Does This Kill The Mac Pro?

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Gissing] “Thunderbolt and Lightning
Very Very Frightning….”

Brilliant!

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

[Aindreas Gallagher]

there’s way too much much OS X under soho’s nails for video – it’s a real problem.

There’s no skipping off to Win7, that isn’t actually a solution – you’re talking masses of storage, assets, file systems, everything – i have met a dozen flavours of common set file directory systems under OS X in post – job number folder at top, render folders, script folders, FCP and AE project folders – if the box driving the IO systems, the OS and the media management and storage is removed by the vendor – that is likely to be a very broad problem in the short to medium term.

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Aindreas Gallagher]

would you look at the sad state of me – cap doff to soyka.

off on a post production rant and had badly neglecting an inspired cultural allusion there.

also a cracking tune!

let us all crank el speakers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ&ob=av3n

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

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[Aindreas Gallagher]

I… don’t know… its been a while..

I was WinNT for a good number of years, I’ll defend that OS until I die. It was fashioned after the one ring as far as I can tell. It didn’t crash once in three years on a P3 600mhz – and I beat the hell out of it.

It’s just – have you seen the windows 8 proposed explorer? they’ve got the ribbon there now. its like GUI vomit. I don’t know if I can go there walter, having badly studied design, and also, when they go WIN8 – we are all actually going to go to an insane version of metro using a mouse??? when we press the start button. we’re going to be in metro tiles, on a 24-30″ inch screen, to manage our applications.

meanwhile quicktimeX continues to be terrifyingly brain damaged, lion doesn’t have persistent scroll bars, won’t show the drive at default..

oh sure good. jesus.

Frankly, I think both OS’s are going to hell.

I’m not sure what exactly in jeebus’s name we are supposed to do at this stage.

I fear for the professional, I am not afraid to tell you.

time was we could rely on the proletariat moron to broadly purchase the same kit we badly needed at mass market prices.

If our own specific operating system, hardware/software system needs are about to slip to the bad (L-R not centre) bell probability curve of popular computing… if everyone else is wandering away to consumable computing on completely different terms…

well then, its just not pretty.

NOT PRETTY.

DOOM.

I call utter doom.

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Aindreas Gallagher] ” what happens if the mac pro tower goes?”

I have very strong feelings about the Mac in general, but first some background.

We aren’t a hardcore facility, but we do have some comparatively hard core gear, I guess.

We have a SAN that runs metaSAN that is both fibre and Ethernet based.

We own cameras, lenses, we still farm out audio on most of our productions (acquisition and post), and of course we scale the freelance crew as needed, sometimes one person, sometimes 20 people. We do all kinds of projects, we don’t do features, though.

Other than that, we are lean and mean and we get a surprising amount of work done with just a few of us. We like it, it works, we are fairly efficient and good (if I do stay so myself) at we do. Our clients are pleased.

We are also lucky in that we control almost the whole production pipeline. For the most part, we edit what we shoot. It’s rare, but we do get hired to shoot and not post, or post and not shoot but those projects are rather sparse. So perhaps my view is myopic or limited.

The San is relatively new and its been great, absolutely great, for us. We are beta testers of this particular package, so we’re living on the edge a bit.

Here’s the weird thing about it, it’s agnostic to file systems and formats. Yes, its a windows server with a huge blob of SAS connected storage where the data is then served out to fibre and Ethernet (storage is formatted NTFS). Macs, windows, and even Linux can connect to it, and metaSAN makes it all work. To our Macs, that storage looks and operates like HFS+. It’s rather nuts.

All of our edit/post machines are Mac computers that connect via fibre and Ethernet. The nice thing about the Ethernet is that the licenses float, so if someone comes in with a laptop, we have an extra license that we can install on their machine, and away they go. Its very flexible, and any computer can be used as a server be it windows, Mac or Linux.

Now, as I mentioned, we are small, and most of the technical responsibility falls on my shoulders. It’s fine, I can handle it, but I only know what I know, and troubleshooting macs is what I somewhat know. In our testing, I have had to do some things on the windows machine that are completely foreign. It’s a completely new language that I am uncomfortable with. I can “support” our other macs over the phone, over iChat or logmein (over my iPhone, no sh*t), and I know how to tell the person on the other end of the line how to get them back up and running if need be. If something goes wrong on the windows side, I am a fish out of water, I need to call people.

So, basically, it’s fear. Not only do I edit and creatively support our little company, but I am the tech dude as well. Windows would be a big problem for us, not only with training, but support and hardware building and purchasing. I know nothing about that, and I’m a bit scared of it, frankly. With macs, I can diagnose and fix the problem, then get back to the right brain work that I was initially hired and paid to do..

I firmly believe Macs have allowed me to do all of this wihtout completely pulling my hair out and allowing me to have a life outside of the office. Maybe I’m being naive.

Now, what if the MacPro goes away?

Well, if Apple offers a suitable processing alternative (let’s just say that’s an iMac for now) our SAN is still fine. We can connect via Ethernet, or get a thunder PCI connector and connect through fibre, on an iMac. Sure, it won’t be as fast as pcie fibre, but we would still have plenty of overhead for the work that we do.

We never finished uncompressed anymore, it’s most likely ProResHQ, and the occasional 444. All totally fine over Ethernet, and would be great over thunderbolt.

It would not be ideal as our choices would be more limited with GPU and the like, but I think, we’d be okay for a while during the formulation of a bigger plan to Windows if we had to. Our SAN will still work with Windows, so we are OK there.

So, yeah. It will be an adjustment, and our current infrastructure would support a non MacPro environment wihtout too much of a speed loss. A little, but not a ton.

I hope that Apple will refresh the MacPro one or two more times before they kill it. But they might not. Even if we had to switch to Windows tomorrow, we could do it. Most everything hardware wise is cross platform, and you can even by Episode to encode ProRes on Windows these days. Don’t get me wrong, I will not look forward to that day.

Galileo Figaro, Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me.

[Frank Gothmann]

I doubt the final version of Windows 8 will get rid of the startmenu as we know it. It’ll be an option. It’s still in there, even in the DP; you can activate by changing the registry. And some of the new UI features once your out of metro (which sucks for the Desktop, I agree) are pretty sweet plus some nice performance tweaks even at this early stage in the DP.
Windows 7 is a pretty good OS; I don’t think MS is keen on repeating Vista all over again so I don’t see W8 bleak at all.

[Aindreas Gallagher]

reading through – how in the hell? I thought NTFS was death? read, but no OS X write?

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Aindreas Gallagher]

ara.. forget my geeky questions. although that was a cracking answer.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Galileo Figaro, Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me”

tune!

<]:0)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irp8CNj9qBI

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

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[Michael Gissing]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I thought NTFS was death? read, but no OS X write?”

OS X can read write NTFS with the right software.

https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html

[Rafael Amador]

[Walter Soyka] “What exactly is it about Windows that gives you pause?”
I still remember my friends PCs, all with the boxes open, the tripes out, HDs out of the enclosures, strange wide cables, fans to cool them and dust everywhere.
Macs were clean.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com