Apple computer news

CUPERTINO, CA -- Apple (www.apple.com), on the heals of its purchase of the Silicon Grail compositing system product line, has acquired Emagic (www.emagic.de), a provider of software solutions for computer-based music production. The Windows-based applications of Emagic's products will be discontinued effective September 30. Emagic will now operate as a division of Apple.

Apple's Silicon Grail purchase brought the Rayz and Chalice products under the Apple umbrella at the end of June. Rayz is a compositing system designed to run on Linux, IRIX, Windows and Mac OS X. Chalice includes effects and color correction tools. Silicon Grail software was used in films such as Titanic and Men in Black. The software is similar to the Nothing Real product line, which was acquired by Apple in February. At press time, Apple declined to comment about the acquisition or the future of the product line.

What they did talk about though, was the availability of the compositing/visual effects software Shake V.2.5, which is now available for Mac OS X. Shake was added to the Apple family last year when it purchased Nothing Real.

V.2.5 adds an improved image input, a disk-based proxy system and the ability to limit the rendering process to a portion of an image for quicker processing. It will be available in August for Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX and Windows platforms. For Mac OS X it will cost $4,950 with annual maintenance cost of $1,199. For Linux, IRIX and Windows platforms it costs $9,900 with an annual maintenance of $1,495. Existing Shake customers can double the number of existing licenses at no additional cost by migrating to Mac OS X.

So what do other compositing system manufacturers think of Apple's recent purchases?

Well, Steve Roberts, CEO of Toronto-based Eyeon Software, had this to say: "Apple is putting together some pretty serious compositing programming talent. Nothing Real, Silicon Grail and the Discreet Combustion programming team to name a few. They want to get that creative/video production side back onto the Mac. They did very well with the prepress revolution (ie, newsletters), now it's the same thing with editing and creative production. For Eyeon it has been great Suddenly our competition has been disappearing from our platform (Windows) at the very time we are expanding, and releasing major product enhancements."