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For Those About to Rock, We Be-Mac You

Eugene Robinson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:47:43 -0500

D’arby Rose (with Stratocaster) is a few years senior to some of her fellow rock campers.

During the course of human events, it sometimes becomes necessary to bring the rock—and we cannot bring the rock without the hallowed tools of our trade. So we summon our guitars and amps, our boots and leather, our Pete Townsend windmills and Janis Joplin caterwauls. And now we also enlist our Macs—for they bestow furious powers of transformation upon those who seek rock star greatness. Yes, Macs are even more potent than cowbells.

Consider the DIY career stylings of D’arby Rose, singer-guitarist of the As Ifs, a band that most certainly has the coolest name in the entire history of rock, ever. At the gravelly old age of 17, Rose has already produced all the must-have media assets that one would expect of a serious punk-rock frontwoman. She’s got the demo CD. She’s got the music video. She’s got the website with the obligatory music downloads and calendar of live appearances. And she, along with drummer Lily B, created all of this stuff with nothing but a MacBook.
And we do mean nothing but a MacBook.

The As Ifs record and edit all their songs directly in GarageBand. Their music video, “Radioactives,” was also a MacBook-only affair: The girls used an iSight camera to capture footage, and then edited the entire 02:07 video—rapid-fire cuts, gonzo special effects and all—in iMovie. D’arby Rose seems blissfully unaware of her hardware and software upgrade options (she couldn’t name a single prosumer-level editing tool during our interview), but entry-level Mac gear hasn’t stopped her from recording a respectable oeuvre of eight songs. She also has a Jack Black level of confidence in her band’s awesomeness: “We’re, uh, pretty amazing. At first, everyone was like [in a patronizing adult voice], ‘Oh, that’s cute—they’re playing music.’ But then we started playing shows, and people realized this was serious.”

The documentarians: Shane King (left) and Arne Johnson.

Cue the second act of this “The Mac Is the Creative Center of Everything” fable. For the last six years, D’arby Rose has attended Portland’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Camp for Girls, which is the focus of a new documentary titled Girls Rock! by filmmakers Arne Johnson and Shane King. As much as the As Ifs have tamed the lo-fi end of the DIY spectrum, the two documentarians have tackled the hi-fi end—and, in doing so, they demonstrate just how much polish is possible with the Mac gear that’s sitting in most of our homes.

The movie follows the experiences of four girls, ages 7 to 17, as they form bands, write songs, learn instruments, and most of all transform themselves at camp, which is essentially a comprehensive learning academy for aspiring rock stars. The final cut of Girls Rock! runs 90 minutes, but Johnson and King accumulated 250 hours of material during their filming in 2004. This caused problems that just a single Mac couldn’t fix.

Dig it: With such a daunting wealth of footage, the filmmakers were forced to enlist two Macs and a third human editor (Diana J. Brodie) to get their movie ready for film festival submissions. The three auteurs broke into two teams, and their shifts typically lasted 12 hours on a nonstop, 24-hour work cycle. Their software weapon of choice? Apple’s Final Cut.

“I was usually working on longer-form, more structural changes on an iMac,” says Johnson. “And Shane and Diana were doing more finishing-type work on a Power Mac. Countless problems arose, because we had to have two entirely separate hard drive arrays with all of our media duplicated. We would trade program files back and forth, but had constant problems with misnamed files, clips reconnecting to the wrong files, name changes we had forgotten about, and so on—not to mention that every time one of us wanted to capture a new clip, the other had to also.”

After Johnson would finish a 12-hour shift of what he calls “unediting,” King and Brodie would begin massaging the footage into something resembling a movie. Johnson points out that if Final Cut Server had been available when they were in production, the two-squad approach to workflow would have run much more smoothly. Says Johnson: “Final Cut Server would’ve pretty much solved everything by allowing us to collaborate on the same set of files over a LAN, and to keep all of our work in one place. We also, obviously, had a bit of a nightmare with media management spread across two computers, and this would have been greatly relieved.”

Three weeks of intense workflow saw the filmmakers wrangling their footage into a trailer—and, more significantly, an invite to the Independent Feature Project (IFP), a big-biz shindig in which the team emerged as the belles of a very rarefied ball. The IFP yielded 19 meetings in two days. King and Johnson met executives from HBO, MTV, and Showtime (among others), and eventually signed a deal for an independent theatrical release. Girls Rock! opens March 7 in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, so perhaps by the time you read this, people will be taking in the surprisingly not-so-strange spectacle of 7-year-olds bringing the rock.

