In his latest Mac Focus article, Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Heid said that despite a common misperception, Mac OS X operating system has been ready to handle business tasks for some time, thanks largely to the arrival of Microsoft’s Office X for Mac in November. And now the next generation operating system is better meeting the needs of video editing, and music and audio production.
That’s thanks to native Mac OS X versions of Apple’s $999 Final Cut Pro and Adobe’s $649 After Effects. Heid praises both products and especially the former, Apple’s own high-end video editing package.
“The new version 3.0 still runs under Mac OS 9, but it purrs under Mac OS X,” he says. “The new version brings far more than just OS X compatibility. On a well-endowed system — a Power Mac G4 with a 500-megahertz or faster processor and at least 384MB of memory — Final Cut Pro displays common video effects in real-time. In previous versions, you had to either twiddle your thumbs while rendering an effect or buy expensive third-party acceleration hardware. Final Cut Pro’s real-time talents also shine on the top-of-the-line, 667MHz PowerBook G4.”
In the music and audio realm, the progress isn’t quite as impressive. However, at the recent National Association of Music Manufacturers (NAMM) convention companies such as Propellerhead Software, Bitheadz, Emagic, Ableton, and BIAS showed current or upcoming products that should change this.
“Many media producers will need to stay with or occasionally return to OS 9 until the software plug-ins and other utilities they rely on become available for OS X,” Heid says. “But the pieces are falling into place.”