Well, it’s good to be back. Where have I been? Well, I’ve still been here, however, I haven’t graced you, the home reader, with my presence. Mostly because Dennis Sellers over at MacCentral stole my beat. Check him out, as he’s reporting all the Mac sightings on TV and in the movies. <http://www.maccentral.com> However, I’ve been doin’ a multitude of things, the least of which is, reading up on QuickTime 3.
QuickTime became the industry standard last February, approximately one year ago as you read this. Now, I could simply regurgitate what I’ve read at <http://www.apple.com/quicktime/> or, I could point you there. You can download QuickTime 3, and then upgrade to QuickTime 3 Pro from there.
What I’d rather do is tell you all the wonderful things that you can do with it, and then wrap up with a little tidbit about, well, The Super Bowl.
FireWire
What is it? <http://www.apple.com/firewire> has  
the specifics, but the highlights are that the latest G3 has
two FireWire ports. And this really nifty logo.
IEEE 1394 defines the standard for FireWire, invented by
Apple Computer. FireWire allows for throughput of 400 Mbps,
or approximately 30–40 MBps—which is more than adequate for digital video. On Thursday I was privileged to attend a FireWire seminar at Apple Computer conducted by the fine folks at Intelligent Media, Inc. <http://www.intelligentmedia.com>. They demo’d the Canon XL 1 digital video camera and Adobe Premiere 5.1 on Apple’s latest and greatest G3, codenamed Yosemite.
In fact, I was going to title this section, “You Can Make a Movie for only $9995!” but I thought better of it, based on news I’ll get to in a moment. I can’t do the demo justice with mere words, so suffice it to say, I was blown away. They provided the following list of URL’s, which I suggest you check out at your earliest convenience.
Digital Video magazine’s site. Impressive if simply because they have an OS 8.5 banner ad on most of their pages. <http://www.dv.com>
The repository for all things FireWire, however, it didn’t look like it was updated recently. <http://www.dvcentral.org>
Home of New Media magazine, I suggest you run right over and sign up for a free subscription. You’ll be glad you did. <http://www.hyperstand.com>
The homepage of the four cameras I saw demo’d. <http://www.canondv.com>
And of course, <http://www.apple.com/firewire>, the home of the standard. A really nice whitepaper is available here, plus an essay on why you should shoot your next film on DV. The answer? Broadcast quality digital video. Of course, the Canon rep said that was an oxymoron.
So, do you need 63 different peripherals? Well, FireWire supports that. You can hot connect, or disconnect your FireWire device. Try that with a SCSI hard drive. Of course, the big story, as I mentioned before, is digital video. A 9 GB hard drive comes standard with the Yosemite. The system I saw had two, capable of storing 90 minutes of digital video.
And of course, according to Ron Margolis, president of Intelligent Media, QuickTime is the glue that holds the system together.
So, how does this affect you? Well, I’ve been busy in other ways since last we chatted as well. I’m putting together a small budget film. I received a commitment last week for half the money. I may not even need the other half if I can purchase the above system outright. With Adobe Premiere, I can edit the film that I shoot myself. Bump the result to 35mm film, and voila. Sundance here I come. Six films at the festival this year did the same thing, and to talk to them, they’ll tell you that conventional film is dead. They just can’t agree to when. What they can agree on, is that Apple is responsible.
 
For the one or two of you that didn’t see Super Bowl XXXIII, during the first commerical break, quite possibly the biggest media event of the nineties took place. I’m of course referring to the Apple ad, wherein HAL explains to us that the misnamed millennium bug wasn’t his fault. Or was it? And I like the all red Apple logo. Some of you may recall the last time Apple ran a major ad during the Super Bowl, 1984. So, this is kinda the 15th anniversary of that ad, which is #3 on the all time Super Bowl ad list. I think Apple did an admirable job of following it up. You’ve got to see it to believe it. So, it’s viewable and downloadable at the Apple Website at <http://www.apple.com/hotnews/features/hal.html>. Tell your PC-afflicted friends.
72 and sunny in El Segundo.
Until I set up offices at Manhattan Beach Studios.
e ya next time.
Disclaimer: Mike is about to shoot a movie, so, if you wanna  
jump on the bandwagon and show your financial support, ;-)