“I pretty much learned how to edit while we were on the project,” says Johnson, “and that’s a testament to the ease and power of Final Cut. When I first started dabbling in editing, it was on Adobe Premiere, and I gave up, deciding editing probably wasn’t for me. But now I’ve coedited a feature documentary and work fairly consistently as a video editor.”

As for D’arby Rose, she’s scheduled to work as a roadie at next summer’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Camp for Girls, bringing the rock and moral support to the incoming cadettes. “I’ve learned so much about who I am from the women who work at camp,” she says. “And now I want to be one of those women who supports the girls.”

URLs of Rock
The As Ifs’ most rocking website www.theasifs.com, The rocked-out home of the Rock ‘N’ Roll Camp for Girls www.girlsrockcamp.org
King and Johnson’s rockumentary www.girlsrockmovie.com

Squeeze 4.5 Compression Suite

Helmut Kolber — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 15:52:32 -0600

You can import multiple videos, assign compression settings to them, and go grab a coffee while Squeeze does its thing.

If you're creating video for the Internet, mobile devices, CD-ROM, or DVD, you know that the fun of editing stops when it comes time to compress your work. It's one of those things you hate to do because you usually need to make your file size as small as possible, which inevitably forces you to compromise video and sound quality. That's why it helps to have an application like Sorenson Squeeze, which specializes in compressing video. Version 4.5 of the Squeeze Compression Suite doesn't add any major new features to the last version we reviewed (3 out of 5 stars, May/06, p50), but it sports a few nips, tucks, and bug fixes, in addition to Universal binary support.

One mark of distinction is that Squeeze can now compress video into every major video format, including QuickTime, Flash, Real, and Windows Media. Squeeze also includes some high-quality commercial compression codecs, such as Sorenson Video 3 Pro (great for making videos that play in earlier versions of QuickTime) and the On2 VP6 Pro codec for Flash 8.

Squeeze's cluttered interface is actually easy to use. From a single window, you can import one or multiple videos to compress, choose from a long list of compression settings and effect filters to apply, and preview your final video. Squeeze provides dozens of compression settings for all formats, so you can get decent results without knowing a thing about compression. If you know what you're doing, you can also tweak and resave those settings to achieve even better quality.

Squeeze 4.5 compresses video faster than ever. On two Intel-based machines, a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro, our tests finished two to three times faster than when using Squeeze 4.3. On a PowerPC-based Mac, the new Squeeze ran about 20 to 40 percent faster - not earth shattering, but a respectable step forward.

Against Apple's Compressor (part of the Final Cut Studio suite and Final Cut Express HD), Squeeze didn't measure up, speedwise. When we compressed a 2-minute HD video into H.264 format at a 1Mbps data rate on our Mac Pro, Squeeze used only 120 percent of the Mac's 400 percent total horsepower (a Mac Pro has a pair of dual-core processors; if all of the cores run at full capacity, you end up with 400 percent). Squeeze finished the job in 10 minutes and 30 seconds. Compressor did a better job of harnessing the Mac Pro's multiple cores, using about 230 percent of the total CPU power and finishing in 6 minutes and 41 seconds.

But wait; there's more to the speed story. In the test above, Squeeze and Compressor both delivered videos that looked soft and smudgy, so we tweaked the settings. We adjusted the Quality slider in Squeeze to produce a much sharper video, which, unexpectedly, took only 9 minutes to compress. We had to futz with a lot of confusing options in Compressor to get a similar quality boost, which doubled the compression time to more than 12 minutes.

Our main problem with Squeeze: It comes in three confusing - and expensive - flavors. A Flash-only version, Squeeze 4.5 for Flash, is $249 and includes the top-notch On2 VP6 Pro codec. The $499 Squeeze 4.5 Compression Suite compresses into all formats, but it curiously substitutes an inferior Spark codec for the VP6 one and also uses so-so codecs for Windows Media. Finally, Squeeze 4.5 PowerPack works in all formats and includes the better VP6 codec for Flash and a better Windows Media codec - but it costs a whopping $799.

