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Pretty amazing Thunderbolt demo.
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So then you will know that having a Rocket greatly enhances the speed and ease of red material. Not only for playback, but transcode/conform as well., no matter how big and fast your computer is. It also allows baseband monitoring of red raw material from 1080 to 4k.
With it being in a Thunderbolt enclosure, you can now move it around instead of it being inconveniently locked to a sizzle core.
It allows editing of red material on lower cost/more convenient computing hardware.
So yes, the rocket is expensive, but its worth it if your time + convenience = money.
So really, your going to have to pay for something. A rocket in an enclosure is very cost effective, in my opinion, and allows more flexibility at the cost of buying a rocket per machine, or constantly swapping pcie boards.
It is exciting to me, perhaps it’s not to you.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “That was from May of last year,”
Well, they found out a proprietary way of doing it, and so they are selling it? The point I’m making actually is that swapping a HDD is far from a simple DIY procedure. While you have brought up that they are making money out of the obstacles created by Apple, that seems good only for them, IMO. From your “new” link:
While our hard drive solution is proprietary (read as: we’re not gonna tell you how we did it), we can guarantee that—unlike other “solutions” out there—it’s 100% compatible with Apple Hardware Test and maintain proper fan operation. -
We hire a DIT with a MacPro and a Red Rocket to be on set. The day after the shoot we’re delivered 2 hard drives with duplicate footage on each – raw R3D files and ProRes transcodes. We copy the ProRes files to the server, archive the rest, start editing. We only go back to the 4K files for reframing or to fix major color issues (rare). Why edit 4K when we never finish in it – often finishing in SD, even!
Plus, having a mobile Red Rocket wouldn’t help in our shop. We’d need 3 Red Rocket cards to make cutting in 4K worthwhile since we often have 3 editors working with the same footage. That would be a $15,000 investment. Much cheaper to pay for transcodes and use our MacPros to reprocess a couple shots than try to work in 4K the whole time. Faster renders, more timeline responsiveness, less cost in the long run.
Really, editing 4K is a cool demo. The majority of the time it’s unnecessary.
Do you guys finish in 4K?
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Michael Hancock
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Would you call the iMac a DIY machine? It never really has been. I don’t think iMac hard drives have ever been on the Apple DIY list, maybe I’m wrong.
Also, the newer models have an extra drive bay that is not locked to the firmware lockout (but is also not user replaceable). I am just pointing out the follow up to the story.
I have no idea why Apple does this, but my feeling is that it’s a practical one. An iMac is not a practical DIY machine, however.
It’s not a big deal if you want to use an iMac. You shoud know going in that the iMac is a rather limited computer if you need to get to the guts of it, but thunderbolt opens it up to greater opportunities.
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And that’s great, Michael. It’s not practical for you. For me, who often serves as “DIT” it’s completely practical or am I not allowed to share my enthusiasm about it? Because it might not work for you, I’m wrong?
We handle our own transcodes, which makes a rocket even more useful.
The reason for my excitement for this demo is that I could personally handle real time capture/proxy creation, data verification, on set playback from a centralized portable system. Then most of that system could also plug right in to a studio environment. Perhaps I am naive, but for us and our needs, it fits right in to how we operate (except the windows part of it).
There no way we would all edit native 4k, which makes a portable rocket even more intriguing. After edit, conform can be done on any available machine, including a laptop. You say you’d need a rocket per machine, I’d say no you wouldn’t.
No we don’t finish in 4k, but we try and grade from the 4k raw if at all possible.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “It’s not a big deal if you want to use an iMac. You shoud know going in that the iMac is a rather limited computer if you need to get to the guts of it, but thunderbolt opens it up to greater opportunities.”
Fair enough Jeremy, and Thunderbolt is great, indeed. But I was wondering as well if Apple would follow this trend in the future, with their new line of computers, you see? I took the iMac as a recent example on how Apple has created more obstacles over the years, as there has been ongoing tweaks in that model in order to close it down even more to the end user. See this for reference:
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The MacBook Pros aren’t this way, refreshed late last year.
MacPros aren’t this way.
My guess for the iMac is a heat issue. Looks like they are trying to keep a close eye on it for whatever reason.
