Andrew Kimery
Forum Replies Created
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[Walter Soyka] “I use both a Surface Pro and a MacBook Pro. I can’t tell you how fingerprints I’ve left on my MBP screen trying to interact with it by touch.”
I think everyone and their brother has tried to ‘pinch zoom’ on my MBP screen when looking at pictures.
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I’d call the RED Rocket a hardware accelerator card for use with R3D footage. It has hardware onboard to process R3D footage in order to take that burden off of the host computer. It’s not a GPU, which is responsible for generating the images/GUI that you see on your computer monitor.
With regards to expansion, the link you provided just talks about some new GPUs. Is this the article you meant to link to?No Film School: What’s the Deal with GPU Expansion, Anyway?
They talk about GPU expanders, but I don’t think they actually purchased to tested any. Their last sentence in the article is “Anybody tried any of these, or finally abandoned your Mac for a PC and its easy world of expandability? Tell us about it in the comments.”
In the comments people talk about needing to use hacks and scripts to get eGPUs working with MacOS/OSX so it seems like using it on Mac isn’t as straight forward as using it for Windows.
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[Scott Witthaus] “I think this is what I was saying. “
Just expanding on the thought you started.
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[Walter Soyka] “I doubt it. BizonBOX lists the 1080 as “Windows-only support.””
According to this article external GPUs aren’t supported by MacOS (though it can be hacked to accept them). It’s plug and play on Windows so the ball seems to be in Apple’s court about whether or not it will enable support for external GPUs. I hope this feature is added in a future update as running an external GPU via ThB 3 certainly opens up doors to expandability that don’t currently exist.
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Oliver,
Do you have any hands on time with the project sharing in PPro? From what I’ve seen (just videos, no hands on time) it looks like editors still work in separate project files and you basically hit a ‘sync’ button that pushes your current project to the other editors and then they hit ‘okay’ to accept your changes. If there are any conflicts then you have to resolve them. This seems like a very clunky and less useful solution compared to Avid where everyone literally works out of the same project.
On an unrelated note, I agree that BM feels like a front runner to pickup MC, but I just can’t figure out what they would do with it. They’re putting so much time/money into morphing Resolve into an capable NLE that adding a competing NLE to their line up sounds too cannibalistic unless you think that Resolve will never be more than an finishing system with ‘okay’ NLE abilities.
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[Scott Witthaus] ” Adobe would have a very difficult time trying this.”
AFAIK Adobe is split into three main silos; Creative Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Document Cloud. CC is still the biggest revenue generator, but Marketing is growing a lot (not sure about Document). Adobe looks to be someplace in between Apple and Avid in terms of dependence on the creative sphere for revenue.
[Scott Witthaus] “Avid has used this “aspirational” marketing strategy for years and one only needs to look at stock price to see how well that has done for them. It’s not a smart strategy and certainly not a smart way to choose an NLE.”
Don’t all companies use aspirational marketing though? Ex. FCP’s “In Action” page is populated with movies, TV shows, broadcasters and high-end commercials. It’s all telling us that these high profile projects used FCP and you should too.
[Scott Witthaus] “Exactly. What product solves the problem you have. For me, the solution is not the fact that some movie or doc was cut on a Media Composer. But pose the product as a solution (“I need to have multiple editors cutting in various locations and need to be able to output multiple formats for different screens and regions, etc. . What system solves this problem…”) and then you can more easily sell it.
“If you talked with a product consultant of an NLE vender and asked, “I need to have multiple editors cutting in various locations and need to be able to output multiple formats for different screens and regions, etc. . What system solves this problem…?” I’m sure they wouldn’t just start listing off names of movies and TV shows that used their NLE. They would give you a nuts and bolts answer and possibly mention a project by name that had a similar workflow as an example of their NLE executing that type of workflow successfully in the wild.
From an advertising standpoint though they have to do that in broad strokes and one of the best ways to do that is to highlight big, successful projects.
[Bill Davis] “That somebody could finally buy an inexpensive digital camera in like a VX-1000 or the Sony PD-100a, digitize the result into FCP Legacy on an affordable Mac via Firewire – and make a damn decent video master that you could duplicate and distribute via VHS – was TRANSFORMATIONAL in the spread of video as a communications medium. “
I think many things were happening concurrently and what we remember most probably depends on what circles we were swimming in at the time.
For example, during my first stint in Los Angeles in 2001 a lot of indies, docs, music videos, etc., (pretty much anything that was “budget challenged”) was being done on FCP primarily because of cost reasons. Many post facilities I’d been to had it running on a machine somewhere just to experiment with it, and, to Shane’s point earlier, I think it turned into the go to NLE for side projects & home offices because of it’s price point and feature set (it certainly struck a chord that other ‘inexpensive’ NLEs like Vegas and Premiere had not). Once ‘Hollywood people’ got used to FCP on small projects they started migrating to bigger and bigger projects. IIRC this is how FCP displaced Avid at Bunim/Murray. They were using it for small things, saw how capable it was (and that it was a few zeroes cheaper than Avid) and transitioned to it in 2004-ish.
2002 seems be when ‘notable’ films started coming out (“notable” just being films that were big enough to be written about) like “Rules of Attraction”, “Full Frontal” and “The Ring”. On a related note, Apple acquired FilmLogic in 2001 and turned that into Cinema Tools which came out in 2002. So either a significant enough demand from film-centric productions already existed just two years after FCP’s release or Apple was looking to help stoke those fires (probably a bit of both) because Cinema Tools was certainly an ‘up market’ product that initially cost as much as FCP did.
2003 and 2004 saw more FCP movies (ex. “Ladykillers”, “Supersize Me”, “Cold Mountain”, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”) and, IIRC, the first primetime scripted series (“Scrubs”) as well as big facilities such as the previously mentioned Bunim/Murray and Pie Town. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure when Pie Town started with FCP but in my mind they have always been one of the beacons in the FCP community (even expressing optimism about FCP X though they ultimately transitioned to Avid with Resolve for finishing). I think around 2004 is when I noticed trailers houses in LA also ditching Avid for FCP.
[Scott Witthaus] “But if ‘different’ makes one faster and more efficient, then there is a premium.”
Splitting hairs, but I think the premium is still because it’s faster and more efficient, not because it’s just different.
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Just going to echo Shane’s point that cost was the thing. In the early 2000’s almost every post house I went into had a copy of FCP sitting on a computer in the corner because why not? It was too cheap not to try. I worked at a post place once which was Avid based, but when they first started doing HD they bought a FCP rig to do their HD onlines because it was so much cheaper than upgrading to Avid’s HD offering at the time.
If FCP would’ve been even remotely close to the cost of an Avid then very few people would’ve given it a shot.
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[Bill Davis] “If I’m ever going to invest in a new desktop system, I need to know how much more performance I can expect.”
There’s certainly a point of diminishing returns though I think a related, and possibly more relevant question, is how much performance does one need in order to execute one’s own workflow in a satisfactory manner? For example, take the online/offline you use and compare it to Vashi Nedomansky’s workflow for the movie “6 Below” where he edited 6K R3D files natively. You use a MBP that’s a year or two old (IIRC) and Vash used a Dell with a 20-core CPU, 12gig GPU and 128gig of RAM.
Is his machine w-a-y faster than your MBP? