This week the Manager, TSU, attended the AUC's Digital Voyages Conference for Academics and Developers in Adelaide. His attendance at the conference was sponsored by the AUC in return for his running the Final Cut Pro 4 and DVD Studio Pro 2 pre-conference workshop last Sunday.
He comments that, as a filmmaker, he feels that this version 4 of Final Cut Pro is the first digital video editing program that effectively can work without additional proprietary hardware add-ons. The workshop was a very effective demonstration of using a professional video editing product on what are essentially desktop computers.
TSU Network Manager is also at the conference, and attended another of the pre-conference workshops, on Mac OS X Lab Management, as a participant.
One of the recurring themes of the conference is the power of the current Macintosh operating system, OS X (ten, not 'ex'). The fourth major release of this unix-based operating system, OS X 10.3 (codenamed 'Panther'), is due before the end of this calendar year, and it shows great maturity. The Division should seriously consider an active program of adopting the upcoming release as the standard operating system for its Macintosh computers in labs and on desktops.
