Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Intel-only

MacNN has listed the minimum specifications of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, due to be released in "about a year". The biggest change is that it is Intel-only - PowerPC users are left out in the cold.

Or to be precise, the Developer Preview is Intel-only but I think this will extend to the final release as well. Why? Because Snow Leopard is about speed and optimization of the operating system and what better way to optimize the OS than to remove code for systems that haven't shipped in 3 years (by the time it is released next year)? There are very few applications out now that aren't Universal Binary or Intel-optimized, and three years is pretty generous I must admit.

However, before you throw out your old PowerBook or PowerMac, remember that Snow Leopard has very little in the way of features and is purely an optimization release. As you're not running cutting-edge hardware anyway, the extra performance probably doesn't make much difference to you. But I'm sure the frantic selling will begin regardless.

More WWDC 2008 Day 1 news

Since my previous post some more things have cropped up:

3G iPhone
* Not 3G but is actually 3.5G
* Thinner at the edges but actually thicker in the middle than its predecessor by 0.7mm and slightly taller (people are making way too big a deal about this)

AT&T
* Apple no longer gets a cut of the subscription fee from AT&T
* No more prescribed service plans - mix and match data and voice
* Starting price: $30 a month for unlimited 3G data plus $39.99 a month for voice. Text messages are no longer included so add $5. This means the price increases from $59.99 a month to $74.99 a month. And that is the base plan.

As someone who was put off more by the monthly price than the initial cost of the phone, this doesn't make me happy. And this is entirely an AT&T thing because Apple no longer receive money from them.

However, if you want to use your phone as an iPod Touch with internet access even when you're not near a WiFi point, this is a good thing. Or if you only use voice, for example.

* In-store activation only, no more activating via iTunes
* GoPhone service no longer available

[via TUAW]

So Apple adds features, AT&T takes features away. Great.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard announced

Apple just released a few preliminary details about Mac OS X Snow Leopard (I think they're running out of cat names...). The interesting thing to note is that NOWHERE does it say that this is OS X 10.6. It could be a major point update for 10.5. I think it probably is 10.6 but it's worth bearing that in mind though.

Apple has stated that the focus will not primarily be new features but improving the quality of the OS. I think a lot of people will be disappointed by the lack of features but this is great for people who demand high performance (a lot of people reading this blog I'd imagine).

Here are the improvements:
* Multi-core optimizations with a new technology called Grand Central. This makes it much easier for developers to create multi-core optimized applications (FCP dev team, I'm looking at you...)
* OpenCL support - Enables developers to use the processing power of the GPU to perform tasks. It will be interesting to see how developers take advantage of this but it could use your graphics card as an extra processing core when rendering and encoding for example.
* Theoretical support for 16 TB of RAM. But how much can each application address?
* QuickTime X - "optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback". That's a little vague so I'm wondering if there is some kind of GPU acceleration involved. And the "modern audio and video formats" bit makes me wonder if Windows formats such as WMV are supported out of the box, without requiring something like Flip4Mac.
* Support for Exchange 2007
* Safari speed improvements
* Takes up less space on disk
* Released in "about a year"

There have been rumors that 10.6 will be Intel-only but this report neither confirms nor denies this.

Also, there is no word on price. Consumers might be hard to win over if there are no new features so Apple may adopt lower pricing. I have heard some people say that performance and stability should be in Leopard anyway so the update should be free (which I disagree with). I personally would pay full price for an update that "unlocked" my graphics card for use as an extra core though. To me, that is worth paying for. And it'd probably result in a bigger performance boost than buying $130-worth of hardware.

Rough cuts

Shane Ross has a great post about "rough" rough cuts and how frustrating it is when producers cannot see past a lack of audio or sound effects, or a dodgy transition. What is worse is when the producer gets it into his or her head that you are trying to pass that off as the end product, despite your protestations to the contrary. That has happened to me and is a nasty situation for all involved.

I think the key is to make the producer comfortable with you. Normally these kind of problems go away on the second or third project as the producer realizes that you can do the job and are not a cowboy, and they get familiar with the way that you work. I also find that a comfortable producer will give you a lot more creative freedom (I prefer to see scripts as a guide rather than a rulebook for example) and in return you will take advantage of that freedom to return a better product, so it is mutually beneficial.

