Paradoxically, there were plenty of cool things at the DV Expo, but very little to report. The Macintosh with Final Cut Pro was featured in the overwhelming majority of booths, with a bewildering assortment of real time boards, fancy RAID solutions and the like.
Avid Xpress DV
But into the expo came a challenger: Avid Xpress DV. And quite honestly, I was a bit worried. All these years, I had thought Final Cut Pro was an Avid clone, a cut down version of the "real thing" beloved of editors everywhere.
The Avid people had a nice selection of Macintoshes and PCs, with a ratio of one PC for every Mac. If you consider they had all but abandoned the Mac a few years back, it was pretty obvious that Windows was not the promised land, at least in popularity terms with professional videographers. The Macs were mainly Titanium Powerbooks, with the odd iMac added in for variety; the PCs were no-name desktops.
But there was a major problem with the Avid system: Based on about 15 minutes of trial and error, it's almost impossible to learn without extensive training, even for someone (like me) who was experienced using a number of other video editing systems including rival Final Cut.
The interface doesn't look like a Mac, nor like a PC. Instead, it looks a little like a SGI workstation, which should have made me right at home. But somehow it didn't quite gel. The fonts were somehow hard to read. The user interface was not even vaguely similar to Final Cut Pro or EditDV or Premiere. Yes, there was a timeline, but you can't double click on individual timeline elements to open them individually. When you double click on an element in a bin, a viewer opens sans display; all you see is controls. If you click the controls, the sound plays without the video. If you click an unmarked button on the title bar, the video appears and you can play it successfully.
The systems had special keyboards (show price $129) so you could figure some of it out by reading the labels on the keys. But other than that, an excess of cryptic icons and behaviour very different from any video editing application I've seen before were profoundly discouraging.
Discreet Combustion
Much more interesting was Discreet's Combustion compositing program, a very sophisticated cut-down version of their legendary SGI-based products (which cost from a quarter of a million to over a million dollars).
The Mac Addict magazine review had impressed me greatly, not in its words, but in a pair of pictures showing an absolutely horrible chroma key and the result after the matte was pulled. This probably means little to you, but I had been struggling with similar issues using After Effects with an absolutely pathetic degree of success. The MacAddict reviewers managed to do it with only short time with the program. Color me impressed.
From the brief demo I saw (alas, I saw only part of it), this application looks distinctly fast and loaded with fascinating cool features. Perhaps best of all, the Discreet reseller at the show has an almost-within-shouting-range of affordability deal: $2,500 for users of the After Effects Production Bundle. I happen to be one of thos people, so (amazingly) I could qualify. Cool.
I'm going to have to download the demo; if I do, I will report back with more details. But this looks like a real winner of a program.
Editing systems, no cameras
Yes, you too can edit HDTV, using a $35,000-odd system completely with a stunning flat panel Plasma HDTV display and an Apple Cinema HD Display. Cool.
But you can't shoot it; of all the video cameras floating around, there was not a single HDTV camcorder. Is that disappoining or what?
The Sony rep dropped broad hints that there might be somehing for us prosumers as early as next year. Personally, I doubt this - the cost of disk space alone is going to prevent this from becoming a true consumer product (or even prosumer) for some time.
But we can always hope.
MiniDV tapes sure have gone down in price! I got five Sonys for $3.95 each, or $22.25 for the lot. Not bad, not bad at all. I remember when they were $15 a tape!
Conclusion
I wish I could say this was a great show; it felt like there really wasn't a lot new. There were plenty of people in attendance, and the booths were crowded. One person told me it was a great show for them.
I was very happy to see most people using Macs, with little indication of serious inroads from PC users. No question that Final Cut Pro was the reigning champion. Avid's display was packed in the beginning of the show, but it seemed to empty out pretty quickly towards the end. I wonder if others were similarly confused by the interface? It really is very strange.
Hope that was an interesting report! Drop me a line with questions or comments.