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Think the Mac is dead? I think not…
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[Dan Brockett] “At some point, most everything that takes big iron and lots of third party software to accomplish will be able to be done by anyone with a small, portable and cheap device. Moore’s Law still applies and doing almost everything in software will just keep on evolving. Remember ICE cards for your Mac and AE plug-ins? Seems like ancient history but it was only, what, ten years ago?”
Pixar offers a counterexample.
The average render time for a frame of Toy Story (1995) was 2 hours, and tens years later, the average render time for a frame of Cars (2005) was 15 hours — and the Cars renderfarm was 300x more powerful! (https://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/12/pixar_quiz.html)
When Toy Story was re-rendered for 3D in 2009, the average render time per frame was essentially realtime — 1/24th of a second. (https://online.wsj.com/article/SB125201712352284765.html)
I think that Moore’s Law isn’t just transistor count (or speed, or price) — it seems our expectations of what we can do with our technology double every 18 months as well.
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 -
That’s the thing Mark, I am normally extremely optimistic. I love what I do, I love producing, shooting and editing. But I make about a third of my living writing, interviewing and prognosticating about where the industry is headed. And based upon factual data, trends, speaking with industry leaders, it is headed in the direction that I am putting forth.
I don’t think the post industry will die tomorrow. But it is constricting in a way over the past two years that show us where it is headed and at what rate it is shrinking. There will definitely be high quality work done, but the audience that thinks that they are capable of producing high quality work will continue to grow exponentially while the actual positions and amount of work available will continue to shrink.
It is not that if you are over 21, you cannot work, but as a producer, it makes sense that employers will find employees over about 30 to not be as appealing as kids, 18-25. Most kids have more free time available, do not have spouses and kids (you know the marriage rate has gone below 50% for the first time in our country’s history, a couple of years ago), that means that they are available to work more hours at a lower rate than someone who is over 30, has a spouse, kids, a mortgage, etc. And most importantly, kids have grown up on media so they can learn software and grasp concepts more quickly. A partner I used to share an office with is an AE guru. He told that it took him two years of his life, working AE 15-18 hours a day, to really learn AE at a high end pro level. I know younger motion graphics artists today who can really learn almost any app (AE, Maya, Nuke, etc.) in a matter of months, not years. People under 30 have grown up in a different world and learned to speak the language much earlier than we did.
Ageism has never been more rampant in our industry and based upon the parameters that the market is demanding, older, more experienced workers (sometimes known as Pros) are not as appealing in general. They want to work fewer hours and make more per hour. Not saying this applies to everything but it is a general trend.
Back more on topic, I agree with you. I only use Macs because I have lost years of my life in stress as a result of running my business on PCs. Macs are just simpler, easier and more reliable but they still have plenty of issues and problems too. My last MBP was lemon, Apple just had to replace it with this i5 15″ MBP I am typing on. That used to never happen, I have owned 15 Macs since switching from PCs in the 90s. It isn’t important which tools we use, who knows what we will be editing on?
I own a G5 tower, loaded up with an upgraded graphics card, Aja Kona 3, RAID card, etc. But I haven’t replaced it with a Mac Pro because I don’t have the need lately. More and more projects I edit are strictly for the web, so why spend $5,000.00 to just stay current?
I don’t think the industry is crashing and burning, but there are trends that pros at all levels should be aware of, that most of them aren’t. I already went through the digital revolution when the VX1000 hit the market. At the time, the hot tip was owning a BVW-D600 Betacam, an AVID MC for off-line and a linear on-line bay with lots of expensive Beta SP or DBeta decks, a Grass switcher and an Abekas DVE. So many people were caught with their pants down when DV and FCP 1.0 came in. I foresee a lot of people today who will be in a similar position with the expensive tools that they have invested in and that they are ignoring where the industry is going. Cheaper tools, and a hungrier, leaner, much cheaper labor force.
Cheers,
Dan
Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs
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Good points Walter. It is true, nature abhors a vacuum. Increasing processor speed and capability creates a sort of vacuum, and is always matched by the user demanding more functionality. 3D has got to be amazingly demanding on rendering, you are doubling your workload.
Dan
Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs
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[Dan Brockett] “And the trend is that sales of powerful, large desktops, both PCs and Macs, are plummeting over the past three years and will continue to plummet.”
Overall, this may be true — but workstation sales continue to grow, and professional graphics hardware sales are up 77.9% YOY.
[Dan Brockett] “More and more users who used to buy towers are now buying iMacs and laptops. More and more post facilities are going under, I can’t tell you how many I used to use here in LA that no longer exist. It used to be, “why go to a post house, when for $15k, I can have what the post house has here in my office or home?” Now it is evolving to, “why should I have a $15k editi bay in my office or home when I can do most of what is needed on a $2,000.00 iMac or laptop?” It is the next logical step. “
Digital content creation is a really broad market, with many niches within it, and the failing film/broadcast companies in LA is just one piece of the puzzle. More content is being created now than ever before. There are plenty of companies winning new business — someone is buying all this gear — so I think generalizing film/broadcast misses the big shift in our business.