The bottom line. Squeeze does a good job of simplifying the video compression process. We just wish Sorenson could deliver great codecs (especially for Flash) without digging so deep into our wallets.

COMPANY: Sorenson Media
CONTACT: www.sorensonmedia.com
PRICE: $249 to $799; $79 to $229 upgrade
REQUIREMENTS: G4 or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.3 or later, QuickTime 7 or later, 128 MB RAM; 90MB disk space
Improved software performance. Supports lots of video formats and codecs. Fixes sound popping/clicking bugs. Universal binary.
Doesn't exploit multicore CPUs. Expensive.

Cinema 4D Release 10

Helmut Kobler — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 14:45:45 -0600

Cinema 4D's interface doesn't look Mac-like on the surface, but it does have a Mac-like feel.

Veteran 3D animators love Maxon's Cinema 4D, and Release 10 of this 3D modeling, animation, and rendering application rewards the devoted - it makes big strides in character animation and also offers a much-improved interface.

Cinema 4D's new features already build on an impressive foundation. For starters, it's a very fast modeler, letting you use a few parametric primitives to quickly establish a model's basic shape and then sculpt that shape to perfection using various polygonal editing tools, splines, and more. You spend your time creating instead of tinkering with tools.

Cinema 4D is especially good at creating all kinds of visual elements for motion graphics projects (provided you're using the MoGraph module - more on modules in a moment). It's easy to extrude 3D text for logos and banners and then animate the text by letter, word, line, or block. You can clone any object, arrange the live copies along almost any path, and use different "effectors" to animate objects with real-time behavior. You can composite multiple layers together within Cinema 4D or export entire compositions to applications such as Adobe's After Effects, maintaining each distinct layer and even carrying over data for 3D cameras, lights, and more.

Release 10 updates Cinema 4D's massive character animation module, called Mocca 3. Mocca streamlines your skeleton and rigging process by letting you place your joints first, and then it automatically creates the bones around those joints. It also knows how to limit the bones' movement based on your joints' parameters. Mocca can weigh your skeleton automatically, connecting mesh, bones, and deformers and allowing you to fine-tune the results. You can also easily pin muscles to your skeleton, leaving Mocca to flex them and deform skin based on how you animate your character. Together, these and other new tricks make Cinema 4D the easiest, quickest way we know of to create expressive characters.

Cinema 4D's intuitive, streamlined interface has actually gotten better. The whole interface now defaults to a neutral gray color scheme (similar to that of After Effects 7), and it sports redesigned tool icons and better-organized groupings of tools and objects. A bigger deal is the introduction of layers into the software's Object Manager, letting you organize tons of objects and tags into groups. Likewise, Cinema 4D's Timeline can single out objects and specific animation parameters, so you can focus on them without distractions. Some forms of keyframe editing also require a step or two fewer than before.

Now, about those modules. Cinema 4D's design lets you add new features by adding independent modules. The standard edition ($895) already includes powerful modeling, animation, 3D paint, and rendering tools, which can handle plenty of meat-and-potatoes projects. Maxon's add-on modules include one that creates realistic hair and fur, another that creates interactive particles (water, dust, and much more), and still others that add gravity, friction, wind, and other physics to your 3D worlds.

The bottom line. Cinema 4D is in prime shape, with a great blend of powerful features, ease of use, and a relatively low price.

COMPANY: Maxon
CONTACT: www.maxon.net
PRICE: $895 to $3,495; upgrades begin at $295
REQUIREMENTS: 1GHz processor or faster, Mac OS 10.3 or later, 512MB RAM, OpenGL-compatible video card
Powerful, intuitive, and affordable. Fast on Intel-based Macs and multiple-core processors. Universal binary.
Not the best choice for superrealistic rendering. Expect to want to buy an extra module or two

Avid Xpress Pro 5.5

Helmut Kolber — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:27:06 -0600

Avid Xpress Pro uses the same interface as Avid's other editors, so if you know one Avid, you know them all.

Avid Xpress Pro 5.5 is a high-powered video editor brought to you by the company that put the digital into digital video editing. Not only does Xpress offer a long list of pro-level features, but it also sports file compatibility with higher-end Avid gear found in edit bays around the world. But Xpress still has some annoying quirks; namely, its Mac support has been pretty iffy lately, and it also costs nearly $400 more than Apple's Final Cut Studio ($1,299, www.apple.com), which has more features.

