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MacBook Pro 17″ vs. Mac Pro
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[Jim Giberti] “Why, because it was done obtusely through an email to Franz that had to be confirmed.”
Actually David Pogue/NY Times had spoken to an unnamed Apple executive and misstated the info. Forbes did as well. Apparently Cook’s email and Apple’s official confirmation clarified.
While not a “press release” NY Times and Forbes are major media for the most part . . . as opposed to the rumor mill route which was often our source (us here) source of information.
I’d consider this much more direct communication to major media. The debate initially was that Pogue didn’t attribute the executive (and that may not have been Cook).
[Jim Giberti] “wasn’t it this directly published in, oh I don’t know, any credible publication on line or otherwise…say the COW:”
It was, through the NT Times as I noted. Cook and Apple cleared up an accuracy issue. So now we have a new attribution. Cook. And an Apple confirmation. Through the major media. NY Times and Forbes.
Of course it would have been better if Pogue used an attribution and a direct quote but at least Apple jumped in within the day to straighten this out. All in major media rather than rumor channels.
Still not ideal but this is a major step forward. Cook revealing a hardware roadmap for an existing product a year or more in advance through the major media is noteworthy.
I think Apple may be working out how they communicate with the media. It’s not like they have a lot of experience doing this 😉
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[Jim Giberti] “I would be furious at seeing my PC peers running screaming systems if all I had to counter was the email promise of something better than my already aging technology in an 18 month window.”
At least Apple and Cook communicated it.
People complain about the lack of communication so Cook communicates and Apple confirms in the major media and then people complain that the communication doesn’t count because they don’t like the message.Cook has spoken. Now we get to make our purchase decision. We can wait until later next year or move on. At least we know.
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I’ve never been any good at connecting the dots. But here’s my connection nonetheless:
These are the dots:
Monday: “new but not really” Mac Pro.
Tuesday: Smoke download available.What does it all mean? It means I’m not buying anything.
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[Jim Giberti] “They created a universe in which countless businesses operate.”
And that’s the nuts and bolts of it, right? They created a universe. Like any of the other gods, they just mess with us. Only the Fundamentalists are seeking a personal relationship. The rest of us just want a big day once per year when we can shop.
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[Craig Seeman] “I think Apple may be working out how they communicate with the media. It’s not like they have a lot of experience doing this 😉
“Exactly my point Craig,
Looking at the Pogue/Franz/Forbes/Cooke statements, clarifications, long term promises, I’m just suggesting there’s a bit of a better way to treat your venerable creative professional base.
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[Richard Herd] “And that’s the nuts and bolts of it, right? They created a universe. “
Well, we kid of created it together.
They’ve made the Macs.
We’ve made all the beautiful films and designs and music and stories using them
That’s the universe.
Without us, Cupertino’s just a campus with expensive perks.
At least that was the dynamic that worked before they got really, really rich.
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[Bill Davis] “… the FCP-X model of expressing EVERYTHING as metadata …”
They got rid of the data? No more picture and sound?
That would really change everything in post.
Franz.
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[Liam Hall] “I’m intrigued Bill, what do you actually make with FCPX? Honest question, not bating, I promise.
Liam Hall
Director/DoP/Editor
https://www.liamhall.net“A representative sample of my recent projects out of FCP-X would be…
– Broadcast HD Commercials (with SD down convert for cable) to SoCal NBC, CBS and Cox affiliates.
– Corporate Powerpoint presentations combined with narrated video embeds produced in my studio using X then deployed to the web for access by nationwide sales teams numbering in the hundreds.
– Multiple “re-branding campaign” Internal corporate videos for a huge national health care payments processing company.
– A 16 minute training video on “safe chemical handling” for the country’s largest national pool supplies retail chain.– Plus, of course, my current personal obsession, the 14-camera “performance video” I self-funded working with a local Jazz education “not-for-profit” – to try to explore the limits of the multi-cam capabilities of FCP-X. (1st rough cut done as of late last night! – yippee!)
I think I’m up to about 50 paid FCP-X projects at this point. In a variety of complexities and different types.
Are you interested in some particular aspect of my work that I can answer questions about?
