[Andrew Kimery]

[Shawn Miller] “I don’t know if I would take that bet. ☺ I could possibly see the base for dedicated Photoshop and Illustrator users (designers and photographers) skewing a bit more towards OSX, but I would be surprised if motion designers, compositors, 3D/VFX artists, video editors, etc., were as Mac centric as their print/design/photography counterparts. I don’t have any numbers to back this up, but I feel like there’s been a steady stream of 3D, VFX and mograph artists switching to Windows PCs as they continue to offer more and better performance per dollar than any offerings from Apple. I could be completely wrong, but I would be really curious to know what the actual numbers are.”

Editing, at least in my experience, is very Mac-centric. I’m over 15yrs in and between CA and IN I’ve seen maybe 5 or 6 PC-based NLEs in use. Maybe the shift to PCs will keep happening naturally (depending on what Apple does), but if Adobe just killed Mac support out of the blue it would go very, very poorly for them.

[andy patterson] “Adobe could just say to the Apple users the PC works just fine and we will no longer support Apple.”

Adobe tried that with PPro and came back to the Mac because a huge part of the editing community is on the Mac. Avid merely hinted that they might try that and there was a near riot from their Mac user base.

I’ve thought about switching a lot in the past couple of years, but as a freelancer in LA I move around a lot and it’s just easier to have a Mac because almost everyone else has a Mac. Switching would be more of a headache than it’s worth to me. If anything I’ll do a Hack before I go Windows. Again, not because I have anything against Windows, but just because I work in a Mac-centric part of the industry in a Mac-centric city.

[andy patterson] “Adobe should go PC only and let the performance get even better.”

It doesn’t work like that. Apple can wring out a performance boost because they control both the hardware and the software. Adobe can’t wring out a performance boost by going PC-only because they still have to support millions of possible PC configurations. Now if Adobe went Mac-only then they might be able to better optimize their software for Mac hardware because Macs have very few variables compared to PCs. Or Adobe could build their own Adobe-brand PCs and optimize their software for their machines, but I don’t see that happening either. 😉

[Andrew Kimery]

[Santiago Martí] “I thought Radeon Pro 460 had 4 Gb of ram”

You are correct; the 460 has 4gig.

[Andrew Kimery]

[andy patterson] “I think they felt as though the quality would not be as good. I think Quick Sync will only work with single pass renders. My system renders pretty fast with a mediocre GTX 1060 and a mediocre 3.4 GHZ Haswell Quad Core CPU. “

Possibly. From what I’ve Googled, Quick Sync gets improvements with each new CPU generation from Intel and the Kaby lake CPUs will be able to handle 10-bit video so the quality seems to increasing a lot with each update.

[andy patterson] “That does make things harder for Adobe. If I were Adobe I think I would drop support for Apple (in two years from now). PCs are not evil : )”

That probably wouldn’t go well as I’d bet the majority of Adobe’s base are Apple users. Even if Adobe went Windows-only it wouldn’t solve their problem of having to support a nearly infinite combination of hardware, drivers, chipsets, etc.,.

[Andrew Kimery]

[andy patterson] “I imagine the settings are about the same. FCPX is using Intel’s Quick sync for h.264 renders. There are software titles for the PC that can use Intel’s Quikc Sync. “

Do you happen to know why Adobe doesn’t support Quick Sync in the same way? I’ve tried googling it, but haven’t come up with any info (other than people asking if/when Adobe will support it). I’ve found third party encoding plugins that support it and work with Premiere Pro, but they are Windows-only.

[Brett Sherman] “Not necessarily. Could be Adobe’s lack of interest in improving performance over new “features”. It clearly is an advantage to Apple to have the resources of OS development, but Adobe knows that and can respond accordingly. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know.”

Adobe also has to worry about being cross platform which typically necessitates running well on everything, but being optimized for nothing.

[Andrew Kimery]

[andy patterson] “remiere Pro does not have a timeline index but we can find content in the timeline. “

Meant to mention this in my previous post but I forgot. A few days ago Andy Mees posted a screenshot of a Timeline Index feature he built in PPro and is noodling around with.

[Andrew Kimery]

The export times between PPro and X have been posted a lot over the last few years so while I’m not surprised that X is faster (as it has been in all the other online videos I’ve seen) though the difference in the speed always makes me wonder if the tests were setup appropriately. Not saying that they weren’t, but with differences like that my gut reaction is always to second guess the results at first.

IMO Apple hardware complaints seem to fall into one of two camps. Apple-centric complains (ex. long hardware upgrade cycles, too narrow of performance gaps between product lines, etc.,) and cross platform complains (PCs are faster, more expandable, etc.,). This vid was mostly a cross platform comparison but ends with a bit of an Apple-centric tease (the 2015 MPB vs the 2016 MPB).

