Leopard Envy
I played with two machines running Leopard over the holiday (machines owned by distinctly non-technical friends, by the way) and I have to admit that I want it bad. But I can’t have it, and you probably know why — because I’ve got Media Composer installed. Yes, I could run two machines, or I could partition a drive, but I don’t want to do that. I want and expect to use my laptop for editing and I want to do it transparently and without a restart.
Meanwhile, Final Cut Pro has been Leopard-compatible since mid-November. That’s not so long ago, of course, and I’m sure that Avid isn’t given first dibs on info about Leopard and for that reason it will always be at a disadvantage with respect to OS X compatibility. So I’m willing to wait a while. But I sure hope Avid is working hard on this issue. So far, all I’ve heard is “Mac OSX Leopard and Microsoft Vista support is planned for a future release.” I sure hope that means “very soon.”
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Splice Now 
January 3, 2008 at 4:11 pm
My understanding is that Avid is waiting for specs on the new Mac hardware which will be announced presumably at Macworld in a couple weeks. Those machines may not run anything but Leopard and Avid didn’t want to have to work on being compatible with Leopard and then develop once again for the new hardware.
Sadly, I am not expecting compatibility with Leopard until roughly May, and given the track record with bugginess and new OS’, I am prepared to wait even longer for a solid version.
January 11, 2008 at 8:20 am
Well, the new Mac Pro is out, a bit ahead of Macworld, and the architecture doesn’t seem all that different to me. Different video card (but this was available before), faster PCI Express, and different memory controller. Seems like it’s an incremental change with the same basic architecture.
In general, I’m very disappointed by all of this. Avid needs to get closer to Apple’s development cycle. It took them forever to get on Tiger. Each of these delays hurts the bottom line and pushes people to FCP.
If I was buying a system right now, I’d want the fastest computer I could get and that would be a new MacPro — and I wouldn’t be able to have one.
Patrick — if you have to put together a new Mac-based Adrenaline, what do you do for a CPU?
January 11, 2008 at 11:23 am
Avid, along with a lot of manufacturers and for that matter even Apple field employees, do not get a lot of insight to details of new hardware or software releases from Apple. Avid’s bigger issue with the MediaComposer is the software was not written with an abstraction layer which allows the flexibility to easily port to new hardware or new OS’s. I was hoping that Apple would, like Microsoft does, sell older OS systems on new hardware. Apple does not do that. Key Code Media stocked 75 Tiger Macpro systems at the Tiger OS end of life. Our Apple rep asked us what we would do once we ran out of Tiger systems. We are testing the MacPro Leopard systems with XP. My understanding is that the MediaComposer will be qualified by May 08 for Leopard.
February 12, 2008 at 1:31 pm
The problem here is Avid’s development schedule takes nothing into account except its own internal calendar. Product development is handled very poorly in terms of outside trends. With the new executive structure, I really hope that Avid will start to become less insular and flow with the changing landscape a bit better.
We’re testing the Leopard versions very soon so it won’t be long but I agree, the development schedules need to be better synced with Major changes a little better.