For long enough, Apple has lagged behind Grass Valley’s Edius offering, or even Adobe Premiere, but the loyalists have stuck with their stunted versions of Final Cut Pro and found workarounds for what they needed, not with the cost of time or money, though.

Today, I opened the App Store and was presented with an extremely oh-you-will-not-miss-it eye-catching pane that highlights the new offering from Apple. It also has links to the Motion and Compressor packages. Price-wise, it is simply fabulous. Final Cut Pro X is priced at USD299.99, while the other 2 products are USD49.99 each.

From the official Apple press release, it states:

At the heart of Final Cut Pro X is the Magnetic Timeline, a trackless approach to editing your footage that lets you add and arrange clips wherever you want them, while other clips instantly slide out of the way. You can use Clip Connections to link primary story clips to other elements like titles and sound effects, so they stay in perfect sync when you move them. You can even combine related story elements into a Compound Clip that can be edited as a single clip. The groundbreaking new Auditions feature lets you swap between a collection of clips to instantly compare alternate takes.

Professionals in the industry seem to like it, and one of the comments heard is:

I’m blown away by what Apple has done with Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro X is incredibly modern and fast, but most importantly it lets you focus on telling your story in the most creative way, while it actively manages all of the technical details.
Angus Wall, Academy Award-winning film editor

Features I’m going to love about FCP X are:

• Auto-syncing of audio files (goodbye PluralEyes)
• Background rendering – do you know how much time this will save???
• Image stabilization – woohooo…
• Audio clean up – eliminate rumbles and hums upon ingest. Wow!
• Color matching - Select a clip, pick another to color match it to. Boom, it’s done!
• 64-bit capabilities – time to stock up on more RAM to juice up the machines!
• Multi-processor support – simultaneous operations can occur, and save time!

Here are some screenshots taken from the Apple App Store.

To have a sneak preview of what the software is all about, take a look at what user FinaCutKing has to say in his YouTube video.

The best quote from the video is: “Remember to live life as if every day were your last. One day, you will be right”. It makes me ponder whether or not my life is making a difference to others.

This morning on the 1st of January 2011, my iPhone 3Gs (iOS4.x) alarm didn’t go off as scheduled and I thought it strange. My wife’s iPhone 3G (OS3.x)  alarm rang, though. I didn’t give it much thought, until I read a status message on Facebook from a friend whose alarm also didn’t go off.

My dear Steve Jobs, are you trying to ruin the start of the year for many? It’s a really, really bad bug – I’ve already read on forums some cases where people have missed tour bookings due to their alarms not ringing.

It’s not the first time Apple has had bugs with their alarms either – they’ve had similar problems due to daylight savings too.

Time for me to go traditional, I guess… Especially since I’ve got flights to catch and events to go to in a different time zone over the next few days. Let’s hope this bug only affects the world today, otherwise the iPhone will surely be the disaster for many.

Alex signing out and heading to the airport for a flight to Bangladesh…
01.01.2011

For the uninitiated, here’s some news for you – your existing SIM cards CAN be converted to Micro SIMs easily and without having to pay extra dollars to your local telco. Of course, there are Micro SIM cutters that you can buy, but why bother, if you’re only going to ever cut up one of your SIM cards?

What if I make a mistake? Well, you were going to go to your telco and get a new SIM card anyway, weren’t you? No risk here. Having said that, please don’t lambast me if your DIY skills aren’t up to par.

Here’s what you need before we get started (feels like a college science experiment already).

A SHARP pair of scissors
An ACCURATE ruler – don’t go cutting up your SIM cards while using a free Ikea paper tape
A fine-tip permanent marker pen – I used an OHP marker

This is the job brief – turn a 15x25mm SIM card into a compact 12x15mm Micro SIM.

Dump the “unsmart” Nokia, and move to the “slightly-smarter-iPhone4″.

Here’s the Micro SIM holder for the iPhone4, and the regular sized SIM card that needs to fit into it.

With your fine-tip marker pen, draw out the outlines and centralize the golden chip at all times. I coloured in the area that corresponds with the nicked corner, so that I don’t “forget” which way is up.

Brandishing the SHARP scissors, I began cutting along the lines, exactly as drawn. If in doubt, cut slightly less – you can refine it later. Nick the corner you marked out earlier, with the same angle.

When done, try and insert the new Micro SIM into the holder. If it doesn’t fit, shave off a bit more of the plastic.

Insert it face down. Hopefully it will fit snugly. If not, continue shaving to size.

If it works (which it should), do remember TheBackpackr and send over some love!