What I do find interesting are comparisons of MBPs to iMacs to nMPs. Typically I think people expect pretty distinct good, better, best type results but in reality the results are surprising close/mixed. There is always a point of diminishing returns on the cost/speed scale, but it’s surprising how quickly that point is reached in a Mac environment. Are the lower-end machines punching above their weight or are the higher-end machines underperforming?

I think another interesting variable would be to throw a couple of hackintoshes into the mix. One of the counter points to complaints about the age of the Mac Pro is that components haven’t changed very much, so why not put a modern, top-end Hack against a nMP? Booting a Mac into Windows might be easier to accomplish the same type of test, but I don’t know if there are any performance penalties (ex. less optimized drivers) while running Windows on a Mac.

Many times Bill has commented on how smooth X is on his laptop compared to his desktop and I would not be surprised if Apple is ‘tuning’ X for MBPs and iMacs because those are the mass market machines. That’s what sells (especially laptops). And if you are cynical enough you could theorize that this is the self-fulling prophecy that Apple uses to kill the Mac pro (why optimize apps for a MacPro if no one is buying it, why buy a MacPro if apps aren’t optimized for it).

EDIT: I know lots of things get tossed around in here, but I think the political insults are unnecessary. Points can easily be made w/o them.

EDIT #2:
[Bill Davis] “For some reason, no positive X post will EVER go unchallenged here.
????”

No post on any NLE goes unchallenged here, and that’s the great thing about being here.

[Andrew Kimery]

I liked how the article gave both a nice birds eye view and dug into the nitty-gritty. Though not being a Lumberjack user or an X user (or even someone that works are shows remotely like his game show) the nitty-gritty wasn’t as meaningful to me as it would be to someone else. ????

[Bill Davis] “And I know they have products that are designed to translate between the environments with their X to CC product.

But I don’t know the current status of where they are focused regarding development. “

I think it boils down to where they want to put their time/energy since it’s just the two of them. For example, a few years ago I was talking with Philip about getting Lumberjack to work with Avid (since it would probably get used on every reality show if that happened) and he didn’t say it couldn’t be done, just that basically AAF was a hurdle they didn’t really want to deal with. PPro might have ended up in the same category of too much effort for too little return.

[Brian Seegmiller] “How do you implement those smart collections into Premiere Pro CC?”

PPro’s Search Bins can auto-populate based on metadata such as keywords.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Oliver Peters] “FWIW (and an edit to my previous post), it is also possible to have multiple editors open the SAME Premiere project on a SAN. However, until Adobe gets Adobe Anywhere worked out, this approach is very dangerous. “

Maybe you have more info than I do Oliver, but from video’s I’ve seen about Adobe Anywhere I’m left underwhelmed. To me it’s not really project sharing but an attempt to help automate the process of keeping multiple projects in sync. For example, if Tom, Dick and Harry are sharing a project in Avid they are literally sharing a project. They will be working out of bins (which can only be modified by one user at a time, but can be read by everyone) but there is always just one project.

If Tom, Dick and Harry are working with Adobe Anywhere (and again, please correct me if I’m wrong) they each have their own version of the project and in order to kept the projects in sync they have to push a button to push their changes to the other users and the other users have to agree to accept those changes. If there are syncing conflicts then the user has the option to keep their changes, keep the other person’s changes, or keep both (not sure what “keep both” does, makes two sequences?).

AFAIK this doesn’t address one of the major issues of working in a multi-editor environment which is ending up with work and media spread across multiple projects. If Tom goes home, but forgets to share his changes, then only Tom’s version of the project contains Tom’s work. Or Dick and Harry accidentally work in the same sequence but they don’t know it until it’s time to share and Premiere tells them there is a sync conflict that has to be resolved.

I’ve always felt that Avid’s approach of saving bins, as opposed to projects, was deceptively simple and effective. I’ve worked a lot with PPro, FCP Legend and Avid in multi-editor environments and in my experience it’s always been less work using Avid from an organizational and logistical perspective. I really want to like Adobe Anywhere, but every time I see a video for it I’m just like “meh”.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] “Ideas are worthless. Implementation of ideas is where actual value starts to be built. “

Knowing how to implement an idea is still knowledge. ????

Semantics aside, I think Apple brought in Wes because of the specific skill set and experience he brings to the table.

[Robin S. Kurz] “My hope is actually that Wes is there to implement an even tighter and smoother integration of Motion files and projects into FCP, for starters. “

That’s where my money is at too. I mean, when he was at Adobe he helped strengthen the bonds between AE and PPro and PPro and SpeedGrade so creating a more robust conduit between Motion and FCP X just seems like a natural thing for him to be part of.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Robin S. Kurz] “Because Wes knows something Apple doesn’t? “

If Apple knew everything that Wes knows they wouldn’t have needed to hire him. 😉