CS6 is released – so what now?

[Chris Harlan]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Clear as mud, right?”

Hey, I appreciate the insight. I’m trying to come to some of the same understandings that Aindreas is.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Chris Harlan] “Hey, I appreciate the insight. I’m trying to come to some of the same understandings that Aindreas is.”

openCL GPU support is new in Pr cs6.

It’s baby steps.

You will hear over and over from people who have switched to windows and Pr (to an i7 type tower, so current MacBook Pro/iMac in a tower config) with cheaper Nvidia GPUs, that Pr screams.

It’s proven , it’s mature.

Pr has system requirements and there’s also recommendations that you can find online. Most times, that recommend usually doesn’t include Macs. They simply don’t have many CUDA options. You will find the occasional Quadro 4000 Mac user, and they seem generally happy.

The new iMacs/MacBook Pros are really sweet computers, but they aren’t powerhouses, and neither is the MacOS. It never has been. I’ve been trying to clamor that around these parts for a while now. Macs are not the fastest computers, all things considered, period. They are still nice computers, no question.

So, if you really want to stick with (Mac) OSX, your decisions are an older MacPro with a few “for real” CUDA cards, or newer and greener (in the experince sense) portable desktops. I, personally, am one of the people that’s going to stick with OSX for as long as possible.

Then there’s the Internet tea leaves, those bastions of hopes and dreams. Nvidia released new Lion based Cuda drivers. People are sticking “non Mac” supported pcie Cuda based cards in to MacPros and it sort of works. It’s not highly recommended, but one could say its working better than ever. What does this mean? Where’s it going? We (the royal we) still don’t know for sure. One thing we do know, even though there’s silence on new Mac hardware, we know it’s not standing still. We (of the royal persuasion) can see the little development hints around here and there if you look hard enough, but there is no concrete foundation on which to build quite yet. So, if you need to buy now, the decision is a solid “maybe” of a Mac, to a solid “perhaps” on windows. Windows.

We are professionals. An OS switch wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But do you want to do it?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “CS6, says the prole, feels like an utterly massive release, I mean even the way they just threw speedgrade in there?
I mean good god right? that is right in its infancy in the suite. I am genuinely near mad to get the suite working in my gaff.
It feels like the software equivalent of a childhood boxed millenium falcon.”

Speedgrade looks amazing. It really does. It’s excitng times.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “As you say: adobe are looking to drive through with disparate, native, highly compressed capture codecs that demand CPU at every stage.
Part of me, in my heart of hearts, cannot get rid of the catholic guilt that says that looking to perform with non-optimised camera codecs in the timeline is somehow wrong. That said, all the codecs are advancing at lightspeed? and coming from the cobwebbed world of 7, the idea of simply plopping red on the timeline kind of beggars my mind.

FCPX has highly intelligent adaptive workflows to manage this dichotomy, and you could argue, these are workflows more in tune with the inclinations of post inclined editors who like to feel brick pavement under their feet in codec terms. “

And this, right here, on a deep down philospophical level, is why Premiere is not FCP8. Thankfully.

Adobe has an entirely different philosophy. Entirely.

Adobe makes software to run on a wild variety of hardware and a few OSes. In that process, through all the things an NLE needs to do these days, compromises simply have to be made. Also, it seems, Adobe is striving to be as “open” as possible in the sense that you can throw whatever you want at it, in nearly any format/structure, and it will do it’s best to work. Adobe has also built an optimized “engine” and that engine can use various sources of power. You, as user, are “rewarded” by having more power, as it’s simply the way computing works. More computing/GPU power and efficiency = faster and more powerful. Simple. You can get the same work done on slower and cheaper, but it’s slower. And cheaper. So there’s that reward as well.

Apple doesn’t work that way, hardly at all. They have built a different style of efficiencies and even more strict compromises. Avid has it’s methods, as does Edius, and Autodesk.

Now, it’s just a matter of choice on what you want to learn.

[Chris Harlan]

[Jeremy Garchow] “openCL GPU support is new in Pr cs6.
“

Yeah, it ran real well on my laptop when I XMLed a project, so I’m guessing when it was buggy for me the evening before, it was because I was doing something odd with ProRES and had imported it improperly.

[Jeremy Garchow]“So, if you really want to stick with (Mac) OSX, your decisions are an older MacPro with a few “for real” CUDA cards, or newer and greener (in the experince sense) portable desktops”

I’ve got a GTX 285 in my 8 Core, so that should be worth something. I won’t install till I get the full Suite, so I can’t really test it out. But, I’m looking forward to it. I’ve upgraded from CS5, so I haven’t really seen Mercury at its best, yet. I’m also looking forward to trying Media Composer/Symphony on the same machine. So far, I’ve just been using it on my laptop. I suppose I can always upgrade the 285 to a 4000, and double the RAM in my 8 Core, if I’m really smitten.

[Jeremy Garchow] “I, personally, am one of the people that’s going to stick with OSX for as long as possible.”

I go back and forth a lot. I liked my years in the Wintel world and was pretty much forced to MacVille, but now that I’m here…

[Jeremy Garchow] ” An OS switch wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But do you want to do it?”

I’m not sure I’d switch as much as add. Maybe get a PC and put Media Composer/Symphony on it. Then try CS6 via Cloud, and just see if I like it there. Of course, for me that’s a big investment just to test the waters, so I’d need to be a lot closer to certain than I am now.

[Thomas Frank]

I am not going into the CUDA thing since we have 60% of our Mac Pro have it… but the comment about the OSX to be being a powerhouses. This is the most absurd thing I ever heard since the day I was introduced to the computer!
You aware the OSX is build on UNIX right which is a multitask whore, don’t get me wrong Windows 7 is not bad (took them for ever to get descent OS… and NT was good) but there is a reason why Unix and Linux is still used today for Supercomputing.

By the

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Thomas Frank] “I am not going into the CUDA thing since we have 60% of our Mac Pro have it… but the comment about the OSX to be being a powerhouses. This is the most absurd thing I ever heard since the day I was introduced to the computer!
You aware the OSX is build on UNIX right which is a multitask whore, don’t get me wrong Windows 7 is not bad (took them for ever to get descent OS… and NT was good) but there is a reason why Unix and Linux is still used today for Supercomputing.”

It’s built on it, but it’s not the same.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m am going to stick with OSX for as long as possible.

There’s more to an OS besides speed.

You can boot a Mac in to windows and using the same software, it runs “faster”. It doesn’t mean better or more convenient.

OSX isn’t a slouch. It’s very powerful.

But when doing speed tests with similar software, OSX doesn’t run quite as fast.

I am comparing how NLEs run, not what servers need to do. There’s big differences and there’s no hard and fast rules.

Jeremy

[Aindreas Gallagher]

windows. to be blunt!

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