I guess it’s So Long and Thanks for all the Fish!

[Marc Fisher]

“Plus, on my PC I have a Blu-ray burner, two DVD burners, and two external hard drive bays. Something else you can’t really do with a Mac Pro, but that comes in handy on a regular basis.”

seriously, i thought this was a pros and cons thread about FCP-X
you all have turned it into a Mac vs PC war.

oddly though Gary, I’ve had a Blu-ray burner hooked up to my Mac Pro (2006 1.1) model for more than a year already. I also have 2 internal dvd-burners, mostly because i refuse to get rid of the old, replaced one, so i just put them into the open bays I have. I have 4 sata drives internally, and I added a PCI-E sata card to get external drives hooked up.

To top this off, I have 2 graphics card running in my machine to run Davinci Resolve. (and I don’t get driver conflicts like most PCs would).
Oh, and here’s a great one that PC cannot claim, I can run Windows 7, just as well on my Mac as I can run Mac OS X, (or even Linux), and it IS supported by Apple.
So that means for the investment of a mac pro, i get the best of all three worlds, and in my field, that means a lot.

oh, and btw, while all these price comparison are being thrown around, esp about how expensive things are at Apple, who the hell ever buys RAM form Dell or HP?

[Chris Conlee]

And quite impressive at that. Way ahead of its time. I ran MovieShop on a Draco (Amiga clone) for years.

[Tim Wilson]

I’ll stick with Media Composer being introduced at NAB in 88, even if it didn’t ship until a couple of weeks after EMC. 🙂

That said, we’re splitting hairs here, and I admit that I should have been more careful with my language. Still, the gist is true. Not only did Henry Ford NOT invent the car — I don’t know if he was one of the first ten at the party. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, and Peter Frampton didn’t invent that thing where you put a tube in your mouth while you play the electric guitar. But they stuck the landing in a meaningful-enough way that the people before them are seen as precursors, and their peers as variants.

THAT said, while I’m sticking to my guns that the landing for desktop video was stuck longest and loudest on Mac, and by no means exclusively, I really don’t want to be seen as a Mac pimp. While I built my own video production company around Macs, my opinion is that Apple lost its pro-focus a long time before FCP 7 shipped, for deeper reasons than typically come up…but have on this thread, and this one too.

Thanks for all the fish, indeed.

Anyone else wants to have the last word on this sub-thread is welcome to it. 🙂 The main part of the thread is the one that deserves the spotlight.

[Herb Sevush]

“I’ll stick with Media Composer being introduced at NAB in 88, even if it didn’t ship until a couple of weeks after EMC. :-)”

I’ll settle for a tie.

I’m just sticking up for the long forgotten Editing Machines Corporation. This whole conversation got me remembering my EMC2 days, not unhappily, and I sent off a note to Bill Ferster, original designer, that contained this line:

“There were features on the EMC2 that I still miss to this day – such as the ripple wall, the EDL view, the timecode scratch pads and the ability to easily set offsets for multi-cam sources.”

So, a salute to the betamax of NLEs.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Gary Huff]

[Marc Fisher]oddly though Gary, I’ve had a Blu-ray burner hooked up to my Mac Pro (2006 1.1) model for more than a year already. I also have 2 internal dvd-burners, mostly because i refuse to get rid of the old, replaced one, so i just put them into the open bays I have. I have 4 sata drives internally, and I added a PCI-E sata card to get external drives hooked up.

I didn’t intend to say you couldn’t have that, just that’s it’s all internal bays without having to have external devices, which you cannot do with a Mac Pro.

[Craig Seeman]

[Gary Huff] “I didn’t intend to say you couldn’t have that, just that’s it’s all internal bays without having to have external devices, which you cannot do with a Mac Pro.”

OWC sells internal Blu-ray kits for MacPro
https://eshop.macsales.com/search/internal+blu+ray

The only thing that’s been missing is the ability to play Blu-ray video on Mac but event that can be done now.
https://www.macblurayplayer.com/index.htm

[Aindreas Gallagher]

yeah – but isn’t this just a mad thing?

