Dr. Pascal Lee leads a research team preparing for the first manned expedition to Mars. He needed to find an environment as barren as the one awaiting on the red planet and found it in the Canadian high Arctic. He also needed to bring along a computer that would stand up to the rigors of life in such a hostile environment. He found that, too.

“I take my PowerBook because it’s proven to be robust,” Dr. Lee says. With their PowerBook computers, Lee and his team can use AirPort to stay in wireless contact with each other, exchange high-definition QuickTime files, and send information to Mission Control in Houston. And they never have to utter those infamous words: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Read more about Dr Lee and his PowerBook in “Rehearsing for Mars.”

Did you catch the coelurosaurs and therizinosaurs crunching across the screen on the Discovery Channel this summer? If not, you missed a great show, one in which Final Cut Pro played a large role.

While a team of over 20 digital animators created the goliaths in “When Dinosaurs Roamed America,” another team of cinematographers hiked to exotic locales in Argentina, Tasmania, and Florida to capture footage that would be used to create the lost world in which those dinosaurs roamed.

In the field, cinematographers relied on Final Cut Pro and their PowerBook to review and assess footage shot that day, and in a Los Angeles studio editors used Final Cut Pro on a Power Mac G4 computer to meld digital animation, high-definition video, sound, narration, and music into a compelling digital experience.

Used to working with uncompressed video? Then you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time just waiting for sequences to render so you could see if the effects you used worked as well as you imagined.

That’s the beauty of real-time editing in Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro has built-in support for real-time effects. Just pop a real-time PCI card in your Power Mac G4, and you can see your effects in real time, without having to first render the video.

Exactly how does it work? We’ll show you. In October and November, we’re hosting a series of seminars demonstrating how you can use a Power Mac G4 computer, Final Cut Pro, and a Pinnacle CineWave RT card to edit uncompressed video in real time. Without compromising flexibility or image quality.

Have you noticed how many Sherlock plug-ins we have to choose from?

The answer is 54, and the latest plug-in is a real gentleman. It’s Jeeves (of Ask Jeeves fame). Ask Jeeves waits (in the Internet channel) to serve your every web searching need. Like his counterpart on the askjeeves.com site, you can use the Ask Jeeves plug-in to pose questions in plain English and receive quick and relevant responses. How quick? Ask Jeeves incorporates “popularity technology,” so your searches benefit from the millions of searches Jeeves has been asked to perform previously.

Got a good topic to research on the web? Start up Sherlock, click on the Internet channel, and ask Jeeves to give you a hand.

One day, David Gratton sat down and played a QuickTime movie.

And his life hasn’t been the same since.

An investment banker, Gratton was completely overwhelmed by what he saw. “It was fantastic. You could actually interact with video. I played with it for hours and hours,” he says. “It was one of those things that really pulls you out of the box.”

It also pulled Gratton right out of the bank and into the New Media program at the Vancouver Film School. It gave him a new career, a new business —ici Media—that has produced work for Greenpeace, singer/songwriter Kelly Brock, and Totally Hip Software, and the chance to “form the future” of interactive multimedia.