Phillip Bloom goes to the dark side

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Claude
Oliver Peters showed me this excellent article. This does not mean “throw out your Mac’s”. He specifically states that he has a ProRes delivery requirement (as most of us do). It’s just that modern PC’s – be it Dell and HP, or ASUS, MSI, and the other Chinese brands, are making GREAT STUFF. I would like to see a consortium group of users hold Apple executives “hostage” (this is an expression of speech – I am not suggesting that someone does something illegal) and FORCE them to answer the question “why won’t you fully cooperate with NVidia – it’s not like it will cost you any money, and people will still buy your computers”. My introduction to the original FCP was because of the AJA Kona and original AJA I/O products, which happened because of Apples cooperation with third party companies. I wish this policy would return.

There is no question that many Chinese and Taiwanese companies are making incredible modern computers (let’s face it – where do you think the iMac Pro is being manufactured). It’s a shame that “we” have to suffer financially and technically, because Apple simply won’t be cooperative with “third party companies” as they have done in the past. I assume this is all because of “the bottom line”.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Steve Connor]

Premiere NEEDS to run on a fast PC, it’s actually a bit of a dog on a Mac, it’s playback performance is considerably worse than FCPX on a Mac, If I was forced to use PPro as my main NLE I’d probably switch to a PC too.

Fortunately I’m an FCPX user so my NLE of choice has great playback performance on my Mac.

Seriously shouldn’t these discussions be on the Premiere Pro forum? Couldn’t Tim give us a “move to Premiere Pro Forum” button

\”Traditional NLEs have timelines. FCPX has storylines\” W.Soyka

[Steve Connor]

[Bob Zelin] “I would like to see a consortium group of users hold Apple executives “hostage” (this is an expression of speech – I am not suggesting that someone does something illegal) and FORCE them to answer the question “why won’t you fully cooperate with NVidia “

Yeah right, how about we hold ADOBE to account for NOT making their software run better on Ati cards?

[Bob Zelin] “and people will still buy your computers”. “

[Bob Zelin] “It’s a shame that “we” have to suffer financially

Sorry, how do we suffer financially?

\”Traditional NLEs have timelines. FCPX has storylines\” W.Soyka

[John Rofrano]

[Bob Zelin] “I would like to see a consortium group of users hold Apple executives “hostage” (this is an expression of speech – I am not suggesting that someone does something illegal) and FORCE them to answer the question “why won’t you fully cooperate with NVidia”

How about we hold NVIDIA executives hostage and tell them to drop their proprietary CUDA API and focus on adding better support of Open CL/GL so that no one has to work with any vendor… the vendors just need to support the open standards like ATI does and may the best hardware win! ????

I’m sure Apple has better things to do than to retool their graphics engine for proprietary API’s.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Michael Gissing]

From where I sit outside the bubble of any specific OS or hardware dependency, it’s a bit strange to see the ‘dark side’ being used to describe the major OS and hardware option. Apple is the niche and forums that still like to think they are truly representative by being Mac centric have missed the move. Michael Cioni wrote an article a while back explaining why he is moving to Windows and other hardware alternatives to Apple. It seems to me that Phillip Bloom is later to the trend.

And sorry John R, but asking us to feel sorry for Apple having to adopt a proprietary API is a bit of a stretch. Every other software company seems to have no trouble with either CUDA or Open CL/GL. Apple is the king of forcing everyone to their proprietary formats. Why did we need their constantly changing xml format when AAF already existed? Why do they need different hard drive formats so we need to buy software to handle their format. Why when I plug any drive into my Linux box can I read and write to everything but HFS+? Why is it a hack to run their OS an someone else’s hardware unlike Windows and Linux? Why is ProRes a closed format unlike DNx? Why do they use patent laws more aggressively to shut down competition. Sorry, writing their graphics engines to deal with CUDA should be considered normal, not an arduous task. No sympathy.

[Bill Davis]

For many and various personal reasons, I’m largely going to stay away from this thread.

Except, perhaps to note that those big ass blue backlit fans kinda remind me of that very first “prequel” year at NAB for RED, when everything looked like it came from a misplaced R. Geiger “Alien” sketchbook.

I wonder if a design and marketing aesthetic that looks to be aimed at teen gamers is any challenge when a company is trying to gain credibility in the sort of design space that Adobe and Apple were both born in? It’s kinda weird to see.

Then again, if the object is entirely to go fast – “Big Daddy” Don Garletts probably beats even a Lamborghini off the line.

