New Features??????????????????

Would you "people" tell me what you're smoking and where I can get some?

Talk to Santos, he's usually in the alley off of Rantoul street.

a SD card or whatever card will never be cheaper to manufacture than a CD/DVD/Blu-ray DVD

This may be true, but the time may come when it will be cheap enough that the benefits outweigh the extra cost. By your logic, they never would have come out with Blu-Ray, since it's more expensive than DVD.

My suspicion is that more profit is made by wedding videographers, Nationwide, than from the remainder of the true independent producers. Add in the industrial producers to the wedding/event mix and you have some whopping numbers.

And those same people all made VHSs of their work before DVDs came along. Just because they're invested in a technology now, doesn't mean they always will be.

In most of the U.S., downloads are a joke.

Legal downloads are a joke, but pirating is as common as can be, and the pirates may well be an augur of the future. Some say we're going to follow South Korea, which is essentially an online-distribution nation now due to piracy. Their DVD market is essentially dead.

DVDSP will get fixed soon, it isn't that big a software development job.

Okay, now you're smoking something. DVDSP is an authoring app for DVDs, not BRDs. To change that and allow for fully-featured BRD authoring would require a major rewrite if not an entirely new application.

Apple will give most of their customers what they want, at they expense of the few that need something more specialized. For example, only a small percentage of customers were using ExpressCard so they swapped it for an SD slot. Most customers don't care but that small percentage is in a tight spot.

The price of Final Cut Studio is spiraling lower and lower, and this will attract more of the lower end of the market, which are most likely going straight to the web.

If you take all of Final Cut Studio's users, take out those that output just for the web, take out those that just want a quick DVD in Compressor, take out those at the higher end who pay to get it professionally made on something like Scenarist and then replicated - how many are left? I don't know.

Jon,
I'm not trying to pick on you, but I think you're confusing the iMovie/Final Cut Express crowd with the Final Cut Suite crowd. I believe most who are creating content for YouTube haven't paid $999.00 for their camera, let alone their editing software.

So far as the spiraling cost of Final Cut Suite, I believe this is the first time the price has ever been cut, and I won't be surprised to see us get nicked again soon after Snow Leopard is released. The software still has not caught-up with the hardware.

I haven't seen anything here about the installation process. It takes hours, and someone must be paying attention to it to endlessly swap disks. My MacPro with 12GBytes of RAM used less than 2GB for the installation and was doing up to 250 I/Os per second, while 10 GB of RAM sat idle.

And to throw a little salt in the wound, it could have been delivered on a single Blu-ray disk. Then I could have started the installation, and gone to bed.

It reminded me of the days when Microsoft Office for the Mac was delivered on a zillion floppies.

I'd like to see things like the ability to use iDVD themes, more Apple themes added and perhaps an easy to use interface for developing new themes. I'm sure it's easy for many of you, but I haven't had a lot of free time to study what's involved.

Some automation could also be added - connections for instance. A bit of the ol' Apple Polish here and there and WALA - DVDSP5 is born. ;o)

At the risk of sounding like an elitist, DVDSP is complicated for a reason-- because DVD authoring is a complicated process. If it were as simple as iDVD, then we might as well be using that. But it's not as simple; it's a Pro App, and with that carries at least some level of difficulty in learning it's functions.

LOL! If you don't have the time to learn how to use DVDSP you shouldn't be using it.

Harold Abbott wrote:
So far as the spiraling cost of Final Cut Suite, I believe this is the first time the price has ever been cut, and I won't be surprised to see us get nicked again soon after Snow Leopard is released. The software still has not caught-up with the hardware.

Little reality check here:
1. DVDSP is essentially same in FCS3 than it was in FCS2 & FCS1.
2. FCS versions come out every other year. Next one will come out 2011.
3. Apple has not been selling DVDSP as stand alone for ages.

So do you really think that Apple will release another FCS this year with upgraded Blu-Ray Studio Pro?
Or do you think that Apple will release free update to DVDSP that will upgrade it to BDSP in the middle of developing new FCS, when Apple has not upgraded DVDSP in the last 2 major FCS releases.

I'd guess no to both.

My guess is that if we are ever going to get BDSP it will be in FCS4 in 2011 or else it will never going to come. Apple wants iTunes to beat BD and if it has to neglect FCS users for that, it just does it.

PS. I also believe that 10.6 will be distributed in dvd and 10.7 and FCS4 will have options for dvd and sd-card or usb3-thumb. Majority of macs might newer get BD-drive even before 2020 (or when online goes beyond hard copies), so BD will not be feasible for most mac users.

We're all entitled to GUESS about the future. And your guess is as good as mine.

True, but that doesn't mean we can't take history into account with our guesswork. And FCS' history does not agree with introducing a major feature update through a point release.

FCP 4.0 > 4.5 introduced HD support for free. I'd say that was pretty big, even if it was just one codec.

But Apple has lately adopted the policy of charging for new features for devices without a subscription model (e.g. iPod Touch software updates, MacBook Pro 802.11n unlock, etc). So don't hold your breath.

We're all entitled to GUESS about the future. And your guess is as good as mine

Yes, but it is against the TOU on the Apple Boards 😉

Jon Chappell wrote:
FCP 4.0 > 4.5 introduced HD support for free. I'd say that was pretty big, even if it was just one codec.

Yep, but change from DVDSP to BRSP is so much bigger step that it won't happen with point-release. It has to be whole new software, although the GUI might stay similiar.

You state this so matter-of-factly that it implies you know details of DVDSP internals. Can you cite some references, or is it a guess - even though that's against the boards' TOU?

It's common sense! Blu-Ray is an entirely different standard, both in the encoding of the information and in the functionality and capability of the spec. Why do you think Sony's proprietary Blu-Ray authoring app is $50000?

I'll answer your question first - Sony charges $50,000 because they can get it. It has nothing to do with the complexity of the software.

It's common sense to me that encoding, functionality and capability of the spec are in Final Cut Pro and Compressor. That's why we no longer need DVDSP to author a BD disk in Final Cut Suite.