Thoughts on 2019

[Bob Zelin]

I was going to make a long post, but much of my opinion is in Oliver Peter’s wonderful WordPress article.
With that said, I look forward to

1) a new Mac Pro with interchangeable graphics card, user upgradable RAM, and (dare I say it) – PCIe slots (never happen !). How will people react to a $12,000 2019 Mac Pro with a soldered in AMD GPU, soldered in RAM, soldered in 10G ports (unless they are on the motherboard) and no way to pop out the internal boot drive. Would you spend $12,000 for this type of machine ?

2) Apple willing to allow NVidia products to work with the macOS (I am sure there is some crazy story there)

3) Adobe able to fully implement GPU acceleration (like CUDA acceleration) with AMD graphics cards on a Mac

4) I am dying to observe the acceptance of the wonderful Lumaforge shared storage product line, now that Apple is selling it directly. Let’s see how that goes in 2019 !

bob Zelin

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

[Joe Marler]

[Oliver Peters] “https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/the-state-of-the-nle-2019/

My 2 cents

Oliver”

Oliver, thanks for that nice, well-round article.

Re FCPX optimization for Macs more than cross-platform NLEs, recent versions of Resolve have challenged this long-held notion. We formerly viewed FCPX’s hyper-responsive skimmer as something only Apple could achieve by owning the app, hardware and OS, and targeting only Macs. This was seemingly supported by how clunky and slow Premiere is on 4k H264 playback — ironic for a playback engined called “Mercury”.

However Resolve 15.x has a “skimmer” and it’s almost as fast as FCPX — yet it’s a cross-platform product. This is an astounding achievement. Blackmagic only controls the application layer — no kernel extensions, device drivers or add-on hardware was used to accomplish this.

Re FCPX improvements, people tend to emphasize user-facing elements, but it badly needs some significant architectural and media management improvements. Unfortunately these are not “sexy” from a marketing standpoint. From a development (and test) standpoint these tend to be difficult and time-consuming.

The current plugin architecture allows a software error in a single plugin’s code to crash the entire host process (FCPX). The more plugins, the more likely this can happen. Ideally the plugins should be run in some sandboxed fashion, similar to how most web browsers run each tab in a separate process address space.

For an app which emphasizes ease of use through UI simplicity, FCPX media management can rapidly become very complex and difficult to understand. One of the worst areas is management of external proxies which cannot be relinked if the drive name or underlying folder structure changes.

Overall FCPX data integrity is amazingly good (in terms of not losing edits). However there are an uncomfortable number of reports of lost render files, red clips, black clips, red clips that play, red audio which won’t play, red audio which *will* play, etc. This can’t all be blamed on hardware — I’ve had all these on a variety of machines.

From a software development and management standpoint, these things are “hard problems”. They may need the OS guys to fix something in the Core Data APIs or SQLite database, which involves cross-team prioritization and scheduling. If a senior developer is given the choice of working on a new user-facing feature vs cleaning up somebody else’s mess, the former is more attractive.

I’d personally like to see some collaborative features — and not just LAN-style, but cloud-based. Even small distributed teams who don’t share a LAN/SAN could benefit. Unfortunately to do that well and reliably — and test it thoroughly — is another hard problem.

[Ronny Courtens]

Hey Bob!

Thank you for your kind words. We are indeed very happy with the fact that Apple is selling some of our standard models directly, and we also have an Enterprise division now that covers the needs of our larger clients with more complex integrations based on our scale-out Petabyte solutions. I will be on the road in the next months, visiting clients and recording case studies. Would love to talk with you in more detail, I will contact you soon.

– Ronny

[Chris Harlan]

I’ve got the same situation. I live in Premiere-land, but keep upgrading my home MC license just in case. Each year I debate. I actually quite enjoy Premiere, and while I suppose I will be back on Avid at some point, I’m not as certain of it as I used to be.