Beyond the HD hoopla.(viewpoint Video)

If you've ever been to an Apple Computer press conference or keynote speech, you know they can have an atmosphere that's similar to a religious revival, with cheers and applause from the crowd (and there's always a crowd) that ring of "hallelujah." It's not really clear whether those cheers come from employee plants in the audience or are indeed the spontaneous reactions of faithful, fanatical users. But it doesn't really matter. The cheers are often well deserved, even if an inspired presentation trumps technological achievement.

Such was the case at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention this past April. Final Cut Pro was on stage gaining well-earned "oohs" and "aahs" by editing multiple streams of high-definition video from a Panasonic DVCProHD source in software (that is, with no additional expansion hardware). It was an impressive demonstration, with real-time previewing of four layers of 720p and two layers of 1080i, and Apple deserves credit for showing (with its usual and memorable flair) just how far the industry has come.

Yet this story is both broader than what Apple makes it and a little less spectacular. Make no mistake, Apple's Final Cut Pro does deserve just about all the accolades it receives. In Version 4, it's now a surprisingly mature non-linear editing interface at a remarkable sub-$1000 price. Moreover, the NAB announcement of a new upgrade, Final Cut Pro HD, hammers home the fact that, just as Final Cut is a professional editing application priced for all creative desktops, editing in high-definition is no longer exclusive territory. Best of all, the upgrade from Final Cut Pro 4 to Final Cut Pro HD is free. Surely HD for the masses is here.

And it's all true. You can edit HD on the desktop with Final Cut Pro HD without extra hardware. But there is a revealing caveat that puts Apple's announcement in perspective: You need Panasonic's new AJ-HD1200A DVCProHD videotape recorder deck with FireWire I/O. (The AJ-HD 1200A is priced at $21,000, although that cost reflects the price of HD equipment, and is not really the caveat.) Granted, Apple was straightforward and didn't gloss over the Panasonic partnership. But somehow amid the hoopla of Apple's show, this piece of the picture got a little obscured, and it was the Final Cut Pro HD announcement that lingered as one of the biggest stories of the show.

Why is Panasonic's new deck so important? FireWire. A FireWire cable is the only I/O "hardware" you'll need to import HD into Final Cut. Of course, adding FireWire to a video deck might not seem like that b!g a deal on the surface, especially where DV users have been sending footage to Final Cut and many other editing tools via FireWire for years now. But at 100Mb/Sec, DVCProHD, or DV100 as it is sometimes known, carries four times the data of 25Mb/sec DV. And processing that much data demands a faster PCI bus, faster hard-disk I/O, and a faster CPU.

DVCProHD does mildly compress high-definition video into a proprietary codec format. And editing it in real time requires both support for that codec and the processor strength to decode and encode on the fly. Therefore, as much as anything else, Apple's announcement is about the increasing processing power of its CPUs. They've come a long way since the early days of DV in the mid-1990s.

Nothing in that HD mix is really exclusive to Apple or Final Cut, or at least won't be for very long. As powerful as Apple's processors have become, Intel hasn't been standing on the sidelines, and there's plenty of number crunching power for Windows-based editing applications as well. Naturally, Apple's experience with FireWire--the company did invent it and now integrates it into both its hardware and operating system--has given Final Cut an early advantage working with Panasonic's new deck. However, Windows XP supports FireWire, too. I'd certainly expect to see Windows-based editing companies support the AJ-HD1200A with similar aplomb before too long.