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MacBook Pro with a Retina display … is that a young persons thing?
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No, elements are the same physical size on screen but twice the pixels per inch.
My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools – Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools – Edit QuickTime chapters and metdata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools… -
The catch of course is that you only get the full effect of the Retina display – full HD in a window with some application UI visible – if the screen is set to the equivalent of 1440 by 900.
That doesn’t give you enough room for enough of the UI for most apps – Smoke 2013 seems the only software designed for this kind of editing.
In Final Cut Pro X you can show both the Event browser and the inspector while viewing your 1080p video.
In practice many people will set their screen to ‘More Space’ which scales the UI so you get the equivalent of 1920×1200. See the comparison between the five screen settings at the bottom of the article at https://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-macbook-pro-handles-scaling
If 1920×1200 will used most often, Apple should offer the new 2xUSB3 2xThunderbolt 15″ MacBook Pro with a 1920×1200 screen! Then we could edit away with enough room around the video to control our apps, and switch to full-screen mode for pixel to pixel 1080p video preview.
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Alexandre Gollner,
Editor, Zone 2-North West, Londonalex4d on twitter, facebook, .wordpress.com & .com
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[Alex Gollner] “The catch of course is that you only get the full effect of the Retina display – full HD in a window with some application UI visible – if the screen is set to the equivalent of 1440 by 900.”
Will be interesting to see. I think when you’re in the office or home, you’ll want to use a secondary display like a 27” screen. Now that’s a simple menu selection but of course currently I imagine it would just blow up your laptop’s smaller application window if you had the screen open as if the 27” screen was a projector screen for an audience to view what’s on the laptop.
When you run with the laptop screen closed, you could certainly see much more real estate on the 27” screen. Would be a cool option to be able to have the laptop’s retina screen open with the virtual 1440×900 application window and see the secondary on the 27” screen in glorious 2560×1440!
“Glorious,” now there’s a new word for Tim Cook to use in his next presentation as “awesome” wears thin. Most companies have a User interface or Usability Designer. Of course when Steve Jobs was CEO, this wasn’t necessary (because Steve said so), but I wonder if I should be moving back to California after all?
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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[Jon Chappell] “No, elements are the same physical size on screen but twice the pixels per inch.”
I’m seeing more clearly already. 🙂
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
Thanks Gary
I’ve said to folks countless times myself (usually in regard to editing in FCP Classic) that they need to view at 100% to check for issues, interlacing etc, so you’re right of course, in that making that 100% pixel for pixel display possible within a regular viewer window can’t be a bad thing.
My point if any though was (and Tim cuts straight to the chase below) that the window itself may be too small for the less eagle eyed amongst us to actually spot that there’s a problem. I mean to say, obviously the window / UI itself hasn’t got smaller, but I’m suggesting the less wary might infer from all the Retina marketing and hyperbole, that just because they now have a pixel for pixel display in the viewer that they are actually “seeing” all those pixels.
It puts me in mind of good old fashioned 14″ portable tellys from back in the day, remember watching one of those? I seem to remember, years ago, my mum complaining that her “new” big TV didn’t have as good a picture as the little one. I explained that the picture was actually the same but that now she could see just how bad it was. Didn’t go down especially well by the way. Anyway, as it happens I’ve got an old portable in the back room, and when my family’s big screen TV’s power circuitry fried unexpectedly a while back, it got to enjoy a brief return to glory front and centre in the living room. The picture was great, really crisp and sharp after having been watching that (sadly crappy) LCD for so long … it was perfectly fine for most things, but oh lordy, watching a nice movie, or Game of Thrones etc was just awful because I couldn’t “see” it in all it’s glory, the detail was there but just sitting a bit closer was not the answer. The answer turns out to be the lovely Panny Plasma that I’ve replaced it with, absolutely gorgeous picture.
But I digress (as usual). Back on point, having access to that 14″ portable tv crispness at all times within the Viewer window has got to be a good thing, and as long as I can also view it at 100% and full screen (or some technically accurate semblance of that) then I’d imagine I’ll be a perfectly happy Retina camper … tho obviously I’ll have to buy one first, which could be a while, long lost rich uncle’s notwithstanding.
Cheers
Andy -
I just had a colleague bring his 17″ laptop in with some After Effects work we were doing on a historic drama – the usual painting out 20th & 21st century tech or removing houses from wilderness scenes.
He was a bit shocked to see what he had missed when we put it up on the 45″ LCD. Before that the editor, who had cut on twin 24″ screens (AVID MC6), was also horrified at details missed during the edit. We found heaps of shots that needed work that he hadn’t seen – small camera bumps, action continuity over cuts etc.
Luckily he was at the grade/online and we rolled a few cuts a frame or rolled edits to tidy this up. Nothing beats a big screen. The later you leave it the more the problems to fix when it is most expensive and with the tightest deadline. If you are producing for iPhones then small laptops, regardless of pixel res are appropriate tools perhaps.
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Sorry for the double post but it seem more relevant in this thread:
AnandTech has a review on the Retina running Windows 7 and 8 that shows the display in 8 scaled 100, 125, and 150 percent that can be displayed at original size as well as fit to browser window. Looks very sharp at all scalings. Here is the link to the display grabs, you can back track for the review. https://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2080#1
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
As a pedant (handy attribute to those who grade & online) I don’t get the retina reference. Did the marketing people realise a retina is a light capturing device, not a transmitting device?
Or is it based on the Latin root rēte meaning net? I suspect the later as they attempt to scoop up slavish buyers into the Apple net with market speak for hi resolution screen – something we have incrementally been enjoying for many years. Suddenly it’s now retina instead of ‘higher res than last model’.
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I think they derived the term from research that indicated that at that resolution – and given a normal eye to screen distance – it’s impossible for the human eye to resolve discrete pixels. So the display achieves “beyond human retina resolution” ergo its a retina display.
Clearly more marketing than pure science – but in the history of selling stuff – nothing new in that!
With all the talk here about how this is gonna effect “old eyes” – I wonder if there’s a “get rich quick” play – by mounting those dirt cheap plastic fresnel sheet magnifiers on a nice brushed aluminum pole with a cheap articulated arm so that we can “swing in” a magnifier at will to take full advantage of the glory of our new screens.
We could dub it the “Retina Screen Quality Control Enhancer” and probably get bites at $129!
😉
“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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Of course Bill any screen resolution does that based on the screen size to distance ratio. So it is purely marketing blather.
I do like your magnifier idea but of course that immediately reduces the perceived pixel ratio so it might be best called the Unretina or RezRazzer.
On another note would the iRetina be an example of hyperbole or mere redundancy?
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