Posted by Henry Butz on October 01, 2009 at 07:07:20:
Apple really dropped the ball on the prosumer video market during the latest operating system upgrade to Snow Leopard. I am one of 23% still running Tiger on the Mac. 10.5 didn't hold any interest for me, although I did want to experiment with iPhone development. All of the hooks and api's for iPhone are in Leopard. Oh well, onto other hobbies.
With Snow Leopard released, I figured it would be a great time to finally dust off my old applications, apply patches and upgrades, and take the plunge. But, I'm not liking what I'm hearing about OS 10.6. Final Cut Express 3.5 does not work under Snow Leopard, but 3.5.1 does... but, the installation package will not run. No problem. I have already upgraded to 3.5.1. under Tiger. I'd even consider upgrading to Final Cut Express 4. The buzz about FCE 4 is that some features have been removed and placed into their "pro" version, making this more of a downgrade than an upgrade. LiveType dumps many hundreds of megabytes onto the main drive without the option of using an external drive. Some clever person discovered that if you alias one of LiveType directories you can trick the installer into using a different volume. Yet from another source, I read that FCE 4 is having problems with Leopard. Apple has not released any information about more updates to Final Cut Express.
I'm not plunking down $1k for Final Cut Studio just to get the mpeg-2 encoder. I'd rather drop back to WinXP and use TMPGEnc for under $40 bucks. That's where my DVD menu generation program is anyway. It took me a while to figure out an intermediate Apple video format for TMPGEnc to chew on, but it works now.
I could also use iMovie - granted, it's kind of a child-like interface when compared to Final Cut, but it's simply amazing how fast I can assemble a movie with transitions, titles, and output to a Quicktime movie... minutes instead of hours. But iMovie is riddled with problems, like the inability to import from TOD and MOD files - the mpeg-2 video format of choice for flash-based video cameras. iMovie will only import these file directly from a flash memory card on a card reader, provided it's in the correct format with the MOI index file intact. It's impossible to have it transcode from MOD files directly. What folly, since it's just mpeg-2 video with a MOD file header. The way around this is to use MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 to transcode the MOD/TOD files. It will even de-interlace the video for ya on the fly... all for free, provided you've given Apple $19 for the mpeg-2 decoder for Quicktime. This assumes that you aren't editing your movie footage on your video camera, in which case things might get weird - nothing which can't be fixed with some creative editing.
What's nice about MPEG Streamclip is that it can translate the MOD files directly into dv-avi format with a divx codec. Why is this so sweet? Because, I can then drop back into Windows with the divx codec installed and have Adobe Premiere 6.5 edit the avi files. Premiere 6.5 just *loves* the divx avi files. I can edit video with real-time previews under Parallels version 4 faster than I did on my old PC! It's totally killer. That will output in mpeg2 video with pcm audio with Adobe's mepg encoder which gets fed into DVDLab's menu creation program.
Everything looks great, but there's just something about DVDLab's older software. I think they tend to screw up the navigation. So, I drop that back into another piece of software which generates .img files from DVDLab's folder for burning directly onto DVD. Unfortunately, the DVD burner wants to see an .iso file. What's the difference between .img and .iso files? The name. Yup, you just rename the file to .iso and you're ready to burn. How do you mount an .iso file on a Mac? You double-click on it. Some stuff Apple does well. For that matter, what's the difference between an MOD file and an mpeg-2 file? Just the header information. Most of the time, you can just rename a MOD file to MPG and you can play them. I had looked into upgrading my DVDLab software - one of the best DVD menu editors of all time, but their marketing department switched to an Internet based activation process which tethers me to their company forever. Besides, my Win2K virtual machine under Parallels does not have direct Internet access. It's frozen in time because sometimes you just need to get stuff done without worrying about spyware, viruses, and trojans.
I can't believe I'm back to using my old Windows2000 system under Parallels for video editing again. Apple just bounced me back into the dark ages. And, what's the deal with Firewire and external drives? Apple just about admitted they've given up on Firewire 400. Rumor has it that people are hacking the kernel to get it working again. I spent a lot of time and money on over a terabyte of external disk space running on Firewire. Now apple is telling us that USB is more stable? I don't think so. Fix it, dudes. I've also read that external drives are spontaneously ejecting under Snow Leopard. Based on Unix, the operating system keeps much of the disk reads and writes in RAM to gain speed, writing back out the drive only when the drive is dismounted. If the drive ejects without warning, the drive can become damaged beyond repair (without special software to reformat it). Ironically, one of Snow Leopard's "features" is the ability to eject drives more easily. Gee, thanks Apple. Personally, I'd rather go back to having to power down my system to eject a drive rather than having the drive eject at random times.
Where does this leave the Prosumer video editing market? Well, I don't know about you but I'm stuck on a Mac with Tiger 10.4 using Windows20000 for my video editing. You software makers are all pathetic.