Much ado about video editing
Apple's european QuickTime Roadshow.

02-12-2.000

 

Last week, Madrid (Spain) played host to a conference organised by Apple España and featuring the team that's taking the Roadshow around Europe (it started in Paris, came here, and is now heading to other capital cities). As accompaniment, many third-party representatives from brands such as Sony, Pinnacle, Astarte, LaCie, Puffin Designs and Sorenson Video made further presentations.

On the promotion that we got, the event was designed to introduce Apple's latest technologies in digital video: Final Cut Pro, QuickTime streaming, webcasting, the works. In fact, it was a bundle of sessions on digital video editing directly aimed at professionals for the promotion of Final Cut Pro (or professional video cameras, or DVD recording systems, or... ). Impressive indeed as such, but totally lame as any other thing. Apple España's press release was extremely truthful when it portrayed the event as "the Destop Movie" event. More precisely, it was "the professional desktop movie editing" event. In spite of a three iMovie-sporting iMacs in the foyer, this was no event for aficionados.

Apple's Spanish subsidiary has long been criticised for focusing exclusively on selling to the traditional, graphics-industry customer base of the company. That customer is nowadays frequently involved in video capture and edition, and in the translation of it into film, TV or DVDs, and that was the content of the presentations. It's worth mentioning the morning's only non-(fully)-commercial presentation, the one done by William McGrath and Rafael Izuzquiza about their recently finished film "Lost, perdidos en Nueva York", a moving film about living and working in New York City from a Spanish actor's perspective that was filmed directly to digital and edited using a G3 and Final Cut Pro. They expounded on the simplicity and cost savings of working directly and exclusively with digital video and Mac equipment. Also noteworthy were Puffin's exhibitions of Commotion.

But, apart from the worthy exhibition of easily-sold, incremental technologies, there was a big void where there should have been QuickTime streaming. It's very nice to see the latest you can do in film-like effects in minutes, but what exactly can I do with that video and the web? How complicated is it really? What do I actually need? How about some examples? Some real-world cases? No way: Apple stuck to showing slides filled with commercial information... and in English too, as if for reading the brochures we needed an european-level expert ;-).

Sorenson Video's people (whose technologies are fundamental in these matters) were represented by some German consultants and, sort of, by a Spanish company that's distributing them and which could'n tell us a thing. The germans, al least, promised to send on some brochures... all in all, a truly impacting, eye-opening close brush with webcasting ;-). For those of us really interested, there was nothing to learn.

Overall, the Conference was a public success for Apple España and party. No glimpse was given of the new technologies of video on the web (the biggest selling point for QuickTime 4 and 4.1) but we saw plenty of video editing solutions. A lot of attention was given to Apple's traditional markets... and very little to the ones they should be cultivating for the coming years.

 

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