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 -
To be fair Walter, a quote from your article you linked to…
“While a welcome number, the 25.7% gain over the same quarter a year ago should be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s more a reflection on how bad the Q1’09 market performed than how good Q1’10 turned out.”
I don’t feel that market statistics are currently very relevant for the exact reason listed above. We are barely, sort of, kind of coming out from the worst economy since the Great Depression so same quarter sales and sales growth are not a realistic indicator of where the market is really headed. When you had the most horrible year in your recorded computer sales history, any growth from the dismal numbers last year will look impressive.
Yes, my viewpoint in probably very LA-centric because that is where I work and that is the main concentration of broadcast and filmed entertainment, but it is by no means always the sole reliable indicator of the industry’s health overall.
Cheers,
Dan
Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs
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Dan Brockett: “I don’t feel that market statistics are currently very relevant for the exact reason listed above. We are barely, sort of, kind of coming out from the worst economy since the Great Depression so same quarter sales and sales growth are not a realistic indicator of where the market is really headed. When you had the most horrible year in your recorded computer sales history, any growth from the dismal numbers last year will look impressive.”
I’d absolutely agree with you that this year may be an outlier in sales. Also, many of these workstation sales are going for CAD, engineering, medicine, science, visualization, etc.
However, even if it’s hangover demand from the recession, it’s still demand, and the total workstation market is still large – several billion dollars. Apple may eventually decide to focus on consumers exclusively, but I don’t expect the entire workstation market to disappear. Like another poster in this thread mentioned: as long as there’s a need, someone will produce power on the desktop.
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 -
[Dan Brockett] “but the future is pointing toward not needing fast and powerful computers and fast and powerful is a relative thing.”
What area of the industry do you work in? You sound like you haven’t had any experience with VFX. Editing and shooting is one thing, but a huge portion of TV shows(including reality), commercials, and films have some sort of digital cosmetics, roto work, or compositing. Even shows like The Office employ a team of visual effects artists. You cannot do this kind of work on a slow computer with a tiny screen. I can’t wait for the day when I can composite with my 30″ OLED display and a supercomputer the size of a potato.
[Dan Brockett] “YouTube and Vimeo mean that people don’t need to see RED 4k footage on a 107″ plasma for it to be acceptable to them anymore.”
You’re assuming that Youtube, Vimeo, and the internet aren’t going to increase in quality and speed. If you’ve been paying attention, Youtube videos even a couple years ago don’t look nearly as good as the one’s today because of better compression algorithms and faster computing. If anything, as people get used to higher quality video, content creators aren’t going to be able to get away with shooting something on a flip HD.
Motion Design, Color, Editing
SWGC Incorporated -
Hi Illya:
Ha, ha, that’s a good one. I have served as a post supervisor on numerous shows, VFX Producer for a 100 episode animated series, supervising six animators and compositers for a year and half, I am a DP, have shot plenty of green screen and heavily composited shows. I know all about the computing power needed to accomplish visual effects.
Contrary to popular opinion, we are also overdue for a backlash from the audiences for the VFX abuse that people in our business have inflicted upon the audience. I even read a piece in Entertainment Weekly yesterday about how directors are just slinging cheesy looking VFX all over the place and how the audience is becoming jaded to it, much like listening to Auto-tuned vocals is becoming a joke for anyone with an ear. After a while, it is all so much moving Photoshop. It all looks synthetic and fake, other than the tastefully applied subtle VFX, But, I digress…
Yes, I know visual effects are overused even on bad sitcoms like The Office. You are missing the point here. You are thinking about today, while I am talking about tomorrow. Small, cheap and powerful will be what we all are working on and the footprint will be much more on a cloud or in portable computing. I know it is inconceivable to many that we won’t all be using giant, heat spewing chunks of aluminum like Mac Pros, but I and many in the industry feel that we won’t be in just a few short years, at least nearly as much as today.
If you have noticed, operations that used to take maximum horsepower like particle effects, advanced shading and texturing can now be done in prosumer editing and effects programs on relatively slow hardware at relatively quick render times. This will continue to develop at an ever increasing rate.
