The Macintosh Used to Be Easy.
I remember when the only programs on the Macintosh were MacWrite and MacPaint.
Boston Final Cut Pro User Group
Last night I went to a meeting of the Boston Final Cut Pro User Group, they call it BOSFCPUG for short. Try pronouncing that. There's a group in LA too and a group in New York. The meeting room at Apple Boston was packed to overflowing. There's a lot of interest in Digital Video here in town.
I learned that I have a lot to learn.
Final Cut Pro 3 New Features
Phillip Hodgetts showed us how to color correct Digital Video. Color correction means that you can take a shot where the sky is washed out and the grass looks brown, and enhance it to make the sky look blue and the grass green. Now I know why post production on Star Wars takes years. Phillip said that before he had the color correction tools in Final Cut Pro 3, editing a shot might have taken him 20 minutes, but now it takes 6 hours.
BorisFX
Tim Wilson was very excited to show us the titling features of Final Cut Pro 3 and the add ins that his company BorisFX provides. Tim showed us some amazing stuff including letters that flew and rotated onto the screen and then were pulled off screen by unknown forces! Well, not unknown, but magical.
Side Notes
This group is going to be a great resource for Boston area Final Cut Pro users. Vendors were on hand to demonstrate hardware including the new Cannon XL1S video camera. We only had a 5 minute break, so there wasn't a lot of time with the hardware. Maybe in a future meeting. There's so much to learn, and such a wide range of experience, I think that subgroups might emerge for Final Cut Pro beginners, Video experts, etc.
OS X crashed at least three times and caused some excitement when the Unix code was displayed on the screen. It seemed that people experienced with the OS were not surprised to see this, but as someone who is considering the purchase of a Macintosh, I was.
There were references to both Star Trek and Star Wars during the presentations keeping the term Geek alive and well. That's not a criticism, just an observation. The guy next to me was eating a bagel with cream cheese that he brought from home. The cream cheese was in it's own little plastic cup.
Overall, it was a great meeting and I look forward to the next one.
OS X Weblog
Now there's a web log to help people with OS X.
Yikes!
