Talkin' Smack: IBC, MTV, Baby You and Me Girl

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OPINION • SEPTEMBER 11 , 2000
Talkin' Smack: IBC, MTV, Baby You and Me Girl
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Well, as you know, reader, I opined earlier this year that this would truly be the summer of Mac.

"I remember. That was a good column."

Thank you. Anyway, I think this year's IBC show (held in my most favorite city in the world, Amsterdam) is helping to prove the accuracy of that column.

For one thing, we're getting two—count them, two—high-definition capture and editing systems, and we're getting them for an incredibly small price, all things considered. Last week Digital Voodoo brought us its new D1 Desktop 128HD card, which handles uncompressed HD for about the cost of many SD systems, starting around $10,000. And later this month Pinnacle will, barring any delays, bring out its Targa Ciné, another uncompressed HD solution and editing system for around $30,000.

I also still have faith that Matrox will bring out its dual-stream, uncompressed SD capture and real-time editing suite for Final Cut Pro (RT Mac) before the end of the season. They're demonstrating it right now in Amsterdam, and its release can't be that far off.

We also got two new Avid systems, XPress 4 and Media Composer 10, both of which, for the first time, will offer the same features on the Mac as on the peecee. (Does that mean they'll have to stay away from AppleScripting until Windows has something comparable?)

And speaking of Avid, you might have noticed that their little audio division, Digidesign, had a couple of announcements as well, including the release this month of a FREE, downloadable version of Pro Tools 5.0.1. There's also a new Pro Tools 5.1 LE, and, some time in the not too distant future, a full version of Pro Tools 5.1.

We've also witnessed several great programs gaining multiprocessor support for the new G4s, including Boris FX and EditDV, with several others on the way.

And that's just IBC news!

For the entire summer, we've also made some impressive gains, including Flash 5, Photoshop 6 and many, many other programs.

And hardware? Are you kidding? We got some dual-processor Macs, some 2,880 DPI printers from Epson (starting at $99, if you can fathom that), the new Wacom PL500 LCD digitizing tablet, some new Voodoo cards from 3dfx and just a whole slew of other stuff.

Alas, Windows does still own the market on spreadsheets. That's something we're just going to have to live with. (I'm not sure I want a guy with a Cube doing my taxes anyway.) For now, I guess we're just have to get along with the best creative tools available anywhere. Poor us.

Peace. I'm outta here.

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