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Quantel
A quiet revolution is underfoot from Quantel, the erstwhile highest-of-the-high-end purveyor of compositors that, before Discreet and other competitors came along, towered over the broadcast scene. Since the company was bought by its management and venture capitalists from its parent company eighteen months ago, the big Q started in on the big task of changing its image from a seller of expensive proprietary boxes used by just a few extremely wealthy customers to an open system that can satisfy lower-end budgets, but still scale up to the beefy Quantel Uber-boxes of days of yore. The buzzword is generationQ, and it's a Windows 2000-based system that can run its software on ordinary Windows PCs which can communicate with others running the same software but packing serious Quantel hardware inside. Taking a look at this software, it's really nice-looking, highly functional, and more like the timeline-base workflow model that's so popular today than the old Quantel filmstrip model. But heck, I really like the filmstrip metaphor of Henry and EditBox, and these are not going away, so everyone can be happy. Best of all, the new software interface still allows you to enjoy a favorite feature of Quantel software, its "gesture-based" way of doing things. Best of all, that scalability makes the system useful for a number of applications, from news editing, to short-form compositing all the way up to HD editing.
By the way, I asked senior Quantel engineers about this new interoperability agreement their company made with Sony, Avid and Cisco for using the new MXF standard, and Quantel seemed a lot less excited about it than Sony. Wary of standards in general, one wise engineer expressed his skepticism about standards and the committees that oversee them, throwing up his hands and saying, "No committee has the balls to say 'no, your way isn't good for the standard.'" Wise words indeed -- the OHCI standards for DV camcorders come to mind -- every DV camera is different, now isn't it? Standards, schmandards, say the companies. Let's "improve it." Describing MXF as markers in the data showing in times, out times, date-shot and so forth, the Quantellians aren't too impressed with the IP address in each piece of equipment that Sony bragged about the day before, either; Quantel's been doing that for years, decades even, say the titled gurus of Quantel. Soaking up their wisdom was like a breath of fresh air. Don't count this company out, yet.
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Apple
Next stop was at the Apple booth, where the star of the show was the new Apple Cinema Tools plug-in, the $1K add-on for Final Cut Pro 3 that brings 24-frame editing to the hottest editing software of the moment. Taking a close-up look at the new software, it looks to me like it's feature-complete even at this early stage. For a total of $2K (FCP 3 plus this plug-in), now you get 24-frame editing for keeps, where before you'd have to pay that much in rent just to use a system to do that for one week. When I commented to Apple officials that this looks like its conquest of Avid is now complete, they made sure to emphasize that Apple wants Avid to succeed, too. Even though the companies compete on a few levels, after all, Apple wants to encourage any product or activity that complies with their Prime Directive: Sell Macs.
At that same Apple booth, we saw its new acquisition, high-end compositor Shake running on OS X, and looking great doing it, too. Apple was publicly (and uncharacteristically) quiet about this for some reason, but the thing was sitting there front-and-center, running like a top on a dual GHz G4. Nice. Also, the 23-inch Cinema HD display was in full view all around Apple's area, and wow -- that's the most beautiful display I‘ve ever seen. Everyone was just standing there gawking at them, jaws agape. We all wanted one.
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