Good morning. I'm glad to see people here this morning. I realize it's awfully early for folks, 9 o'clock in the morning. Particularly, I'm sure, I saw a lot of people online last night playing with their iChat cameras and stuff, and all the new software. So I bet folks are rather tired. I appreciate you coming here this morning. So what we're going to be talking about today is-- if I can get this to work. Hello. Oh, how cool.

Don't seem to have a remote. OK. What we want to be talking about today is-- kind of changing the scope of what a lot of the other sessions are within the conference. Typically, you know, you spend a lot of time digging down into various aspects of the system, but today we're actually going to spend time focusing on the very, very top stack of the architecture diagram and applications. This is the first time, in fact, that we've talked about applications at the developer conference and how developers can actually get involved and participate in the process of enhancing our application story.

Apple has a number of pro applications. Oh, cool. I appreciate that. Well, let's not make changes right now. Thank you. Apple has a number of pro applications that we currently have, including Final Cut Pro, which is our video editing suite, Shake 3, our compositing tool, which is used for things like Lord of the Rings and The Matrix, eMagic for music creation, DVD Studio Pro for DVD production and authoring, and Final Cut Express, which is basically Final Cut video editing for DV in the prosumer space.

Within those set of applications, there's actually a number of opportunities available to you as the developer. One area is in the scope of plug-ins, the ability to create filters and effects and other things for video and for audio. For each of these applications, there's a number of plug-in opportunities, and we'll talk more about that both a little bit later and in some of the other sessions. In the hardware domain, there's an opportunity for creating both video and audio I.O. devices, being able for multi-channel audio or for high definition or standard definition video or video cards for dealing with video acceleration and being able to do things like real-time effects and such.

And in the content area, which is a new area for us, the ability to create audio loop libraries for Soundtrack, which is our looping application, and animated fonts and textures and objects and other templates for our animation tools, specifically LiveType, which I'll be talking about in a moment.

I want to spend a moment and talk a little bit about Final Cut Pro 4. Final Cut Pro 4 is now, let's see, a week and a couple of days old. It just shipped a little bit ago. And it's actually a suite of applications. Final Cut Pro itself, which is the video editing tool for being able to deal with everything from DV to standard definition, high definition film, and a number of other applications that are now bundled with the app. Soundtrack, which is an audio looping tool. Live type for text animation.

Cinema tools for being able to manipulate film. And Compressor, which is a transcoding tool. And to get into the application in even more detail, I'd like to invite Brian Meaney, the product designer for Final Cut Pro. And he'll show you a little bit about each of the apps. And I'll be back after he's done. BRIAN MEANY: Thanks, Brett.

Okay, so you can give me about a few minutes to kind of talk about Final Cut Pro 4, which is going to be a little bit of a challenge as there's so many things inside this application. So what I'm really going to try and do is go over a highlight of a lot of the different ones to give you an idea of some, and I do mean just some of the things that are actually in there and how you can tie into these things. One of the first things to note is Final Cut is a quick-time video editor. It's meant to be a robust editor with a lot of the tools necessary for professional video editors, But in addition to that, what makes it very unique is having a lot of effects capabilities built in as well. And it's a blending of those tools. And a lot of the stuff gets down to the workflow and how people use it, which is what's led to this very big success.

And as I say, we're fundamentally based upon QuickTime. All of our files are QuickTime-based in everything that we use. I'm just going to open up our log and capture window at this point in time. What we do is we capture all of our files to QuickTime. We can either use the built-in FireWire to capture a number of formats. We can capture directly to our low resolution format called offline RT, capture DV directly bringing the video over FireWire. DV50 is a new format that we can do with Final Cut 4 now as well, bringing that over FireWire. Panaslatic is including FireWire on their decks. In addition to that, we've created a new IO framework kit for bringing in uncompressed video over FireWire. So AJ is the first one to make a box for that called the IO, appropriately named. So you can bring in uncompressed data, either 8-bit or 10-bit, over FireWire onto your computer without the need for a third-party card. So this is revolutionary. A lot of the stuff that we do, but everything is QuickTime-based. And even those formats that we record to are new uncompressed formats that we've worked with as well, keeping all the video in YUV, which is the native format for video and so forth as well. So a lot of tools to kind of bring in video of the highest quality possible, but in a big range, a large, large scale. Flexibility is one of those key things that we try and keep within this application, and that's why the more things that tie into it maintain that flexibility for all of our users. It's a very key thing as the professional industry moves forward again and again. So in here, I certainly have a sequence, a little spot that was kind of graded. Right now I'm playing in a DV25, just a regular mini-DV that was kind of captured. Here I have it playing in DV50. And this has actually been shot with the new Panasonic SDX900 camera, which is the equivalent of the DVX100 from Panasonic, which does 24 frames per second. And I'm actually playing this back at 24 frames per second right now doing the reverse telecine that we've done inside Final Cut Pro. And that's another new feature that's inside Final Cut Pro 4 as well. So we can edit at 25, 29.97. We can edit in these standard definition video rates, but we can also scale in the same application in the same project up to high definition as well. Currently, the capabilities for high definition video are limited to third-party PCI cards and so forth, which can bring in the video either uncompressed or uncompressed formats into the offline RT, a lot of different variations. So there's a lot of ways to tie into this one application that make it very robust and very flexible. And actually, even as I jump back over here, I even have a clip over here of the same spot in 8-bit uncompressed playing back at 24 frames per second playing on the same system. So again, a lot of formats on the same system playing together. I can work with this footage, cut it together, work with it any way I want to. So certainly QuickTime, again, It's the big basis for all these different items that we use.

