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Just the Messinger…Vincent LaForets Blog today – FWIW.
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[Steve Connor] “Rubbish, it’s Adobe and BMD software that’s NOT supporting the new iMac Pro, they’re the ones causing the problem NOT Apple.
The iMac Pro is very clear intent that they are still interested in the “high end video professional””
It’s conceivable to me that both perspectives are true in a way. Apple cares about high end video professionals, as long as they’re running FCPX.
Anyone else, they’re happy to have as low-hanging fruit, but such people aren’t the mission.
My assumption is that Adobe and BMD would be delighted to have the same access to the innards of Apple’s hardware (including chips) and operating software that Apple’s own developers do. They likely prevented from it, though, certainly practically, if not legally. I don’t know a single thing about Apple’s support for third-party development these days, and I could easily be a million miles off the mark regarding the current state of things, but I can assure you that this was entirely the case “back in the day.” Apple was quite specific about the kinds of optimization that they had not the least interest in helping us pursue.
This isn’t to denigrate the efforts of Apple’s third-party outreach and support efforts. Those people do care. But I think it’s important in a debate to make the value-neutral observation that limits exist to the kinds of help or access that they’re able to provide. All those render tests and other benchmarks in articles like Vincent’s are simply outlining the specific tenets that spring from the proposition that “Apple optimizes for their own stuff in ways they don’t allow anyone else to.”
Business as usual. At a certain point, we have to acknowledge that Apple’s coolness toward anybody else’s software running on their machines — again, hoping to make that sound value-neutral — isn’t a bug, but a feature. Apple would be failing at their most basic tasks if their own application software didn’t absolutely blow away the experience of using anyone else’s applications on their own platform.
But to extrapolate from that to “Apple doesn’t care about [implied ALL] high-end video professionals” is leaps too far. Heck, another example of the extent of Apple’s caring is asking you to pay only $249 for apparently a lifetime’s worth of access to the best possible experience on their platform.
If you want to pay more for a lesser experience, well, go right ahead. Or split the difference and go for a free version of Resolve.
There’s no problem here for Apple to solve. Nothing different to be done. They’re doing what they’ve been doing for generations. Caring deeply about your experience using their stuff.
Anyone else’s stuff? I’m not sure they care enough to copy-paste one of these: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Couldn’t have put it better. As I put in another thread about this, if you only buy fcpx for an encoding tool at £249, if it speeds up your workflow in some cases by twice as much, it’s worth it.
Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk -
[Tim Wilson] “My assumption is that Adobe and BMD would be delighted to have the same access to the innards of Apple’s hardware (including chips) and operating software that Apple’s own developers do”
I’d Imagine they don’t get early access to Apple hardware at all, but the specs for the imac pro had been around for a while so it would have been theoretically possible for software developers to at leats be a bit more prepared.
To be fair it’s still early days, the iMac Pro hasn’t been out for long and if BMD, a very “Apple friendly” company haven’t optimised for it yet then I’m not surprised Adobe haven’t – if they ever will of course.
\”Traditional NLEs have timelines. FCPX has storylines\” W.Soyka
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Well Adobe is going to have to do something about optimizing their software for new hardware. When you can get a 16 threadripper for under a grand it’s very frustrating that Photoshop and other programs in Adobes stable can only really make good use of four cores. The jump in hardware that AMD has precipitated has seemed to really catch Adobe with their pants down.
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While nowhere near the features of other NLEs, ScreenFlow certainly seems to take advantage of the iMac Pro. Unlike other Masc based on “i” processors which use Intel QuickSync for hardware assisted encoding, the iMac Pro is using the Vega GPU. ScreenFlow immediately recognized that and offers hardware assisted encoding. The developer did not have to make any changes to hook into that. Access was through the already existing API.
One thing ScreenFlow and FCPX have in common is that they are both Mac only. Perhaps developers of cross platform software may not (yet) be taking advantage of iMac specific resources.
See this at 5:07
https://youtu.be/BCBPo4l48hU?t=5m1sAnd see this at about 3:20 regarding ScreenFlow as well. Note that he mentions Adobe Media Encoder does not advantage of the hardware.
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[Erik Lindahl] “I’d also add a lot of the reviews so far don’t test multitasking performance. “
I think that’s hard to do, because of all the variables. And, of course, the settings in your app prefs. For example, the Adobe apps let you dial in how much of a machine’s resources are grabbed by a single app. Primarily in their case, that’s RAM, but it may affect other parts of the system.
One huge challenge in doing these evaluations, is that Apple can tailor its apps for its own hardware. Any developer of cross-platform apps must work within the parameters that are common for a wider range hardware. A prime example of this is the 2013 Mac Pros and the dual-GPU configuration. Apple balances the load across both GPUs in FCPX/Motion/Compressor. But a single GPU is more common in PCs and most other Macs. Therefore, Adobe, hits the first GPU harder, which has lead to overheating in these machines, when under heavy load and with renders set to OpenCL.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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I wouldn’t say it’s that hard, but it will be very dependent on “your workflow”. Then again all these tests are more and more becoming very workflow / app / format dependent.