Maybe someone will go full retro and we’ll see a “Rat Fink” flag flying over a booth at next years NAB promoting “ultimate hot rod” computing for video pros…

I can almost smell the nitro fumes!

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Michael Gissing]

[Bill Davis] “I can almost smell the nitro fumes!”

I totally agree….with your first sentence. If the appearance of a computer is so much more important than the performance then stick with Apple. No-one does classy like them.

If you watched the video, you would know that Phillip prefers to spend time with his cat than watch the Apple render bar. The lights on the fan can be disconnected btw.

[Steve Connor]

Funny thing is that even on my 2013 MacBook Pro I don’t really find myself waiting a long time for renders so I imagine people with newer Mac systems don’t either.

I’ve Spent so many years enjoying the discussions on this forum but I think I’m done now, it’s clearly dominated by PC users, trolls and people who know very little about FCPX. Shame really but I’ll pop back if I ever want some PC buying advice

So long and thanks for all the fish

\”Traditional NLEs have timelines. FCPX has storylines\” W.Soyka

[Craig Seeman]

I just have to ask that, given PPro, Resolve, Avid, all cross platform, all supposedly work better on PC where you can buy the systems exactly as you need from the many commercial computer retailers big and small, why do any such editors use Macs at all? If Macs are such a disadvantage to them, the choice is obvious. Why debate at all?

I prefer FCPX so my option is… Mac. End of story.

Apparently Adobe, Blackmagic, Avid have chose, at the moment, to date, to develop for the Mac so some viable subset of their customers are choosing to run on Macs.

[Joe Marler]

[Michael Gissing] “Phillip prefers to spend time with his cat than watch the Apple render bar.”

That was an *Adobe* Premiere render bar, which Philip described as “painful”. Philip’s machine was a mid-range 2013 6-core D500 Mac Pro. That may have been OK in 2013 for 1080 content, but it’s not OK for large amounts of H264 4k if Premiere is being used, and even FCPX can be sluggish since Xeon doesn’t have Quick Sync acceleration for H264. From his blog it’s obvious he shoots a lot of H264 4k from his drones and smaller cameras, and this is shown in the outtakes from his Master Class.

Ironically despite the vast increase in hardware performance of his 10-core GTX1080Ti Windows machine, it wasn’t that much faster than the 6-core nMP at exporting 4k from the Panasonic EV1 — about 50 sec vs 65 sec. I suspect a 12-core D700 nMP would have been faster.

He uses Neat Video a lot and that’s slow on any machine. His 10-core Windows machine was much faster than the 6-core nMP: 50 sec vs 3.5 min — but he’s comparing a four-year-old mid-range Mac Pro to a fairly high end Windows machine. Neat Video has previously said their algorithm scales poorly across dual GPUs. So in this case Philip was effectively using a single D500 GPU vs a GTX-1080 Ti, which is about 3.5x faster. It would be interesting to see that exact test on a 10-core Vega64 iMac Pro.

But this is a problem largely of Apple’s own making. Yes FCPX is blinding fast, esp on certain workflows and hardware, such as handling H264 on a 2017 top-spec iMac. But even FCPX can struggle on a 12-core D700 nMP if using 4k H264, or if using compute-intensive effects like Neat Video.

For years there’s been a smugness in the FCPX community about how fast and efficient that software is, and if people struggling with Premiere performance issues on Macs would just switch to FCPX, everything would be great.

Well they aren’t going to switch — for perfectly valid reasons they like Premiere — I used it for years myself and still have a CC subscription. Philip Bloom likes Premiere, he’s used to it, and he’s not going to change no matter how much faster or better FCPX is. Rather he’ll just get better hardware, and if Apple doesn’t make that hardware, they lose him as a customer. Philip’s video perfectly described his dilemma and decision process.

What should scare Apple is how easy it is for people like Philip to move to Windows. He spends all his time in Premiere and that UI “surface” dominates the user experience. The underlying OS isn’t that visible to someone editing video 10 hrs a day. They’re smart enough to realize that PC hardware is cheaper, faster and upgradeable while maintaining largely the same experience at the application level.

I think Apple finally realized this and thus we have the iMac Pro and a new “modular” Mac Pro on the way. Had they moved quicker in this area Philip Bloom (and all those he represents) might still be an Apple customers.

There’s a line of reasoning that Apple doesn’t really care about competing in this area because the iPhone revenue dwarfs Mac products. But that’s only as a percentage of total revenue. Mac-related revenue is nonetheless very high. If it was a separate company it would be bigger than Time Warner, Facebook, McDonald’s or Northrop Grumman. Apple’s Mac revenue is not that much smaller than Oracle’s total revenue.