Editing inside Final Cut, very simple and very easy. We have our sequences, which are just based right over in here, timeline, which matches up to the sequence and so forth. And editing, just by opening up items into the viewer, is as simple as drag and drop. I can choose edit styles over here, drag them in, and I'm good to go, especially once I actually have the video targeted in here. So I can edit my video together very simply and very easily. There's lots of tools inside Final Cut, lots of shortcut menus, lots of extra tools like our trim edit window and things like that that give our professional users the tool sets that they actually need. And it's these little items, the flexibility, that make the application very powerful. Now, some of the places that we can kind of for working is dealing with effects. Effects are a very key thing. One of the things that we added inside Final Cut 4 is a new ability to deal with speed. So in this case, per se, I'm just going to call up the speed dialog. I can change this maybe to 50%, and we can now play back items in real time, playing them back, actually doing this on screen, doing this in software, or it can be accelerated with third party hardware as well. But I can go beyond that. Down this area I have speed being indicated. If I reverse that, you can see how the bars are a little less over here, so I can actually see that it's moving now in slow motion. And if I actually just kind of come in here with a different tool, I can actually start key framing the speed and choosing a different item where that's actually going to be. So I'm speeding this item up, moving it around. I can slide this keyframe around to accentuate or move it around and have it move forward or actually at a different point in time do just the opposite and actually have it move in reverse, indicated by the red down here as well. I'll just make that a little bit more dramatic. So very quickly, I can kind of do these motions, keyframing these items, and again, there's a tool set inside this application for bringing up all the different items I need. So I can bring up the keyframe editor, view all my time remapping right in here, And in this area, I can just actually resize this area to maybe get a little bit more. Actually smooth out these items right down here in the timeline and play with that and manipulate these items right in there. So again, that flexibility and that workflow for what's going on in there. Other things that we've kind of done dealing with effects and so forth, things like color correction, another big one. We actually have some new window layouts. I'm going to move over to one specifically for color correction where I have a video clip over here just between two shots. It actually needs to be looking a little bit more correct. It's a little bit kind of dull in here. And I quickly want to correct that. So there's a lot of tools dealing with the different scopes that I can kind of view in here and kind of get them any way I want. Right now I'm limited to a small window set. Typically I'd be editing this on a dual monitor display or whatnot. But we have a new window that we call the frame viewer in here, where I can view different windows together.

So in this place I'm gonna look at the previous edit and the current edit. I can actually see the color differences between the two that I actually want to get in here correcting. So again, just with some more simple tools, keeping this all very easy, I can actually come in, add a color corrector. All these items are bold, or can actually be done in real time. And these are all built with the FX Builder, which I'll jump into in just a second. And just gonna open up the three-way color corrector up in here. And very quickly, I can actually come down and say, you know what, this is gonna be my black level. I'm gonna set up my white level to be this little white line over in here. And instantly, I'm starting to get some more matches in there. Then I can actually start tweaking this a little bit more, getting it just to be the color values I want. And, you know, again, using my frame viewer over here to compare the previous to next edit and see how those things are going. So Final Cut has both some simple tools, as I'm using this eyedropper, to create and change things quickly, but it also has a robust tool set of professional tools, things like the scopes and things like that, to give everything that the professional also needs. We work very hard to make sure that we're not only just bringing a tool set to the users that is expected, but also doing it in unexpected ways. And that's what this community is now coming to expect, expecting new and innovative tools that they can use in here to do video editing, video effects, and compositing. It's not just doing one or the other. It needs to be a blending of everything. It's essentially really creating this content of moving images. So actually getting into that, these are all just some simple effects for kind of doing these things. Titling is a very big thing that needs to be done as well. An application that we also bundle, as Brett mentioned, which we have a suite of applications in here, is LiveType. LiveType is a titling application that ships with Final Cut Pro 4 that works hand-in-hand with it, where you can actually sync up items back and forth. You can actually have certainly system fonts that I have down in here for viewing these things. But one of the things that's unique about LiveType is its ability to use what we call live fonts. Live fonts are fonts that have been created that actually allow you to view. These are all actually animated, and they'll actually move over in time. So very quickly, these animations are all created for the user. And all they have to do is choose these things as a font, and these things will be animated for them automatically. And it's not just fonts that are actually included in here. There are things that actually can be developed and created. There are also textures. And all these textures are also in different groups. So there are geometric textures, there are liquids and things like that. Lots of different categories and this can be infinite. It can be added to the application time as well. So a lot of different tool sets that are available for them. In addition to that, there's also objects that people can use. And again, they're all grouped into categories.

