Digital Video - February 2008 - (Page 23) LEOPARD OS 10.5 & FINAL CUT EXPRESS 4 IN REVIEW WHAT’S NEW, PUSSYCAT? APPLE’S LEOPARD AND FINAL CUT EXPRESS 4 ARE WELL-WORTH THE UPGRADE. BY OLIVER PETERS O ctober brought the release of Apple’s long-waited Leopard operating system, formally known as Mac OS 10.5. Although most working editors are treading lightly — waiting for the right time to upgrade — Apple also sweetened the pot with the release of Final Cut Express 4, which is ready for Leopard. Professional editors working with the full Final Cut Studio package or Avid Media Composer may tend to view Express as a watered down “lite” version. Nevertheless, FCE 4 is an extremely powerful package for its $199 price tag. Since it’s built on the same code as FCP, all of the FCE 4 tools are simply a reduced subset of the full FCP feature set. FCE 4 is actually an ideal application for new editors who are interested in learning FCP. It supports DV, HDV and now AVCHD — the newest prosumer, www.dv.com compressed high-definition video file format. Anyone finishing and mastering in these formats — without the need to rough-cut first at a draft resolution or master to a higher level format — will be perfectly happy with FCE 4 as their main editing application. This covers the majority of video users, including educational facilities, corporate video units and indie filmmakers. LEOPARD ON THE LOOSE Let’s first look at Leopard. I decided to install it on my older Mac PowerBook G4 as a real-world test. Many FCE 4 users are likely to be budget-conscious, so although new MacBook Pros are on any Mac user’s wish list, there are some great deals on PowerPC Macs. A PowerBook G4 that’s faster than 1.25Ghz is robust enough to handle Leopard and most things you’d tackle with FCE 4, including compressed HD. Throwing caution to the wind, I ran the standard Leopard install. The more cautious (and recommended) approach is to use the Archive and Install method, available under Options after you select the destination hard drive. Fortunately for me, the installation went painlessly, but there are some things you should know about Leopard when you first start to use it. Initially the machine takes a long time to restart and you do get a bit nervous watching that blue screen. In my case, it was just a matter of being patient. Once you are up and running, the computer takes a while to put things in their proper place. Spotlight, Apple’s resident search utility, will re-index all of your hard drive contents, even if you migrated from Tiger, which already used Spotlight. Not all of your applications will run properly under Leopard. Most will be fine. Some will require patches and some just won’t work. After installation, I decided to clean house and remove many of my unused applications. My tools of choice for this clean up were several lowcost or shareware and freeware utilities, including AppDelete (removes all files related to an application) and Cocktail (cleans up many of the Unix and OS X system files). Remember to Repair Permissions using Apple Disk Utility. Much has already been written about the big features like Time Machine, Spaces and Boot Camp. In my case, I have little interest in these. I’m good about backing up, cloning my hard drive with SuperDuper!, as well as burning frequent backups of document files to DVD-ROM, so, I disabled Time Machine. That’s fine, except the first time you stick in a FireWire drive, you are prompted to make this the Time Machine archive drive. This behavior persists, until you say YES. If you don’t actually intend to use SCORE LEOPARD OS 10.5 PROS: 64-bit computing, Time Machine and Boot Camp CONS: Software incompatibility and more user prompts. BOTTOM LINE: Most Mac users will want to upgrade after the dust settles. MSRP: $199 CONTACT: www.apple.com dv february 2008 23 http://www.apple.com http://www.dv.com
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