-
MacPro – shameful performance
-
[walter biscardi] “I’ve been cutting Non-Linear since 1993 when I was one of the first editors at CNN to learn this new thing called “Avid.” A Mac Mini can run rings around the equipment I used back then. “
Ditto. I was cutting on this new thing in 1993 called the VideoCube. We were outputting 60 fields per second video directly to satellite feeds that were used on TV stations across Georgia. Nobody ever had a clue it wasn’t linear.
Bret Williams
Web Design . Motion Graphics . Video Editing
http://www.bretwilliams.com -
I am surprised the VideoCube wasn’t making more inroads back then. As I mentioned in response to Walters post were were using it in 93 as well. We were outputting full motion video and rendering wasn’t even an option. It was all real time. Only 2 layers, plus a graphics layer, but it was all completely real time. Cropping, keyframing, rotation, alpha channel graphics, etc. It was amazing. No crashing or freezing or babysitting.
It used wavelet compression which was able to pull off AVR 75 quality at 12:1 compression.
What it lacked over time was the layering tools and the hooks into the online/offline process that Avid had. But it was a little powerhouse!
-
[Bret Williams] “What it lacked over time was the layering tools and the hooks into the online/offline process that Avid had. But it was a little powerhouse!”
Just like my first NLE love, Media 100. Never had the layering capabilities, but the image quality always blew Avid out of the water.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
-
I think what Jerry is talking about is what the original poster is complaining about.
I think that snow leopard will start to address this issue.
With that said, I’ve had a suspicion for quite some time that FCS3 will be released hand in hand with SL as a full 64bit cocoa re-write.
Otherwise, it’s getting to the point that the hardware is surpassing the software to such a wasteful degree.
64 bit FCS + SL is a marriage made in heaven.
jk -
Gabriel,
All we can do is hope that the promised Snow Leopard system will get FCP to make use of all available cores. Like you, I am on an 8 core.
O/T, I directed a film called “Mockingbird Don’t Sing” which your father acted in around 2000. There can’t be that many Regalbutos in the world, so I’m assuming you know what I’m talking about.
Send him my best affection. He’s a trouper.
Best
Harry.
Harry Bromley-Davenport.
-
[david bogie] “when the glaciers were receding”
This is an ICE card reference – right? 🙂
-Simmie
6 MacPros – Kona 3 & Kona LH
1 G5s – Kona LH
xbox360, Wii, PSP, PS3
https://www.speak.co.uk -
[Stuart Simpson] “This is an ICE card reference – right? 🙂
“Good lord, yeah, we had two of those stupid things. Paid $10k each for them!
They. along with four or five Media 100 Nubus hardware cards are at the bottom of Luck Peak Reservoir.bogiesan
-
Ooh, ooh – can I play? I remember it like it was yesterday…
The earliest removable storage (the “bricks” you refer to) were called R-Mags – probably for “Removable Magnetic media” or some such nonsense. They were 2 gigs each. One box (like 4 rack units high) held 2 R-Mags. But hey – removable!
Then Avid went to a new docking station that used “Shuttle” drives. They were a little smaller and more squared off (the R-Mags had rounded tops). They had either one or two drives inside, depending on how you bought them. 4 gigs or 9 gigs.
Then the IS9 drives came out. 9 or 18 gigs each. Half-height, so you could put 8 drives in the docking tower. And you could stripe them for AVR 76 or AVR 77, real broadcast resolution & limited realtime effects. Man, that was livin’ large!
Believe it or not, I know of one facility here in Burbank that still has some R-Mags & the chassis laying around for the strictly offline clients.
-
Yay Video Cube! My favorite NLE ever.
Back in the day at NBC, we started this thing called NBC 2000. You probably know it as those @$%^#! squeezed credits. The engineers at NBC were, to put it nicely, uncooperative. Not only were we nonlinear, we sere non-union. Very bad. They made it clear that Avid’s video output was unacceptable. They said the blanking was wide. Not on our network, so sir. They were right, of course. But still obnoxious.
So our bright people found the Video Cube. Hey, what do you know – full-raster video. And broadcast quality. Actually, kinda’ like 3/4SP is “broadcast quality.” Which is to say, barely.
So we took in material from the D3 show masters & video we shot on Beta SP, did our thing and output back to D3. Sweetened the audio in our facility. Walked the D3 down to Edit 10 for QC & it was hard-shipped to NY for integration.
As a linear guy & sometime Avid guy, I LOVED this editor. Very easy to work with. Mostly real-time. To this day, the fastest editor for short-form (promo) editing I’ve ever used. Loved the jog wheel interface (being an old Grass Valley guy). Hated the rendering quality, as it essentially recompressed the video with each new render. Hated the incredibly touchy Ultra SCSI storage (we had custom 6 foot cables made up to reach the rack of storage drives). Kinda’ dug knowing I was working on a Unix system underneath the PowerMac GUI. Loved the improved quality of the Turbo Cube when it came out. Never got to use the StratoSphere version, ’cause by then NBC made nice with Avid AVR77.
Much as I like FCP, I do miss the Cube.
-
What year were you on the cube? Because there were never any unix underpinnings in the mac os until 2000, and the cube was long gone then.
And yes, it was 3/4spish broadcast quality. But the thing was it was wavelet, not jpeg. At 12:1 compression, JPEG was barely viewble and blocky. Wavelet softenened the image instead of breaking up. And everything on the graphics layer was completely uncompressed.
The cube was out years before Avid had a 60field solution. The strata, which I did get a chance to work on, looked better than AVR77 and was QT based, but it was horrible. It didn’t have any sort of nesting. So if you wanted to do something complex, then add an effect to that, you’d have to render a sort of mixdown, then place that in the timeline. It had no knowledge of tc or reels or anything. Like exporting and importing.
You mention the destructive compositing the cube had mainly because it only had 2 layers) but Avid is the same way if you render as you go. Add a dissolve and render it. Then add a title over the dissolve and Avid will use the rendered dissolve file as the source for the render of the title. A feature I wish FCP would implement. If I spend half an hour rendering something, I’d like that to be used as the source for anything I add to it. With Avid it speeds up the workflow on complex stuff. When you’re done editing you can delete the render files and do a one-pass best quality render.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up