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 know 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. Okay. What we want to be talking about today is Thank you for joining us. I'm going to start off by 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 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. 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.

We 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. 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. I'll be back after he's done. Thanks, Brett.

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 superimposed 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 toolset 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-adjust and paste the attributes of that basic motion to this item down in 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, and I'm going to drag this into 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 item is because it's 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 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, and it's 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 FXBuilder. FXBuilder 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. These are the 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 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 Final Cut. So you can actually put it 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 as 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 gonna 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 that 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, start getting idea of what it's actually going to sound like.

That'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 of 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 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, kind of move on from there.

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 to 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 within 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 are a couple of third-party developers today who actually make FX Script plug-in suites for Final Cut.

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 FX Script is one that you can actually get and start playing with even as a user for being able to do custom effects development. 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 plug-in model that's supported within Final Cut Pro. So if you have 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 you're an effects developer and have experience with After Effects, this is another place that you can be bringing in your plug-ins.

And in addition to all of the stuff that we've talked about, 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.

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 I/O, 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. A.G.A. 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.

In the USB domain, there are opportunities for multi-channel audio acquisition. Certainly, we'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 plug-ins and After Effects plug-in capabilities. And on Friday, we have a session on plug-ins that will cover everything from Shake plug-ins and After Effects plug-in capabilities.

Now, moving on, the next interesting opportunity in the developer domain is in the workflow area. 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 the problem domain in the professional video and audio world.

There are 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 very high-end color correction and going back and forth between film and scoring. You name it, there are just a whole number of different pieces to the process. The interesting situation is that the real world isn't the same. It doesn't revolve around any one application. It involves many to be able to solve the problem.

We've spent a lot of time thinking about that from the perspective of our pro applications. I think we have some interesting things 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, all the various things are laid out in the timelines and such, to the metadata surrounding each of those. What effects and other things that are actually applied in transitions and such. 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 things, you know, 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 of the other teams. Bill, what are you doing with some third parties to help, you know, 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, 24p HD 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 I/O box. All of the ports are active on that I/O 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.

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 once, 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. 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 a 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 we're going to go through this, 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 to the online data.

Editors are really, really jazzed about this, extremely jazzed about this. I spent last week in LA 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. 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 film. 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 once you come up or wait we're gonna start with Bill and then we'll go to Milton that's right Bill's actually gonna 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 gonna do what editors do they use you know 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 in 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 9 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. Thank you.

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 the high-end 2k system so Bill why don't you go ahead and do the export now we'll have Milton come up Okay, so this is a sequence. We'll play through this for a second.

Question I got, what's your favorite documentary film? My favorite documentary? - It's gotta be the last walk. I love Neil Young, so when he sings "Helpless" with the band, and when Joni Mitchell kicks in from behind the curtain. ♪ I can feel ♪ I think you get the idea. This is for Silver Docs, which is a film festival by AFI, and it's presented on Discovery Channel. So this project was shot at 24p in HD.

It was captured with the Kona HD card and then captured to an offline resolution. This was actually transcoded to DV in this particular instance. And all I need to do here is go ahead and do a file export of this sequence. And I'm gonna go down to my automatic duck, AAF export. And you can see I've got this file here, Silver Docs. And I'm going to go ahead and export that.

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 gonna go ahead and bring that up right away.

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 pre-loaded the material. However, I'm going to use Build's 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 Clips bin, 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, 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. 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.

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.

The other thing we're doing in addition to providing access to the full information is also making sure that there's 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 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 information. It's 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. 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, or 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, anything like that, make sure you contact your industry evangelist, Jeff Lowe, who represents professional film and video. We appreciate you all coming today. Thank you.