I can sum up my opinion of the new Macintosh AV technologies in one
word: cool. This is not your average, everyday 'cool' though. It's one
of those long drawn-out, very empathitc and emotional utterances of the
word. A more appropriate spelling might be
'Coooooooooooooollllll.........' And it would be followed by a
meaningful smile. Cool. Yes indeedy.
Now that I've shared this professional, high-tech opinion with you,
let me tell you how I arrived at it. I've been working with the AV
technologies on my desk for about two months now. There was an
incredibly high 'Wow-factor' upon opening the box, and I admit that I
basically showed off for the next several days. I was amazed at all the
stuff the machine could do, and I hope that my impromptu audience was
equally impressed. If not, they did an excellent job of acting. Soon,
though, the newness wore off and I was back to business as usual.
Except that, in some cases, work life became a little more interesting.
The AV-based Macintosh models are two of the latest model rollouts
from Apple. Named the Quadra 660AV and the Quadra 840AV, these
computers are designed on the same technologies as the other Quadra
units. Both run on the Motorola 68040 CPU (25MHz and 40 MHz,
respectively), both sport the built-in FPU, both have built-in Ethernet
and video, and both come with high-density floppy disk drives and can
have optional CD-ROM drives installed. In just about every respect,
these units are equivalent to other Quadra units, with the 840AV having
the fastest CPU of any Macintosh ever.
What seperates these Macintoshes from any other Mac ever made is the
addition of an AT&T DSP chip and a new
video and graphics
architecture. The video subsystem allows for input and output of SVHS
or composite video (NTSC, SECAM, and PAL formats for the techies). The
DSP (digital signal processor) allows the AVs to process 16-bit,
CD-quality audio both in and out of the computer. The DSP also can be
used for telephony and data communications, emulating a 14.4k baud
error-correcting modem in software. The understated crowning
achievement of the hardware is that it now can interpret real-time
speaker-independent voice commands through the DSP and some very
elaborate software.
The one item that makes these machines very attractive, however, is
the small price difference between the AV equipped Macintosh and a
"regular" Macintosh. For example, a Quadra 660AV is roughly a couple
hundred dollars less than a similarly equipped 650. And the Quadra
840AV is only a few hundred dollars more than a similarly quipped Quadra
800. So where Apple could easily have inflated the price on these units
without difficult, they chose to keep the cost competitive with the
remaining product line, and the goal being to get this technology into
the hands of those who might not have had it before. Like myself, for
instance.
As I mentioned earlier, the first few days I had my AV I spent
mostly exploring the new capabilities of the machine. But as I got back
into my working routine, it didn't appear the features would be all that
useful. Voice recognition is nice, but is it really effective or useful
enough for daily use? How often am I going to be digitizing digital
audio? Since I don't have a CR or TV with cable in my office, how can I
watch TV in the background, and am I going to be digitizing audio that
frequently? My immediate answer to all these questions was negative. I
didn't know at the time how the new functionality could work into my
daily routine. I came to learn that dealing with this technology had a
completely different kind of learning curve
Admittedly, I'm writing this article from the experienced side of
the coin now, and I've learned quite a bit about how the technology can
be used. In fact, as I sit here typing away, I have a CD playing in the
background from the internal CD-ROM drive. This is something that could
be done before, but not in 16-bit stereo at 44.1kHZ, which is CD
sampling frequency. Anyway, I've found that in at least two cases with
this computer, more is better. I refer to both internal memory and hard
disk space in this statement. As I see it, to really take the advantage
of more than one aspect of the AV technologies simotaneously, a minimum
of 16MB of RAM is necessary. All the features can be used with less,
but they'll be used at one time. Dosk space is also a valuble commodity
when digitizing audio or video, as files are created when doing this
will generally e in the tens to hundreds of megabytes in sizes. A
230MBdrive is minimum, 500MB is better and a 1GB or more is even better.
An ideal configuration would be to have a 500MB internal drive and a
1GB or larger external drive. But, of course, not that many of us can
go down to Joe's Computer Store and walk out with a high-capacity drive
when the mood strikes.
Before continuing with my description of the different aspects of
the AV technology suite, let me say that the AV is not for everyone.
