[Andrew Kimery]

Soft compared to what? How the footage looks like in the camera’s view finder? How the footage looks if you hook the camera up to a broadcast monitor and play it back? You even said yourself, maybe the footage itself is slightly out of focus. I’ve seen a ton of slightly out of focus footage from smaller HD cameras as it’s much more difficult to judge focus on the on-board viewfinder or LCD than it was for SD cameras.

The shooters swear up and down they focused but the minute you view it on something larger than the camera’s tiny LCD screen it is glaringly obvious that the subject is a hair soft. They wall right behind the subject is tack sharp though. 😉

[Shane Ross] “IN my experience, when you ingest HDV as ProREs via firewire, it comes in as 1440×1080 ProRes. Still flagged as anamorphic…so still fills the frame. But can’t multiclip with other ProREs files that are 1920×1080.”
Correct. HDV captured as PR via FW will keep it’s native frame size unfortunately.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

[Dennis Radeke] “c) Perhaps most interesting to me is (my opinion) that the Z800 is a better Mac from a case design POV than the Mac. Case design, entry into the system, accessibility, layout are all superior to MacPro which was designed in 2004.”

The shell of the Mac tower is from ’04, but the interior layout has changed multiple times as it’s contained everything from single proc G5’s, to water-cooled CPUs, to the intel chips it has today.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

He does w/regards to the current version of ThB (i.e. copper), but, honestly, if raw performance and max expandability truly were our utmost concerns I don’t think any creative pro would’ve stayed with Mac from the mid-to-late G4 era to day. Windows machines have had more slots, faster CPUs, a broader range of GPUs at better prices, more I/O options (USB 3, eSATA, HDMI), etc., yet people stuck w/Apple because, for lack of a better term, they preferred the way it feels. They, we, seem to tolerate quantifiable short comings in order to get something that’s not quantifiable.

Now that DaVinci is $999 how many of those new installs are going on pretty limited MacPros and how many are going on Linux machines with a handful of GPUs in the box? Or what about Assimilates Scratch? People kept asking for a Mac version even though it would have limitations that the Windows version would not and Assimilate finally gave the people what they wanted (a not quite as functional version for the Mac) and they people we happy.

Good enough + Apple Secret Sauce = it will sell, IMO. People will bitch and moan but they’ll still buy it and tweak their workflows to use it and life will go on.

Honestly, I figured Apple would give the MP another refresh or two before sending it off into the sunset.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

[Thomas Frank] “They would be stupid if they drop it… the reason why everybody wants Apple product is because it is and might have been used by the high end.”

I feel like that was true at one time but I don’t know if it still is. For example, Apple sold more iDevices in 2011 than they have sold Macs in the history of the company. When Jobs came back to Apple he said that the PC wars were over, that MS had won and Apple was looking for the next big thing.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

Shane,

Do you think it’s just the MacPro that is EOL or do you think Apple is exiting the pro desktop market entirely?

With Thunderbolt there’s been speculation that Apple could ‘re-envision’ what a higher end desktop computer looks like. I’ve tossed out the idea of a ‘super mac mini’ of sorts that is modular and relies on ThB for expansion as opposed to PCI slots.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

[Andrew Richards] ”
One of the biggest problems with FCSvr in my experience was that editors saw using it as a chore, they did as little as possible in order to avoid spending time in it, and they really just wanted to have the metadata they were creating in FCP (markers, bins, etc) to “just show up” in FCSvr. But since FCP7 didn’t talk to FCSvr at all, that could not be achieved with anything approaching a practical workflow.”

This was my reaction when I started testing it for possible deployment at the last place I worked. The integration I’d hoped for just wasn’t there which was very disappointing.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] “I’m the contrarian here often, but I’m not convinced that 3D is ever going to be much more than a solution looking for a problem in the reasonable future.”

I pretty much agree about 3D. I just tossed it in there as an example of how our media-crunching needs keep expanding alongside our media-crunching abilities. It’s the same w/computer games. The faster the hardware gets the more hardware demanding the games become.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] “When legacy was born, storage was expensive and computers were slower. Today, storage is cheap and computers and networks are ever faster. X is building toward that future. All your past editing decisions – preserved – constantly on – and available to you to use or modify as you like.

For some people yes, for other people no. SD used to be a chore to handle, then it became common place. Then HD came out and it was a chore to handle and now it’s pretty common place. Now 4k and 3D are coming down the pipe and they will be a chore to handle.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo probably has one of the most cutting edge workflows and the amount storage they needed for finishing the film was 55TB. That’s just space for the locked edit, VFX shots, mixing, color correction, etc.,. Lord knows how much storage they needed for the full rez (5k) dailies. For RT playback they had to build a disk array that could handle 1.1gigs a second (for 1 stream). For offline I think they cut w/ProRes LT proxies. Extreme example? Maybe today, but I think it will become a fairly common workflow for Hollywood movies very soon. The David Fincher film Zodiac shot on the Viper, recorded 444 RGB and required 144TB to hold all the dailies.

The faster our machines get the more we ask of them so I think the net result is pretty much the same. Sure, any modern computer today could handle an SD workflow like a hot knife through butter, but how many of us are still doing SD-only workflows?

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

Romeo,

As others have said LA is a tough nut to crack and it’s also not the center of the universe. With that being said, you haven’t even been out of school for two years and I feel like you left with some delusions of what it was going to be like. I don’t mean that as an insult, but I’ve seen lots of people get out of college and expect to jump right into the editor’s chair and that’s just not how it works. If you’ve been hammering away at LA for 3-5 years w/o much luck then I’d reconsider but you haven’t even been at it for two years yet.

I’d say many LA editor career paths go something like this runner/working in the vault, logger/transcriber/digitizer, assistant editor, editor. There used to be a junior editor step in there between AE and editor but that doesn’t seem to be the case much anymore.

[Angelo Lorenzo] ”
I will say this, anyone I know who has come to LA and goes back home never returns. No matter what their intention is, it just doesn’t happen.”

Hello Angelo. I’m Andrew and I came to LA, went back to the Midwest, and returned. Now you know someone that’s done it. 😉 W/that being said, I don’t know anyone that’s left and come back either (besides myself).

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Andrew Kimery]

I figured all the time you saved using FCPX is why you can crank out some of those near-novella posts, Bill. 🙂

My time here is inversely proportional to how much transcoding, rendering, and/or exporting I am currently doing.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)