Article courtesy of the IBC and the IBC Daily News.
Saturday 14 September 2023
Apple welcomed to AAF fold
Mark Horton, AAF (right) with Apple's Bill Hudson: Commitment to open systems
by David Fox
Users of Apple's popular Final Cut Pro nonlinear editor will soon be able to exchange files directly with high-end post production systems like Quantel's iQ, after the computer manufacturer signed up yesterday to the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) at IBC.
"It's critical that Apple continues to be a full part of the production and post production process, and AAF is the future for media interchange," commented Bill Hudson, Apple's strategic accounts manager for professional systems.
"We've always been a strong advocate of open standards. We've been pushing formats into the production world, like QuickTime and FireWire, to allow our products to interoperate with the rest of the industry," added Dave Edwards, the company's director of product marketing for professional applications.
For interchange, AAF was the next logical step. "AAF allows us to interchange material with all the other products. It will be very important to us as we expand our market share in the industry," Edwards added.
AAF Marketing Director Mark Horton remarked: "The folks at the AAF Association are delighted to welcome Apple aboard at IBC. There is a huge fan base of Apple users, and this is another stage in extending AAF interoperability into the widest possible community. Plus, they're just good guys to have around. The whole deal with AAF, why it started, was that people coming into the industry for the first time couldn't believe how difficult it was to move stuff around. It was very much islands of interoperability and then nothing."
At IBC, AAF can be seen in action on shipping products in acquisition, graphics, compositing, editing, news production, archiving and colour grading on a wide variety of stands, including Panasonic, Leitch, BBC Technology, Pandora and Quantel. "Those are widely different types of companies, doing widely different kinds of things," commented Horton.
Also at IBC, SGI has announced that it has also joined AAF. Other recent recruits include Da Vinci, Nucoda and The Post Group.
When Final Cut Pro is AAF-compliant, users will be able to edit offline on an Apple PowerBook then email the AAF files to a Quantel machine for high-end finishing, said Tom McDonald, who was Apple's worldwide product manager for Final Cut Pro before joining Quantel as director of market development just before IBC. "The AAF glue will bring all those great systems together and provide more workflow flexibility and choice," he added.
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