Xpress's core features have been in place for years - things such as flexible trimming tools, advanced color correction, real-time video and audio effects, multicamera editing, media consolidation, and a highly customizable interface. Version 5.5's most important improvement is that it can capture, edit, and export HDV and DVCPRO HD video as well. If you've jumped on the HD bandwagon, chances are that Xpress will work with that stunning footage you've shot. Plus, if you add Avid's Mojo hardware to the mix ($1,695 to $2,495), you can also work with uncompressed SD video. Xpress still doesn't support uncompressed HD, which is something that Apple's Final Cut Pro handles right out of the box.

Xpress does have something that Final Cut users will envy, however: the ability to combine different media formats on a single timeline without having to render them first. Nowadays, a project's footage can come from different cameras shooting in different formats, and Xpress's ability to seamlessly mix them all together is a time-saver. Another feature we dig is Xpress's built-in motion stabilizer, which can remove (or at least minimize) camera shake. Effects packages such as Adobe After Effects or Apple's Shake can do the same thing, but being able to do it right in your video editor saves time.

Arguably, Xpress's biggest advantage is that it's compatible with all of the high-end Avid workstations in the world (and there are lots of them, since Avid is considered the gold standard in film and TV production). You can do the vast majority of your work using Xpress, and then take your project to a rental suite and finish it up on a high-end Avid box. For example, suppose you shot your project in uncompressed HD, but you copied it to DV video tapes and edited those tapes on your Xpress-equipped PowerBook. (Why not a MacBook Pro? More on that later.) Once your edit is done, you could take your project file to an Avid Nitris, which would automatically recapture and reassemble your edited video using your HD master tapes, and apply top-tier color correction and other effects. (You could use the same strategy with Final Cut Pro, but it's generally harder to find high-end Final Cut systems to rent, as opposed to Avid gear.)

Xpress includes a mixed bag of sidekick applications to help polish your digital productions. For text titles, Avid's Marquee excels at creating layers of animated 3D text, with multiple light sources and other effects. SmartSound's Sonicfire Pro 4 lets you compose royalty-free music from loops and predefined melodies, and it can also change your music's orchestration depending on different mood keyframes you set (there are keyframes such as dialogue, heavy, light, and so on). Xpress also includes a full-blown version of Sorenson Squeeze Compression Suite ($419), which encodes QuickTime, Flash, and DVD video using high-quality codecs.

But Xpress's sidekick applications don't feel as strong as the apps found in Apple's Final Cut Studio. They don't offer quite as many features, they don't share a common interface, and they don't work together quite as tightly as Final Cut Studio's companion apps. (For example, it's not as easy to pass a project from one app to another and then back again.) Finally, while PC Xpress users get a DVD-authoring app, the Mac version doesn't offer DVD authoring at all. To make a DVD, you'll have to use Apple's consumer-oriented iDVD, or buy Final Cut Studio simply to get Apple's excellent DVD Studio Pro. Having no DVD support is a problem for Xpress, and it's something that Avid should address.

Another chink in Xpress's armor is that Avid is often slow to bring feature updates to the Mac. Case in point: The Windows version offered HD goodness almost 18 months earlier - that's just not cool. Avid took more than four months to fully support Mac OS 10.4 when it first shipped. And, as of this writing, Xpress 5.5 isn't a Universal application, so Avid recommends that you not run it on Intel-based Macs - although the company assures us that a free Universal binary update should be available by the time you read this. It's not that Avid has bad Mac support, but history shows that Apple is much faster in issuing useful updates to Final Cut Studio (which is Universal), as well as in taking advantage of new hardware and OS features. One last knock: Xpress requires you to connect a USB dongle.

The bottom line. There's no denying that Xpress is a powerful tool, especially if you want to fit into the larger Avid family. But membership in the Avid family only goes so far. What Avid really needs to do is give Xpress the same attention on the Mac as it does on the Windows side.

COMPANY: Avid Technology
CONTACT: 800-949-2843, www.avid.com
PRICE: $1,695, $49.95 upgrade
REQUIREMENTS: G4 or faster, Mac OS 10.4.6 or later, QuickTime 7.1 or later, 1GB of RAM, 128MB of video RAM, 40GB disk space
Full of pro features. Works with popular HD formats. Compatible with higher-end Avid systems.
Historically iffy Mac support. So-so companion apps. No Universal binaries. Pricey.