Every new Mac shipping today will play back stereo audio and digital
video in the form of QuickTime
movies. This functionally is present in
the system hardware (audio) and software (video). If your interests lie
in viewing multimedia applications or taking existing multimedia pieces
and putting them together into a production, then you don't need the
extra hardware on AVs. I'd suggest, in fact, that you take the savings
on purchasing a lesser machine and put it into disk space or extra
memory. But, if you want to generate multimedia as the elemental level
by digitizing your own audio clips or capturing video or animations to
disk, then the AV is an indispensable tool for you.
We'll begin our look into AV technologies with the enchanced audio
capabilitites. Since the introduction of the MacII, all Macintosh
computers have been able to play 8-bit stereo audio with 8, 11, and
22kHz. You had to attach a set of headphone or eternal speakers to hear
the stereo, but it was there. Several companies developed third-party
solutions for captuing audio in stereo to the Mac, and in a few cases
these add-on could digitize at frequencies higher than 22kHz, but very
few claimed to give full CD-quality 44.1kHz sampling.
The addition of the AT&T DSP to the AV Macs allows the computer
to digitize and play back 16-bit audio clips in stereo from 8kHz to
48kHz, ahigher sampling rate than CD. Headphones or extrenal speakers
are still needed to hear the stereo playback in full, but the Aduio
Visual monitor can be connected to the AV Mac to play stereo audio back
through its built-in Bose speakers (and let me tell you, the audio
quality of those little speakers is incredible!) Digitizing stereo
audio is as simple as plugging a stereo input into the microphone jack
on the back of the Mac and pressing the record button. Under System 7
(System
7.1 comes shipped on the AV Macs), samples can be saved
into system sound files, playable on any System 7 Macintosh, although some
audio quality will be lost playing back a sound file on a non-AV Mac.
High-quality audio sampling is expensive in terms of disk space. At
the highest-quality input setting, 16-bit stereo at 48kHz, 4 bytes are
written to disk 48,000 times per second. That translates to about
190KB/second. For a three minute sound file, that equates to about 33MB
on disk. Even though some audio enthusiasts insist that you can hear a
difference in quality between a 48kHz sample and a 44.1kHz sample, many
others will say the difference in indistinguishable. Even dropping down
to 44.1kHz sampling, the same three minute audio file drops in size to
around 30MB. A 22kHz sampling drops to 15MB. Dropping the recording
quality to mono or 8-bit would halve each of these predicted sizes. The
point here though is that we're a long way away from being able to copy
our favorite CD onto 1.4MB floppy disk to play back on another computer.
Capturing and digitizing video has become a popular activity, either
for getting information for a multimedia presentation, or just for
sharing clips from your favorite TV shows with friends (the latter
activity violates copyright laws and is generally frowned upon). Video
capturing boards such as the Video Spigot and Video Vision, from
SuperMac and Radius respectively, have allowed Mac video junkies to
digitize video into QuickTime movies for a couple of years. These
add-on cards tend to be rather expensive, though, and have generally
been available only to true enthusiasts or the truly wealthy. Some of
these solutions were combined with video accelerators so any video
captured using them was replayable only on similar systems. Performance
quality vanished completely if a movie was played back on a "regular"
system.
The video subsystem on the AV Macs handily tackles this issue and
another important one, displaying Mac video on an external monitor, like
a TV. There are four video ports on the back of the AV Macintosh: an
RCA composite video in, an RCA video composite out, an SVHS in, and an
SVHS out. The AV Macs have an app called the FusionRecorder installed
on the disk. This app, part of the VideoFusion QuickTime editing suite,
allows you to capture video from the composite or SVHS input jack to a
QuickTime movie. You can capture video at 160x120 pixels, 320X240
pixels, or at 640X480 (full screen resolution). Other video capturing
applications may allow you to capture video at different resolutions,
such as Passport Producer Pro that can capture at any custom resolution.
The "better is more" caveat applies here also. Each frame of a
160x120 video clip digitized in 8-bit color, minus audio, occupies
18.75K of space uncompressed. At 15 frames per second, each second of
video occupies 281.25K of disk space. The larger resolutions and
larger bit-depth captures get increasingly larger. To take the same
image in 24-bit color format, each from will occupy 56.25K of disk
uncompressed, while a second of video, captured at 15 frames oer second,
will occupy 843.75K of disk space. So, to capture full-screen images at
full-motion speeds (30 frames per second) in 8-bit color, you need
8.79MB of disk space for each second of video, or 300K per frame.
