Secrets of Wild India Finally Comes to the US

On the 29th April, Secrets of Wild India (the first production that I worked on for Icon Films) is being broadcast across the United States. As Marketing and Development Assistant, I've created this TX card to celebrate the occasion.

Final Cut Studio 3 and Mac OS X Lion - Possible but Not Practical

Apple aren't known for their sympathy towards legacy products. When they introduced the first iMac back in 1998, many customers were dismayed to see that they'd neglected to include the option for a floppy disc drive. Years later, and the removal of packaged Apple software from its stores reinforces Apple's stance on what it sees as dated tech; it's over - move on.

Apple have been just as ruthless with their programming as they have with hardware. With the introduction of Mac OS X Lion, Rosetta (a dynamic binary translator that allows you to run applications programmed for PowerPC system architectures) is no more.

When I first heard about this, I was pretty concerned. I've been using Macs now for eight years now, and I've accumulated quite a number of PowerPC applications over that time. What's more concerning from a professional stance, is that Final Cut Studio, a software suite that I've spent many years learning and making a living from, will no longer function under the new Mac OS X environment.

But all is not lost! If, like many people, you have a Snow Leopard install disc, you use it to install Rosetta on Lion, and breathe life back into your old applications.

So you'd assume that that was a problem solved. Chalk one up for old-skool Mac users worldwide. Well, not exactly.

In my current job, I've been trying out how Mac OS X Lion plays with Final Cut Studio 3, and its not always pretty. It all comes down to Lion's apparent improvements in dividing processes between multi-core processors, which solves some problems, but introduces others with general use.

Final Cut Studio was not built with multi-core system architecture in mind. For that reason, you'll find that it's rather infuriatingly inefficient at making the most of your system resources. Slam something into Compressor, and watch in Activity Monitor as your 16-core Intel Mac Pro barely bats an eye-lid at your request. It is possible in this scenario to use the virtual clusters trick to force your Mac to work harder, but this is a bit of a dark art, and can render your entire system unusable if set-up incorrectly.

Lion, however, eats these kind of complicated calculations for breakfast, taking the guess-work out of all of this, carefully allocating processor time to all of the tasks presented to it. Sounds great on paper, but then when you want to edit in Final Cut and transcode in Compressor at the same time, Lion doesn't know which tasks deserves more attention. What you're left with therefore, is a slower, less-responsive and asthmatic editing experience, where every render takes considerably longer.

The problems don't stop there, either. In my experience, Final Cut Pro acts erratically even when you haven't got anything else going on in the background. Recently I was editing together a five-minute piece consisting of nothing but ProRes Proxy QuickTimes and a couple of AIFFs on a ProRes timeline, and consistently found that Final Cut would drop frames on two occasions during playback (anything from about 5-50 frames) before I paused and resumed playback again. All this on a brand-new 17" MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, 1GB of AMD graphics memory and 4GB of RAM - specs that dwarf the listed minimum system requirements of Final Cut Studio.

My advice? Don't upgrade at this time if you're still hanging onto Final Cut Studio 3 and below. Save the £21.99 that you would be spending on Lion and put it towards something useful, like some FCP X, Avid or Adobe Premiere tutorials. Just remember that if you choose to stick it out with Snow Leopard for the long haul, then it won't be long before Apple leave you and your aging system behind to fend for yourself.

River Monsters 3D

On 8th April, an extra special River Monsters will be jumping from screens in jaw-dropping 3D. Filmed in the Okavango Delta, Jeremy Wade hunts down a mystery killer that haunts the inhabitants of the region.

The following TX card was created by myself and distributed via e-mail, social networks and Icon's website.