A lot of people seeing a 5K iMac beating an iMac Pro by a decent margin is often due to the fact they are using h264 footage as source and destination format. For me that’s very very uncommon. What’s however common is say rendering from / to ProRes while at the same time transcoding from ProRes to h264-references.
I also wouldn’t think it’s that uncommon for a FCPX to have a number of films exporting in the background while editing and having background rendering on.
At the end of the day a “real world” test by my self on say 10 of my latest projects might or might not be relevant to user X, Y or Z on the net.
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[Tim Wilson] “This isn’t to denigrate the efforts of Apple’s third-party outreach and support efforts. Those people do care. But I think it’s important in a debate to make the value-neutral observation that limits exist to the kinds of help or access that they’re able to provide. “
What’s interesting, if we are talking specifically about the claims on Laforet’s blog, is that Red support is third party support in FCPX. You have to download and install a plugin from Red, not Apple, to use Red footage within FCPX. Out of the box, FCPX can not read r3d natively.
The other NLEs in question use their own media readers, and implement Red’s SDK to gain access to the raw controls for Red, and then offload processing to their media encoders and decoders.
So, while BMD is closer (as their software works more quickly) this is what is meant when people say that Adobe doesn’t develop for the Mac, which sounds weird. Yes, they develop software that works on the Mac (and Windows), but they don’t develop using the tools available to them in the OS. They write around it, because they have to, in order to develop one software that’s cross platform than develop multiple softwares for multiple platforms. This is certainly a business choice by Adobe, and not because Apple doesn’t allow access to all the switches.
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[Erik Lindahl] “I wouldn’t say it’s that hard, but it will be very dependent on “your workflow”. Then again all these tests are more and more becoming very workflow / app / format dependent.”
Hence, my attempt to do some real world tests at an existing facility.
https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2018/01/06/putting-apples-imac-pro-through-the-paces/
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Tim Wilson] “It’s conceivable to me that both perspectives are true in a way. Apple cares about high end video professionals, as long as they’re running FCPX. “
I believe Apple’s pattern over the past 18 or so years (since OSX, really) has not pointed in that direction. Apple’s biggest investments and biggest cash cows are in hardware: mobile devices (iPhones moreso than iPads) and Macs. They make a good amount of money taking their 30% cut from the App Store. But when it comes to their own software apps, they really don’t dominate in any area, certainly on on the pro level.
FCPX appeals to the amateur who wants to do more than iMovie stuff. YouTubers etc. Some pros find value in it as well, since it does quite a lot of the basics quickly. But clearly when they EOL’d the pro-targeted FCPS, they were deciding that this was not an area where they could compete well. If you’re familiar with Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, FCPX is the low-cost rebar/minimill competing against the established giants AVID, PP, etc. And for basic stuff, if you’re starting from scratch in terms of craft, it’s there and really not bad. (By the bye, I think it’s great that pro shops have found ways to leverage FXPX/Motion into paying operations, btw. I’m not knocking their choices. In earlier days, I used D-vision and Discreet Edit and did fine in my freelancing. But those skills did not translate well into getting hired at bigger shops. I lost out on a good picture cutter job at a major trailer shop simply because I was not facile enough on AVID. Personally, I think they were hiring for the wrong reasons, but the fact is that more hiring managers prioritize software skills over creative talent. And they get away with it because the field is rich with people having both.)
FCPX is just not going to come anywhere close to supplanting the Mac itself as a sales priority. They were charging a LOT more for FCPS when they just up and killed it. Obviously the software side is not their primary focus. Their best play is to establish their PLATFORM as the go-to, and that means making all this great hardware with tight OS integration available to be leveraged by other pro software platforms in not just video but design. Apple undermines their own success if they try to force vertical integration with only their own prosumer-level software. They would be providing incentive to buy Windows instead. (Much of the Mac’s success as a preferred platform for tech geeks is not just its Unix-based OSX architecture but also because of their App Store and providing xtools tools to developers to better leverage Mac UI and hardware architecture.)
Look at their software. None of these (except maybe Compressor) comes close to dominating their market field.
Personally I lean toward PP right now because the cutting interface makes more sense to me, and I already spend much of my professional day in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, so the UI logic is familiar, and my hotkey habits seem to apply. Whereas FCP has always been a quirky bizarre app designed by people who apparently had no familiarity with existing editing systems.
Anyway, this is all speculation, isn’t it? The new Mac Pro will reveal much. They say it will be extensible. They have declared a mea culpa with their coffee pot Mac Pro’s design. And these Pro machines I feel reveal their realization just how much of the future in computing will require powerful processing and graphics capabilities.
I expect the reason Adobe (and others) does not currently leverage the full iMac Pro architecture has more to do with Adobe’s internal priorities. And the short time since these pro machines started coming out. Adobe in the last year or so seems to have gotten better at progressive improvements. I’m getting app updates week or so. My hope and expectation is that Adobe will better leverage the Apple architectures, hopefully in the near future and not next year.
Meanwhile I will focus on what I can focus on: User speed, and right now that’s in PP. I’m not writing off FCPX altogether. But my days are better spent not swearing at the UI.
[no flash-frames where none intended]
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