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A Mac Pro prediction
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For so many years I’ve chanted “never buy a Dell” to people who complain about their problems with them. There are lots of good makes – I lean towards Asus myself.
I can add to that – never use a laptop as a Hackintosh. It almost certainly won’t work. You need to go to https://tonymacx86.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/CustoMac Buy your choice of stuff on the list and install software as directed. It will work – I’ve done two, one of which is right here, though it gets very little use these days. Works perfectly doing all the Mac stuff required.
Still don’t understand “debug Windows”. Should I be debugging this machine and all the other Windows computers I look after? They do seem to be working perfectly well without me fiddling with them, just like all the other millions in the world.
Bernie
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[Chris Kenny] “I think you’re right that we’ll see a redesigned enclosure with less internal expansion. If it’s really four Thunderbolt ports and two and PCIe slots, it’ll be fine. It’ll annoy some people, but it’ll fundamentally do everything a “pro” Mac needs to do.”
GPU, Red Rocket, RAID card — oops, three cards, two slots. Two GPUs, Red Rocket — oops, three cards, two slots. Two GPUs, RAID card — oops, three cards, two slots. Three GPUS — oops, three cards, two slots.
Next-generation Thunderbolt could help there on the storage side (if the controllers and peripherals would be ready in time), as it wouldn’t be bandwidth-limited like current Thunderbolt/4x PCIe RAID controllers. A 2013 Mac Pro with 1 or 2 PCIe slots and any number of first-generation Thunderbolt would be a disappointment, though, because there would be bottlenecks built into the system.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “GPU, Red Rocket, RAID card — oops, three cards, two slots. Two GPUs, Red Rocket — oops, three cards, two slots. Two GPUs, RAID card — oops, three cards, two slots. Three GPUS — oops, three cards, two slots.
Next-generation Thunderbolt could help there on the storage side (if the controllers and peripherals would be ready in time), as it wouldn’t be bandwidth-limited like current Thunderbolt/4x PCIe RAID controllers.”
Thunderbolt seems to be able to achieve real-world speeds of about 700 MB/s for external storage, and for all we know that’s limited by the storage controller in the R6 and it could go higher — Thunderbolt’s theoretical maximum bandwidth is a full 1250 MB/s and its design indicates it should have fairly low overhead. Vanishingly few users, even in pro video, actually need more than 700 MB/s.
Resolve (probably the most demanding widely used app) as of version 9 has much-improved single-GPU performance (to the point where there are now single-GPU systems in the official configuration guide), and of course OS X now supports much faster graphics cards than it did a couple of years ago. Filling internal slots with a GTX 580 and a RedRocket and using Thunderbolt for external RAID and video I/O would produce a Resolve system capable of handling the vast majority of projects with ease.
[Walter Soyka] “A 2013 Mac Pro with 1 or 2 PCIe slots and any number of first-generation Thunderbolt would be a disappointment, though, because there would be bottlenecks built into the system.”
The Mac Pro is already a system built for maybe 5% of Mac users. If you want to then talk about people for whom two PCIe slots + four Thunderbolt ports would be insufficient, I suspect you’re now talking about 5% of 5%. I believe Apple is interested in its pro customers, but I think their focus is on what we could perhaps call ‘mainstream pros’, not the most obscure upper reaches of the market.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Bernard Newnham] “In what way was Windows annoying?”
There are just a ton of annoying little things with Windows:
– It takes longer to re-install, if you have to.
– If you build your own box you have to deal with installing lots of drivers.
– It takes forever to boot if you have a motherboard with lots of on-board features or many PCIe cards installed (since some of this stuff insists on showing screens at boot that take a few seconds to go away).
– There are updates. Always updates. So many updates. It seems like if you walk away for five minutes, there are new updates that the system wants you to reboot to install.
– Explorer can’t show calculated folder sizes in a column, preview QuickTime movies, or do a bunch of other things one takes for granted on a Mac. QuickTime in general sucks on Windows, to the point where just opening a QuickTime movie, even on an extremely high-end system, takes much, much longer than you’d think it possibly could.
– You can’t, of course, jump back and forth between FCP and Resolve on the same system.
– Virtually every drive we get as a post house is Mac formatted. We use a utility called MacDrive in Windows, and it’s pretty good, but sometimes if drives are incorrectly unmounted it won’t mount them until they’ve been mounted by a real Mac.
– Windows uses drive letters rather than labels in paths, and drive letters can change every time drives are remounted. This means nothing has a stable path (unless you manually assign a mount point, which takes way too many clicks). Media in projects will therefore need to be re-linked all the time, etc.
– We have a bunch of in-house custom workflow scripts. Windows lacks the standard Unix-style command line utilities and uses rather than / as a path delimiter, requiring me to maintain two versions of these scripts for Mac/Windows.