I agree, YouTube and Vimeo have increased immensely in quality over the past few years and more and more material is seen only on-line. But I am also of the opinion that resolution is overrated. I constantly see projects shot on the RED at 4k that are still horrible projects. I see many projects shot on low end cameras like the 7D, 5D MKII, HVX200 and the EX1 that are quite excellent, that are gathering fans and audiences and making the creators plenty of money. We have definitely reached the era of good enough. Most of the gear on the market even one or two notches above a Flip can produce quality that is good enough for the vast majority of most audiences. That is a monumental achievement from just a few years ago. Sure the Alexas, Vipers and REDs have their place, but those types of tools are not increasing in use, relative to the audience that is creating content, they are decreasing in relative use when considered against what is being produced and created with all of the tools available. Mac Pros are the same, more and more content is being posted on laptops and iMacs. Sure, there is the hardcore pro user base, but they are also decreasing in relative size as crafting media becomes cheaper and simpler. Is the Mac dead? Definitely not. But is the Mac Pro on life support? Sure does look that way from Apple’s perspective.
Dan
Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs
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I’ve been thinking about our exchange yesterday, and I might be arguing for the faster horse-drawn buggies at the dawn of the automobile. What I should be arguing is that progress will continue, whatever form it may take.
Earlier this week, I was working on-site with a client and made some edits to a render-heavy particle system on my laptop. I uploaded the project from my laptop to my workstation, rendered it back at the office, and downloaded the final render files; the project was complex enough and short enough that it was faster to download than it was to render locally.
Taking this a step further, I don’t know how long we will have workstations on our desk. Perhaps bandwidth will increase enough that I can ditch my workstation and do all my heavy lifting with rented computer time from Amazon. For the foreseeable future, I will still need my AJA card and my RAID, so no iMac for me, but you’re right to suggest that the technological climate could change as much as I’ve been suggesting the business climate is.
I don’t know specifically what the future will bring, but to get back to my original point, I’m confident in saying that I will have continually more computational power at my disposal, and that I will continue to find ways to use it to serve my clients better.
Thanks for an interesting discussion! Cheers,
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 -
Absolutely on the nose Walter, you totally get what I am speaking of, you just expressed it much more eloquently.
When you have AVID, the undisputed originator of pro non-linear editing, showing editing over the web at NAB, that is a sea change. I don’t think that computational power will ever go down, that would contradict every paradigm that has been set since the computer was invented. But what I do see happening, the thought I was trying to get across was that the methods and tools that we use to access this power are evolving on a massive scale.
“I might be arguing for the faster horse-drawn buggies at the dawn of the automobile.”
This is such a brilliant summation of the idea I was trying to communicate. It obviously offends people when a new way of doing things becomes the norm, people fundamentally are creatures of habit and don’t like change. That is why editing over the web, technologies I have recently written articles about like Sohonet, Aspera and various new and powerful remote workflow AVID tools are changing how we will work in ways that we can’t even imagine yet.
The main point being that in the near future, what if instead of buying huge hunks of plastic and aluminum from Apple, we buy computational bandwidth from Apple, Amazon, Google and who else possibly? The interface becomes something much more iPad-like in size, weight and portability or even Android/iPhone like in some cases. Yes, we now have iMovie on the new iPhone, I postulate that this is just the beginning. It took a long time for people to get over the idea that they don’t have to own hunks of plastic like cassettes, CDs and DVDs for their entertainment media, it will take a while for pros to learn that they don’t need to own rooms full of expensive Mac Pros too, that is what people are conditioned to think. This all goes back to the death of the PC age articles that have been circulating. PC, as in big, expensive, heavy and immobile tower. Amazing directors like Chris Cunningham have been doing a huge portion of their serious work on laptops for years, this is just the next logical step.
Another area I have researched and interviewed geniuses like John Underkoffler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6YTQJVzwlI&feature=PlayList&p=C71CF1912FB24D22&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=30 and written articles about as well is the extremely outdated way that we interface with our computers and devices. The touch technology that is so popular in mobile computing is a great start but there are other methods and technologies evolving that will make working with media much more intuitive and simple. When you think about it, the monitor, mouse and keyboard are ancient in computing terms and relatively inefficient.
Thanks for your really sharp observations and thinking, you totally get it. This has been a fascinating exchange of ideas in this thread.
Sometimes it is the people on the set who cause an entirely different way of changing the entire workflow after them (RED 4k, for instance). And sometimes it is the people in the edit bays who radically change the way production is done (portable editing on set/location, the ability to motion track in software simply and effectively, freeing up the camera from the tripod and motion control rig when shooting green/blue screen).
I think that what we are evolving to and what is coming down the pike will change how we all work in ways that we can barely conceive of today. I really like the idea of total democratization of the tools, both hardware and software, even though it has caused many of us to make far less money than we used to. There is a lot of work today being shot on DSLRs and small inexpensive camera by people who previously would have not had a chance to ever visually communicate their stories and ideas before. Gear used to be so expensive, huge, heavy and complex. It is encouraging to see the tools truly evolve and become modern.
Cheers,
Dan
Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs
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