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At the WashingtonPost.com, photojournalists are developing new roles
for themselves. Yes, they’re as obsessed as ever with the need to
capture the breaking story. Yes, they still see themselves as
storytellers, narrating poignant tales of the human condition. And,
yes, they still believe that images have the power to pierce the
soul and capture the mind as few other vehicles.
But now they have even more powerful tools to help them convey
their stories.
Take photojournalist Travis Fox, for example. Equipped with a Canon XL-1 digital
video camera, his PowerBook, and Final Cut Pro, he set out to
document life in Yugoslavia after the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic.
FireWire allowed Fox to transfer footage from the camera to
his PowerBook. And with Final Cut Pro installed, the PowerBook
became a portable digital editing studio, allowing him to edit video
and craft his story right on the spot.
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Bill Gentile doesn’t take his daily cup of coffee for
granted anymore, not after learning that coffee is the second most
important commodity in the world (trailing only petroleum).
Instead, he decided to create a short film about coffee, a film that
would kick off a series of documentaries about the “goods of
life”—“agricultural commodities that have shaped history and the
way we live today.”
To help him produce his first documentary, he turned the raw footage
he shot in the field over to the students in his journalism class at
Kent State University. They took Gentile’s digital footage and
edited it on Power Mac computers loaded with Final Cut Pro, software
that allows them “to move pieces of video and sound around as I have
been doing for years with pieces of written copy. It’s that easy to
use.”
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With more than 10 years of experience in the broadcast industry,
professor Patrick Sproule was all too familiar with the high-end
video editing and compositing packages used by advanced students at
Charles Sturt University in Australia.
So he thought it would be better for his first-year television
production class to cut their production teeth on something far more
accessible—a suite of dual processor Power Mac G4 computers and
Final Cut Pro.
What he didn’t count on was that his “advanced” students quickly
abandoned their high-cost, high-maintenance packages in favor of
Final Cut Pro. Nor was he prepared for the reactions from a team of
executives from a local television station. “They recently enjoyed a
demonstration of our students’ work,” he recalls, “and were blown
away when we let slip that it was created on Final Cut Pro costing
only one thousand dollars.”
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“Sweet”—the acclaimed short film by Elyse Couvillion—embarked on a
world tour with the RESfest touring digital film festival just two
months after its final edits were completed. With RESfest officials
saying it “may be the most beautiful film shot yet on miniDV,” it’s
not surprising that “Sweet” was also selected to premiere at the
2001 Sundance Film Festival.
If you get the opportunity to see “Sweet” on the screen of a trendy
art theater in your neck of town, you might enjoy knowing that in
bringing “Sweet” to life, Couvillion was supported not only by the
five-time Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Allen Daviau—the
cinematographer responsible for “E.T.,” “The Color Purple,” “Empire
of the Sun,” “Bugsy” and “Fearless”—but also by a stellar cast of
industry veterans, her Power Mac G4, and Final Cut Pro.
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“The thing about the Mac,” observes digital designer and musician
Brian Walls, “is that the people who are developing on the Mac are
the ones who are breaking new ground.”
Walls is one of those people, and he broke new ground in January
when he merged the worlds of electronic music and video games to
produce an original eight-minute video that played nonstop in the
Apple Games area at Macworld San Francisco.
His strategy in creating the video was “to produce this feeling of
excitement and the incredible amount of creativity that’s involved
in the games.” The result was a kaleidoscope of video clips from the
latest Mac games set to a frenetic digital dance music soundtrack.
How did he assemble the whole project in less than a month?
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Thank you for reading this issue of Apple eNews.
Look for your next issue on April 19.
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Looking for a solution to your accounting and business management needs?
MYOB’s AccountEdge offers a wealth of features: payroll, invoicing,
time billing, receivables and payables tracking, check book management,
contact management—everything, in short, that a small business needs.
It’s garnered considerable praise. Macworld’s Jeffery Batersby, for
example, believes AccountEdge has the “best, most complete set of
accounting tools on the Mac,” and syndicated columnists, like David
Horrigan, praise its power, utility, and simplicity.
For a limited time, MYOB also offers a $100 rebate to QuickBooks
customers who purchase AccountEdge and has recently posted a free
QuickBooks conversion utility on their website to make the transition
easier.
And while AccountEdge currently runs on Mac OS 8.6 and 9, MYOB plans
to soon release a free update that takes advantage of Mac OS X.
If you haven’t visited our support site for awhile, we invite you to
take a look at some of the recent changes we’ve made to our product
pages.
Each one sports a new look and makes it easier for you to find
information specific to the product you’re interested in — answers
to common questions, troubleshooting assistance, key articles in our
Technical Information Library (TIL), relevant software downloads,
instructions for upgrading memory, and more.
For example, our new page on Final Cut Pro helps you locate
online and downloadable manuals, leads you to DVD Studio Pro
discussion groups, tells you how to upgrade to Final Cut Pro 2,
offers tips and techniques for a variety of relevant Final Cut Pro
topics, and provides a list of a wide variety of TIL articles
on Final Cut Pro.
Writing about Mac OS X in the New York Times, David Pogue says, “The
result is almost everything Mac fans could wish for: a gorgeous,
easy-to-navigate and virtually crashproof operating system that
makes previous consumer systems, like Mac OS 9 and Windows Me, look
like hand-cranked antiques.” (Free registration required.)
The members of the Stanford/Palo Alto Mac User Group are feeling mighty SMUG. Afer all,
they got to see Mac OS X up close and personal. Find out how you can, too.
Internet World writer James C. Luh says that Mac OS X “is perhaps
the first consumer OS designed from the ground up for target
customers who are likely to connect to the Internet. The software’s
designers had an unprecedented opportunity to embed features for
using the Internet into the heart of the OS.”
iTools at your service. If you’re looking for a fun way to tell
friends about Mac OS X, why not send an iCard? A new member of the
Apple category on the iCards site, X-sightings celebrate the
availability of Mac OS X in a novel way.
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