This is a very deep set. There are hundreds of each of these categories lined up and ready to go. And in addition to that, there are also effects just for adding in the text. So I can get into things like, say, a motion path and very quickly start creating some animation. So if I wanted to, I could actually just by double-clicking on this item, add in some text over in here, and just play this thing in very quickly. It's animated those items in. So you can see very quickly how I can create not having to animate every single character. In addition, if I wanted to do something else, maybe I could come over into something like this and maybe add something way to end it. I'll add the curly slide down here. I'll just move my preview over so I can kind of get a quick idea of what's going on. It's going to just play through the different items, give it a quick preview, and now as I've added the curly slide towards the end, it's actually going to curl this one out. So very quickly, it's animating all these characters for me without me having to get in there for every single item.

And all these effects can be created, they can be added to and so forth. It's a very robust application with a lot of abilities to tie in there. And titling is one of those things that people want to do and have something that looks very unique but they don't want to have to spend a lot of time with it. So this tool is gonna be essential for doing those sort of things. Getting back into effects, back into Final Cut over here.

So compositing, as I kind of mentioned, compositing effects goes hand in hand inside Final Cut. It's a lot of things that you want to be able to do in here. And as I open up a sequence in here, I simply have some shots that I really want to do some compositing over and so forth. So I'm going to just open up some clips. And very quickly, just by using what we call the superimpose edit, I'll edit this particular one over there. And right now, it's just showing the full video here. So if I want to change that, I don't have to go into some special mode or things like that. I can actually just select the item in here, grab the item, start shrinking it down and moving it. And to do the animation, I can slide it wherever I want, simply set up some keyframes. I'm doing it all right here in the window, so I'm actually seeing what I'm doing. I can get in here with Bezier controls and so forth as well, and instantly jump back and play that back in real time. It's that real-time performance that makes all the difference. So having as many effects as you can do in real time is vitally important. So if I do or don't like that, I can start changing the timing of that, move that around and have it move really slowly around that one keyframe, then move fast over there. So I can really play with all those different elements. Now we can get in here and start adding all sorts of other elements, like maybe I'll add in some text. I'll do the same sort of thing. I'll just do a superimposed edit to add it in here. Actually, why don't I just swap it up to the track up here. So now this text is great, but again, it's this tool set that makes Final Cut unique, so there's a lot of things that we can do in here to make it easy. Maybe I want to have this text follow along the same path as the video I just created. Well, this is a computer, so I can simply copy what we call paste attributes, just paste the attributes of that basic motion to this item down here. And now, in real time, it's all tied to my elements.

Now, as you can see, I'm playing with these things and creating these things and doing it in real time. It's that real-time feedback that allows me to be creative, to play with these different elements in time. And I can start getting into layering all sorts of tracks and effects and things like that and stacking these things up. But in the real world, it's not necessarily about all the layers that I'm actually doing. It's about what I can actually do with my video. So in this case, I'm actually going to drag a Gaussian blur, a filter, onto my item. So you can see it's blurry over here and then keyframing back in. So I can do filters and effects, not just the typical keys and things like that in real time.

Or maybe what I want to do is actually get into something else altogether, and I want to know what my video tracks items, because it's a source footage I'm going to buy. So I can actually come in here and say, all right, let's do a timecode print filter. And so I can do that. And so every single frame now is being updated, you know, as it's playing along there in real time. So I can get all those facts going on for me. So the real-time performance inside Final Cut 4 is very robust right now, which is really nice and really great for our users.

So beyond all that, now these effects that I've been creating over here, like the Gaussian Blur, these are all created in FX Builder. FX Builder is the language that we use for creating all of our effects. Every single one that's created inside Final Cut is actually open. You can open them up, actually see the code that's actually been used to create it, and go in there, either modify it or create your own. Use it as a template. We have the new menu that kind of shows up in here, showing all the different points and so forth, and we actually have some developers that have created their own plug-ins and things like that as well. So this adds the number of effects that can go on, and it ties directly into our real-time effects structure. So the items or the effects that can be done in real time just show up as real-time as well. So for our users, again, very, very powerful solution. So they're getting that interactivity all the time, which is really important. So, you know, very key elements as to what's kind of going on at that point. In addition to that, in addition to our own effects that we actually use. We also work with third-party After Effects filters. So here I have a filter from Stage Tools. There's other ones from CineLook and things like that that you can actually use, and they show up directly in the menu as the manufacturer's name, and you can actually apply them and use them as well. So tying in directly to those. So again, compositing and effects, all inside one application. Beyond that, there's a lot of other things that have gone inside Final Cut 4. Customization is a very big one. One thing that we've added to keep the layouts and keep yourself working very efficiently is a fully customizable keyboard. There are over 600 commands inside Final Cut, and a lot of them are listed in here. That's why we have to have the whole search mechanism in here as well, so you can actually find all the different ones that are in there. But very quickly, you can find all the different items that you want. Here's all the ones related to audio and things like that, and search and create them or customize them to any of the commands. And these are not just limited to just the single keystrokes or the command keystrokes. You can go down to command option, shift option, or things like that, and just do it as simply is dragging and dropping to one of the layouts. And then you have customized to that item. Tool tips update to show the new items and so forth. Very robust. And you can even go steps further of actually adding in buttons. Dragging to the areas in here and so forth as well will add buttons to your user interface. So again, keeping the user actually very productive in their entire workflow, which is a key to what we try and do.