As far as “closing it down” the iMac has been a fairly closed computer by its very design since the beginning.
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[Jeremy Garchow] ” As far as “closing it down” the iMac has been a fairly closed computer by its very design since the beginning.”
It’s the same design, all right. The thing is, in a very recent past, and in less than twenty minutes, you could do it yourself (being just a little tech savvy). Now you need to rely on a proprietary hardware/software solution. That’s what I’m calling “closing it down” and that’s what I’m afraid will be the trend for Apple’s hardware. Does MacBook Pro battery ring a bell? And did you say MacPro? Isn’t it what was unnecessary here in the first place? Anyway, I wonder how closed down Mac computers will be in a near future, and that includes the Mac Pro replacement.
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Jeremy,
just a quick note to say thanks for posting the link. It seems most people get the basic idea that I was trying to draw attention to Thunderbolt in general and the possibilities it brings for editors. I should mention for our Mac Users, that I ran the same test on Macbook Air using 10.7 and it kicked @ss. I edit a lot on both platforms and both sides should be impressed.
The purpose was not to compare either OS which the cow users seem to get (other forums are hung on the fact I used Windows ) but to show multiple devices in a chain. Running windows just opens the user base even more to show TB vendors that we need more devices. I should mention that getting the stuff to run on windows TB requires Windows drivers for each device (same as mac) so you can’t simply connect a TB device and have it work (with the exception of the Apple TB 27″ display) .
Another thing for the Cow users to note is that each type of computer has different limitations to how many TB devices can be connected and in what order. I refer to this as THUNDER WARS and you’ll know what I mean once lots of devices start showing up and people try to get everything running perfectly. I’ve got a ton of various early beta TB devices in the lab and it can be challenging at times understanding why things work and don’t work – not a lot of notes on it yet. I think we’re writing it as we go along;) I think all this will work out over time. Both Intel and RED have been very supportive of the things we are working on – stay tuned.
Anyone heading to NAB might stop by our booth, I’ll try and have this or a similar demo setup for people to check out. The realtime scrubbing and playback has to be experienced to be believed. As true geek myself, it takes a lot to get my jaw to drop and this did it pretty quick.
thanks
DKH
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[kim krause] “the mac mini will be the new mac pro!”
Kim, I half-agree with you.
If you bought a Mac Pro only for its ability to expand, then yes, the Mac Mini with Thunderbolt is the new Mac Pro, for you. Video editorial used to require a workstation because there were no desktop or portable systems available with the necessary expansion capabilities. You needed the expansion that a Mac Pro provided, but perhaps the CPU performance and RAM capacity was overkill for your needs.
Thunderbolt separates expansion from raw computing performance, and moves it outside the box. That’s what makes it a big deal. For the first time, you don’t need to buy a Mac Pro if all you want to do is move some large frames of video around quickly. With Thunderbolt, portables can be expanded, too, which opens up all sorts of new possibilities for doing work on a portable machine. I think this is the exciting part of this demo.
I agree with you and Jeremy that this means that the two of you won’t need Mac Pros anymore. I’m glad that you have new options that will work well for you. However, I sharply resist the implication that Thunderbolt makes the Mac Pro irrelevant because other systems now also have expansion capabilities, or that Thunderbolt will enable bolt-on CPU and RAM upgrades (which is totally inconsistent with current system architecture).
There’s still a big difference in compute power and RAM capacity between a Mac Pro and a Mac Mini that Thunderbolt cannot address. If you bought a Mac Pro for its number-crunching performance, then Thunderbolt will not make the Mac Mini the new Mac Pro for you.
In other words, I’d argue that thanks to Thunderbolt, fewer people will need Mac Pros to do their work. Users with CPU- or RAM-intensive applications will need them, while users with expansion needs will be able to use smaller, cheaper, lower-performance systems.
Sidebar: it’ll be interesting to see if this snowballs into the rumored Mac Pro cancellation. If a large segment of the current Mac Pro constituency moves to a MBP, Mini or iMac with Thunderbolt since they need expansion and not compute performance, will Mac Pro sales be reduced drastically enough to put it on the chopping block?
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
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