Why does QuickTime report a different resolution?

Ever wondered why QuickTime reports a completely different resolution to the one you exported at?



Welcome to the world of non-square pixels. NTSC and PAL use rectangular pixels to fill up space on the screen and save transmission bandwidth, which was more of an issue when the standards were invented. Computer monitors use square pixels and so QuickTime has to squeeze one side of the image in order to prevent it looking stretched. This is purely for display and the file is not modified.

The pixel aspect ratio of NTSC footage is 0.889 meaning 720 x 0.889 = 640 so it is displayed at 640x480. For PAL it is 1.067 so 720 x 1.067 = 768 and it is displayed at 768x576.

QuickTime also has some options for controlling how the movie is displayed. Open up your movie, go to Window > Show Movie Properties and click on the Presentation tab.

You will see an option marked "Conform aperture to:" with the following options:

Classic - Classic is identical to having the conform aperture setting switched off.




Clean - Scales the image to compensate for the pixel aspect ratio and crops it to mimic the overscan on a broadcast monitor.




Production - Scales the image to compensate for the pixel aspect ratio but does not crop the image.




Encoded Pixels - No modification is made to the footage. Note the stretching caused by non-square pixels.




This is one of the many reasons why a broadcast monitor is essential.

Exporting chapter markers to DVD Studio Pro

I am constantly seeing posts on Apple's support boards by people who can't get this to work. This seems to be a common problem so I'm going to give a step-by-step workflow followed by troubleshooting tips at the end.

1. In the Final Cut Pro timeline, navigate to the point you wish to place the marker, press M once to place a regular marker and then press M again to open up the Edit Marker dialog.



Make sure that you are adding the markers to the sequence itself and not to an individual clip. There are some rules though - Don't place one within 1 second of the beginning, don't place one within 1 second of the end and don't place them less than 1 second apart.

2. Click the button marked Add Chapter Marker and it will automatically insert some text into the box. Do not change this text; just click Ok.



Repeat for every marker.

3. Go to File > Export > QuickTime Movie. Do not export as QuickTime Conversion. Under the Markers drop-down, select DVD Studio Pro Markers.



Or Go to File > Export > Using Compressor. This will not display a dialog box but you will be able to see markers on the timeline in the Preview window.



4. Export the file.

5. Open up DVD Studio Pro and drag the exported file onto a track.



In the timeline, drag the edge of the horizontal scroll bar to decrease the size of the timeline and see everything at once. You should be able to see all of your chapter markers.



6. Go to Simulate and double-check that they work.

Troubleshooting

• I think most problems are caused by not knowing the restrictions on chapter markers. This is from the FCP 6 manual:
  * No chapter marker should appear closer than 1 second to the beginning or end of
  your edited sequence.
  * A chapter marker should be at least 1 second away from any other chapter marker.
  * A maximum of 99 chapter markers can be placed within a single program.
  * When you export from a sequence, only sequence markers are exported; markers in
  clips are ignored.
  * When you export a clip from the Browser, the clip's markers are exported.


• Markers within nested sequences will not be exported.


• You must select DVD Studio Pro Marker and not Chapter Marker under the QuickTime export options.


• Don't put chapter and compression markers in the same marker!


• I have had better luck with DVD Studio Pro Marker rather than All Markers in the QT export dialog.


• Be aware that if you export a QT movie with markers and then import it into Compressor, you will lose your chapter markers if you do not have Compressor 3 (included with Final Cut Studio 2).


• I have heard of people having success by trashing their preferences. We have a free utility that will automate it for you - Preference Manager.

Let me know if you can think of any more troubleshooting tips.

Final Cut Server coming soon?

Apple just mysteriously added a new category to their discussion forum named Artbox. Now, if you recall Artbox was originally developed by Proximity and was purchased by Apple two years ago and turned into Final Cut Server.

It was announced at NAB 2007 and slated for release in the summer of that year, but never came. It was then pushed back to January 2008 but still has not been released. I hope this is a sign that preparations are being made for its release.

The most plausible answer of course is that it's just a support section for existing Artbox users (rather late though, considering Apple purchased them in 2006), although I am not aware of Apple doing this for Final Touch users before the release of Color.