We had several early-adopters of the iPad join in for a discussion on how they use their toy for work and play. We heard from Ben Israel (then Digital Strategy Director at Integricity Interactive), Niki Cheong (avid blogger & The Star journalist), Toh (founder of mytechnews.info) and Warren Tan (Managing Director of Integricity Interactive).

I’ve been working with video for more than a year now and have learnt so much over that period. I really want to thank my wife Grace who runs her video/photography company called Stories for teaching me so much. Now, I teach her stuff too!

With all these awesome videos, I want to show them off on our iPhones and iPad. Digging around for the best and optimum video settings to compress to is just a pain. I’ve summarized my options here for you (and skipped all the lengthy explanations).

When converting / compressing videos, I use Handbrake – it’s an excellent FREE software.

Standard settings for all devices

Format: MP4
Video Codec: H.264
Framerate: Same as source
Quality: Constant quality: 100%

The only settings that differ between devices are the Picture Settings. Click on the button and set Anamorphic to None, check Keep aspect ratio, then adjust the width as shown below. All widths are in pixels (px).

iPad / iPhone 4

General info: iPad screen resolution: 1024 x 768
General info: iPhone 4 screen resolution: 960 x 640

If compressing HD / Blu-ray videos (or anything wider than 1024px), set width to 1024 (height will automatically adjust accordingly)
If compressing DVD, set width to 720  (DVD resolution is SMALLER than your iPad, so we don’t want to blow it up unnecessarily)

iPhone 3 / iPhone 3Gs

General info: iPhone 3 & iPhone 3Gs screen resolution: 480 x 320
Set width to 480 (height will automatically adjust accordingly)

* Disclaimer: I don’t claim to be a guru on all things video related, but these settings work for me. If you encounter issues, do leave a comment and let me know. All the best.

If you’re as big a fan of watching movie clips via VLC as me, you’ll be thrilled to know it’s now available on the iPad. Ever since discovering this awesome, FREE app, I have used it to watch every single movie I have. It plays just about every single format and codec known to man. Here’s what VLC themselves say about their app.

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework, that plays most multimedias files and various streaming protocols.

It is simple to use, yet very powerful and extendable.

VLC has all codecs built-in. It comes with support for nearly all codec there is. And what is more it can even play back the file or media if it is damaged! Missing or broken pieces are no stop to VLC, it plays all the video and audio information that’s still intact.

Having this on the iPad means you don’t have to spend hours performing convoluted conversions from AVI files to proprietary M4V files any longer. You can pretty much just drag your downloaded “legal” movie files into iTunes and have them transferred for viewing via VLC.

Transferring video files from computer to iTunes to iPad

To transfer video files from your computer, you need to do it via iTunes and the Apps tab. Scroll to the bottom and you will see the file sharing section (to be honest, I think a lot of these features are hard to find due to the bloat in iTunes over the years). This section shows which files can be accessed by the respective apps.

After you sync your iPad, and fire up the VLC app, you’ll see a selection screen with a thumbnail of your video file.

Click on it, and voila… that’s how your video will look like on the iPad. It uses simple, standard controls to navigate your video.

Today, the Daily Mail, UK’s 2nd biggest-selling newspaper made a boo boo by quoting a parody Twitter account, thinking it was the REAL Steve Jobs. Many of us who spend copious amounts of time on Twitter are familiar with the popular @ceoSteveJobs account that spews lots of funny one-liners aimed to poke fun at all-things-Apple.

So, what did the parody account say? Just 13 simple words.

We may have to recall the new iPhone. This, I did not expect. – @ceoSteveJobs

Then, the Daily Mail went on to publish the following news piece online.

I can only imagine how embarrassing it must be for the newspaper, when the entire twittersphere picked up on their mistake and started *rolling their eyes* at the gross misreporting.

Soon after, the article was pulled from the Daily Mail, but a copy still remains here at TheBackpackr.com – read it, if you wish. At the same time, a seemingly similar post (view here) with the same imagery was found on the Daily Mail, though dated earlier. Bizarre.

This iMaxi product with wings is probably slated as a gag that will humiliate that insane Apple fanboy/fangirl in your life who incessantly talks about Apple, Apple, APPLE. It’s fairly cheap to give away as a crazy gift, but I wouldn’t be caught dead with one. If you’re really, really keen on getting one, go on to their store here.

And just in case you haven’t seen one of my favourite spoof ads that came out hours after the launch of the iPad, here it is.

Here’s Bill Gates of Microsoft fame – note the snide comments to Steve Jobs. Looks at the contextual advertisement that appeared on the right hand column too!

And now, Steve Jobs, the man who brought us Apple computers (and nearly Apple everything these days!). Once again, note the advertising on the right.