Product Reviews

For digital video professionals Apple has gone a long way to covering all the bases - Final Cut Pro and Shake are both 'best in class' products, but a new open-source application is attempting to challenge both - and at the very highest end. Jahshaka is billed as a real-time uncompressed digital video editor, animation and real-time effects compositing application. But is it any good?

Jahshaka is based on SGI's OpenGL technologies and built in to Mac OS X. It is developed using SGI's technologies because they're powerful and portable; Jahshaka is also available for SGI IRIX, Linux and Windows.

If this sounds like a pipe dream, particularly as it comes from the open-source world where projects are frequently announced but never finished, it's reassuring that Jahshaka hasn't been developed solely for the love of coding. The Jamaica-based developers plan to sell custom support packages to studios and broadcasters rather than package the application, not uncommon in the Unix world. The project is proceeding with support from major names including HP, Red Hat, Nvidia, Trolltech and Intel, but, tellingly, not Apple.

It has already borne fruit other than the main application: the GPUMathLib and OpenMediaLib, two free software libraries. GPUMathLib is designed for real-time GPU-accelerated effects and currently powers the RasFx, a group of 12 plug-ins that can be applied in real time to anything from web video up to 4K film. OpenMediaLib allows developers to easily implement cross-platform support for any media file format as long as they how to open a file and read out a frame.

As for Jahshaka itself, the interface is like Apple's compositing application, Shake, in that it's entirely un-Mac-like. But it's simple enough to understand. It has been

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developed using the open-source QuickTime libraries from Trolltech that form the basis of the KDE desktop in Linux, but Jahshaka doesn't need X11, KDE or any other special Unix libraries to be installed on the Mac. Anyone familiar with the high end of video and film, particularly using ultra-expensive applications such as Discreet Flame or SGO Mistika, will feel at home immediately - at least as at home as you can be in such complex environments.

All work is done from within one window that can be switched between animation, editing, effects, paint and text CG. Files in use are stored in the 'desktop'. Not to be confused with the Mac's desktop, it's a dumping ground for video and graphics objects to be used in the project.

Jahshaka is currently an alpha-test release and as such is relatively stable, but did crash twice during our testing. A more serious consideration is that it currently only works with a limited selection of media file-types.

In fact, until recently, the Mac OS X version was unable to even export Mpeg files, making it next to useless. However, development is moving at a fast pace and QuickTime support is due to be finished by the end of February 2005 using the OpenMediaLib library.

Criticisms are that chroma keying is currently quite primitive and there's no motion tracking or warping. Editing is a simple, timeline-based process, but work is done on raw video material, usually in the form of still images. As for video formats, importing and exporting is limited to Mpegs 1 and 2 only.

Jahshaka is best described as a work in progress, and its developer says it won't be fully ready until version 2.5 or 3, but the concept of the program is so exciting that it's impossible to ignore. As it develops it could easily begin to challenge the big names in film and video work, but at present shouldn't be used for any production work. Anyone thinking of using it instead of Final Cut Pro should think again - even when it's finished it will be a different application aiming for a different market. Jahshaka's strength is in real-time effects and compositing, not in easy-to-use DV editing for which it's overkill and, at present, too unstable.

If it develops as promised, Jahshaka could become a revolutionary tool for independent film makers on tight budgets. At present, it's worth downloading just to play with.