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Gee4orce · Oct 28, 2005, 06:10 AM

So, I was at the first day of the Mac Expo at Olympia, London yesterday. There was a G5 set up with Dual 30" monitors (no idea of the spec of the machine) running Apeture. This was constantly demo-ed by an Apple employee, so you couldn't really get hands-on, and there were several presentations in the Apple theatre covering Apeture and what it could do.

Well, got to say thing thing is even better in the flesh then it looked online. The demos went very smoothly and were impressive. The application was very responsive, and looked absolutely gorgeous on twin 30"ers. One part of the demo was cropping a photo, then applying some image adjustments, then going back and adjusting the crop - all the image adjustments remain. The editing actions are non-sequential, so you can alter something earlier in the process without having to re-do things you did later. This alone is fantastic.

Apeture really opens up the power of RAW formats. In one example, they recovered washed out highlights in an image, which would have been impossible working with JPEG, then re-adjusted the quarter tone shadow levels, bringing the shadows back up to the correct exposure. Just amazing.

Apeture was really drawing a LOT of interest. Ironically, Abobe has the very next stand, demoing CS2 and bridge etc. Got to say, next to Apeture, the Abobe apps just look old and tired.

mpancha · Oct 28, 2005, 09:10 AM

Can't wait to be able to actually run Aperture for myself, but it looks like that will be in the very distant future given the minimum requirements.

Gee4orce · Oct 28, 2005, 10:42 AM

Hmm. It's not so much the CPU requirements I'm wondering about - I wonder if it'll be quite the same running on anything less than £3500 worth of pixels.....

mpancha · Oct 28, 2005, 10:58 AM

touche... good point. Putting the possibility of running aperture even farther into the future....

CaptainHaddock · Oct 28, 2005, 11:58 AM

One part of the demo was cropping a photo, then applying some image adjustments, then going back and adjusting the crop - all the image adjustments remain. The editing actions are non-sequential, so you can alter something earlier in the process without having to re-do things you did later. This alone is fantastic.

Aperture is really the first app to show how amazing Tiger and CoreImage are. You really couldn't run that kind of program on anything other than OS X. Since it was being developed at the same time as Tiger, I imagine the Aperture engineers gave the Tiger engineers a lot of feedback on the kinds of things CoreImage had to be capable of.

I can't wait for it to show up at the local Apple store here so I can spend some time playing with it.

It'll be a while before I have a camera and computer that are worth buying it for.

CaptainHaddock · 12:11 PM

I also just read that there is no "save" feature in Aperture. After all, every single change you make to your photos is just an instruction that can be viewed, changed, and deleted at will. I think that's the handiwork of CoreData. Expect to see "save" disappearing from other applications in the future.

Thinine · Oct 28, 2005, 01:48 PM

That machine was likely a quad with a Quadro 4500 (only card capable of driving dual 30" displays) with a bunch of RAM. So what you saw was likely best case scenario.

Cadaver · Oct 28, 2005, 11:38 PM

Originally Posted by Thinine

That machine was likely a quad with a Quadro 4500 (only card capable of driving dual 30" displays) with a bunch of RAM. So what you saw was likely best case scenario.

Could have been an AGP-based G5 with a GeForce 6800-based card. Those too can run two 30" displays.

Lee33 · Oct 29, 2005, 09:04 AM

That machine was likely a quad with a Quadro 4500 (only card capable of driving dual 30" displays) with a bunch of RAM. So what you saw was likely best case scenario.

Yeah, for sure. I guarantee you it was a quad system with the best video card available. Anyone using Aperture without that system can expect slower results.

bowwowman · Oct 29, 2005, 09:06 AM

I think that's the handiwork of CoreData.

exactamundo !

'bout friggin time

littlegreenspud · Oct 30, 2005, 07:20 AM

Originally Posted by Cadaver

Could have been an AGP-based G5 with a GeForce 6800-based card. Those too can run two 30" displays.

It was definitely a quad 2.5 G5 with a quadro 4500. I asked the man demoing Aperture.

dazzla · Oct 30, 2005, 08:27 AM

Jesus, what hope does that leave for us in the real world? Apple need to release a demo of this, could push people to buy new machines as well.

DeathMan · Oct 30, 2005, 10:25 PM

Of course you expect to have slower results if you're not using the latest, greatest everything. That doesn't mean the software will be unusable. This is a next generation software application for next generation hardware. Much like Motion was. I bet Motion would sing on this new Apple hardware.