In addition to that, audio is a very big thing as well. As I kind of get in here, certainly I'm going to move to, again, a slightly different layout. All of our layouts are based upon workflows and things like that. We have an audio mixing layout. So in here, I can actually get in here, do some more customization, resizing the timeline tracks, bring those up a little bit, and actually just start playing these items in real time. And with keyframing turned on, I can actually start doing keyframing and moving my items in real time, adding keyframes down here in the timeline and so forth as well. So I can do my real-time mixing inside of here, working with files of 24-bit. And in addition to that, not only real-time mixing for audios and levels, we also work with third-party audio unit filters. So we've rewritten our Apple filters that we actually had in there for Final Cut Pro for audio units, as well as we can now actually work with third-party ones as well. Sorry there. So all of our units will now kind of show up in there. And in addition to all these things that are going on, we've also included another application that we mentioned before as well, which is Soundtrack. I'm just going to quickly move over to Soundtrack here.

Soundtrack is our audio looping and music creation editing application, which is very powerful. Right in here, I have a file that's been exported from Final Cut Pro with having markers that show up. These are called scoring markers. They allow me to line up things very quickly between the two applications. So very quickly, if I'm looking for items, I can just start clicking on items, even while I'm playing my video, started getting an idea of what it's actually going to sound like.

It's a little low at the moment. But you can find all the different items, search for the different ones that I want, find the loops, and then just drag them off. It'll create a track for me automatically. I can loop those things out and just keep kind of going. There's a very extensive search mechanism. I can do the same sort of thing that I can do in all the applications. Start searching maybe for a strum guitar, find the items I want, and again, just drag these in. And these are all loops that are created. They're shipped with over 4,000 loops. But again, there are more items that can be added to these. It's a very extensive database finding these different items so you can see how powerful it really is. You can get into lots of different items, lots of different music and add these items in. You also can work with, in addition to all these different loops, work with audio units inside this application as well for doing your mixing. So, for example, I can bring up my filters. These are the ones that are shipping directly with Apple, but also here are some from eMagic that have actually shipped. And I can actually get in here and maybe add something like, let's see, let's Let's do the Fat EQ here. And I can actually also bring up the UI for this item as well. And actually start playing and animating and automating this from the UI from the manufacturer as well. All this while doing my music editing. So again, a very powerful little application for creating my music for my video productions. I'm gonna move back over to Final Cut Pro quickly as well.

And just one of the last things in addition to that is all these items that we bring up is also exporting out over to Compressor. Compressor is basically an application that does all of my compression. It does MPEG-2 compression. Most importantly, it does 2-pass VBR for going out to DVD, combining that with certainly the music that I'm actually doing inside Soundtrack, bringing all my productions together, and then going over to DVD Studio Pro as well. So a lot of ties and files in there as well. There's a lot of different presets for going out to pretty much any format that you can kind of create inside QuickTime. So a very robust set of features inside this application.

And this is just kind of the beginning of the tool set. There's cinema tools as well, which allows me to do 24p editing as well as film editing, so I can do the offline or online editing and so forth as well, HD editing, and there's even further interaction that some of my colleagues will get into in just a minute. But that is the basics of Final Cut Pro 4, some of the few ties-ins and so forth in there as well. A lot of the different ways you can actually start getting into the application, but it's a very open one. And again, the biggest thing about this application that makes it unique and powerful is the set of tools. The set of tools are based upon open standards, be it QuickTime or other ones that we're kind of working on, keeping it open to bring people in and create other things out there in the community of making a much bigger one than anyone could do by themselves. And that's something we believe very strongly in. So, with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Brett and kind of move on from there. Thank you. Thanks, Brian. Final Cut and the suite of applications is an incredibly rich suite. There's no way we can cover the feature set here in the time we have available.

So we apologize for rushing through, but the goal here is actually just to give you enough of an overview to help us actually focus on the really important message, which is what are the developer opportunities? Within Final Cut and within a number of the professional applications, such as eMagic's Logic, all of them have various plug-in models available to you, whether it be for audio units, as you saw with Soundtrack and with Final Cut Pro, but also within Logic. All of these applications support audio units. And they allow you to have various audio effects and even be able to do a number of things either improve the quality of your sound or actually generate new sound. So audio units are one very important feature of these various applications. And if you happen to be an audio unit developer, there's an opportunity for you to make your audio units available to these apps.

