Sachin Agarwal: April 2005

NAB runs from Monday through Thursday, which means most people leave on Thursday or Friday. Last year I felt weird *leaving* Las Vegas on a Friday. So this year I stayed through the following weekend. After partying the first Friday and Saturday night, my body took Sunday off. But after that it was non stop until the end. Here's a summary of what we did over 9 days:

Restaurants: Lots of great food. Vegas has the best restaurants. Highlights were Envy, Ah Sin, Marrakech.

Clubs: It's strange but all the cool clubs from last year were pretty lame this year. Voodoo Lounge was my favorite, but now it's Mix. We did bottle service at Ice where Paul Oakenfold was DJing. We had so much alcohol just sitting there that most people were passing out by 2. Mix is amazing. It's on the top floor of Mandalay Bay and you you have an incredible view of the strip. We tipped the bouncer and got a private table outside, and two free *bottles* of Grey Goose!

Shows: We saw Second City again at the Flamingo. And we saw Eddie Griffin do standup. It was his first night in Vegas and they didn't promote it well at all. There were about 30 people in a place build for 50. They ended up combining two shows and pulling random people from the casino. But Eddie still did an amazing show. He's hilarious!

We saw O at the Bellagio. That was amazing. It's Cirque De Soleil performed over water. The large pool has a platform in it that can lower and raise so sometimes it's a deep pool for diving, shallow to walk or swim, 4 inches of water so you can "run" over water, and sometimes fully up so it's a solid platform. The coolest part of the show was how they would change sets without you noticing. Your attention would be on one part of the show, and then all of a sudden you realize they moved in a whole bunch of new props on tracks, and you never noticed.

Other: We took a day off from Vegas and rented a car and went to Red Rock Canyon. And of course there was the requisite gambling. Although this trip had the least amount of gambling I have ever done on a Vegas trip. We went to Fremont Street which is a lot of fun because it's more laid back, with bands playing. We saw the car show at Imperial Palace.

Overall an amazing trip. And a great way to celebrate a huge release.

Click here for all the pictures

I love Las Vegas.

We blew them away at NAB 2005!

This is a long post, so to sum it up, NAB was incredible. Apple dominated the event by shipping many, many incredible products. The competition had NOTHING, and they lied to their customers, telling them Apple was making stuff up. "There's no way Apple can be doing that." The users will see it when it's in their hands next month.

On April 17, Apple announced Final Cut Studio, which includes a number of applications. One of these is Final Cut Pro 5, which I have been working on for the past year. The main features in this release are native HDV editing, Multicamera editing, and Dynamic RT.

HDV is a new camera format that should take over for DV. It's high definition, and records to the same mini-dv tapes. It's able to do this by compressing the video in mpeg 2 long gop. Final Cut Pro 5 can capture, edit, play, and output this format natively, *without coverting it to another video format first*.

Multicamera editing means you can shoot a scene with a number of cameras simultaneously. From within Final Cut, you can play up to 16 angles at once (in a 4 X 4 grid) and switch to the angle you want to see live by using the keyboard. It's like an old video switching board, except it's all in software and works for every video format in FCP.

When you are playing back video with a lot of effects applied, we don't make you stop and render first. Dynamic RT Extreme adjusts image quality and frame rate on the fly for optimal playback and scales performance as CPU power increases.

For this release, my manager and I re-wrote the entire playback engine from the ground up. He did most of the work involving scheduling, reading, and decoding the video frames. I worked on the effects architecture and video pipeline. This is what allowed us to do the HDV playback and Dynamic RT.

Peter Chou and I wrote all the code that takes the HDV movie you have edited, and conforms it to the HDV mpeg standards so you can send it back to the camera. Mpeg is long gop, which means certain frames depend on other frames. If you cut some important frames out, you can't play others. Peter and I wrote a lot of very complicated code that goes through your movie and only re-encodes the bare minimum for output to the camera. Other software forces you to re-encode everything, but we only encode around your cuts. This is the part our competition doesn't believe we can actually do.

Besides Dynamic RT and HDV conform, other things I worked on for this release include: a system for XSan admins to define a maximum data rate for each Final Cut station, and a mechanism for our realtime playback engine to get video frames from the render engine when it can't generate a frame. This isn't fast, but it at least provides some basic playback of Motion and LiveType clips in a sequence. I also made improvements to scrubbing, including a low quality scrub for increased performance.

We blew everyone away at the show. The Apple areas at NAB were overflowing, from the press conference on Sunday, to the last shift Thursday afternoon, with people sitting at the neighboring companies booths, and watching our demos. People were amazed. We got great reactions from people. "Is this really native?" "I can't believe you guys did this." "My business wouldn't be where it is today without Macs and Final Cut Pro." And I heard that an engineer from Avid (our big competitor) came by to see if we really were editing native mpeg. He left very sad. Everyone thought we would be taking the easy way out and converting to another format, like they are. We aren't.

I LOVE to demo. You all know how passionate I get about Apple and Macs, and so it's great to be out there on the show floor and really tell people why Final Cut Pro is the best way to edit. Plus i'm showing off my work, so it's even better.

