News for Sunday, 12 September 2004

Thanks to Colonel Moutarde, back from IBC, to have given us this exclusive report.

Hello,
I'm just back from the IBC in Amsterdam, which is the second audiovisual professionnal event after NAB in Las Vegas. As every year, Apple is there with all their professionnal products. No iPod nor iMac here, but a full range of G5s with all the new displays, including 30". On their usually (for such events) well designed stand (a huge black cube noir with many demo machines), there are demos of FCP4HD, Shake, Motion, DVD SP, Logic, Quicktime H264 AVC codec, and Xsan. NewsEdit from Grass Valley (a very commonly used news compositing solution) is now compatible with Final Cut Pro, which is very good news for FCP integration in client servers image managing solutions that are used in TV studios. Of course, many nearby stands would also display softwares and accessories for the Macintosh environment, such as acquisition cards of external storage solutions.
When you get around the stands, most people talk about High Definition. Everyone talk about it and all have their own products related to this now mature technology. The emerging format is the 1080p and the leading compression system is the H264/MPEG-4 that will be included in Tiger Quicktime. The AVC alliance now includes ADB, Apple, ATEME, Broadcom, Dolby, Envivio, Frauenhofer-HHI, Fujitsu, Harmonic, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, JVC, LSI Logic, Mitsubishi, Moonlight, Motorola, Nokia, Packet Video, Panasonic, Philips, Polycon, Samsung, Sentivision, Sharp, Sony, ST Micro, Tandberg, Texas instruments and Thomson Broadcast. Quite an impressive list ! Few will bet on Windows Media HD and Microsoft seem to be quite alone on their stand, yet war is raging. Olivier Abecassis,TF1 [n°1 commercial TV in France] new technology leader announces that "AVC is the best choice for mobile services broadcasting and High Definition" and "TF1 consider the ABV technology as the key to the success of French [future] land digital TV in France".
Many brands as Panasonic or JVC have or will have a "general public" HD camcorder in their line. Sony will be selling in the months to come a HD version of their PD150 using HDV format for around €5000 ($ 6000). Final Cut Pro and other compositing systems already include the requested codec for reading HDV files. Most of Plasma and LCD displays now have a sufficient resolution to to display such a quality image and it's funny to see the general public may get equipped with HD material before TV channels do....
IBC is open in Amsterdam until September 14th.

Xsan presentation

An Xserve rack

FCP HD on 2 30" displays

From outside the expo halls : welcome

Photoshop formation demo. 15" Alubooks only

The AJA stand, with a small (Huge) SCSI storage solution with a well known look !

Laurent tells us some good newd:

I had a good surprise when the school year started to find out the national Education (which was quite long stuck in DOS then Windows issues) is starting to experiment Linux and Mac OS X solutions. The famous software (to teachers !) "Casimir" for national evaluations all 8 and 11 year old pupils take was just replaced by "JADE". This new version is no more an exclusive Windows solution. I could install it on my Mac and import the "GEP" base from my school pupils.

It will still take time for the anti-Mac boycott to cease, yet it seems things are beginning to change.

Microsoft explained on their online music selling site how to make the purchased songs iPod compatible.
As with protected AAC and ATRAC songs, it just takes you burn a CD then rip it again. Apparently someone didn't appreciate this quite plain simple deprotection lesson, as the advice disappeared shortly afterwards.
There are two things this story illustrates:
- Stupidity has no limits
- Being incompatible with the iPod is quite a heavy burden to bear.

For some times, we are receiving increasing amount of request from current PC users wishing to switch to Mac. Questions are quite often on a practical aspect, regarding peripherals and compatibility. As a sign, we have also seen an increasing amount visitors of our website connected via a PC computer. This is an excellent sign for Apple, which should see its market share increased. Users and consumers are ready now. Do not hesitate to try to convince the most PC fans you know to switch to Mac, you will see that their argument and defense line have dramatically changed recently. They simply need your help to convince themselves that this is the way to go.

Hereafter is an interesting report from Ben.

For now 4 years, I am one of the "Black T-shirt" during the AppleExpo, and this year have noticed that visitors had a really different position regarding Apple's computers, without noticing that visitor type has changed. Previous years visitors were asking: what are the advantages of Mac over PC, they wanted to see a demo of MacOSX to evaluate it with their PC OS, etc.... But always with a informative perspective. Usually at the end of the demo they were usually not really convinced that Mac could be an alternative to their PC and head hakes... it is true that it was not so simple to make both world compatible, and to have all main application native under MacOSX. Then 2004 has come... visitors came to our booth (PowerMac G5, iMac G5 or notebook G4) with a simple question: "I am going to buy a Mac, what should I know, how to make my choice?". Then it was not anymore necessary to demo OSX quality, or computer performance, consumers were coming with an already clear ides to leave PC world, what ever difficulties, in order to regain a superior user experience without giving performance and possibilities away.
and this behavior really surprised me, no need of marketing or business speech, simply give your opinion regarding their needs, they were looking for something more like consulting.
So I decided to discuss with some of those new Mac users to identify the reason of their shift: stability linked to an almost virus-free world, close to 100% compatibility with PC applications, with the huge advantage of having a nice, easy to use and performant OS, GarageBand and iLife, and finally in most cases: the PRICE!! As incredible it can sound to some readers, I am not inventing it! Some came with PC configuration proposals (based on Dell or other manufacturers), and in most of cases Mac equivalent solution was cheaper, without forgetting that Apple's computers also looks simply better, more "sexy"...
So to close the subject, keep talking about Mac around you, it is becoming less and less difficult to convince news users...they just need to touch the "beast" and be finally convinced with your help...

[Translator notes: a spark to pull them out from their darkness]

Hereafter is a report from Wiebe:

I have installed a second ATA HD (Maxtor 80GB/2Mo cache/ATA 133 (6Y080L0)) as described by Jefftrep
here
I have connected this HD with an ATA133 certified ribbon cable to my Superdrive A107D, that way; it is recognized by the system as AT-6.
(Do not forget to define slave and master!)
When compared to my original Seagate (ST380013AS), it is faster, and much more silent.

This proves one more time that this tip is useful and performance-wise interesting.