FX Script is another interesting opportunity. This is a scripting language with inside of Final Cut for doing special effects or effects actions. In fact, all of the effects that Final Cut uses are built within FX Script. There's a couple of third-party developers today who actually make FX Script plug-in suites for Final Cut, and it's an interesting opportunity both for Final Cut Express and for Final Cut Pro if you happen to be a developer with skills in doing video manipulation of various types. An effects script is one that you can actually get and start playing with even as a user for being able to do custom effects development, and this still doesn't work. Okay.

After Effects plugins are also supported within Final Cut. So there's basically a certain fairly minimal level, but nevertheless a level of support for After Effects, the plugin model that's supported within Final Cut Pro. So if you have, you know, development you've done using the After Effects plugins API set, they can be brought into Final Cut to be able to, again, take advantage of both generators and effects for example blurs as you saw and a number of other things that are available so if your effects developer and have experience with after effects this is another place that you can be bringing in your plugins And in addition to all of the stuff that we've talked about, and a whole other area of opportunity is for Shake. Shake is Apple's compositing, very high-end compositing tool, and they have their own plug-in model, which is available for being able to do very sophisticated compositing effects. And we'll talk more about the Shake plug-ins later in this week. Thank you.

In the content space is another opportunity. Brian showed you Soundtrack for being able to create music. Well, it comes with a set of loops, but there's a huge suite of musicians out there and people who have various loop libraries available. It is possible to actually take loop libraries that exist potentially maybe for ACID and for others and bring them into the Apple Loops format. Apple Loops is a unique format that includes both tempo information and key information because Soundtrack has, one, a unique ability of being able to do in real time to be able to adjust both tempo and key, to be able to basically reuse loops in a very flexible way. So there are, in fact, is a tool available as part of the Soundtrack application for being able to take existing loops and build Apple compatible loops, so Apple loops. In the visual space, there's another opportunity for content developers, which is both for LiveType and for Final Cut. Today, there are folks out there who do create fairly significant suites of motion back or animated backgrounds and things like that that are available. LiveType model one step further because you can take animated content and actually be able to provide some looping and effect behavior in addition to just basic, if you will, motion back content. Motion backs are just animated backgrounds, but with LiveType it's possible to have basically prefix loops and repeating center sections of the loop and end loops so that you can and create very sophisticated streams of animation that can be extended over time. And those can be approached by either providing textures, which are effectively the animated backgrounds, objects, which are very similar but have alpha channel capability, generally motion objects that are assumed to be composited with some other material and so have alpha channel, and live fonts, which are a very unique capability. It's basically the concept of having, effectively, fonts, but where each glyph or character is actually a full animation. And effectively, each character is a movie, which, as you saw in the demo, characters that effectively draw themselves or, in some cases, are hand-assembled or things like that. They're a very, very clever way of beyond the normal font mechanism. But all of these are available as an opportunity for those of you who are up and to be content developers.

In the hardware space for the various applications, there's certainly in the PCI card development area opportunity for video acquisition hardware for standard and high definition video. One of the big challenges is how do you get all this data into the machine? And certainly for things like high def, you need to be able to take advantage of PCI and now PCI-X. And if you are a hardware developer, there's a great opportunity there. Also for Final Cut and for the eMagic, the Logic product, there's a number of opportunities for multi-channel audio acquisition capture boards as well, in addition to for the PCI card and the video space accelerated hardware real-time effects boards.

So basically, there's the concept of IO, bringing your data in and out, both for audio and video, and being able to do very high-speed effects work. We do, for Final Cut and the other products, a lot of things are done in software, particularly now with the new G5. There's just an enormous amount of power that's there, but there's still not enough horsepower to be able to do things like high-definition video effects or things like that in real time. There's a lot of opportunity to be able to do some very interesting things.

In the FireWire domain, as mentioned, there's a couple of interesting products that are coming out, both audio acquisition units that go over FireWire for multi-channel audio input and output, as well as our new I.O. framework that we've made available so that developers can actually do that now in addition to audio for being able to do that with standard definition uncompressed video. AGA is actually one of the first developers to do that, but we're anticipating quite a number of other developers jumping in to being able to do other firewire-based uncompressed SD solutions. 1 And in the USB domain, there's opportunities for multi-channel audio acquisition. Certainly, you're seeing more and more multi-channel audio capabilities throughout the applications. I think you saw yesterday the keynote, one of the sessions they talked about QuickTimes and new capabilities for Surround. There's a lot of activity out there in terms of extending the support for multi-channel audio and a lot of places to provide hardware for it.

For all of these opportunities, there's a number of sessions this week that I've encouraged you to go see. If you're into content creation, this afternoon there's a Creating Content for Soundtrack and Live Type session where we'll actually get into detail around how to make the Apple loops, how to take various motion video content or animations, and make them available for live type, and the tools and other formats that are available there. On Thursday, there's a session on interfacing professional video hardware with Final Cut Pro, where we'll get into the various issues around both acquisition and the real-time effects, as well as the new I.O. framework and how you can take advantage of some of the new capabilities there.

And on Friday, we have a session on plug-ins that will cover everything from Shake plug-ins and audio unit plugins and After Effects plugin compatibility, as well as where we're going in the future in terms of actually trying to unify some of our plugins across the professional application space.