Needless to say, without some form of image compression, full-screen
full-motion digitizing is not yet possible even on the Quadra 840AV.
QuickTime does have several compression algorithms available for
digitizing and playing back video clips. In fact, QuickTime does not
work with raw video. Every video clip digitized for QuickTime is
compressed, even minimally. The compression alogorithm offer a variety
of compression ratios, but each has a price to pay. Generally, the
higher the compression ration, the poorer the video quality. Apple's
highest-compression alogorithm, called "Cinepark," compressed a
two-minute video clip I digitized in 16-bit color from over 200MB to
under 8MB of disk space. The quality on the final clip was usable and,
given the relative newness of video clips in local presentations, still
had a high "wow factor." The tradeoff? It took over 90 minutes to
compress the clip. Of the four clips I digitized for the presentation,
most were compressed right after I left work, during my lunch break, or
while I was off at meetings. It's possible to do other work on your Mac
while compressing in the background, but neither process benefits from
doing so.
One does not have to digitize video to take advantage of the video
technologies in AV, however. The AV Macs ship with Video Monitor, an
app that displays a video signal from either the composite or SVHS input
on the monitor at QuickTime window sizes (160x120, 320x240, or 640x480).
This is handy for viewing video promotions, training videos, or "The
Simpsons" (the latter being done off the clock or behind closed doors,
also not recommended). Video Monitor can also "grab" a frame of video
to the clipboard for inclusion in another program. This is highly
useful for taking "video snapshots" of people or other objects for a
variety of uses. You can simply connect a camcorder to the video while
running Video Monitor and grab whatever the camera sees to the
clipboard.
Video conferencing is not only popular in business and education
these days, but also relatively easy to do with the AVs. A video
conferencing program called ESoF2F ships on the AV that, when connected
to a comcorder or other camera input, allows point-to-point video
conferencing between Macs connected via Ethernet. This program only
transmits video, not audio, and Ethernet is recommended because of the
vast amount of video data being pumped across the network. We have
tested this minimally across an Ethernet connection and saw fairly good
throughput. I'd rather not think about what might happen across a basic
AppleTalk connection. This demo application is upgradable to the full
version that also handles video "whiteboarding," passing the Macintosh
screen data as well as the video across the wire. How is audio handled
in the full version? Same as the demo: pick up the phone.
And last, but not least, on our video tour, is the ability to direct
the screen display to a TV monitor instead of a Macintosh or other
compatible monitor. For years many third party solutions have been
available that redirect the video output to a TV signal for display on
TV monitor, or even to capture to videotape. This ca now be done
internally by telling the Monitors Control Panel to send the output to
an extrenal video source and connecting either a video camera or VCR to
the composite output of the Mac. This is useful for taping the screen
activity for use in another type of production (such as a training
video) or for demonstrating use in a training classroom where an LCD
overhead display may not be available. The downside to this method is
that the upper and lower portions of the screen are lost due to
television's overscanning the video signal for display. Essentially,
you lose the screen space of the upper and lower portions of the
display. This can be somewhat annoying, especially when trying to
display some use of the menu. In this arena, the third party video
conversion solutions have an edge over the built in video. The use of
an external monitor from the Mac disables the computer monitor, whereas
other products display both images simultaneously. But, if your use
will be mainly for presentations using slide shows (such as from
a<
href="http://www.microsoft.com/mspowerpoint/default.htm">PowerPoint or
Persuasion), the internal video output is more than sufficient.
Another aspect of the DSP chip on the AV that I've been using
frequently is the telephony capabilities. Through software, the DSP
chip can emulate a 14.4kbps error-correcting fax modem. The GeoPort
connects the DSP to the outside world through a variety of means,
including standard telephone. ISDN, and others. Currently, only the
telephone adapter is available, but others will arrive in the near
future.The telecom adaptor connects a standard RJ11 phone line to your
Mac, enabling the use of the fax modem. The GeoPort extensions
extensions make the telecom adapter look like an Apple Express Modem. I
use ZTerm to connect to our local 14.4 error-correcting dialups,
AppleLink to get information from Apple directly, and America Online for
entertainment. I've sent and received faxes on campus and acorss the
country. I've even used AppleTalk Remote Access to dail into my Mac
from a PowerBook out of town to read mail and copy files back and forth.