Shake 4.1

Helmut Kolber — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:12:58 -0500

Shake's interface takes a little getting used to, but your patience is rewarded.

Apple's Shake has long been an effects-compositing powerhouse - so good that it's regularly used to conjure up eye-popping scenes for movies such as The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. But now, with version 4.1, Shake is no longer the tool that only fat-cat Hollywood effects shops can afford. Originally priced at $2,999, the new Shake (a Universal app, no less) now costs only $499 (OK, you can stop rubbing your eyes in disbelief). Shake is roughly half the price of competing compositors such as Adobe's After Effects 7 Pro Edition and Autodesk's Combustion 4. Shake's new, lean price makes it a nearly irresistible proposition - if you can see past a few quirks.

Shake has an impressive lineup of hardcore compositing tools. For starters, it offers two powerful keyers (keying is the act of removing an element of an image from its background), Keylight and Primatte, which can be used individually or together to minimize common keying headaches. Among many other things, Shake's keyers can pull a sharp key from a poorly lit green or blue screen, can successfully isolate frizzy hair, glass, and other hard-to-key elements, and can also remove green or blue tints that have spilled off a screen and onto your actors. Of course, you'll find similar tools in other compositors, but Shake delivers them at a lower price.

Shake also lets you composite 2D images in 3D space, creating a sense of depth between one element and another. It's easy to tag elements for 3D treatment, arrange them in 3D, and then move a virtual camera around the world (along with simulating camera-lens behaviors such as focal length and depth of field). You can't add 3D light sources and shadows (you can in After Effects and Combustion), but you can match camera moves created in 3D apps such as Maya.

You'll also find a full-fledged motion tracker, which, among other things, is handy for mapping an image onto another moving image (say, slapping an advertisement onto the side of a bus). An image stabilization feature called Smoothcam can take appreciable camera shake out of footage while keeping the final image remarkably sharp. Likewise, Shake uses optical-flow technology to smoothly speed up or slow down footage, or convert it to slow motion, with an image quality that seems on par with the best results found in high-end plug-ins for other compositors and is way ahead of what Final Cut Pro manages.

But these core features really only scratch Shake's surface. Beyond them, you'll find world-class color correction, vector paint tools, spline-based morphing and warping, a comprehensive scripting language, expressions, macros, a plug-in architecture, and so on. Also, Shake features some basic (if slightly clumsy) integration with Final Cut Pro, in that you can send individual clips from your Final Cut timeline to Shake for compositing, and then see the final rendered result automatically carried back to your Final Cut timeline.

Still, what's most important about Shake isn't its bag of features, but its out-of-the-box approach to building composites. Other compositors such as After Effects and Combustion build shots by placing layers of footage on a timeline and then applying different effects to some or all of the layers. It's a familiar approach if you've used a video editor such as Final Cut or a layer-based image editor such as Photoshop. But in Shake, you create composites by building what's called a node tree, which works a bit like a flowchart. Each of the visual elements in your scene (actors, props, backgrounds) is represented as a node on the tree, as is each effect you want to apply to those elements (chroma key, color corrector, blur). Making a composite is simply a matter of connecting one node to another in a logical order.

For simple compositing work, a node tree may seem no better than a layer-based approach, but when your composites become more complex, Shake's workflow really shines. Take a quick glance at your node tree, and you can intuitively see how even an intricate composite comes together, one node at a time. The tree also makes it quick and easy to find specific nodes, edit them, rearrange their order in relation to each other, isolate them so you can see their solitary effect on your composite, and insert new nodes into the workflow. Simply put, it's a great way to work.

Despite all this, Shake does have a few chinks in its armor. For one thing, it has virtually no type controls or predesigned type-effect libraries (unlike After Effects), so if you want to do motion-graphics work, you'll have to import rendered text from other software. Shake also doesn't have its own particle generator, although you can create particles with Apple's Motion software and then import that unrendered project directly into Shake.