Now, moving on, the next interesting opportunity in the developer domain is in the workflow area. If you look, although we have a very rich set of professional applications available from Apple, it's really just a small drop in the bucket compared to really the problem domain in the professional, certainly professional video and audio world. There's just so many other things that people have to do to be able to produce a movie or produce a CD, whether it be script writing and storyboards to dealing with a very high-end color correction and going back and forth between film and scoring and you name it. There's just a whole number of different pieces to the process. And kind of the interesting situation is that the real world doesn't revolve around any one application, that it involves many to be able to solve the problem.

And that, in fact, we've spent a lot of time thinking about that from the perspective of our pro applications. And I think we have some interesting things that we'll be talking about here in terms of how you can actually participate in this process. One of the big problems with workflow is certainly how do you get information back from one application to another? How do you get access to the raw data that's in the application, whether it be in the case of Final Cut, the project and how all the various things are laid out and the timelines and such, to the metadata surrounding each of this, what effects and other things that are actually applied and transitions and such. And this is just for video, never mind other aspects of the workflow.

Independent of that level of data, there's the issues of actually the various formats that the media end up bringing into the pie. Certainly, QuickTime on the Apple platform makes a big, big difference here because we have one consistent way of being able to deal with multiple forms of media through a consistent set of APIs, and that helps a lot, but it still is a big challenge in terms of being able to deal with the different formats of media there and the different formats of project files. But that's, again, only kind of one piece of the problem. Moving data between the various things is one thing. But along the way, you really need to be able to modify it and be able to do interesting things with the data as it goes from the different stages of the workflow. It's more than just reading the files. So with that, I actually want to pass off to Bill Hudson from Apple, who will talk a little bit more about what we're doing in this and actually talk about some work we've been doing with some third parties to help really show the opportunities in the workflow space. Bill. - Thank you, Brett.

Brett mentioned workflow, and that's a little bit about what we're going to talk about here. And that very much is an offline to online workflow where Final Cut Pro is used for offline editing and moving project file data over to a Quantel system, either an EQ or IQ. In Final Cut Pro 4, we've got XML interchange format. And this is the industry's first nonlinear editor to expose all project file data via XML. So for developers, there's a lot of opportunity there to create products that address various workflow issues. Nothing is hidden or proprietary in this project file data interchange. You have complete access to all Final Cut Pro project attributes. And it provides a link to other editing systems, asset management databases, and post-production pipelines. So we'll touch on one of those here in just a minute.

The first implementation, of course, is an AAF plug-in by Automatic Duck. And for those who do not know, AAF is the Advanced Authoring Format. There are many manufacturers who are members of the AAF association. And they are all striving to arrive at a standard by which information can be transferred among various disparate systems in a post-production workflow.

So let's talk first here about what this process is and what we'll be demonstrating here in just a moment. First you're gonna have your offline acquisition. So let's say you shoot film 35 millimeter or 16 millimeter and you telecine to HD at 24p. Or you maybe shoot HD originally in 1080, one of these different frame rates. At that point then, you're going to capture into a Final Cut Pro desktop system using either a Pinnacle CineWave card, the Pinnacle CineWave 4, which they will have drivers available very soon, or the AJA Kona HD card. So these two cards, their drivers allow for different capabilities. Right now, the Pinnacle CineWave will allow you to capture when they ship this product, CineWave 4. either in photo JPEG, DV at 25 megabit, or DVC Pro 50 codecs. The AJA Kona card HD can now capture to photo JPEG. So this gives you the ability to have files that are very, very small. So basically 24 PHD is about 96 megabytes per second. So when you capture these offline formats, you're much, much smaller. You can work mobily on a PowerBook. So here's your acquisition into Final Cut Pro.

So at that point, you're going to then, you can edit with real-time effects, high quality, again, low data rate. DV at 24p is about 2.9 megabytes per second. And all your frame and time code information is completely accurate in your project file. You can monitor your video out NTSC with real-time 3.2 insertion over FireWire. Brett mentioned the AJA IO box. All of the ports are active on that IO box, so you can monitor, like I said, your video, and you can get multi-channels of audio out, which is really a nice thing to be able to do while you're in an editing environment. You can then export using the Automatic Duck AAF plug-in and then transfer that file over a network directly to a Quantel IQ or EQ system. And it's at this point that I'd like to introduce Tom McDonald from Quantel. Tom?

Thanks, Bill. I think my friends at Apple are being a little bit humble about XML technology because it's a huge step forward and it's a huge commitment to not only the professional video industry and film industry, but to developers as well. This is the first time, essentially, the whole kimono has been opened up for such a popular application, and the potential to impact workflow is huge in Hollywood, but it is potential at this time, and what we need to do to make it successful lies in the hands of the developers. So I hope everybody actually has an opportunity here to get their heads around what this means and go forward and make some great complementary apps that can move this whole effort forward. I'm going to talk about quickly what XML Exchange does for Quantel. Quantel is the makers of very, very high-end digital film editing and graphics systems. Essentially, there is a group in Hollywood and some folks in London, different production areas, film areas, that are never happy with the performance of systems. You can never have a fast enough system. Our job, essentially, is to stay ahead of Moore's Law as much as we can, and we've done this for about 25 years. What's pushing this movement forward now for us and is very good for us is the fact that in the film area, in the film arena, The technology has now reached a point where you can scan film rather than going back and having to cut film. And as we know, once media is in a digital environment, it's much easier and interactive to manipulate. And these files then get scanned to 2K file sizes, and that's about 12 megabytes a frame.

