Even before rolling out Mac OS X, Apple spent considerable time and energy trumpeting the benefits of its new operating system. And while concepts like multithreading, protected memory, and Unix underpinnings sound promising to most Mac users, explaining the real-world benefit of those features can be difficult-unless you happen to work with digital video.
To video professionals-the folks who make a living capturing uncompressed-video streams, editing and enhancing broadcast-quality programs, and encoding and creating high-quality DVDs-OS X’s feature list is more than just an assembly of marketing buzzwords. They believe that the new OS is an important addition that makes it easier for them to do their daily tasks on a Mac.
Why are video professionals embracing OS X? Let us count the reasons.
What Lies Beneath
High-end digital video involves huge amounts of data that need to be captured, edited, and rendered. The classic Mac OS wasn’t really up to the task.
"For years Apple was getting by with a very innovative and consumer-friendly OS, but one clearly lacking industrial-strength features such as preemptive multitasking and protected memory," says Boris Yamnitsky, president of 3-D compositing software maker Boris FX. "The Unix kernel in OS X has the potential to boost the overall system performance and stability."
As a result, Yamnitsky says, future versions of Boris Red and Boris Graffiti will be "easier to develop, will perform better, and will be more robust." Since video– effects applications tend to be complex and computation-bound, all those improvements will be especially welcome, he adds.
A Beautiful Mind
The multithreading capabilities of OS X have proven to be especially attractive to video pros. Multithreading allows much more to occur in the background, making expensive workstations more cost-efficient.
"Normally under OS 9, the Mac user was locked out when capturing uncompressed video under QuickTime. Now you can read e-mail and surf the Web at the same time," says Grant Petty, CEO of Blackmagic Design. "Batch capture is really boring and time-consuming, so it’s really nice to be able to still use the computer."
Petty’s company teamed up with AJA Video Systems to create the Kona series of standard definition and high definition video-capture cards, for which Blackmagic Design wrote only OS X driver software.
But the benefits of multithreading appear in more areas than just capturing. "In this line of work, you do lots of rendering, which, if you’ll excuse the pun, renders you immobile," says Michael Alberts, chief editor at Ambidextrous Productions in Los Angeles.
Being able to render in the background while working in the foreground with OS X is a major plus for editors like Alberts. And that capability appears in DVD Studio Pro 1.5, which now features QuickTime performing background encoding of MPEG-2 files when you use the OS X-native app.
The Sound of Music
Video pros also appreciate what OS X offers for audio and video playback. The new OS supports multichannel audio, a particularly useful feature since a lot of video hardware supports more than two channels of audio.
"The Kona cards have six channels, so we can do 5.1 channel surround-sound audio," says Blackmagic Design’s Petty. "This is really important because of all the DVD stuff that’s happening on the Mac, and we now finally have multichannel audio support built right into the OS. Apple has completely redesigned the audio under OS X, and it’s really nice because it’s 32-bit and can take advantage of the 24-bit AES/EBU digital-audio standard for full quality."
When it comes to playing back video, Petty has been equally impressed. "OS X just keeps playing uncompressed HD video without any issues at all," he says. "We even force quit the Finder, and when the Finder launches again, the HD video keeps playing without dropping a single frame."
OS X’s Unix roots add stability and multithreading. But just as important, they create a common bond with other Unix-based systems. The television industry has been based on Silicon Graphics’ Irix for the last 15 years, Petty notes, and now with the Mac having a Unix core, porting software from SGI’s more expensive hardware to the Mac should be easy.
Tomorrow Never Dies
So when will video pros embrace OS X-and the Mac platform-en masse? For some, it’s a question of hardware. Ambidextrous Productions’ Alberts, who edits television commercials and feature films, has decided to make the switch to OS X but is waiting for OS X-native drivers. He expects a driver for his Aurora Video Systems Igniter card in August.
On the software side, many of the major applications-such as Apple’s Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro and Adobe After Effects-have already come to OS X. Others, such as OS X-native versions of Media 100’s Media 100i and Avid Technology’s Avid Xpress DV, should be out by mid-summer.
Apple’s embrace of Unix has made life easier for video hardware and software makers-as well as for the video pros who will use those products on OS X. While it’s too early to say how widely Macs will be used for editing and broadcast work, the big picture for Mac-using video pros has never looked better.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on July 1, 2002
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