What if there actually IS a new Mac Pro?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Darren Durbin] “Technically? Yes. You likely have to install new drivers, which is quite reasonable, but you can make it work.

Legally, Maybe. If you bought a Z800 with Windows preinstalled, as most small businesses would do, then no. New motherboard == new license (this isn’t necessarily the case if you have some type of volume license or software assurance.)”

Thanks, Darren.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Frank Gothmann] “I looked those up especially for you. No, I didn’t look for these before purchasing because I knew about MS OS policy. I also think it is no secret that Windows is a much more open and flexible OS compared to X. “

How so? You mean where you can install it? Or how often you can install it? I find the MacOS, or sorry, OSX to be rather open and flexible.

[Frank Gothmann] “If you have AJA drivers and shove the drive in a machine with a Matrox card it won’t work obviously. If you haven’t deactivated CS5 on the old machine it won’t run or allow you to activate on the new on etc. But you will boot to be able to sort out your drivers.”

Sure, I am just talking about being able to boot from one machine to the other. Thanks for letting me know. I have no idea how cloning works on a PC. I do know I can boot any mac in to firewire mode and then boot another machine from it.

[Frank Gothmann] “I would. I have been unhappy with Apple for quite a while, basically since the whole iPhone craze started. I have issues with quite a few things that they do and especially how they do it. It makes a huge difference if you are the small underdog that they were 15 years ago or a big, global player. You cannot act and behave in the same way.”

Fair enough.

[Frank Gothmann] “If you think this through to the end, what is the endgame scenario if Apple has its way. We get our music through Apple, our movies, our television, our books, magazines, newspapers, textbooks, software, hardware, peripherals as they see fit. Of course, it won’t happen that way, but this is essentially how they have set themselves up.”

They aren’t the only game in town. You have a choice on where you can buy your media if you don’t want to buy from Apple.

[Frank Gothmann] “And where will you look?”

I’ve heard awesome things about NT. Seems doable, right?

If Apple announces that they are out, I would look to Windows and HP or Boxx. Something like that. I run Adobe on a Mac, so I’d probably look to run Adobe on Windows. Our SAN and subsequent hardware and software is cross platform (I can even run a mixed Os environment, even Linux), our Cache-A is cross platform and our capture cards are cross platform. We’d need to keep a Mac around to export XMLs from our old projects if that becomes a reality.

We aren’t locked to ProRes, but it’s what we work in mostly. I really like Adobe MEdia Encoder than can encode P2 MXFs (and others) for a 10bit 422 codec that almost any NLE in existence can read without buying anything. Some might have to rewrap or transcode, but almost any NLE can do something with it.

Don’t get me wrong, a platform switch is of course on the brain after many years of not having to think about it. Everything we have is ready to go, we would just need to get new CPUs and swap some cards, and then of course, get up to speed in Windows which will take a long time, and of course adjust our wok flows accordingly, which will also take a while, but I’m not scared of it.

Thanks for your response. Glad to be hearing some actual facts here.

Jeremy

[Tim Wilson]

[Darren Durbin] “[Tim Wilson] ” e3000 not only cost in the same neighborhood as Xserve — it could cost a lot less”

We have/had several customers who dropped significant six figure sums on an E3000 box – in some cases, the memory alone was close to six figures. “

I’d be shocked if there weren’t scores of multi-million dollar installations.

My point is that A-line series, “A” was for “affordable,” or something along those lines. It was pitched very specifically at small and medium businesses with shiny brochures. I could swear that one of ’em had balloons on it.

And I’ll keep saying: 3TB. The series was not *limited* to deep pockets, and the small guys were just as well-cared for as the big ones.

But overall, I agree with you agreeing with me. 🙂

I also agree that roadmaps are of limited value. But I’m some combination of amused and amazed and annoyed that so many people are so adamant that good-faith attempts to stay in touch with their customers is somehow a bad idea.

Is it really better to have the most active threads in the largest media professionals community in the world speculate whether the hardware at the core of their business, provided by the vendor at the core of their business, is going to exist any longer?

I take that back. It’s a fantastic idea. Always happy to see the traffic. 🙂

And kidding aside, the energetic insights.

