tune back in

Certainly these wonderful modern machines have taken the tedium out of sitting around and waiting, and they help pass the time while traveling. But if you can get out of the habit of using these things and really connect to the world around you, that will be much more helpful to your improvement as an artist. Those times when you are just sitting there with nothing else going on, immersed in the people and happenings around you are when you really get to see special things: people just going about their ordinary business. That's when people are at their most fascinating. You'll never get to observe all that much of the world when you're busy rushing from place to place so that times when you're sitting and "doing nothing" are actually prime observation opportunities.

-- Temple of the Seven Camels on Carrying A Sketchbook

Breaking my iPod addiction is one of my short time goals. Engage. Engage. Engage.

After a few of your fine whiskies, the most amazing thing happened on my walk home - the road stood up and hit me in the face."

getting the obvious right doesn't mean you're smart

So NAB has come and gone. Both Final Cut Studio 2 and Final Cut Server have been announced. The revelations weren't exactly revelatory which is probably why I predicted them fairly well.

COLOR

Apple bought Silicon Color - makers of Final Touch - back in October, 2006.

This is what I had to say about it:

My gut feeling is that it [Final Touch] won't be built into Final Cut because its too late to be integrated into FCP6 (NAB 2007, mark my words) and, frankly, a dedicated colour correction application is a better idea because of the different workflow between editorial and grading. They can do this quickly: They can move on this very quickly too. Take what would have been FT3, tidy it up, and release it as part of FC Studio 6 with Apple branding.

Bingo! Not really a surprise though. Apple seems to have just focused on improving the integration which still, apparently, sucks total balls...

Press play. Color, when doing the kind of stuff that makes it worth using, is not real-time. Which, of course, is totally OK—but what's not OK is that Color doesn't render any sort of interactive preview that you can view in the context of a session. To see your work play back smoothly, you must batch render and view the results in Final Cut!

-- per The Other Stu over at ProLost

(NB: He was behind the design of Colorista which is a competitor to Color and is integrated within FCP... not sure how it gets around the lack of 32bit timelineness in FCP though)

[blah blah blah]

However, part of my blog-rant was the implications for Shake's replacement [aka Phenomenon]:

I see the Silicon Color acquisition as part of a wider strategy to slow customer emmigration while Apple work out their next-generation application. It creates buzz and keeps the mindshare that Apple is still serious about shipping a pro level application. After the non-event of Shake 4, Apple needs to *ship* a modern compositing application. The more people in facilities that are convinced that this is the case, the less likely they are to switch in the short term. I speak of facilities because they are the market for a compositing application of Shake's power and flexibility.

In some ways this is true -- Apparently, there were FCP editors at NAB asking what Shake operators would do now that Color is out. Um, I dunno - continue to composite? Point is -- Colour, within the much wider finalcutsphere, serves as mindshare replacement for Shake... and frankly, mindshare is a large part of why Apple bought Shake. As I've said before: "Yet, somehow Shake became a symbol of Apple's (growing) maturity as a developer of professional production tools. Shake probably sold more copies of Final Cut than it sold of itself."

... and y'know what? Color is more useful to more users than Shake ever will be.

... and I ain't going to go into any length about the (de)merits of democratization colour-grading. I went through all that shit when Final Cut Pro came out. Only one thing to say: Your job becomes convincing people that your skills are worth paying for - not your equipment - this a business, not tenure. Oh and 1985 called -- they want their desktop publishing allegory back.

So where does this leave NuShake™?

At the Foundry. Its called Nuke.

Apple have made some good progress with Motion and Final Cut Pro. Enough for their staff to ask my old colleague Alex Fry

"what he thought now Shake was built into Motion and Fcp".

(I'll let that sink in for a moment). Yup, for Apple's own staff Shake was a really expensive way of tracking, stabilisation and retiming... Hmm.

My feeling? Apple won't ship a feature-film-vfx-level compositing application. Too niche. Too demanding. Too crowded. There's no reason to democratise that level of compositing. Motion is going to be good enough for the huge installed base of FCP.

Apple will continue to improve Motion. It may even (touchwood) at a nodal interface. It'll get closer to what Shake was -- and it'll be realtime, GPU driven -- but it won't be a replacement for Shake. Not in the way current Shake users need it to be.

I'd like to keep hope that Apple may see the light, but I wouldn't build a business around that hope.

- If I were setting up a shopw, I'd be building my pipeline around Nuke. Thought the dirt-cheap-ness of Shake ($500AU) does literally buy you time to be non-commital -- especially when you consider how drop-in-able Nuke is.
- If I were running a shop, I'd be really closely looking at Nuke. Maybe getting in a few licenses and running a small job that way. I'd be planning for the time when my ShakeSource license expires.

[FYI: Ron Brinkmann has also now left Apple and is consulting at the Foundry. So y'know, their 40 pound gorilla in the corner has just crossed-the-floor]

... I'll write on Final Cut Server next time. I have shots to deliver.

The Men of Children!

The movie [Children of Men] is really about how people maintain their roles, even in the most extreme, anarchic of times. You get the sense in the film that monumental social and cultural upheavals don't necessarily bring out the "best" or "worst" in people, but rather confirm what they already were.

The fluidity of the camera work... belies this. The film is haunting because, while its style suggests a world in rapid flux, its characters seem to be confirmations of their previous selves. There is a powerful, almost film-noirish determinism at work in this film. For all its "good intentions"... Children of Men is really a testament to the expressionistic doom that haunts our imaginations.

-- Nicholas Rombes on Children of Men and Retro Futurism

My only comment is on the deliberate use of "men" in the title. The dying world in CoM is a world born of patriarchy c.f. the world of "Y: The Last Man" which despite the similarity in plot setup maintains a markedly more positive tone.