Interesting take on Mac Pro 2019 from a Youtuber

[Oliver Peters]

Seems like a very realistic point of view. Must have good business to be able to drop $6K just to see how it works ☺

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Tony West]

[Oliver Peters] “Must have good business to be able to drop $6K just to see how it works ☺”

I thought the same thing.

I did enjoy the inside tour though.

I also don’t think it’s about doing 8k at this point. Maybe down the line, but you know if it can go through 8k like butter it can fly through graded 4k even faster and that’s a format many work with a lot.

[Bret Williams]

He has 2.5Million subs, and already 500k views on that video alone. He’s doing very well. I know people that are earning a living on 75k subs, and only dropping a video or two a month. This guy is dropping a couple a week and a few weeks later some are pushing 750k views, and many are well over a million after a few months.

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FCPX TUTORIALS – https://www.youtube.com/BretFX

[Herb Sevush]

The video pointed out a couple of troublesome things – design was focused on non-productive, mostly irrelevant considerations, as opposed to designing for actual use. The case opens from the top (it looks lovely in the videos), which means it can’t be serviced while under a desk, while the MacPro’s size and weight make desktop mounting awkward. I guess this is why the (ridiculously expensive) $400 wheels are an option, dragging this around the floor doesn’t seem like fun. And as noted many places, case removal requires you to disconnect all cables, not just the power cable.

I like the idea of a quiet system, but the MacPro noise level is mostly irrelevant when your connecting to several external raid boxes, each with their own fan system, which is the situation in every small studio I’ve worked in. As for invisible internal cabling – who cares when I’m still going to be running a dozen cables into and out of my various editing components

It would have been nice if the engineers had actually thought about the users ergonomics as opposed to their own design aesthetics, but then again that has been my complaint about everything Apple for the last 20 years.

Here is a link to a PC workstation designed for video:

https://puget.systems/go/152078

at $5.5K it seems functionally equivalent (I’d love to see a speed test comparison) to a 12core 2019 MacPro costing $10.5K. What do I get for the 5K difference other than the ability to run OSX – a cute case, less noise and no interior cabling.

I will admit I was getting ready to shell out the money to move on from my Trashcan, but the more I think about it, the more I’m willing to wait and see what develops.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Oliver Peters]

[Herb Sevush] “Here is a link to a PC workstation designed for video:”

I reviewed one of their units:

https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/are-you-ready-for-a-custom-pc/

Very impressive and very quiet. If you are mainly working in Premiere or After Effects (or Avid for that matter), I would dare say this gives you a lot more bang for the bucks.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Bob Woodhead]

[Herb Sevush] “other than the ability to run OSX”

And there’s the rub. I do NOT want to go back to Windows if I can ever avoid it. At this point, I’m still willing to pay the “Apple tax” to stay on OSX.

[Tony West]

I’d like to know if their engineers went cableless to make it more durable in that less parts to go wrong with it or for style.

Not many people are going to be looking at the inside of the box for very long.

Makes more sense for that to be a longevity move. Does anyone know for sure?

[David Cherniack]

[Bob Woodhead] “[Herb Sevush] “other than the ability to run OSX”

And there’s the rub. I do NOT want to go back to Windows if I can ever avoid it. At this point, I’m still willing to pay the “Apple tax” to stay on OSX.”

As a Windows guy I can understand that…if it’s based upon your knowledge of, and use of, the OSX ecosystem. I have nothing against Macs (Apple Corp. is a different story) but I’d be horribly disadvantaged to even contemplate switching because of my reliance on utility software that only runs on Windows. In my editing and office work I use a macro program that saves me the drudgery of sometimes a few dozen keystrokes and mouse moves and clicks. It has 10 years of written macros for a dozen different apps and it don’t run on OSX. So there’s sympathy here for your point of view if it’s for the ecosystem reason. OTOH if your editing box is only a stand-alone, with no reliance on an ecosystem that only runs on Macs, then Premiere, Resolve, and Avid function the same on both platforms. But if it’s simply because the IDEA of Windows10 is anathema, then by all means, happily pay the additional money that Apple is equally happy to remove from your pocket.

BTW:
Windows 10 is an excellent OS. Not perfect but neither, I gather, is OSX
.The Mac Pro is a beast, aimed a production houses that need it and can afford it, and at fanbois who want it. I think it will sell a lot more than the ill-advised trashcan, but as it comes from the same (over) design ethos, there may be more than meets the eye lurking in them weeds. Wise, smallish houses will wait and see.

David
https://AllinOneFilms.com

[Brad Hurley]

Knowing Apple’s design ethos, I think it’s less about “style” than a clean aesthetic, which are not exactly the same thing. I doubt it’s really about longevity; would cables really reduce the lifetime of components that are rarely if ever moved? Apple’s all about sweating the details and fine points; did you catch that they even included a USB port inside so you can install a dongle (e.g., for DaVinci Resolve Studio) without having it hanging off the outside of the computer? My guess is that their designers took pride in producing something that is as clean on the inside as it is on the outside.

It’s admirable, but those of us who don’t care about aesthetics will still have to pay extra for those design decisions if we buy one. I’d be sorely tempted to switch to Windows when my 2013 trashcan bites the dust, but I’ve tried three times to switch to Windows fulltime and always ended up going back to the Mac. I would consider a Windows machine as a dedicated computer for DaVinci Resolve, though (which is mainly what I use these days for editing, color correction, and audio) and nothing else, but based on the reports in BMD’s Resolve forum the Windows version seems to be buggier than the Mac version.

[Bernard Newnham]

That Puget Systems workstation has a Gigabyte X299 Designare motherboard. Scan.co.uk says that’s it’s already end-of-life, they don’t sell it any more. That’s the PC world – change is rapid, blink and it’s gone. Most components are out of date in a few months.

Never mind – just rip out the old motherboard, processor, graphics card etc, and chuck in new. Easy and cheap – and who cares about wires in a box that’s mostly shut? You need the wires to have the flexibility to do the upgrades. Removing all the cables seems a pointless exercise, unless of course you are trying to lock your customers in to a rigid system. Would Apple do a thing like that?

I don’t know whether or not DVP on Windows 10 is more buggy than on OSX, but it certainly does crash from time to time. I’m sticking with it, rather than using PPro as I’ve done for years, because I can say to my students “It’s free!”, and that counts for a lot. And it’s a very good system, just not quite finished yet.

Bernie