Especially when they agree with me. LOL

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Sure, I am just talking about being able to boot from one machine to the other. Thanks for letting me know. I have no idea how cloning works on a PC. I do know I can boot any mac in to firewire mode and then boot another machine from it.”

There’s no analogous Windows feature like target disk mode for booting (that I know of). Apple wins here. By a mile.

However, in your original use case for target disk mode, you were talking about installing Snow Leopard on a machine that shipped with Lion. PCs don’t have the same artificial restrictions about installing old OSes on new systems that recent Macs do. As long as there is no technical barrier (like missing hardware drivers), you can install an older OS on a newer system from install media (the old-fashioned way).

On a Mac, you can deploy the same image onto disparate hardware configurations without really thinking about it. This is one of the things that Apple makes much, much simpler than Microsoft. On Windows, deployment like that is possible if you know what you are doing, or if you spend a couple bucks on Acronis software to do the hard stuff for you. That’s the route I’ve gone for configuring my render garden (it’s too small to be a render farm) — it was pretty easy to do, and so far, so good.

On Windows, imaging or cloning tools are readily available just as they are for OS X. The general idea is the same — get a known-good configuration and then back it up in case of emergency. For the sake of completeness, I’d also note here that some applications may require reactivation when booting from a clone because their activation data may be tied to the serial number of the hard drive they were originally installed on.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “What recent roadmap led you to Windows/HP?”

I know you didn’t address this to me, but I hope you won’t mind if I jump in here anyway.

I didn’t go looking for roadmaps as I’ve started integrating Windows for creative work alongside my Macs. I looked at track records and current trends, and I looked at current industry promotion efforts as a proxy for larger corporate strategy.

In my article FCPX and the Domino Effect [link], I talked about how the decade from about 1998 to 2008 saw a string of really exciting and overwhelmingly positive surprises from Apple for video pros. However, starting in around 2008 and continuing through the present, I think we’ve seen a string of mostly negative surprises and shifting focus. ProRes 4444 was cool, but otherwise, Apple hasn’t given me much new to be excited about lately — and they’ve surprised me too many times by taking away the things I was interested in.

In other words, from where I sit, after 10 good years with Apple, I’ve been on a 4-year losing streak.

While Apple has left apple.com/pro [link] untouched in favor of running ads showing how to hide your computer in a manila interoffice envelope or how to get your phone to call you Rock God, HP has been actively pursuing the digital content creation industry.

Z800s are everywhere you look. 3D studios are buying them left and right — some new purchases, some replacing Macs, and some replacing previous HP xw series machines. Every quarter, JPR’s workstation surveys show increasing sales and market share. Their industry press coverage is enormous. There are ads and promotions everywhere. They are wooing users like me, telling me that they’ve got a solution for me, and backing it up with real shipping products with great performance.

Most importantly, neither HP nor Microsoft, nor other notable vendors like Dell, Boxx, and Lenovo have nuked the products their professional customers were relying on without warning, over and over.

Full disclosure: HP sent me a sizzle core beast workstation. That said, it came with no talking points and no strings attached — and if it had, I wouldn’t have accepted it. I have no interest in being a shill. I’ve been really impressed with the machine as well as with my experience with Windows 7, and I think it could be a good solution for a lot of people here. That’s why I’ve been talking as positively about Windows/HP as I used to talk about Macs, and why I put my money where my mouth is and bought 4 more HPs for rendering.

Interesting side note: HP was configuring that workstation for me during the PSG division spin-off rumor frenzy. Even amid the uncertainty, they were still working hard to promote their products to the DCC/entertainment industries. That impressed me, and along with their industry position, it gave me confidence that even if PSG had been sold, it would have been a strong business worth maintaining like IBM’s PC business with Lenovo.

I know that the Mac platform still offers some unique advantages, but at this point, I’m interested in the vendors who I know are interested in me. To bring this back to roadmaps, I appreciate companies sharing their plans for and visions of the future — even if they are short term (like the FCPX 2012 feature set or Z820 pre-announcements), and even knowing that they are subject to change.

Even if you don’t trust the specifics of a roadmap (which would certainly be reasonable), it’s nice to know if your vendor is actually working on the sorts of products you hope to use.

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

Fair enough, Walter.

Thanks for taking the time.