I went around the show a little during the week and no one else was doing anything interesting (on the software front). I was amazed at how boring everyone else's products were. Instead of editing HDV natively, like we are, everyone else was converting the mpeg movie to another format and editing that, taking the easy way out. We didn't settle for that. We set the bar high, and we did it right.

I watched the demo of Adobe Premiere to see what they were up to. They were demoing HDV editing by converting it to another format, which means it takes a lot longer for import and export, and you lose quality. And they were lying to their customers. "Look at how well it scrubs." Well no shit it should scrub well, you converted it away from mpeg 2. Final Cut Pro stills scrubs well, but that's actually an interesting demo for us since we are editing mpeg and it's actually a big deal that our performance is so good.

The Premiere guys would lie to the people there about what their product was capable of, and how people should be using it. I had several people come to my booth saying the Adobe guys said Final Cut Pro couldn't do this or that. All lies. Apple has a policy to not talk about other companies. Adobe doesn't seem to have that much class. I hope the customers do their own research.

Overall it was a great show for Apple. We released a huge number of new applications that address all of the complaints our users have, and add many features.

Apple's official pictures from the show

What a year it has been. My years are just as much divided by our product releases as they are by birthdays and New Years Day.

It was February 2002 when I was trying to decide whether to work for Apple or Amazon.com. I was seriously considering Amazon (really!) because it offered a chance to do something completely new, start over in a new place. Then the manager at Apple told me about NAB, our big conference every year in Vegas, my favorite place! Oh also, he could send me that year, even though I wouldn't actually have started working yet. Where do I sign?

NAB has always been the highlight of the year. It's a week of celebrating a release, and partying with all my co-workers at Apple's expense. It's a free vacation every year. Click here for pictures from NAB 2002, 2003, 2004. You see each year has gotten progressively crazier. In 2002 we had suites at the Venetian. Last year I was in Vegas for a week, and at the end of it I didn't want to leave.

This year there was no holding back. 9 full days in Vegas. I might as well move there.

We're celebrating our best release ever! Final Cut Pro 5.0. Packed full of amazing new features.

This year I really feel like Final Cut Pro is my application. Not that I own it, or that I did most of it (far from it actually), but that I really understand it, I wrote a fairly large part of it, I know how it works, and going forward I'll be building on my own code, not someone elses.

This was the smoothest and best development cycle ever. We re-wrote the entire RT engine from scratch. We met (and sometimes beat) our deadlines. We kept adding features because we had time. It was great. At the end of the day we have a killer product.

Jam packed weekend with lots of pictures.

Friday was a surprised birthday party for Del. Dinner and drinks and Tommy's Joynt, followed by dessert at his place.

Saturday was the San Francisco Beer Festival. A bunch of us volunteered so instead of paying admission and standing in lines, we were behind the tables serving beer, and tasting it all.

It was lots and lots of fun. I can honestly say I will be doing this event every year. I'm not sure if I could pay and be on the other side of the table though. More fun to serve.

I was serving Pyramid for most of the night. I love Pyramid beer, but they aren't as big or popular as they deserve to be. Most people only know about their hefeweizen and apricot ale. but if you go to their restaurants, they have incredible IPA, stout, porter, and more. Plus the food is good.

We were also right next to the Firestone booth, my favorite beer right now. I had plenty of samples of that. I got a Firestone hat and poster.

Funniness: after last call, Eric and Zach carried a tub of ice around the place filling it with leftover beer from the tables so we could drink it later. Del tried to carry 3 full cases of beer up to the volunteer area but they stopped him :)

The real hero for the night was nextbus.com. I was able to use them on my phone and get all around the city. They recently added a few additional lines which helped a lot.

It was especially useful late at night when the muni runs its owl service, infrequent, unscheduled rounds. I refuse to take cabs!

Sunday I went to see Garbage at the Warfield. My cousin works for Digidesign, a company that does high end audio hardware and software. Garbage uses a lot of their products and he was able to get free tickets, and back stage passes!

The show was incredible, and afterwards we met Butch Vig and Duke Erikson. Unfortunately Shirley Manson was sick so she didn't come out afterwards. Garbage's new album is great!



Update:Added more pictures from weekly dinner which include Al and Amit DJing at Hush Hush.

Snow Patrol
Rilo Kiley
OC Mix CDs
Spoon
Garbage (Bleed Like Me)
Jem

iTunes just released a 114 song collection of Smashing Pumpkins rarities and B-sides for $113. So tempting, but that's too much. I hope someone puts together an iMix of the best 20 or 30 songs.

They seem to have a new claim every single week. Sometimes it's the most shocking, most emotional, most controversial. I saw the episode where Kerry meets her birth mother and I was so disappointed I thought I would stop watching the show, after 10 years!

But then they came back with two great episodes. First the episode with Miranda from Sex and the City where she has a stroke. And then one of the best episodes they have ever done.

The last episode I saw was about Gallant and his work in Iraq. It was narrated by Neela reading a letter she wrote to him, and Gallant reading a letter he wrote to her. The episode went back and forth between Iraq and Chicago, showing how similar their day to day lives are.

It was very well done. I highly recommend it if you have it sitting on your tivo!