All without purchasing a modem
Another app that ships with AV is ApplePhone. When used with a
GeoPort and a microphone, ApplePhone turns your Macintosh into a speaker
phone. This may seem quite toyish at first, but is useful for those of
use who get cramps holding the phone with out shoulders while continuing
to type at our keyboards. ApplePhone also has a built-in answering
machine that will answer the phone after four rings, play an outgoing
message, and digitize an incoming message for later retrieval. This
application is basic in its functionality, but really shows the
potentional of the telephony applications to come. It's now possible to
create a program that would allow your Mac to operate like one of those
common (and oh, so annoying) voice mail systems that would direct call
("To speak with someone in sales, please press '1'"), take a message for
a particular person ("Hi, this is Bob..."), and play back recorded
messages over the phone line ("Press '3' to hear your messages"). There
are now also heaadset devices that combine a microphone and earphone in
a single unit for use with AV Macs. It's a dream device for shoulder
cramp sufferers everywhere.
As I mentioned earlier, the voice
recognition of the AV didn't really strike me as very practical when I
first experimented with it. Sure, I could get it to select menu options
from any application I had open. Sure, I could get it to select
standard dialog box buttons. Sure, I could get it to shut off my Mac
when I was done for the day (like I really ever turn it off, anyway).
But except for a few bells and whistles, it didn't seem tobe all that
useful. That's when I discovered speech macros.
The Speech Macro Editor shipped with the AV is one of the workhorses
behind the smoke and mirrors of speech technology. The speech macro
library that comes with the AV will have your computer tell you what
time it is, what day it is, and will even greet you pleasantly. This
discovery led to a large number of speech response macros. For example,
the computer's response to "Computer, location of Commander Riker" is
"Commander Riker is not on board the Enterprise." Similarly, "Computer,
when is Eriq's birthday?" results in "Eriq's birthday is January 4th."
The wonderful part of this is that your AV could quickly become your
dummy partner in a stand-up routine. Hopefully, the computer will have
more important uses than that.
Still, though, this was all bells and whistles. These weren't
really anything substantially useful that voice recognition could do.
So, for a couple of months, "Computer" didn't listen to me (I turned it
off). Then, when poking around in the Speech Macro Editor (while
researching this article), I discovered that the speech macros were
actually scripts, and they could be based on AppleScript or QuickKeys
scipts. This discovery lef to two solid days of playing around with
QuickKeys Test Drive (which comes shipped on the AV) and the QuickKeys
scripting. After several failed attempts, I came up with some QuickKeys
scripts that were actually useful. My personal favorite, and one I
still use frequently, is a voice command that sets the color depth on my
monitor. Some programs don't like to run in a video setting higher than
256 colors, so I have a voice macro that set the monitor to 256 colors
and then runs the application. It sure beats opening the Control Panels
folder, setting the video to 256 colors, closing the Monitors windows
and the Control Panels folder, finding the application on disk, and
running it.
I soon discovered the Script Editor application that comes on the AV which builds AppleScript or QuickKeys scripts and can save them as "executable" icons on the Mac. The script is nice because it will check syntax on all scripts efore running them, and because it can save the scripts as stand-alone icons. It's then possible to create a script that can be run under a speech macro or just by double-clicking the icon without speech even running. Through the Script Editor I was able to begin looking into AppleScript a little deeper and created a number of scripts for use both with and without speech. The nice thing is there's only one script, and I reference it in the speech macro. I finally even found a way to get the speech macro to open my AOCE mailbox. (I won't tell you how that was done. If you want to know, you'll have to ask.) The end result is that I'm now leaving voice recognition turned on most of the time and am making use of it in my day-to-day operations, thanks mainly to the scripting extensions. And I use it to help me remember important birthdays and anniversaries. ("Computer, when is Anna's birthday?")
I guess the final question comes to this. Could I live my life without an AV Macintosh? The answer is a definite 'yes.' I'm not any more productive doing what I normally do daily, although voice recognition has shaved some processing time off repetitive tasks. With the AV technologies, however, I have a completely different world of opportunity at my fingertips. Training applications and tests or quizes can be easily created with audio and video components. Fax and data communication are simplified and quicker on the computer. And voice recognition is not only really cool and mostly useful, but it has the most growth potential for the entire computer industry of any new technology. All in all, the AV technologies are very impressive and affordable, and I hope industry realizes the capabilities and future opportunities they offer. And you, my friend, should go out there and test drive one.
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