So I just got back from the Apple Pro Event in Seattle, WA. My reactions are mixed, as they didn’t give a schedule of events in the emails, and after I arrived promptly at 1pm (to what was deemed a 1-5 event), they told me to register and wait for an hour. I understand building up the hype, but seriously, this wasn’t a product announcement, all this information was available online before the event, we just came to see it in action. No need to make us wait.
See Final Cut Server in action we did. Very interesting stuff. It runs via webserver to talk to your computer, the network and the internet. Cross-platform performance via a downloadable Java application is an interesting twist for Apple. Embedded metadata in the quicktime files isn’t archived by Spotlight, but I expect a plug in will address this eventually.
Access control seems to be a priority when they developed this software, not only can you assign different groups different projects, you can use smart folders to figure out what you’re supposed to be working on. Thankfully, drag and drop works just fine. One of the most impressive highlights was Radical Media, who built a cross-continental workflow on the beta build of FCS.
FCS integrates with an SQL server to manage the data, and processes XML each and every way imaginable. Apparantly, this can extend FCS to incorporate extensive customization for each project. As well, the SQL allows for a home-brew Ruby on Rails web app that Apple made internally for reviewing and approving videos. Now, the representatives said that complete documentation and source code was available for this at the Apple Dev Center, but I could find none. This saddens me.
Anyway, the rest of the four hour long event was filled with case studies and an extensive advertisement for the year old Final Cut Studio 2. It was interesting to see the Aliens Vs Predator 2 sequence, but apart from the solo of the Predator crackles, it didn’t show much about the specific workflow or process. However, there was a custom plugin that Fox developed for internal use showing off fxscript.
In closing, I found it irritating that a four hour event had about 1 hour of interesting & new content, but for the possibilities in my mind that it generated, it was well worth it.
