[Tig] Apple Acquires Silicon Color

[Perry Paolantonio]

>That would be "Spruce", very nice people, great product for the price.
>Their authoring (it didn't encode) software became DVD Studio Pro 2 I

In fact, it did. Spruce made two hardware encoders over the years - 
the MPX 2000 and MPX 3000, as well as two hardware dolby encoders - a 
2 and a 6 channel version. I've owned all of them except for the 
surround encoder, and still use Spruce Maestro daily, with the 
MPX3000 encoder.

Apple did an excellent job of killing off a great product and making 
something that only works properly if you know what not to do with 
it. What worries me about the way they operate is that they tend to 
push towards software only solutions and that doesn't always work - 
in the case of Maestro, they eliminated hardware encoding and 
realtime decoding of MPEG2. Certainly with the right software 
encoders, one can get much nicer looking MPEG than with hardware 
encoders, but the lack of hardware decoders is really a problem. I 
mean, imagine trying to grade a film without being able to see it on 
a proper monitor, just your computer's LCD.

To their credit, Apple added a couple of very cool features to DVD 
Studio Pro that hadn't made it into Maestro yet, but the problems 
they introduced more than offset those couple of features.

-perry
(never worked for spruce or apple, but i did beta test DVD SP and I 
own two maestro systems)