Apple's NAB announcements: DVD Studio Pro 3; Shake 3.5; Panasonic to collaborate on FireWire HD

DVD Studio Pro 3 The much-anticipated version 3 release of DVD Studio Pro. The primary new features are the addition of Alpha Transitions - QuickTime based movie transitions that can be built from scratch in Motion or Adobe After Effects - and a new Graphical View that allows DVD authors to see the relationships between menus, tracks, slideshows, stories and scripts.

In addition, the new release provides the ability to scale HD and encode directly to MPEG-2 in one step.

DVD Studio Pro 3 will be available in May for US$499. Registered users of DVD Studio Pro 1 and 2 can upgrade to DVD Studio Pro 3 for US$199.

Final Cut Pro HD Final Cut Pro HD, the latest version of Apple's video editing software,delivers the ability to capture, edit and output broadcast-quality high definition (HD) video over a single FireWire cable, without requiring any additional hardware. Final Cut Pro HD supports native DVCPRO HD editing with no recompression or image degradation and enables HD preview monitoring on an Apple Cinema HD Display.

The new release also has a Digital Cinema Desktop feature allows basic SD and HD monitoring directly to an Apple Cinema Display. Built on the open architecture of QuickTime, Final Cut Pro HD scales from DV through SD, HD and film. Final Cut Pro HD can output to most professional tape formats or encode MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and QuickTime files for DVD, web, or delivery on 3G devices.

Shake 3.5 The video compositing tool Shake saw a significant upgrade to version 3.5. The latest release features new shape-based morphing and warping tools and new "shape shifting" special effects.

Shake 3.5 also improves upon the Rendezvous enabled Shake Qmaster network render manager that can now handle distributed rendering tasks for both Shake and Alias' Maya, allowing distribution of rendering tasks across a cluster of Macs.

Shake 3.5 is available immediately for Mac OS X, Linux and IRIX through Apple Authorized Pro Film Resellers. Shake 3.5 will be available for Mac OS X with unlimited render licenses for a suggested retail price of US$2,999, and for Linux and IRIX for a suggested retail price of US$4,999 with annual maintenance of US$1,499. Registered users of Shake 3 can upgrade for US$799.

Panasonic to collaborate on FireWire HD Panasonic and Apple are collaborating on HD over FireWire capabilities, using the 100 Mbps DV-HD capable Panasonic VTR and Apple's newly announced FireWire HD package. A statement reads "Panasonic's new AJ-HD1200A, the first HD production VTR to offer a FireWire interface, and Apple's newly-announced Final Cut Pro HD professional video editing software, enabling mass adoption of HD resolution images on the desktop, and even on PowerBooks." More.

Xsan announced, beta available Xsan is a new Storage Area Network (SAN) file system priced at US$999 per system. The solution provides high-speed access to centralized shared data.

Xsan features include metadata controller failover and Fibre Channel multipathing; file-level locking which allows multiple systems to read and write concurrently to the same volume; and bandwidth reservation.

A beta version of Xsan is available immediately to qualified customers. The final version will be available in Fall 2004.

Motion Apple's newest video effects tool is Motion, an application that features interactive animation of text, graphics and video, with instant previewing of multiple filters and particle effects, and introduces "Behaviors" that allow artists to add movement to type and graphics, such as gravity and wind, without the use of keyframes.

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