And that's a sustained data rate of just video of about 300 megabytes a second. So our systems have special servers, special structures, and color correction tools to digitally assemble these huge files from a longer three or four-month edit session and put them out to film. That's what we're good at. What we're not good at, what we don't produce, are very powerful sub-$1,000 long-form editing systems with the tools that professional editors need to be in a three-month edit and edit at 24 frames and get a project done. That's what Apple does well. So what the XML technology does, it allows us to bring together the best of both worlds to create really what is a unique workflow for Hollywood. And it's something that Hollywood, not just Hollywood, but editing professionals around the world have demanded for a long time, which is flexibility. I'm here to tell you that there is a demand for this product, and there is a demand for this kind of interoperability. And it really is a breakthrough to see this actually move forward. What's happening is that the XML is in turn being turned into an industry standard format called AAF, Advanced Authoring Format, courtesy of our friends at Automatic Duck, Wes back there, and Harry from Automatic Duck, who are with this plug-in, are spinning the XML into a format that we at Quantel can read, and then digitally assemble the offline data from the--to the online data.

And editors are really, really jazzed about this, extremely jazzed about this. I spent last week in L.A. talking to a number of editors, and when I explained the workflow and the flexibility, they're coming up with all kinds of ideas, and they're asking if certain developers are getting a hold of this. We're at a position now where we're actually one of the first, which I don't like.

I'd like to see that there's going to be a lot of partners around. So again, please explore this a little bit. What we're going to do today is I'm going to bring up Milton, one of our product specialists from Quantel, And we're going to go through the workflow for digital intermediate workflow on a Quantel system. And I'll go through this quickly. These are some of the advantages of doing it on a Quantel system. Essentially, it provides a more interactive, more real-time environment for digital assembly of film. It allows the producers, the directors, the directors of photography, the editors to all sit down and watch a film come together as it will be seen in the theater. And there's no substitution for that. It removes errors. and with the budgets of Hollywood films nowadays, this is a good thing. So, Milton, why don't you come up? Oh, wait, we're going to start with Bill, and then we'll go to Milton. That's right. Bill's actually going to take and take a sequence that we captured from a high-resolution environment.

I think in this case it was HD, but it could easily be 2K. And he's going to do what editors do. They use Final Cut on trains, on planes, when they have some spare time in between other jobs, and use the portability of Final Cut Pro, do this long edit and then send us the data. Now what we have here from the Quantel is a substitute. Our 2K editing systems are about this high and this wide, and it didn't make a lot of sense to bring in a whole 2K editing system.

So we brought our smaller version of this, and this will actually edit at 16 by nine in a smaller resolution. But the workflow is the same, our UI is the same, our architecture is all the same. That's one of the unique benefits of the Quantel system is all the same code base across the entire product range.

and then we'll actually do somewhat of a mirror version of what we were doing in the high-end 2K system. So Bill, why don't you go ahead and do the export, and then we'll have Milton come up. Okay, so this is a sequence. We'll play through this for a second.

And it's exporting it out over the network. It's done real quick. And Milton is getting wired, so he'll be here in just a second. So he will be able to, we've got a hub here. We sent it out over Ethernet, targeted one of his disks. And he's going to go ahead and bring that up right away. Okay.

Okay, good morning, ladies and gents. I'm going to take the file that Phil has created by going to my input-output menu, straight to my conform, and drag the file across. For the purposes of this demo, I've already preloaded the material. However, I'm going to use Builds AAF, essentially, to create my conform. So all I'm going to do now is give my edit a name. I'm going to call it My Edit. Hit conform, and then go to my Clipspin, and there it is. That's the edit, exactly the same as Bill created it.

I can scroll across that. And then what I can do is I can go into my QFX and do things like color correct. So in this case, I can use the advanced tools of my color correction. So if I just ramp up the contrast on that, possibly bring down the brightness. As you can see, it's happening in real time. Ramp up my saturation there.

to before and after, and you can see the difference straight away. Go to my settings. I can save my settings, or I can drag other settings that I've created. So I might have that particular look, that look, or that look. Go further down in the timeline. Again, very easy. Drag and drop straight away. Or I could do things like go in and create all my blurs. All of these are harder accelerated to my DVEs. Or I can move things about very fast.

keyframe everything so I can go further down, move the position, and you can see all my graphs are there, available. Everything's happening in real time, very, very fast. So you can see from this simple example how we can offline on a system such as a Final Cut Pro system and then bring it onto a Quantel. In this case, it's a QEdit Pro. It could be an EQ, an IQ, an EQ, which is standard def and HD, or an IQ, which is HD and 2K, and can also load in background 4K plates. Currently, you can bring in information such as the clip name, your dissolves, your cuts in your video, your audio, but then as more and more channels become available in AAF, you'll be able to bring in information such as your color corrections, your DVEs, and your blurs, and all hardware accelerated, all using proprietary hardware, where you're sitting with your director and your producer, and they want things to happen very fast in real time, and that's what you do it. Okay.