Shake's main weakness is its strange user interface, which feels like some alien concoction straight out of the land of Unix workstations (in fact, that's exactly where Shake got its start, years ago). It's not that Shake's interface is bad; it's just unlike any other Mac interface you've come across, so you can't use what you already know from other applications to hit the ground running in Shake. For example, to bring in a still picture or video clip, you can't just choose an Import command from the File menu, as you might expect. Instead, you have to add a File In node to your node tree, which then opens a file-selector dialog box. Likewise, to render a movie, there's no familiar Export command; you have to place a File Out node at the end of your composite and assign it a destination on your hard drive.

Shake has more of these weird little nuances, and while you'll certainly get used to them after a few days, they'll definitely make the initial learning curve steeper. It's also tough to acclimatize yourself to Shake when you've been away from it for a few weeks or months - though chances are that if you're using an app like this, you're going to use it full time. It's an unfortunate contrast to an application such as After Effects, which is easier to learn because it fundamentally behaves like other Mac apps, whereas Shake is really an island unto itself.

The bottom line. If you can spend the extra time to learn The Shake Way, you'll definitely be better off. Quirky interface or not, Shake gives you a lineup of world-class, battle-tested compositing tools, and all for a relative pittance. No other software, on no other platform, even comes close.

Shake represents each image clip and each operation you might apply (chroma key, filter, image stabilizer) as a node. Just arrange the nodes to build your composite.

COMPANY: Apple
CONTACT: 408-996-1010, www.apple.com
PRICE: $499
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4.6 or later; 1GHz or faster processor; 512MB of RAM; 1GB free hard drive space; graphics card with minimum of 32MB RAM; three-button mouse; AJA Kona or Blackmagic DeckLink card required for preview on broadcast video monitor.
Tons of high-powered compositing tools. Great price. Runs well on MacBook Pros.
Un-Mac-like interface. 3D compositing lacks lighting effects.

BONUS TIP: Get Your Shake On

Shake isn't the type of application you buy and dive right into, thinking you'll just figure things out. You'll need some assistance. Here are some Shake guides that we like.

- Gnomon Workshop Shake Bundle

$300, www.thegnomonworkshop.com
The ultimate path to Shake enlightenment, the Bundle delivers over 18 hours of high-quality Shake training on DVD. You can also buy the individual DVDs within the Bundle separately.

- Peachpit Press Apple Pro Training Series: Shake 4
$54.99, www.peachpit.com
This book teaches Shake through clear, step-by-step lessons and DVD project files. Once you get comfortable, Peachpit also publishes the Shake 4 Quick-Reference Guide ($24.99), which acts as a map to nearly every imaginable feature.

- CreativeCow.net Tutorials
Free, www.creativecow.net
A handful of free tutorials, presented via Web videos, focus on specific Shake tasks such as stabilizing a shaky camera shot or morphing. Search the Cow's tutorial library to find your options.

Final Cut Express HD 3.5

Helmut Kolber — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 19:40:53 -0500

When working with Final Cut Express HD's motion effects or filters, you can go way beyond cuts-only editing.

Final Cut Express HD now joins the legion of other Apple apps that have made the transition to Universal app-hood, so it can run natively on Intel-based Macs and take advantage of all the speed gains those Macs offer. But beyond going Universal, Express HD 3.5 has some other fine upgrades under its hood.

Express HD's effects and compositing capabilities have taken a big step forward, thanks to the arrival of true editable keyframes. As always, Express HD gives you tons of video- and audio-effects filters to work with, but previous versions only let you apply one effect value to a media clip and didn't let you change that value over time. For example, you couldn't apply a stylish blur to a clip and then change the amount of blur as the clip played. Express HD's new keyframes now let you precisely control when and how to change filter settings over time. The new keyframe system also makes it much easier to create motion effects, where you might change the scale, rotation, position, crop values, and opacity of clips as they play. If you've always wanted to create projects with lots of MTV-style flash, there's nothing stopping you now.

Express HD also improves on its real-time previews of effects, which now let you composite multiple clips together and also apply effects filters and motion effects without having to render them first. Express HD has had real-time capabilities since version 2.0, but you had to manually set your real-time image quality (high and low) and framerate (full, half, quarter) depending on the number of effects and layers you were trying to preview in real time. Now you can simply choose the Dynamic RT option, and Express will automatically throttle those image-quality and framerate settings back and forth depending on the complexity of the video playing at that moment. Basically, Dynamic RT makes each shot look as good as possible as you review your project - you'll appreciate it if you're doing effects-heavy work, but not so much if you stick to cuts-only editing.

