StickNick dot Com - MultiMedia

First post here on the multimedia side of things so I better get everyone up to speed before diving into this rather long piece about multimedia software.

At the end of November my Windows PC died a horrible death. I won't go into details other than to say it involved a dead heatsink/fan, some thermal paste, and the CPU being ripped from its socket.

While upset, I figured that the computer had given me nearly seven straight years of service. It had gone through dead power supplies, some hard crashes, and more upgrades than my wallet cared to enjoy.

Not bad for an old AGP box.

Yeah, AGP. This is the main reason I let this PC go in the end. Getting super decent parts for an AGP platform these days is next to impossible. Hell, the AMD X2 (socket 939) processor that was running in it was found on the clearance page of an online retailer and all the AGP cards I find are less than stellar or retardedly expensive for what they offer (which is noise and massive power consumption).

The parts that were still fine (GeForce 6600GT, 2GB of ram, and a kick ass Saitek keyboard) are now living in my sons computer.

Looking for a new computer, I hit up the online Apple store hoping to get my hands on a Mac. I've had a MacBook Pro at work for over a year now and have really come to love Apples offerings to the point where I have a pretty hard time working in Windows now - not because I hate Microsoft, but because I find Mac OS X more productive for what I use computers for. To each their own I say.

Circumstances being what they are these days, I put my Apple wants on the shelf and started looking at Dell notebooks hoping to get my hands on a relatively affordable (but not super cheap) workhorse...

... when a friend informed me that I could have her recently dead Apple Powerbook G4 for free. All I would have to do is pay for any repairs. I chatted with her regarding the specs (17", PPC G4 1.5GHz, 1GB of ram, 128MB ATI 9600) and I jumped at the chance and contacted the local Mac shop to inquire about parts and labour.

The people I spoke with via email at The Mac Group were douchebags. Their prices are stupidly high, and they carried more than a faint wiff of Mac Zealot. The hell with it, I thought, I could probably do this myself.

I initially thought that bringing a G4 Powerbook back from the dead would be near impossible for me to pull off. I plunged into replacing the ram and hard drive thinking that I was going to bust the machine to such a point that I would probably wind up bringing it in to the shop, paying a stupid amount of money to have it fixed, and listen to the aforementioned know it all Mac schmo tell me how I should have brought it to them in the first place.

Not so. With a purchase from OWC and the help of iFixit.com, I managed to replace the hard drive add another gig of ram (the laptop came with two 512MB sticks and I only purchased one, 1GB stick) and now have a fully functioning G4 Powerbook 1.5 GHz, 17" laptop. The only thing left for me to do from a hardware standpoint is up the ram from 1.5 GB to the max (2 gigs), but that will come all in good time. Right now OS X Tiger is running smoothly, and all is well...

... with a couple of minor snags.

Software, software, software...

What is turning out to be the difficult part is finding alternatives to applications that I am already pretty well versed at. I don't mean moving from Windows to Mac, I mean moving from the newer Intel processors back to the Power PC processors.

In the recent past, I was working on both a MacBook Pro and a Windows Vista box and honing my skills at video and sound editing by learning Adobe's Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Soundbooth (all of the CS4 variety), and Audition 3 (which is only available for Windows). I was also bringing my graphics and web skills (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash) up to the CS4 level.

The first wall I hit was the simple fact that the new Adobe CS4 suite is not compatible with the older PPC chips. CS4 is strictly Intel.

No problem, CS3 supports PPC, does it not? Wrong. Premiere, Encore, and Soundbooth CS3 require an Intel processor.

The other issue is that I no longer have a Windows box. Couple that with the fact you can't run BootCamp, VMWare Fusion, or Parallels on a PPC Mac, Audition is pretty much out of the mix.

So where does all this leave me?

The good thing is that I'm always open to trying new software...

Video: Final Cut Studio

I've been eying Final Cut for a while. in the video world there are two major players: Adobe and Apple. Now, since Adobe is out of the picture, I've turned my eyes towards Apple.

I've read about Final Cut and, during my research, I've found that it is very well respected. An added bonus is that there are courses offered on Lynda.com - and I have a full membership for the next few months. From what I've seen of the lessons so far, Final Cut is not all that far off from Premiere Pro so, hopefully, it won't take me all that long to get the hang of the software.

Side note: Adobe After Effects CS3 is supported on the PPC processors, so I can continue to work at learning it. A good friend of mine, who is also a super talented musician, film maker, and artist has offered me some hands on lessons in both Final Cut and After Effects. After seeing her recent multimedia creation titled The Hands Of The Dancer, I will certainly be jumping at the opportunity to learn from a master.

All in all it seems that Final Cut Studio has all I need to capture, edit, and export video to the web and DVD. This is the sound of me cracking my knuckles and getting to work.

Music: Logic Studio

When I first started using a Mac, one of the biggest bitches I had with is was the complete lack of audio multitracking software. I had spent so much time in Windows learning and using various pieces of software such as nTrack Studio, Reaper, and Adobe Audition (as well as a plethora of Freeware and Shareware music apps). In the end, with each new release, nTrack became nothing more than a buggy piece of bloatware. Reaper was cool and although it did serve its purpose running on an underpowered Acer laptop, I found it lacking in certain areas (mostly plug-ins). All the other multitrack apps ranged from merely so-so to absolutely god-awful. So I settled into the world of Audition.

Audition is not really considered a professional standard application when it comes to mixing and mastering music but it fit my uses perfectly; it was somewhere in between an entry level multitrack program such as Reaper and the big boys such as Pro Tools. Needless to say I was rather irate when I found that there was no Mac version of the software, and Adobe had (and still has) no plans to port it over to OS X.

This initially left me with GarageBand.

The first version I worked with was part of iLife '06 and I was less than pleased with GarageBand due to two small details: the way you import media and the way you save your final mix.

Importing media should be as simple as, well, choosing the media from an Import file menu. Oh no, you have to bring your media into iTunes in order to have it brought into GarageBand. Rubbish. This was, and still is, an extra, unnecessary step.

As for rendering your final mixes, iTunes appears again. You had to share your mix with iTunes which sent it over as an ACC file. You would then have to re-encode the ACC to mp3. What a contrived pain the the ass.

Apple fixed the rendering problem in GarageBand '08; you can now Save To Disc and mp3 is a format choice. You still have to import your media into iTunes in order to get it into Garageband though. This is still a annoyance to me but not as much as the lack of Save To Disc was.

While GarageBand is neat for working on quick demos, recording jams, and writing songs, it is just for that and I applaud it (and use it) for what it is.

While discussing the limitations of GarageBand with another musician, the name Logic came up. Sure, I had heard of it, but with Audition doing what I needed, I never really paid much attention to Apple's Pro music software.

Now I went looking for it.

Reviews of the Logic Pro suite were very favorable; mostly users could not believe that such a versatile music suite could cost so little compared to other Pro suites such as Cubase or the delfacto standard Pro Tools.

I've played with it a little now and I have to say, Logic is impressive. I've yet to really put it to work for me but, so far, I think I have the music software covered.

Side note: There is now an OS X port of Reaper. It's currently in beta and I've poked around with it here and there. It's not all that different from the Windows version, however, it's still rather unstable and mildly buggy. I think I'll hold off on Reaper for the time being and learn Logic.

In the end I'm pretty amazed at what I can get out of this here notebook; old, discontinued parts and recently released software running seemingly without issue?

Bring it on. I'm looking forward to pushing this Frankenbook to it's limits.