Okay, I spoke too soon. Just one day after a ZDNet blogger announced he could build a cheaper version of Apple’s high-end Mac Pro, Apple themselves have announced they can make their Mac Pro significantly faster and cheaper. I think the ZDNet machine still works out to be cheaper, but not by nearly as large a margin. Some of you wrote in to say you still want, you know, a cool case design, system-wide warranties, the Mac OS, and not having to, um, build your own system. Whatever. That sounds boring. It might even work out of the box. I’m just glad one of you mentioned hacking Mac OS support in. Needlessly risky and difficulty hacky methods? Now you’re speaking my language!

So, what about this new Mac Pro? It’s better and faster and cheaper and stuff. And it doesn’t have a Blu-Ray drive, whatever that’s worth.

Mac Pro

Seriously, Apple makes a really terrific, high-end system. You can get a number of PCs for significantly less that don’t match up spec-for-spec — and the PC market generally gives you more choices — but there’s no question the Mac has a small selection of really good choices that run both Windows and Mac OS X. You know what you want.

Apple is sticking with ATI graphics by default: the Radeon HD 2600 XT. I think the 8600-series NVIDIA is an all-around better 3D card, but for the Mac’s content creation-geared workflow, the Radeon makes sense. For 3D pros, there’s the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600, which is of course overkill price/performance-wise for all but high-end applications. But the real story here is the Xeon architecture from Intel. Think dual 45-nm Quad-Core Xeon processors up to 3.2GHz, starting at US$2799, with 1600 MHz front side bus and 800 MHz memory. I like Apple’s description: “the ideal system for creative professionals, 3D digital content creators and scientists.” I think we should just opt for the “scientist” description, fellow visualists.

One thing I’m not going to repeat that many blogs are is Apple’s hyperbolic-yet-obvious tagline, “fastest Mac ever.”

Actually, wait a minute: oil prices rising, polar ice caps melting, the potential of running out of oil, global terrorism and the potential collapse of the world economy — maybe some day we will see “The New Mac Green: Much Slower and More Expensive Than Last Year’s Model!”

No, scratch that — Obama’s campaign is gaining momentum. I’m sure we’ll avoid all of that; it’s like one of those nasty alternate realities in the sci fi movies we manage to escape.

A combination of frenetic CDM backend design work and all of my clients finally giving me materials 2 weeks before I leave to holiday in Vietnam has kept me from writing, and for that I apologize. Peter has or course kept up the fantastic content, but there is some more material which needs to be spread around and I can’t see any time to write full news posts before I leave. So here it is condensed, and almost editorialization free:

Visualist News

Open Source Film Footage: Stray Cinema

Stray Cinema is an online community where you are able to download and re-edit the raw footage from a film we have shot in London. This will provide people from all over the world with an opportunity to create their own version of the film. Stray Cinema will navigate the film experiment out of the online digital world, into the ‘real world’ with a screening of the top five films in London. The footage shot in London is the first of many open source films to be provided by Stray Cinema.

Lost in Light will transfer 8mm to digital for free* (so why don’t you shoot some 8mm).

New AE Plugin: ZbornToy.

Here’s a fresh new way to composite externally rendered 3D images in After Effects. The plug-in ZbornToy takes grayscale depth maps and magically let’s you continue tweaking and change many parameters from within AE.

Tasty 3D Business: Behind HP’s “Hands” commercials. Java-based 3D sketching. Fine art 3D rendering, and more.

Adobe’s November Plug-in Guide: The November version of the Plug-In Guide is now available. It contains listings of all known plug-ins for InDesign, Acrobat and Illustrator. Categories include Shrink-Wrap, Catalog & Database, Newspapers, and Freelancers.

Outside Hollywood:

Tutorials and Howto

Looping Fractal Noise: Fractal Noise is the swiss army knife of AE plugins. Newbies may pass over it because of the cheezy default plugin look, but seasoned pros can use it for anything which requires random or organic movement and looping motion; clouds, flame, water, slime, morphs

Beaming Up effect in AFX.

Hidden Illustrator<->Photoshop integration

Background: The compositing model (i.e. the layer blending modes & options) used by Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat is different than the one used by Photoshop. Therefore some blending options in Photoshop (for example, complex “Blend If” settings) can’t be replicated in Illustrator. As a result, when you place a PSD file into Illustrator, the blending is isolated. That is, the PSD is treated as things a little world unto itself, and the blending modes within it don’t interact with anything else in the Illustrator document. Objects like drop shadows (set to Multiply mode) only multiply against other things inside the PSD.

AE Keyframe Boomerang Effect: Part 1.

In this tutorial, Creative Cow Leader Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to handle the annoying (and sometimes crippling) boomerang effect, in which a layer moves randomly between two spatial keyframes that are exactly the same.

Using After Effects 7 on Intel-Based MacPro Computers. Ed.: This one is interesting as an alternative to booting into Windows, but don’t get too excited: basically, you have to humble your Mac Pro into running Rosetta and find some way of not having the machine die. In the meantime, I have to admit, I’m getting more addicted to running the Adobe software on Windows, anyway — sorry, Apple. -PK

DIY: Building your own computer for Digital Video. Ed.: See also our DIY Shuttle XPC assembly, which is kind of the portable version of this — only cheaper, and I didn’t dress up like Darth Vader. This looks great as a desktop machine, however, and you’d be hard pressed to match bang-for-buck and customization on the Mac. -PK

Videos

The Rapture – “Whoo! Alright! Yeah Uh-Huh!”: Great animation, great motion tracking, great feel. Rocking clip.

RC plane with Remote Head-Mount Gyroscope-Controlled Camera Plane: We now officially live in The Future.

Apple has finally delivered on the Intel Mac towers for which we’ve been waiting. The new machines give you basically everything you wanted: the slick, cheese-grater chic of the old Aluminum G5 towers, plus the expansion options missing on those machines, all with Windows dual-boot capability and top-of-class Xeon Woodcrest architecture. US$2500 isn’t pocket change for everyone, but these machines are very price-competitive with Woodcrest PCs; as with Apple’s Intel laptops, a customizable single configuration lets Apple ship in greater volume than some of its larger PC competitors by focusing on one model.

My full take is available at CDMusic:
WWDC: New Mac Pro Towers Blaze Through Logic, Soundtrack, Offer Better Storage Options, Says Apple [Create Digital Music]

But let’s talk specifically about what these machines mean for creative visual work. The new Mac Pros offer two significant benefits, beyond the additional expandability and Windows booting: they’ve got even more computational muscle than the mighty Quad G5 towers, courtesy Intel, and they feature beefed-up video card options for playing Unreal 2007— I mean, um, serious graphics work. Add to that new, cheaper, brighter Cinema Displays, and I expect even some PC lovers may go Mac.

(PS, anyone else note the irony of the image above, Apple’s promotional image taken from Apple Aperture, resembling Adobe box art? Is Apple trying to send a subliminal message about Intel-native compatibility of Creative Suite, or is it just me?)