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FCPX Huge Change on the way?
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[Marcus Moore] “I’d love to see Apple start realizing the potential of more targeted press events.”
If they targeted a Pro Press Event to appropriate industry press, they might actually get some good coverage from reporters who understand this stuff.
They may also find a very large professionally interested audience watching such event on AppleTV, iPads, etc.
If Apple really wants to take control of their marketing rather than relying on parroting of misinformation on social media, probably one of the better ways to control this is by creating a Pro targeted event.
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The key word there is “optimized”. That points to exactly what I was saying- making sure the software can take advantage of the hardware. But that’s a long way from MacPro ‘specific’ features.
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Will the iMac support 4k broadcast monitoring?
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When it’s updated to Haswell- possibly.
You can put a DecLink4K Extreme into an existing MacPro, can’t you? And it looks like you can put it in an external PCIe Thunderbolt chassis.
On the broadcast monitoring side I think many machines will be able to run 4K if not now then when the Macs are refreshed with this year’s chips. But who knows, if Apple DOES have plans for a Retina ACD, perhaps (like in 2004), only the MacPro will be able to run it. I’d wager against it, but I’m sure it will be the only one able to run 3 of them.
All I’m saying is that people looking for anything other than thru-put oriented features of FCPX to be exclusive to this machine are probably off base. That’s like saying really intensive After Effects projects are exclusive to high end Machines. They’ll be annoying as hell to work with, and they’ll take a long time to render, but you can do them.
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It’s true, Apple said so. It’s funny that all the off the shelf PC graphics cards you can use in a current mac pro make such a major difference in FCPX already, but since they cost a third as much as an official Apple blessed card and give upwards of double the performance it’s odd they took this long to update the pro.
It’s not like they couldn’t have put a couple thunderbolt ports on the old pro in 2011 to tide professional editors over.
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Thunderbolt has to be supported on the CPU for Apple to use it in it’s hardware. The new Ivey Bridge E chips are the first TB enabled Xeon chips to do that.
It was the same thing with USB3- Apple integrated it into it’s products as soon as it was embedded on the chip, which it was when the Ivey Bridge Macs were released last year (with all but it’s Xeons).
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Ahh, that makes sense. I built a hack pro with two thunderbolt ports with an ivy bridge processor. I wasn’t aware that the current gen xeon procs wouldn’t work.
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[Marcus Moore] “That’s like saying really intensive After Effects projects are exclusive to high end Machines. They’ll be annoying as hell to work with, and they’ll take a long time to render, but you can do them.”
So true. Ever try to work with AE Ray Tracing without the appropriate GPU? Not only does it not support it, but it shuts down multi processing. So now you’re rendering 3D object with one processor. I tried it a few times, but had too many 100+ hour estimated renders. On the new iMac I get more like 10 minutes for the same render.
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[Bret Williams] “Ever try to work with AE Ray Tracing without the appropriate GPU? Not only does it not support it, but it shuts down multi processing. So now you’re rendering 3D object with one processor.”
Ae’s multiprocessing mode for 2D and classic 3D compositions launches multiple copies of the Ae renderer, up to one per CPU core, each requiring its own RAM and each working on a separate frame at the same time.
Ae’s ray-tracer turns off multiprocessing, meaning it only works on a single frame at a time, but that doesn’t mean it’s letting system resources sit idle. The ray tracer is highly multithreaded and will use all available CPU cores. If you watch Activity Monitor, you should see very high CPU utilization.
Ray tracing is just very computationally expensive, not just in Ae, but in all 3D applications that use it.
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
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Well it sure sucks if you don’t have a qualified CUDA card!
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