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JANUARY 12, 2004 Roundup: Macworld Expo 2004
Parties of the third part While Apple might not treat Macworld as a platform for introducing major new pro gear, third-party software developers certainly do, and this year's expo showed a huge range of new products and major announcements.[an error occurred while processing this directive]  On the more lamentable side of things, Adobe, of course, announced that it would be discontinuing PageMaker development. For many of us, this means bidding farewell to an old friend, as PageMaker was not only one of the driving forces in the early success of the Macintosh platform, but the key to acceptance of the computer in general as a viable publishing platform and, from there, as a viable platform for everything else. It was also, for many of us, the first publishing system we ever used, and one of the first applications we experienced on the Macintosh. SInce PageMaker had lost much of its market share over the years, the loss for most isn't immediate in terms of productivity, but it is of personal and historical significance. PageMaker has now been replaced with InDesign CS PageMaker Edition, which carries over many of the technologies into the more modern page layout and design environment. More info: http://www.adobe.com/. See also our overview of the new software here. On the much more positive side, Synthetik Software finally unleashed version 3.0 of Studio Artist. What can I say about this program that I haven't gushed about in the past many times? Just that what I've already declared to be my favorite application of all applications has just gotten a whole lot better. I don't intend to do a review of this software here, but if you haven't experienced it yet, give it a try. If you're at all interested in painting, animation, rotoscoping or general visual effects for still images or video, you will find this software remarkable. If I had to choose one thing that would be my "show pick" for this year's expo, Studio Artist 3.0 would be it. The new version adds full session export capabilities, literally hundreds of new paint parameters, vectorization, a new plugin effects architecture, new and truly unique brush modes and all kinds of other enhancements that I'll detail in an upcoming article. Studio Artist 3.0 is available now for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. More info: http://www.synthetik.com/. There was good news for video professionals as well. Discreet unveiled and showed off Combustion 3 for the Macintosh platform. Version 3 is a major update to this compositing and motion graphics package, bringing several feature enhancements, as well as completely new functionality to the compositing suite. This includes a new Edit Operator, which allows for editing (such as assembling clips with transitions) directly within Combustion. It also adds JavaScript-based expressions for creating complex animations, Flash output, customized brushes and DV capture within the application through FireWire. We'll be bringing you much more on the new version--due out this month--in the near future. More info: http://www.discreet.com/.Also for video pros, Heuris debuted the new version of its Pro Indie HD Toolkit, a suite of tools for capturing, recording and encoding HD footage using JVC's JY-HD10U camera. The new version sees a drastic price cut--down from $4,785 to $499--and also gains a new MPEG encoder. More info: http://www.heuris.com/. Prev 1 2 3 4 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DV Format • Film and Video Magazine • Presentation Master • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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