Think the Mac is dead? I think not…

[Mike Schrengohst]

I was a diehard PC guy since 1978. I poo poo the MAC all the time….
Once I started shooting P2 in 2006 and finally bought a Mac laptop
I have bought 2 more MAC’s and hardly ever experience any crashes….
My old PC edit systems were expensive, custom built machines that are
now boat anchors. I cannot tell you how many BSOD’s we suffered on a weekly
basis. Always swapping HD’s and RAM and they just were never 100%.
I went though about 6 DELL POS’s that were eventually kicked to the curb.
I have been more productive with the MAC’s and have no compelling reasons
to ever look at a PC again.

[Illya Laney]

Entertainment Weekly is hardly a solid source of information. If I used that as a credible resource in my research courses in college, they would have failed me. Besides that, if there is a backlash it’s going to be against 3D, not VFX in general.

To address one of your other points, I think the fact that HDTV sales are on the rise in a bad economy and the significant drop in prices gives enough evidence that people aren’t going to solely watch content on Vimeo or Youtube made with a regular flipcam. For an intelligent guy, you miss one very important point, just because someone watches programs on a laptop, desktop, iPhone, or iPad doesn’t mean they also don’t watch media(keyword being media) on a real TV. It’s not one or the other, it’s both. As someone who makes a living creating bonus DVD content you should already know this.

First you say….

“Sad to say, but the future is pointing toward not needing fast and powerful computers and fast and powerful is a relative thing.”

Then you say…

“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.”

My original post isn’t valid anymore because you just changed your opinion to match mine. By the way, saying that we’ll be using smaller, cheaper, and faster computers in the future is about as mindblowing as saying “I think it’ll rain in Seattle sometime in the future.” We’re all aware of that. Blackmagic has already made serious advancements on the path to this with their adoption of USB 3.0 tech.

Motion Design, Color, Editing
SWGC Incorporated

[Dan Brockett]

Oh Illya,

It’s a conversation, not a pissing match. Yes, yes, you are right, Entertainment Weekly is a not a credible source for a college dissertation but it is a credible source for the mindset of consumers, that was my point. You have to admit, CGI/VFX is all starting to look like so much visual white noise. It doesn’t look realistic in most cases, it looks like video game reality which is about as stylized as Anime/Manga. Lots of talent in the field of creating it but it rarely looks organic and based in reality, it is a very stylized hyper reality that appeals to a young audience who has been raised in an age where that is all they have ever seen.

To some, predominantly the artists who create it, it might look cool, but to a huge audience of viewers, it looks about as real as moving Photoshop. I can’t help but to think that VFX today is beginning to look like the effects in 1902’s Georges Melies “Trip to the Moon” must have looked to audiences just a decade later. Seen that, done that, when will something new looking ever come out? Even Avatar looked like moving Photoshop. Yeah, it was cool 3D moving Photoshop, but nobody thinks that those blue smurfs or their environment looked even remotely real. My hope is that someone like a Cameron or a Spielberg will get a wild hair and make a big, expensive feature with nothing but practical and in-camera effects, just to see if they can still do it. Nothing today looks as organic and fantastic as the effects in Blade Runner or the first Star Wars. Slicker, unrealistically larger and flashier with the sheen of Adobe, Maya and handwritten code all over it doesn’t work for a lot of the audience anymore. They’ve been stuck with that for decades now.

HDTV sales? When were we talking about HDTV sales? If you went to college and ever took a statistics class, or if you have ever worked in retail or marketing, you know that 99.8% of statistics are meaningless, just like the one I used in this sentence. Statistics can be easily interpreted in a myriad of ways by any parties interested in using them to their own ends.

I should clarify, I used to make my living creating bonus material for DVDs/Blu-ray but just like traditional network TV viewership, DVDs/Blu-ray are basically a dead/dying issue. Along with the massive demographic migration of the most coveted male 18-34 audience to the web, much of the other viewership has gone to the web. It’s not that people aren’t watching television anymore, they are, but for an ever growing number of couch potatoes, it is on their computer. Yes, of course we still watch TV, but not as much as we used to and the audience numbers are shrinking, not rising.

