old Commodore to run the ProApps devision. They did a amazing job of running Commodore into the ground, why not the ProApps?
Of course Irving Gould is dead, but I’m thinking his spirit lives on.
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[Aaron Cadieux] “I’ve whined and complained on the Cow before…”
And apparently you still do.
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[Aaron Cadieux] “Newsflash . . . Apple doesn’t give a crap about you, or your business.”
Apple apparently did at one time care. They built the Final Cut Studio did they not?
I’m glad you’re happy with your $300 investment. Others here with many thousands or millions more invested I think are entitled to their complaints.