FCP X GPU acceleration?

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Chris Kenny] “And it’s also kind of silly to advance the notion that we don’t know if Apple isn’t really using OpenCL for much, in the application it was very possibly developed for or even extracted from.”

Chris, “it’s kind of silly to advance the notion” of anything without any evidence. Do you have any evidence OpenCL will be anything close to Cuda in performance? No assumptions or speculation please. If not, then strangely, the real evidence out there points in a different direction – see my previous post.

The real evidence that is not based on assumptions and speculation, also points to Apple moving downmarket and away from niche and enterprise markets. Pro Video is a niche market and I just can’t see Apple spending much time there unless it’s a side benefit of efforts in the mass market that don’t cost a lot.

It’s much more beneficial for Apple to work on iMovie for iPad than on FCPX for MP or MBP.

Clearly the days of Apple focusing on the “pro” market are over – several years now.

Alex (DV411)

[Jerry Hofmann]

Well, without actually using FCP X, I think it’s really premature to make any sort of final judgement about whether it’s a pro app or not. Or whether it’s better than or worse than any other app. They hardly scratched the surface with the NAB sneak peek… more unanswered than answered questions I’d say.

But the foundation is very modern/state -of- the-Art… and does take advantage of a lot of OS tech that FCP 7 just couldn’t address at all. Notably it was very snappy on the iMac they were running it from. I think this bodes well for how it would feel on a 12 core machine, right? Will the 1.0 release of it satisfy us all? Probably not, but the future looks very bright to me. The code base will make updating it easier, just as it was for Motion. If you think about it, the most “new” features in Studio 2009 were found in Motion, not FCP 7. REason? Cocoa Code…

All the talk of it being iMovie Pro: how does this matter? From what I saw it’s hardly iMovie. None of my clients care what I edit on, they only care about results. If the app gives me the results I need, it’s going to work for me. If not, then not… Can’t tell until I know a lot more about FCP X than what is public.

The cost of entry into Pro NLE software crashed a decade ago, there’s nothing new in this pricing at all. FCP X for 299 but it doesn’t appear to include DVD SP, STP, Compressor,Color, nor Motion… which if you add it up, the price isn’t any lower than its been since Studio 1. It’s just broken out. Also this means that they can update/grade FCP without having to upgrade Motion and any other apps they have at the same time like they’ve had to do bundling it all in a suite.

Jerry

[Richard Herd]

How is “Pro App” defined?

[Andy Mees]

HI Richard
“Pro Apps” is a term that Apple use to describe any of their apps that have been specifically engineered for professional applications (traditionally meaning high end media based applications). Under the hood, these apps share use of specific ProApps frameworks, check : /Library/Application Support/ProApps/SharedA/Frameworks.
Hope that helps
Andy