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My take on FCPX or Not
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When my son was little he would sit quietly (no small achievement)and watch Bob Ross in starry eyed wonder. I’m sure on some channel somewhere Bob’s happily creating a field of little trees under a sky of titanium blue to this day… lets just add another one here …
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Craig Seeman] “Given that FCPX is supposed to sell Macs, if/when they get it up to a versatile NLE, this presents a low cost point of entry for a facility.”
But is FCPX supposed to sell Macs to facilities, or to the broad middle?
Am I really going to need ThunderBolt fiber HBAs or ThunderBolt 10G Ethernet boxes, ThunderBolt MiniSAS HBAs, ThunderBolt video I/O, and ThunderBolt hardware compression co-processing? Plus rack hardware for all of the above?
Modularity is nice, but I don’t see ThunderBolt as a facility-oriented solution — especially if it comes at the cost of high-speed PCIe slots in the Mac workstation at the dawn of the GPGPU/OpenCL age.
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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “But is FCPX supposed to sell Macs to facilities, or to the broad middle?”
Broader middle initially. The middle is not the bottom. The broader middle are “mom and pop” shops who need a computer with fast i/o and storage for professional work.
[Walter Soyka] “Modularity is nice, but I don’t see ThunderBolt as a facility-oriented solution — especially if it comes at the cost of high-speed PCIe slots in the Mac workstation at the dawn of the GPGPU/OpenCL age.”
As I said, I believe there will be one or two 16 lane PCIe built in for GPU flexibility. Thunderbolt handles everything else.
[Walter Soyka] “Am I really going to need ThunderBolt fiber HBAs or ThunderBolt 10G Ethernet boxes, ThunderBolt MiniSAS HBAs, ThunderBolt video I/O, and ThunderBolt hardware compression co-processing? Plus rack hardware for all of the above?”
You’ll buy what you need if you’re a facility. The per unit cost of each bare computer will be less. Yes Apple and third parties will want you to buy Thunderbolt tools.
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[Craig Seeman] “Broader middle initially. The middle is not the bottom. The broader middle are “mom and pop” shops who need a computer with fast i/o and storage for professional work.”
Totally agreed. This is where ThunderBolt will be most beneficial — but what separates the broad middle from the bottom?
Which will be smaller in the coming years? This distinction between the bottom and the middle, or the distinction between the middle and the top?
[Craig Seeman] “As I said, I believe there will be one or two 16 lane PCIe built in for GPU flexibility. Thunderbolt handles everything else.”
I believe there will be one or two 16 lane PCIe slots as well, but I don’t think it’s enough for heavy GPGPU. Some of the work going into GPU-based renderers is amazing, and being very parallel, splits across many GPUs nicely.
[Craig Seeman] “You’ll buy what you need if you’re a facility. The per unit cost of each bare computer will be less. Yes Apple and third parties will want you to buy Thunderbolt tools.”
But my point is that this is not facility-friendly. Visualize that machine room, with all these modules, ThunderBolt cabling, custom rack mounts, and wall wart power supplies. It’s not a problem when you locate the hardware on the user’s desk, but it’s not going to be pretty for co-location.
Of course, current Apple hardware isn’t really rack-friendly either, so this may be moot.
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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “Which will be smaller in the coming years? This distinction between the bottom and the middle, or the distinction between the middle and the top?”
I think there’s an industry wide problem related to PC desktop sales. I think the solution is a more scalable desktop. The bottom moves towards tablets. The middle and top will be consolidated by the PC manufactures who need to increase margins to make desktops a viable market. The computer that works for the “stand alone” professional has to also work in the facility.
[Walter Soyka] “But my point is that this is not facility-friendly. Visualize that machine room, with all these modules, ThunderBolt cabling, custom rack mounts, and wall wart power supplies. It’s not a problem when you locate the hardware on the user’s desk, but it’s not going to be pretty for co-location.
Of course, current Apple hardware isn’t really rack-friendly either, so this may be moot.”
Apple’s really good at design. I suspect this is one of the issues they’re tackling. Cables and external power supplies can be a mess. Keep in mind that big boxes with lots of PCIe slots have their own problems. They’re not space efficient. Cooling them becomes an issue as well. I don’t have an answer to this but I think Apple may. Its an area they’ve excelled at.
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“Apple’s really good at design. I suspect this is one of the issues they’re tackling. Cables and external power supplies can be a mess.”
Apple’s Cinema Display monitors have the worst cabling system on the planet, is that an example of Apple’s design prowess when it comes to cabling?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Craig Seeman] “I think there’s an industry wide problem related to PC desktop sales. I think the solution is a more scalable desktop. The bottom moves towards tablets. The middle and top will be consolidated by the PC manufactures who need to increase margins to make desktops a viable market. The computer that works for the “stand alone” professional has to also work in the facility.”