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Bill Davis] “But I have to wonder whether the FCP-X model of expressing EVERYTHING as metadata is seriously changing that. With the new X construct, I know I’ve simply moved “final output calculation” well downstream in my workflows. As I work in X, I’m really just building text lists that avoid almost all the processor heavy lifting – leaving the big calculation load i to after the client has viewed and approved my inter-stage work – that’s probably why I’m finding X so responsive in the laptop world.”
Hi Bill,
I think you’re overstating the role of metadata.
Metadata is just data about data. In a sense, you could argue that all NLEs are mainly creating lists of text data — EDLs.
Every pixel that hits your display — that’s data itself, and it must be rendered to be seen. At a minimum (cuts only), the image data must be decoded from the movie that contains it. It’s possible that this bypasses the FCPX effects pipeline; I don’t know all the details of FCPX’s renderer.
However, once you add a transition, add an effect, tweak the color board, or overlay a title, the image data from the original assets must pass through the rendering pipeline — and real data is calculated.
At some level, performance is critical for all of our work. You want to see your color adjustments in real time? Thanks to the FCPX/Motion renderer, continually calculating all those pixels, you get the real-time feedback you need for productive creativity.
I think FCPX is well-suited for laptops and iMacs not because it’s doing less calculation than FCP7, but because it’s doing it differently — efficiently spreading out the work across multiple threads and multiple CPU cores via Grand Central Dispatch, and exploiting general purpose computing on GPUs with OpenCL. FCPX is built from the ground up with modern computer architecture in mind.
We’ve also been working with HD video for a while now, while computers have grown substantially in computational power. Your laptop today may cut through HD like a hot knife through butter, but 4K (which will come sooner or later) may be a bit harder to handle on that hardware, and RED’s mythical 28K would make it feel like a Power Mac 8600 trying to cut AVCHD.
As for saving the big render until the end, there are different cheats of different types for doing draft work in different applications; for example, it’s not uncommon for me to work at reduced resolution or reduce frame rate on a mograph piece, or reduced detail on a 3D animation, spot-rendering test frames as I go at full quality, then finally rendering the entire thing at full quality.
[Bill Davis] “I personally am rooting for whatever The 2013 “Pro User” refresh that Tim Cook has hinted at to be something that has some type of “scaleable” rendering engine under the hood – perhaps using TBolt and/or Grand Central to leverage additional horsepower. That might even provide for guys like you who currently require the big iron approach – and also let the same software work for someone like me with lower rendering requirements.”
I’m happy to be proven wrong, but this is an area where I think Thunderbolt will be of limited use for the next few years. Even next-generation Thunderbolt is slow in comparison with QPI (Intel’s technology for connecting multiple processors on the same motherboard), and I’d wager that CPU interconnects will not remain static while Thunderbolt evolves.
For CPU renderers, that leaves clustering or render farms — distributing renders over multiple computers. There are a few technical challenges: there is no clustering support built into GCD, Apple’s Advanced Computing Group hasn’t shown any clustering research since 2009, and applications would have to be specially written to take advantage of clustering.
Most apps today with render farm support have separate external renderers and render managers, meaning that submitting a render to a farm is not the same as an in-app preview from the artist’s perspective — you have to leave the app to see your results, and there’s no interactivity for quick tweaks.
Of course, that’s not to say clusters or farms are useless — I’ve started building an in-house render garden myself this year to accelerate final renders. It just doesn’t obviate the need for power on the desktop to enable decent artist interactivity, especially with the sort of computationally expensive work we’re discussing.
I think the interesting part is going to be general purpose computing on the graphics card (GPGPU). That’s an area where Thunderbolt (or internal PCIe) can help, but it’s important to remember that not everything in the render pipeline currently happens on the GPU. Renderers need to be rewritten to take advantage of these new technologies, and other tasks that are currently CPU-bound like media decode need to be moved to the GPU if possible. Rethinking render pipelines in a pro-friendly way that retains compatibility is a decidedly non-trivial problem, especially when there are third-party partners in the ecosystem to consider, but could pay dividends in the future.
Bringing this back to the original point, I’m not rooting against Apple, and I sincerely hope that everyone who waits for their new professional system, whatever it may be, gets what they need. I just think Apple could be a bit more considerate of their professional customers and partners in the present as well as the future, and I will not make the assumption that Apple’s view of professional users’ need and my view will overlap.
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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Why not unix or linux, for you?
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