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Macintosh Graphics
by Robin Rowe
2/2004

Steve Jobs, who is the CEO of both Apple and motion picture studio Pixar, said in his keynote at MacWorld in January that the rate of consumer uptake of digital photography has surprised even him. Jobs says that the number of digital images consumers already have on their computers is much higher than anticipated. Apple's latest version of iPhoto, part of their iLife media suite, has been optimized to retrieve images instantly from up to 25,000 digital photographs.

The same week Jobs made his digital photography announcement, Kodak was announcing it will stop selling traditional film cameras in the United States. Kodak is abandoning the consumer film camera market it launched in 1900 with the release of its inexpensive Brownie cameras that cost a dollar. In 2003 for the first time digital cameras outsold film cameras with 12.5 million digital cameras vs. 12.1 million film cameras in the United States. Kodak has accepted that digital cameras now rule and are concentrating efforts there. However, Kodak continues to sell more motion picture film year over year. Film isn't going away soon.

In this article we'll examine how far the Macintosh is going with graphics, digital photography, and digital filmmaking. Apple has a broad selection of consumer and professional digital imagery tools. And in addition to Apple's offerings, we'll touch upon studio motion picture tools from Steve Jobs' other company Pixar.

" Quartz -- Aqua and X11
" QuickTime
" iLife -- iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and GarageBand
" Keynote
" Final Cut Express
" Final Cut Pro
" DVD Studio Pro
" Shake
" Pixar RenderMan

Quartz is the graphics foundation of Mac OS X. It is a high performance, high quality, compositing windowing system that serves as the graphics foundation of the Macintosh platform. The Quartz rendering format is PDF, a variant of Postscript that dominates the professional publishing industry and that everyone is familiar with on the Web thanks to Adobe Acrobat. By using PDF, Quartz does the 1987 NeXT computer one better. NeXT used a graphics system based on Display Postscript, a subset of the Adobe Postscript printer language optimized for monitor display. Apple stunned observers in 1996 by purchasing NeXT for $350 million and in the process bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple.

Quartz provides crisp graphics, beautifully anti-aliased text, and transparent drop-shadows. On this foundation rests the Mac desktop called Aqua. OS X also offers an alternative desktop, the Linux-standard X11 desktop. The kernel of OS X, called Darwin, is based on FreeBSD -- which is similar to Linux. Adding X11 compatibility enables open source Linux graphics applications to be simply recompiled to run on OS X. There is an open source installer system called Fink, based on the popular Linux Debian packager.

Fink, a free program available at SourceForge.net, makes it easy for Mac users to install open source programs. However, ported X11 apps on the Aqua desktop are a little clunky in operation compared to their native Aqua counterparts. To address that issue, the SourceForge GTK+OSX project is porting the popular Linux GTK graphics library (the underpinnings of GNOME) to run natively on Aqua. That will enable popular Linux graphics applications such as CinePaint and GIMP to run natively on Aqua with the same look-and-feel.

QuickTime is Apple's underlying movie technology. "QuickTime 6, with MPEG video and AAC audio, is by far the most popular version of QuickTime ever distributed, with over 175 million copies downloaded and counting," says Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. QuickTime 6.5 adds support for authoring audio and video content for delivery to the new 3GPP-compatible mobile telephones. Apple's video applications such as Final Cut Pro are based on QuickTime. Apple makes available a free QuickTime API to programmers, and many third-party programs use that for supporting video editing and playback.

Apple QuickTime Products

" QuickTime Player -- free, formats include MPEG-1 and MPEG-4, Mac or Windows but not Linux
" QuickTime Pro upgrade -- $30, transcodes between formats
" MPEG-2 Playback Component -- $20, adds MPEG-2 playback support
" QuickTime Broadcaster -- free live webcasting of MPEG-4 or 3GPP, Mac-only
" QuickTime Streaming Server -- included as part of Mac OS X Server
" Darwin Streaming Server -- free open source QuickTime server, OS X or Linux