(mini rant)

we all know that apple operate on their ability to enter markets at moments of critical opportunity – that goes for everything for a decade – ipod, iphone, ipad, all the consumer stuff. And Macbook Air, in the end, maybe more than most. That laptop really appears to be terra-forming the entire laptop supply chain industry.

FCPX feels horrible for sure. Just a lazy scattershot guess at editing with some trendy metadata tagging thrown in.
For my part I will continue to re-iterate the basic flaws in timeline operation. I do not frankly see how anyone can get past the gluey, inaccurate feel of clip behaviour as you reposition in time on even the newest machines. that basic stuff I really think speaks volumes to the death of the professional software brain trust in apple. they didn’t spot that basic a fubar for god’s sake.

but – asking for towers to be everything they have been, for them to be competitively driven by major manufacturers with economies of scale, has to be whistling in the wind. A three foot tall tower is the equivalent of a really good DJ deck – it is, with every day, vanishing from its originating consumer market relevance. the vinyl is gone. Given the power available in a well specced consumer all in one, the very notion of a mute computing behometh with extra sets of ribs is gone. Or rather it is about to become very niche and accordingly expensive.

Apple are probably not going to produce another tower as we understand it, one would suspect.

It’s weird times – HP is going pseudo IBM, Windows is trying to shift to ARM, Windows 8, in the D9 demos, as it flipped between metro and the new windows explorer ribbon madness looked simply.. ludicrous(..and the woman demonstrating seemed incredibly uncomfortable?)
and… OSX now lacks persistent window bars, or a default representation of the hard drive at the desktop.

A victory for Steve Jobs there on the invisible hard drive.

Still – the ground underfoot is amazingly crazy no?

So one might possibly ask if there could, in all this bubbling looniness, be a bespoke, stable software environment purely for the humble craft of editing?
…with an agreed core set of persistent editing principles reliably presented? in software? to the host hardware?
Can I have a Union?

Anyway.
So, there was, say, a time when the practise of editing had a physical machine expression.

So we all get that this took place. We all draw directly from its practitioners. It is at least interesting to think about our basic consensual notions of editing; the stuff we all agree upon in the doing of it, as we all draw from the work of those who have done it before us.
God knows there’s a lot more of us via software now – sure if it was all steinbecks – I never would have got a look in.

but the degree to which we are all now insanely swamped in considerations of operating systems, graphics cards, the software itself, the intentions of the software providers, the state of computing itself – its gone a long way weird this hasn’t it?

Do we not have any culturally insistent and persistent craft delineations?

Writers don’t have this problem. Their keyboards are left alone. What exactly are we supposed to do here?

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

[Chris Harlan]

To quibble just a little–a number of successful early NLE’s were PC based. Lightworks and the Montage3, which used Intel’s ActionMedia card, were both successful film/tv NLEs out here in LA at the beginning of the 90s, and certainly drew people to use them.

As for 1st broadcast quality, my memory tells me that it is something like the old DPS PVR card and maybe Speed Razor on the PC. Hard to check with Google, though, as what conversations existed were on extinct bbs and services like Compuserve. Man, I used to love Compuserve.

[Gary Pollard]

[Marc Fisher] “who the hell ever buys RAM form Dell or HP?” … who the hell ever buys Apple’s own RAM at its exorbitant prices, when it’s generic anyway? I certainly don’t.

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

[Gary Pollard]

[Darren Kelly] “One thing I never became was a Mac Snob. It isn’t better because Steve Jobs says it is. When will you stop drinking the Kool-Aid!”

One thing that many people are not acknowledging here is that Apple’s quality control has gone seriously downhill over the past few years. Maybe Foxconn has something to do with it.

At a recent meeting with five Mac user friends I was the ONLY one who had not had to send his computer in for servicing or exchange in the past six months. And three of those were brand new Macbook pros.

____

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”