Express HD's two sidekick apps are also improved. LiveType 2 now includes a set of vector-based fonts that you can cleanly scale to any resolution, along with some 70 new animated objects, 15 new textures, and 60 text effects. Soundtrack 1.5 can automatically apply crossfades between clips, and easily record multitake sessions like voice-over or automated dialogue replacement work. There's also a new interface that lets you rearrange tabs and resize your movie window.

The one thing that Express HD still lacks is a project-archive feature. When you need to free up some hard drive space, there's no way to consolidate and archive your project to keep only the video that your edit uses. If you ever want to go back and reedit a finished project, you need to keep all of its raw footage on your main drive or a backup drive (a waste of drive space), or dump the footage and then recapture it from your original DV or HDV tapes (a hassle). We've cited this clumsy approach each time we've reviewed Final Cut Express over the years, and it seemed OK, given the app's low price. But now that other consumer-oriented editors are offering a project-archive feature, Express could use one as well.

The bottom line. Media management aside, Express HD is an amazing app. It can handle pretty much everything that most DV or HDV moviemakers need, and since it uses the same interface as Final Cut Pro, it's a great stepping-stone to Apple's Final Cut Pro 5. For $300 ($99 to upgrade), Express continues to be a phenomenal deal.

COMPANY: Apple
CONTACT: 800-692-7753, www.apple.com
PRICE: $299, $99 (upgrade)
REQUIREMENTS: 500MHz (1GHz for HDV) G4 or faster, Mac OS 10.4.6 or later, 512MB of RAM (1GB for HDV), Quartz Extreme-compatible graphics subsystem or Intel integrated graphics processor, 500MB disk space
Create advanced effects and compositing thanks to editable keyframes. Smoother real-time previews of effects. Same great pro tools, same low price.
No way to consolidate and archive projects.

Cleaner 6.5

Helmut Kolber — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 19:24:19 -0500

Cleaner's interface is plain and simple - in a good way.

Cleaner was once a must-have tool for working with video on the Mac. It was a batch-encoding whiz, able to take raw video and expertly encode it to almost any digital format imaginable, creating everything from downloadable versions for the Web to bigger, better renditions destined for CD-ROM, DVD, and more. But although the latest version of Cleaner has been more than three years in the making, it offers few must-have new features - or anything else we can get excited about.

On the bright side, the things we've always loved about Cleaner are still there: an easy, intuitive batch-encoding interface; lots of preset compression settings that produce good results right away; and manual control over everything from image size and data rates to post-production effects such as noise reduction, gamma correction, and watermarking.

Autodesk has updated Cleaner by adding some new video formats, including various Kinoma Producer formats with presets for popular PDAs and Sony's PSP gaming handheld (many presets use MPEG-4 compression). There's a new setting for iPod video, several settings for Flash's FLV and SWF formats, the ability to encode video in the popular DivX codec, and support for Real 10 (in addition to existing support for Windows Media).

It's great that Cleaner adds so many new formats (even though some of them aren't exactly mainstream); that's why we were surprised to find Cleaner's paltry support for H.264, the sexy, super-efficient compression codec Apple introduced in QuickTime 7. Cleaner can encode to H.264, but it offers no easy-to-use presets. You have to manually create your settings from the ground up.

Ouch. Cleaner's $599 price ignores the fact that it has some genuine competition these days. Case in point: Apple's Compressor ships free with new versions of Final Cut or DVD Studio Pro, and it expertly encodes video into QuickTime files aimed at DVD, CD-ROM, the Internet, and mobile devices (with great support for H.264, by the way). Compressor doesn't support QuickTime competitors such as Real, Windows Media, or DivX, but for many Mac users, those formats are irrelevant anyway.

Stiffer competition comes from Sorenson Squeeze. Squeeze costs $449 and encodes to Flash, QuickTime, and other formats. But Squeeze also includes the Sorenson Video 3 Pro codec, which excels at creating sharp, artifact-free Internet video. In fact, many of Cleaner's own Internet- and CD-ROM-oriented presets call for using Sorenson 3 video, but they often produce pixelated, unprofessional results unless you have the Pro edition of Sorenson's codec installed. But using the Pro codec with Cleaner costs you an extra $299 (on top of Cleaner's $599); you get it for free in Sorenson's Compression Suite.