– While the Windows version of QuickTime decodes ProRes, it can’t encode it, so if we need ProRes outputs we either need to render to uncompressed QT and convert, or simply move the whole project to a Mac to render.
Honestly, when building this system I figured “Meh, we’re using it to run one app (Resolve), how much can Windows really get in the way?” In practice it turns out it gets in the way quite a bit.
As far as going the Hackintosh route:
– Finding drivers that work with everything is pretty much trial and error, searching through Hackintosh-related forums and downloading different things. Expect kernel panics along the way.
– You can’t safely install system updates — they might break compatibility or not work with the crazy hacked up drivers you’re using.
– I encountered odd performance problems I’ve never seen on real Macs — jerky mouse movement, etc.
– Getting two GPUs working on a Hackintosh is non-trivial, to the point where I just gave up.
Put it this way — had we just bought a Mac Pro, our most recent grading system would have been up and running in two hours. Between my mostly unproductive Hackintosh experiments, screwing with Windows, and swapping various cards between PCIe slots, getting a usable grading environment on this system took more like two weeks, and months later there are still a lot of unresolved (and mostly unresolvable) annoyances.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “Thunderbolt seems to be able to achieve real-world speeds of about 700 MB/s for external storage, and for all we know that’s limited by the storage controller in the R6 and it could go higher — Thunderbolt’s theoretical maximum bandwidth is a full 1250 MB/s and its design indicates it should have fairly low overhead. Vanishingly few users, even in pro video, actually need more than 700 MB/s.”
An uncompressed 1920×1080 16bpc RGBA frame requires 15.8 MB; at 29.97 fps, that’s 474 MB/s for a single stream. Given that compositing by definition is never single-stream, I’m sure you can imagine that there are is a significant class of users that do benefit from faster storage or more than 6 spindles in a RAID set.
[Chris Kenny] “Resolve (probably the most demanding widely used app) as of version 9 has much-improved single-GPU performance (to the point where there are now single-GPU systems in the official configuration guide), and of course OS X now supports much faster graphics cards than it did a couple of years ago. Filling internal slots with a GTX 580 and a RedRocket and using Thunderbolt for external RAID and video I/O would produce a Resolve system capable of handling the vast majority of projects with ease.”
Ae is another very demanding and widely-used app that benefits from multiple GPUs for its new ray-tracing renderer. The more, the merrier. I’m a C4D user, but if I were doing a lot of 3D work in Ae, I’d stuff my computer with as many GTX cards as I could fit in it.
[Chris Kenny] “The Mac Pro is already a system built for maybe 5% of Mac users. If you want to then talk about people for whom two PCIe slots + four Thunderbolt ports would be insufficient, I suspect you’re now talking about 5% of 5%. I believe Apple is interested in its pro customers, but I think their focus is on what we could perhaps call ‘mainstream pros’, not the most obscure upper reaches of the market.”
Why should the Mac Pro exclude any workstation user by design?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “Why should the Mac Pro exclude any workstation user by design?”
Because that’s the Apple way. Destructive creation, smaller is better and one picon is worth a thousand words, and the threat that if you don’t like it Windows will make you cry.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Judging by the fact that the new iMac has no optical drive or FireWire ports, I suspect those are definite goners. Add-ons and adaptors to fill those needs, I suppose. Since FCP X now supports the Red Rocket card, I would assume at least one slot, although Apple hardware and applications divisions are internally firewalled from each other, so that may not mean much. If not, then they’ll have to rely on T-bolt expansion chassis.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
And, of course, most of it is the usual Mac user bull from someone who says he used a Windows machine but actually hasn’t really used it in depth enough over a period of time.
We just finished building a little machine for Resolve based on an Asus PNX79 motherboard. It took about three hours and Resolve was rolling – stable and ready for productions work. There was zero tinkering with the bios, slots or anything.[Chris Kenny] “- It takes forever to boot if you have a motherboard with lots of on-board features or many PCIe cards installed (since some of this stuff insists on showing screens at boot that take a few seconds to go away).”
Hmm, this machine I was talking about boots in approx 9 seconds from an SSD.
Oh, those pesky screens. You know you can simply switch them off in the Bios if you don’t care about the fact they give you useful info, right?[Chris Kenny] “- Windows uses drive letters rather than labels in paths, and drive letters can change every time drives are remounted. This means nothing has a stable path (unless you manually assign a mount point, which takes way too many clicks). Media in projects will therefore need to be re-linked all the time, etc.”
Well, simply assign fixed drive letters to your external media. All paths are stable then.
[Chris Kenny] “- Explorer can’t show calculated folder sizes in a column, preview QuickTime movies, or do a bunch of other things one takes for granted on a Mac. QuickTime in general sucks on Windows, to the point where just opening a QuickTime movie, even on an extremely high-end system, takes much, much longer than you’d think it possibly could.”
