Dahnielson

I have started to collect screenshots of different compositors, both old and new, for my own amusement and to study user interface design.

Drew Perttula, über-rayz-user, sent me a number of screenshots from Rayz. Rayz was the successor to Chalice and incorporated technology from Cineon but was sadly enough scrapped in favour of Shake when Apple bought Silicon Grail. Drew was also eager to discuss user interface design at lenght.

This will come handy when I’m designing the GUI for melies fx.

I also spent this weekend researching support for Automatic Duck in melies fx. The plugins that Automatic Duck offers on their homepage export and import OMF data files, a file format created in 1992 by Avid that few applications supported in the begining. As it turns out the OMF file format is dead — dead as in burried-6-feet-under — Avid even try to pretend that it never existed and when one visit the OMFI homepage all you get are either redirected to the frontpage of avid.com or a 404 page.

The reason for all this is the new AAF format created by Avid, Adobe, Discreet, Microsoft, Matrox, Pinnacle, Sony and Sonic Foundry. But it’s ironic that the last couple of years — when AAF have been under development — more and more software sporting OMF have begun to pop up … as the world turns.

But I’ve recieved reports that Automatic Duck has been showing AAF version of their plugins lately at conferences.