As far as the first statement, what I meant by that was that software progress is somewhat negating the need for more computing horsepower to accomplish more and more tasks that used to take large amounts of computing horsepower. I can do particle effects, advanced lighting and shading effects now with ease, even with iMovie plug-ins on a Macbook, things that just a few years ago took the fastest computers available. And I did concede that yes, as more computing power becomes available, software developers and electronics manufacturers fill that processing void with things like 3D and 3D animation which, yes, do require a lot more processing power. But as Walter and I discussed, perhaps it will make more sense to purchase/lease/borrow that computing power from huge entities that hold huge server farms rather than buying hardware that is outdated as soon as we take delivery of it on an ongoing basis.

If we are all aware of the fact that computing is migrating to the cloud and not owning giant and ever more advanced Mac Pro and other PC brand workstations, then why did many of the posts in this thread disagree with this assertation when I posted it? Have you edited over the web? Used Sohonet, Aspera software or any of the latest AVID remote workflow gear? This is the direction of our business, it is there for anyone to see, just go to NAB, read the magazines and websites.

Most people in our business are pining away for the next update to the now outdated and getting slower 15 month old Mac Pros, that’s why I fell in love with Walter’s line, “I might be arguing for the faster horse-drawn buggies at the dawn of the automobile.” Apple’s business has radically changed and pro hardware and apps are becoming an ever dwindling part of Apple’s business and are obviously not a priority or we would have new Mac Pros with the fastest processing available and we would be using FCP 10.0 instead of 7.0.

BTW, enlighten me, what exactly is BMDs USB 3.0 tech and what does it have to do with CPU or graphics processing power?

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Walter Soyka]

[Dan Brockett] “If we are all aware of the fact that computing is migrating to the cloud and not owning giant and ever more advanced Mac Pro and other PC brand workstations, then why did many of the posts in this thread disagree with this assertation when I posted it? Have you edited over the web? Used Sohonet, Aspera software or any of the latest AVID remote workflow gear? This is the direction of our business, it is there for anyone to see, just go to NAB, read the magazines and websites. “

I mentioned earlier in this thread that cloud computing could be the future in production, but I still think it’s a long way off.

There’s a race: local processing power and storage are competing with cloud-based processing and bandwidth to meet our increasing expectations and our decreasing budgets. I think that we will need a quantum leap in broadband speed before I will be able to replace my local machines with the cloud. My RAID runs at 500 MB/s; my Internet connection has a long way to go to catch up. There’s a tremendous amount of physical infrastructure that will need to be built (at great expense) before I think it’s realistic to move video to the cloud.

[Dan Brockett] “BTW, enlighten me, what exactly is BMDs USB 3.0 tech and what does it have to do with CPU or graphics processing power? “

I imagine Illya was referring to new products like the Ultra Studio Pro. It’s a 10-bit SD/HD capture solution that connects via USB 3.0 — meaning you could work on a notebook instead of a big workstation with a capture card.

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]

https://www.psfk.com/2010/06/youtube-introduces-a-cloud-based-video-editor.html

Of course, this is consumer and fairly primitive, but based upon my interviews with the AVID marketing and technical teams, the development of pro level cloud-based remote editing is further along that you would think. I mean, they acquired an entire company just for their remote editing technology.

The beauty of it is that the actual editing is being done on a server at full res, it is proxy editing you are doing on your laptop halfway across the world, mitigating the need for much larger “pipes” than we have available right now. I think that for a while, it will be a proxy-based world, in a way, going back to the off-line/online model that we just kind of got away from a few years ago.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Here is that chart I was talking about https://www.edibleapple.com/how-important-is-the-iphone-to-apples-bottom-line/

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Illya Laney]

[Dan Brockett] When were we talking about HDTV sales? If you went to college and ever took a statistics class, or if you have ever worked in retail or marketing, you know that 99.8% of statistics are meaningless.

You just have a comeback for everything. Re-read my post after you’ve re-read you’re rant about the Canadian tourist campaign and maybe you’ll get it.

[Dan Brockett] “To some, predominantly the artists who create it, it might look cool, but to a huge audience of viewers, it looks about as real as moving Photoshop.”

Where are you getting these “facts” from? You’re just making stuff up now. For the record, watching Avatar in IMAX at Universal City was awesome. I personally like what you call “moving Photoshop” in addition to old Bladerunner style VFX. I’m unsubscribing from this thread.

Motion Design, Color, Editing
SWGC Incorporated