160 GB SSDs coming soon?

This is a few days old but still worth mentioning. Intel has announced that it is entering the SSD (solid-state disk) market this year. In addition to bringing down prices through extra competition, Intel is also offering speed improvements over existing SSD drives from other manufacturers.

Details are sparse but enough to whet our appetites - there will be a SATA (3 Gbps) version and the drives will range from 80 to 160 GB in size (in comparison, the largest generally-available ones are 64 GB). This means that SSDs can, for the first time, directly compete with hard drives on a technical level. They can't yet compete with hard disks on price but Intel is predicting prices of less than $200 by 2010.

This means a lot because solid-state disks are considerably smaller, faster and more reliable than conventional hard disks. Tests with the MacBook Air have shown considerably faster boot and application loading times. The traditional downside to SSDs (and something Intel did not mention) is that their write speeds are considerably lower than their read speeds - in fact, lower than the write speed of a conventional hard disk. This will no doubt change with time but for some tasks such as high-bandwidth acquisition, they are not yet ready to replace something like the RED Drive.

They would be great in a video editing environment though, where you don't need to write large amounts of data very often and much of the your time is spent reading data. With a lot of editing systems (particularly with the advent of 8 core Mac Pros), the bottleneck lies in the disk speed. It can also improve the responsiveness of applications like Final Cut Pro that store only a limited amount of timeline information (such as clip thumbnails) in the main memory, with the rest on disk. I can't wait to see these new drives in a RAID 0 configuration.

Poor GeForce 8800 GT Pro App performance

BareFeats has some benchmarks of the new Nvidia 8800 GT in Motion 3. The interesting thing is how badly the two Nvidia cards (8800 GT and Quadro FX 5600) perform compared to the ATI cards, causing many people to cancel their orders.

The Nvidia 8800 GT is meant to be considerably more powerful than the ATI Radeon 2600 XT but it beats it in all of the tests except gaming, which isn't much help to readers of this blog.

Then add the fact that Color doesn't work well on Nvidia cards as they only offer a limited set of working bit depths, and there is a serious problem for owners of the new Mac Pros. They do not have a high-end ATI graphics card option, and it seems like all pro apps are optimized for ATI.

Their only solution is to go back to the ATI X1900 XT, which is a great card, but it is old tech. You also need to jump through a few hoops in order to get it working. I think the ATI buyout by AMD has complicated the situation for Apple and Intel, which is unfortunate. Let's hope Apple will release some new drivers soon to at least reduce the performance issues.

Xserve RAID replaced by third party solution

Today has been a day of good news and bad news. The good news is that Xsan 2 was released and it looks GREAT, and the bad news is that Apple has now discontinued the Xserve RAID. It's bad news but it's bad news with a decent solution.

There was no official statement from Apple but the old Xserve RAID page now points to the Promise VTrak E-Class RAID Subsystem. It's a shame as I love our Xserve RAIDs (we have three), even though they do put out a lot of heat and noise.

I can see why Apple did it, as the price and complexity did not help sales, and endorsing an established third party is cheaper and easier. The Xserve RAIDs were in need of a update, so it is refreshing to read the specs on this machine:

	Xserve RAID	Promise V-Track
Fibre Channel Port Speed	2 GB	4 GB
Fibre Ports per Controller	1	2
Max number of drives	14	16
Max drive size	750 GB	750 GB
Max storage	10.5 TB	12 TB (24 TB with expansion module)
Drive type	Ultra ATA	SATA / SAS
Controller cache	512 MB	2 GB
On-drive cache	8 MB	16 MB
Redundant controllers	No	Yes
Expansion	None	Expansion chassis adds 16 extra drives
Rack size	3U	3U

See more specs here.

Pricing Comparison

Low-End:


Mid-Range


High-End


Other Promise Configurations


This is without a doubt much better value for money than the Xserve RAID but the high initial cost will put a lot of people off, I would imagine. I think I am going to take advantage of cheap Xserve RAID units and get the maximum possible performance out of our existing units before shelling out for these.

I have spoken to a few people that own Promise RAIDs and they say they are very satisfied with them, so my mind is at rest on that front.