Thank you. So one of the keys that we wanted to go over in showing some of this workflow is there's actually a lot of different pieces that are involved. You heard audio. You heard about cards for different forms of acquisition. You saw various effects. You saw the XML pieces and the automatic duck export to AAF and moving over to a totally different system than the Mac. The key here is there's a lot of pieces involved in producing films and producing professional content. And there's a lot of different players along each step of the process, whether it be the card vendors for being able to provide the acquisition hardware, or whether it be the effects creators or whether the content itself.

And there's a lot of opportunities here for people to participate.. One other thing to mention as we talked about workflow, moving information between different systems, there's a lot of interesting formats out there for moving data around. EDLs, edit decision lists, which were really created for the purpose of editing film. And OMF, which is a format for interchanging between avid systems. XML, which is what we've chosen as our core format for interchanging information. You've seen this for Keynote, but this is what we've chosen for Final Cut and our various professional applications as the key way of being able to exchange information amongst applications. And the goal for us is to be completely open with the project file formats. One of the challenges with opening up a professional application is obviously we're going to continue to enhance the capabilities of the app. and we don't want to certainly open up the binary formats of the files because that makes it very difficult for us to be able to enhance the applications. But there are ways to do to keep things open within your applications and still allow that kind of flexibility for growth. And we've chosen XML as the way to do that. And we've also made a very conscious decision to make sure that everything within the application is open through that process. So basically, in some of these other formats, for example, EDL and OMF, they only actually share a very teeny amount of information for editing a film, for example. Basically just what the various clips are and maybe a little bit of information about some transitions, but not much more than that. Within the model that we've chosen, the goal is to allow all the sequence information, All the effects information and everything for the projects to be available. And the advantage of that is that it gives considerably more opportunity to external developers to get involved in the workflow process. The opportunity for being able to do, create applications that actually do pre-assembly of projects, for example, is really quite interesting. One thing I'm sure you've all seen, you watch HBO or Showtime or all those, between all the various things that they show, they tend to have these little segments where they show, oh, what's coming up next? It's amazing.

Those things are remarkably-- common look between each one of those things. Today, through the various editing systems, there's a lot of work to kind of manually create each of those things. And the opportunity to automate some of that process, for example, by opening up things with XML is an interesting thing to consider. The other thing we're doing in addition to providing access to the full information is also making sure that there's a plug-in extensions to Final Cut Pro in particular, but other applications as we move forward so that you have access to that XML data through a way that's actually integrated into the workflow of the application itself.

We talked a little bit about AEF. Again, AEF is industry format, if you will. We'll call it the advanced authoring format, which is a consortium or a collection of companies that have come together to try and find a common model for being able to exchange information. AEF looks to be very promising as a way to be able to move data around from system to system.

But the challenge with any open format such as or any design by committee format is that it takes a long time to evolve. And while this we think is certainly the most promising of the various formats out there, it still, much like the other legacy formats, still is very closed in many ways. Information that's exported out of one system, like an Avid, for example, or another AEF-producing application may actually contain a lot of what they call black metadata. It's basically metadata that's passed around and only visible to that given manufacturer. And that's one of the things that we're trying very desperately to try and avoid by making things available through XML is to actually make sure that everything is visible. And with XML being somewhat of a self-describing format, It's actually very easy for developers to be able to manipulate.

There's a lot of tools, certainly, in Mac OS X for being able to do that. Automatic Duck, you know, we've worked very closely with them over the past few months to actually build on top of this XML export model this AEF plug-in so that there is an industry standard interchange opportunity, and we thank them for the great work that they've done.

I want to point people off again to some of the various sessions. There's the content creation session that I already mentioned later this afternoon. There's also a session tomorrow on data interchange. We're going to focus on the whole process of both XML and AF and actually what some of the details are behind the interchange formats and how you actually can get more involved in this workflow for going between the various professional media applications. So hopefully we can see a bunch of you guys there tomorrow morning. And again, we have a session on Thursday for going over some of the video hardware opportunities, other acquisition cards and acceleration cards, vendors that might be interested in being able to support Final Cut Pro 4. And on Friday, a session on plug-ins. Again, if you're a plug-in developer interested in taking your After Effects plug-in and making it available to Final Cut, or you're interested in learning a little bit more about Shake, some of the other plug-in formats, audio units and things like that, please join us on Friday afternoon. With that, we're going to close this session, and hopefully we'll see you then. If you have any questions or anything like that, make sure you contact your industry evangelist, Jeff Lowe, who represents professional film and video, and we appreciate you all coming today. Thank you.