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Apple big picture….how big of a deal is this really?
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[Chris Kenny] “Apple now having the most modern rendering engine”
I guess in the sense that it’s the latest to be released, that’s true.
Is it the best though? And really it’s the playback engine that matters, not the rendering engine. I’m a little perplexed why they background render everything to Prores for performance if the playback engine is that good. Also, from what I’ve seen in the Animating with Keyframes tutorial above, the playback performance appears to be poor (dropped frames) compared to doing the same thing on a moderately powerful Premiere system.
All I’m saying is that performance tests need to be done by independent parties before claims of performance, inferred or otherwise, are made. Nonetheless I found it iteresting that the Apple site made no claims about relative performance compared to Premiere or Avid. They may already know something that the rest of us do not.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Cherniack] “I’m a little perplexed why they background render everything to Prores for performance if the playback engine is that good. “
Faster exporting, for one thing. If everything’s rendered already then when you go to export (if you’re using ‘current settings’), it basically happens at the speed of a file copy.
[David Cherniack] “Also, from what I’ve seen in the Animating with Keyframes tutorial above, the playback performance appears to be poor (dropped frames) compared to doing the same thing on a moderately powerful Premiere system.”
Hardly a good test without knowing specific hardware details (and with the system capturing a screencast while trying to play back). But in any event, raw speed isn’t necessarily the advantage I’m pushing for FCP X’s engine here. Its big advantage is OpenCL, which means e.g. current MacBook Pros have GPU acceleration in FCP X but not Premiere.
OpenCL wasn’t really a viable option when Adobe wrote the Mercury engine. It’s a nice example of how “more modern” actually translates into material benefits. (Though of course it wouldn’t be impossible for Adobe to add OpenCL support now. Their engine is new enough that I’d guess it has a fairly clean, modular architecture.)
[David Cherniack] “Nonetheless I found it iteresting that the Apple site made no claims about relative performance compared to Premiere or Avid. They may already know something that the rest of us do “
Meh. It’s not uncommon for a market leader (which Apple is, by market share) to simply pretend competitors don’t exist.
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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] “[David Cherniack] “I’m a little perplexed why they background render everything to Prores for performance if the playback engine is that good. ”
Faster exporting, for one thing. If everything’s rendered already then when you go to export (if you’re using ‘current settings’), it basically happens at the speed of a file copy.”
But Chris, by “better performance” I think they mean playback. And it indicates to me that they still may have some optimizing to do on their playback engine.
As far as exporting in Premiere you can always turn on Use Previews if you so desire or not, if you want to render to a higher bit depth than the previews. I see no advantage to FCP-X in this respect.
[Chris Kenny] “OpenCL wasn’t really a viable option when Adobe wrote the Mercury engine. It’s a nice example of how “more modern” actually translates into material benefits. (Though of course it wouldn’t be impossible for Adobe to add OpenCL support now. Their engine is new enough that I’d guess it has a fairly clean, modular architecture.)”
You’re coorect that OpenCL was not quite ready when they wrote their CUDA engine but I’ve been told privately (long before OpenCL was known to be in Apple’s plans) that OpenCL was not quite as efficient as CUDA in their internal testing. Personally. though I expect to see it as a playback option in some future release, if only to accommodate those with ATI GPUs.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Cherniack] “But Chris, by “better performance” I think they mean playback. And it indicates to me that they still may have some optimizing to do on their playback engine. “
Have you used the app? On decent hardware most things play back just fine before they render.
[David Cherniack] “You’re coorect that OpenCL was not quite ready when they wrote their CUDA engine but I’ve been told privately (long before OpenCL was known to be in Apple’s plans) that OpenCL was not quite as efficient as CUDA in their internal testing.”
Benchmarks of current OpenCL implementations show only fairly moderate performance differences.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Well, it maybe one of the few times that thousands of disgusted clients asked for a refund on their software. I did and they were very polite and apologetic about the situation. They said it took longer than usual to return my email request since they were experiencing much larger volume of emails to customer service than normal. Im sure that made some impact.
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
[Chris Kenny] “Have you used the app? On decent hardware most things play back just fine before they render.”
Just curious…what doesn’t play back just fine so far?
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Cherniack] “Just curious…what doesn’t play back just fine so far?”
I couldn’t give you a list off the top of my head, and the machine I’m using now is a 2007 MacBook Pro that runs FCP X… barely. (It has half as much VRAM as Apple’s specs call for.) My impressions were based on using it on a 2008 8-core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro with a GT120; it was pretty decent. If I end up heading into the office tomorrow I’ll switch the monitors over to the GTX285 in that machine (normally just used for CUDA in Resolve) and try that. The 285 has 7.5x as many CUDA cores, so I’m imagining that’s going to be kind of crazy.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I use the GTX 470 in Premiere these days. It’s great and hardly pops 30% useage when stacking half a dozen CUDA effects on any HD nmaterial. The only time I wish I had more vidram (1.3GB) is when working with CUDA on 5k stills series. (Premiere handles source at up to 11k though you’d need a monster amount of vidram to preview it, let alone the raid speed to push it through).
Check out the performance of the machine at work. I have no doubt that Apple can bring it up to speed if it’s a bit tardy in this first release, which I sort of expect because it is a first release.
Honestly, as an ‘outsider’ I did expect more of the missing features to be present. I’m rather dumfounded in the choices they did make, in the inflexibility of the interface and like everyone else here I’m rather stunned at the pulling of FCS from the market. If I was a user, with my present needs, I’d feel just as upset as many here. But if Apple realy wants to make it a pro app it may take much longer than just a few months that many here are hoping..more like a year or two would be my guess, because it’s quite clear they’ll be relying on 3rd parties to do the grunt work, and they’re not nearly as well capitalized as Apple.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Cherniack] “Apple realy wants to make it a pro app it may take much longer than just a few months that many here are hoping..more like a year or two would be my guess, because it’s quite clear they’ll be relying on 3rd parties to do the grunt work, and they’re not nearly as well capitalized as Apple.”
A lot of the ‘grunt work’ is not that hard, though. If Apple releases an API to access sequence data, and it works reasonably, I suspect I could implement EDL exporting well enough for our internal needs in just a few hours. And by “well enough for our internal needs” I mean “better for our internal needs than FCP 7, which has some EDL quirks that have always annoyed me”.
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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] ” If Apple releases an API to access sequence data, and it works reasonably, I suspect I could implement EDL exporting well enough for our internal needs in just a few hours.”
Now while I agree with the first part of the sentence, the “few hours” strikes me as unbridled optimism 🙂
But I was refering to IO drivers and keyframeable plugins….if keyframable is going to be at all possible – hard to see how it couldn’t factor into their plans if they see it as a pro app. But is there a place for that in the present interface or will it need something that’s not yet apparent?
David
AllinOneFilms.com
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