The bottom line. Nothing supports as many encoding formats as Cleaner does, but you can still get much of Cleaner's core functionality for free - or at least considerably cheaper. We wish Autodesk had recognized that by pricing Cleaner a couple of hundred dollars cheaper. Instead, it may have priced Cleaner right out of a job.

Cleaner can encode your video into just about any format you can think of.

COMPANY: Autodesk
CONTACT: 800-440-4198, www.autodesk.com
PRICE: $599, $125 (upgrade for Cleaner 6)
REQUIREMENTS: G4, Mac OS 10.3 or later, QuickTime 6.5 or later, 128MB RAM, 35MB disk space
Encodes video to many new formats. Same lovable, intuitive interface.
No presets for H.264 video. MPEG-4 encoding doesn't work with QuickTime 7.04 (must downgrade to 7.01). Expensive.

Adobe After Effects 7

Helmut Kolber — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 19:15:37 -0500

The new interface looks cool and creates a color-neutral environment so you can focus on your project's visuals without distraction.

The latest version of Adobe After Effects includes a redesigned interface, big keyframing improvements, and top-tier color rendering options that give even the pickiest effects artists more reason to consider After Effects for the job.

If you've used After Effects before, you'll do a double-take when you launch version 7 for the first time - it has a new, streamlined look. Functionally, all of After Effects' windows and palettes are now docked panels in a single resizable window, so there's no unused space in your work environment. You can adjust the panels to your liking; if you want to make the Timeline larger, for example, you drag its border to a new position, and After Effects shrinks the other windows to make room. You can also undock any panel and turn it into a floating one (great for moving it to a second display) or combine and separate panels by dragging them into or out of each other.

Adobe also overhauled the Timeline's keyframe graph editor. Keyframes still work as they always have, but the new and improved graph editor makes it easier to edit those keyframes. Back in the old days (version 6.5), you could work with keyframes in a graph view, but After Effects displayed each animated parameter on its own keyframe graph that you could reveal and hide at will. This worked fine when you only wanted to futz with a single parameter, but to tweak many parameters at once, you'd have to fill up your screen with multiple graphs - making it hard to find the one you wanted - and cross-reference one parameter with another. After Effects now displays the keyframes for multiple parameters on a single graph and uses a different colored curve to represent each parameter you choose to display. You can easily toggle this graph view on and off from the Timeline, and the graph editor itself features all the keyframing controls you'll need built right into the interface.

Version 7 is also noticeably faster in applying, previewing, and rendering effects, thanks to Open GL 2.0 support (provided After Effects supports your Mac's video card; check Adobe's Web site for more info) - unfortunately, After Effects is not yet a Universal application, so expect slower performance if you have an Intel-based Mac.

If you're springing for the $999 Professional Edition, you'll get two bonus features. For starters, After Effects will render up to 32 bits per channel. Working with 32-bit imagery in the old version's 16-bit mode meant losing flexibility for color corrections and other tweaks; it also risked ugly banding. With full 32-bit support, After Effects 7 now qualifies for more-professional compositing work. The only catch is you'll have to update your third-party filters.

The Pro edition ships with a plug-in called Timewarp, which lets you smoothly speed up or slow down the playback speed of footage and add motion-blur effects. It's a popular feature these days - it made its way into Autodesk's Combustion 4, an After Effects competitor. Adobe's rendition is straightforward and competent, and some of its basic elements also appear in the standard edition of After Effects.

Both editions also sport plenty of smaller touches: the ability to export to Flash video (FLV), more animation and behavioral presets, HDV support, integration with Adobe Bridge, and - oh yes - a product-activation "feature" that keeps you from installing the app on more than two Macs at once.

The bottom line. With a clean and customizable interface, speed improvements, and a better feature set, Adobe After Effect 7 is an impressive upgrade.

COMPANY: Adobe
CONTACT: 800-833-6687, www.adobe.com
PRICE: $699 (Standard), $999 (Professional), $199 (upgrade)
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, 512MB RAM, 500MB disk space, Open GL-compatible graphics card
Efficient and customizable new interface. Improved keyframe graph editor. Faster.
Internet-based product activation. Upgrade is a little pricey given the new features.