At MacWorld Jobs pointed out that there is nothing on the Windows platform to compete with Apple's iLife suite on features or on price. "iLife does for our digital lifestyle what Microsoft Office did for office productivity-all the applications you need are in one box, and they all work together," said Jobs. "Apple is far ahead of its PC competitors in offering the best-in-class applications for digital music, photography, moviemaking and DVD creation, and now they all work together seamlessly." The Mac-only iLife suite includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and GarageBand.

iPhoto is photo album that also does slideshows. Besides keeping digital photos organized, iPhoto includes one-click photo Enhance and a Retouch tool for removing dirt and scratches. Apple offers a more sophisticated slideshow tool called Keynote (Mac only) that competes with Microsoft PowerPoint for creating business presentations. iMovie is Apple's consumer-level video editor (which caused Microsoft to respond with Windows Movie Maker included in XP). The most exciting new feature in iMovie is a "Ken Burns" effect for making documentary-style motion pictures out of still photos. Using iDVD you can burn your iMovie video to DVD. The iTunes software is a digital jukebox. The GarageBand software is a digital audio studio. The iLife suite is included with all new Macintosh computers.

At MacWorld Apple released Final Cut Express ($299), a prosumer version of Final Cut Pro. "Final Cut Express is a perfect fit for the growing market of people who may not be full-time editors, but are passionate about digital video," said Jobs. Final Cut Express can capture and edit digital video over Firewire and apply transitions, filters and effects in real-time. It can add titles, composite layers, perform color correction, and produce graphics and animations.

Final Cut Express (DV-only) projects can be loaded into Final Cut Pro ($999+), Apple's nonlinear editing system that supports a full range of professional editing formats in SD and HD. In 2002 Final Cut Pro won a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award for its impact on the television industry. (Apple also won an Emmy in 2001, for Firewire.). FCP-edited video can be exported to DVD Studio Pro ($499). FCP 4 includes XML interchange format, a way to bridge the gap between different edit systems, asset management databases and studio pipelines. XML import/export was requested by engineers at DreamWorks animation to ease integration of Final Cut Pro.

Shake ($4,950+) is the most popular compositing software in the motion picture industry. Compositing often involves green screen effects, for example, replacing a plain green background behind actors with a digital movie set. Shake has been used for visual effects in over a hundred motion pictures, including Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo, Matrix Reloaded, and X-Men 2. Apple took over Shake by acquiring its maker Nothing Real in 2002. Apple immediately discontinued sales of the Windows version of Shake and alarmed motion picture studios by not immediately announcing plans for Linux. Linux is the predominant visual effects OS at studios such as Disney and DreamWorks. Even Pixar has a 1,024 CPU Linux renderfarm. Apple charges double for Shake licenses on Linux or IRIX compared to the price on Mac OS X.

Pixar is not Apple, but both companies have Steve Jobs as CEO. Pixar RenderMan Pro Server ($3,500) includes a set of tools for rendering animation models as photorealistic images.

" RenderMan animation rendering technology.
" Irma re-renderer for accelerating shading and lighting.
" Alfserver remote execution server

RenderMan is the most popular rendering software in the motion picture industry, not only used by Pixar for films such as FINDING NEMO, but at many other studios such as ILM for STAR WARS EPISODE 2. In 2001 the creators of RenderMan were given an Oscar for their advancements to the field of motion picture rendering. Already available on Linux and Windows, in September Pixar released RenderMan for Mac OS X. Pixar continues to extend Linux support, and just released support for x86-64 chip architectures such as AMD Opteron and Athlon64. In addition to RenderMan, Pixar offers the RenderMan Artist Tools ($2,000), software that provides integration with Alias Maya ($1,999+), the most popular 3D modeling software.

As hardware costs continue to drop professional motion picture and imagery features will continue to become more accessible and necessary for consumers. In fact, Apple's strategy seems to be to develop and acquire high-end media technology to integrate into Apple's consumer-based software. Microsoft is currently concentrating on office applications. Their next version of Windows, called Longhorn -- with their new Avalon graphics engine -- isn't due until 2006. (See my article, "Microsoft Longhorn Avalon Graphics", January 2004 Advanced Imaging for details on that.) Apple released Mac OS X with the Quartz graphics engine in 2001, and continues to refine and build upon it. Apple is setting it's sights on dominating the digital film desktop, much as it did originally with the Macintosh and desktop publishing.

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