MacPro – shameful performance

[Jeff Markgraf]

Bret –

This would have been mid 90s. Started with the original, then upgraded to the Turbo. I was told at that time that the guts were Unix with Mac OS (7 or 8) just acting as the interface. The actual heavy lifting with the cube was done with hardware running under Unix (all cleverly hidden in the box that sat next to the Mac). This makes sense to me, as Unix was usually run in a shell that provided the GUI.

Yeah, the wavelet compression was pretty good. Much better than Avid. Since I came from the online world, I just always cringed at the video quality of any NLE of the time. Heck, Avid’s AVR77 was supposedly the best thing since sliced bread when it came out, and it bugged me to no end with the flicker, chroma shifts and nonexistent color depth. Grrr…

The recompression I’m talking about is what you’re describing – essentially doing a mixdown. There was no equivalent to just rendering uncompressed. The mixdown baked in any compression artifacts, then that clip was subjected to more compression, and so forth. This became an issue for us because we had to render most of our spots in order to have the titles (the show credits) changing faster the system could keep up with. 20 titles with alpha channel, each lasting anywhere from 1 sec to 1 sec 15 frames, on top of short edits (average 2-3 seconds with realtime aspect squeezes and repositioning, not to mention color correction) just choked the realtime capabilities!

But hey, this was before Avid even had real time transitions at all.

Yeah, I really did like that box. Where were you using the Cube?