In the same way as you’d have to install Perian or other tools to get OSX to pick up certain media for previews, same applies to Windows if you want previews for certain Quicktime movies in explorer. Calculated folder sizes: again, just install some freeware. Classic Shell works just fine and it’s free.
[Chris Kenny] ” If you build your own box you have to deal with installing lots of drivers.”
Let’s see, motherboard comes with ONE driver disc and is a one click install for chipset, Lan, audio, etc. Basically everything that’s on the motherboard. Then there is the graphics card. And then…. hmmm. That’s it I guess. Install time: 10 minutes.
[Chris Kenny] “- It takes longer to re-install, if you have to.”
Yep, full system image restore over network… 15 minutes.
[Chris Kenny] “- While the Windows version of QuickTime decodes ProRes, it can’t encode it, so if we need ProRes outputs we either need to render to uncompressed QT and convert, or simply move the whole project to a Mac to render.”
Or get Episode, or Promedia Carbon, or the free FFmpeg.
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[Walter Soyka] “An uncompressed 1920×1080 16bpc RGBA frame requires 15.8 MB; at 29.97 fps, that’s 474 MB/s for a single stream. Given that compositing by definition is never single-stream, I’m sure you can imagine that there are is a significant class of users that do benefit from faster storage or more than 6 spindles in a RAID set.”
Look, you can play the multiplication game all day long. What if I need five streams of 4K at 60 frames a second? Hey, that’s 22 GB/s a second, good luck finding any sort of RAID controller for that.
Most projects don’t need that. They’re not even processed or finished in 16bpc RGBA, and if they are, it’s not the end of the world if you have to render the handful of shots that actually require compositing (i.e. multiple streams) — certainly most users won’t spend thousands of extra dollars on storage to avoid it. Our experience is that indie features are overwhelmingly either 10 bit DPX film scans, or Red/Epic/Alexa footage. 700 MB/s is enough for multiple streams of any of those. I’m not saying nobody needs anything more, I’m just saying that at that point you’re talking about a tiny fraction of the already tiny fraction of computer users who do pro video.
Apple has made some fairly powerful Macs over the years, but fundamentally the Mac is a personal computer. With the relentless march of Moore’s Law, full-sized towers are someday going to be relegated to the kind of niche that refrigerator-sized computers currently occupy (or maybe the niche that was once occupied by those mini-fridge sized “desk-side” SGI machines). Apple has never been interested in niches quite that obscure, so at some point before that happens, they’re going to stop making a full-sized tower.
[Walter Soyka] “Why should the Mac Pro exclude any workstation user by design?”
Because doing so will allow Apple to make it smaller, quieter, less expensive. In other words, a better system for the vast majority of pro customers who don’t (with the existence of Thunderbolt) need quite that much internal expansion. I know I’d find a significantly smaller Mac Pro very convenient for use on location, for instance.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Frank Gothmann] “Oh, those pesky screens. You know you can simply switch them off in the Bios if you don’t care about the fact they give you useful info, right?”
If there are such options in this case, they’re not obvious. I’ve looked.
[Frank Gothmann] “Well, simply assign fixed drive letters to your external media. All paths are stable then.”
We’ve just been mapping paths, which also works, but it’s an extra 16 clicks or something every time we hook up a new drive for the first time, which is usually several times a day.
[Frank Gothmann] “In the same way as you’d have to install Perian or other tools to get OSX to pick up certain media for previews, same applies to Windows if you want previews for certain Quicktime movies in explorer. Calculated folder sizes: again, just install some freeware. Classic Shell works just fine and it’s free.”
I’m aware that some of this can be fixed with third-party software (though my searches for something to solve the folder size calculation issue turned up mostly complaints about the fact that what seems like it used to be the standard solution didn’t work with Windows 7), but installing half a dozen third-party system enhancements of a production system doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea.
[Frank Gothmann] “Let’s see, motherboard comes with ONE driver disc and is a one click install for chipset, Lan, audio, etc. Basically everything that’s on the motherboard. Then there is the graphics card. And then…. hmmm. That’s it I guess. Install time: 10 minutes.”
When you say “one click install”, at least in the case of this ASUS board, what that means is you click one thing that launches about a dozen different installers, takes easily 20 minutes, doesn’t always work perfectly, and if you’re not careful will install some demoware you didn’t want. I know Windows fans tend to be oblivious to such things, but the whole user experience is fairly atrocious.
[Frank Gothmann] “Yep, full system image restore over network… 15 minutes.”
Yes, if you keep images available like that, which requires a fair bit of research to figure out how to set up, and probably isn’t worth the time for specialty machines where you’ve only got one with that configuration. It’s also not clear to me that it’s legal absent a corporate volume licensing agreement.
[Frank Gothmann] “Or get Episode, or Promedia Carbon, or the free FFmpeg.”
Still requires you to output and transcode, generally more than doubling output time and, of course, requiring you to have a huge amount of disk space available to output a feature-length project.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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