I don’t really see how a scalable desktop solves the PC industry’s woes. Computers have become a commodity, and splitting that commodity up into smaller, more elemental commodities isn’t going to make the consumer any less price-sensitive. The only way out of the commodity trap is to differentiate, which is certainly a challenge in today’s open-technology environment.
Beyond that, I wonder if part of our disconnect as we discuss this is that we’re thinking about computers differently. I draw a distinction between desktops and workstations.
Video used to require a proper workstation. Consumer desktops lacked the throughput and processing power to push all those pixels around. That’s not true anymore. Although FCPX benefits from OpenCL, fast GPUs and multiple cores, and can actually use all the power in a workstation, you can reasonably edit HD video on an iMac.
If anything, I think fewer editors in the broad middle need a workstation than did before. An i7-powered desktop with SATA drives and a $350 video card is more than enough for many editors.
Heavy compositing or 3D work, though — the sort of work that facilities generally do and the broad middle generally does not — is much more restrictive on modern consumer-grade equipment than video editorial is.
FCP was the linchpin holding Macs in professional post. With so many important apps being cross-platform, and with many also running on Linux, Apple needs to give the industry a reason to continue buying Mac computers.
[Craig Seeman] “Apple’s really good at design. I suspect this is one of the issues they’re tackling. Cables and external power supplies can be a mess. Keep in mind that big boxes with lots of PCIe slots have their own problems. They’re not space efficient. Cooling them becomes an issue as well. I don’t have an answer to this but I think Apple may. Its an area they’ve excelled at.”
Apple’s designs are beautiful, and the engineering of the Mac Pro case internals is top-notch, but again, who are they designing for? It seems to me that Apple believes computers belong in your hands. They’ll settle for a desk. Apple had the Xserve, built for machine rooms, but they EOL’ed it. I hope I’m wrong about the trend I see here.
Cooling big boxes with lots of PCIe slots is easy — most of them already have all the active cooling they need built in. Cooling a rack of ThunderBolt peripherals which are designed for passive cooling — that’s a challenge.
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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “My question for the forum is this: what do you think we can look for from Apple over the next 6 to 12 months to indicate if they are truly dedicated to the professional (or “complex workflow”) market or not?”
Honestly, they can get come out from behind the curtain, and do the thing that costs absolutely nothing, and can do everything to win back the hearts and souls of the final cutters everywhere.
How about a press conference.
Seriously. Other powerful companies do that. Don’t just manage the spin. Explain what happened in simple terms, own it, explain what you’ve learned and how you’re going to make it better. We’re in Apple’s corner, or we were at one point.
No matter how much I’d love to see that happen, I don’t expect it ever will.
What I expect is that they will shortly release the API that the third party producers will need to make this product get along with the rest of the world. I expect they will come up with an update that will make the program less buggy, add back some of our most necessary functions like multicam and relinking. I expect they will continue to come up with great hardware, and that third parties will bring things that will take the party to the pro level.
There’s something I haven’t seen mentioned much here, but that’s the magic of the app store. Not that Apple needs money right now, consider the temptation that you can push a button, the software goes everywhere at once, and within minutes a giant money barge starts unloading mountains of cold hard cash for your bank account. That might have had something to do with the release. They might have intended to be quick on the updates, which you can do so easily when the software isn’t on a disc, but they might have been bogged down by the deluge of issues raised and decided one big update would be better than a dozen little ones.
The more we conjecture, the worse the possible spin. A press conference would stop the misapplied ranting, and let us make informed decisions about our futures.
It’s like the husband who tells his wife “I told you I loved you when we took our marriage vows. I’ll let you know if that ever changes.” Communication is everything.
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I’m calling it FCX. They took the “pro” out, so I will too.
I’ll reconsider after the first upgrade.Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
blogging at https://fcpx.wordpress.com -
[Craig Seeman] “a single design which could have much wider use than the current MacPro. “
yes. I like the sound of it really.
It would feel quite neuromancer to walk in freelance to a workplace with a mmmm.. mac mini sized 64 cores of intel with a 4GB GPU and.. mmm.. 2 terabytes of flash. bang it on the table, thunderbolt to the display, display thunderbolt to the workplace NAS and we’re off away into our flash gordon future.
nice.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Jamie Franklin] “I feel like a painter that just had all my brushes taken away and I was given a sword to paint with…Bob Ross found his niche (showing my age) in the painting world…but it’s like they shaved his fro and took away his ability to place happy little trees wherever he wanted…”
lol, great analogy!
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl
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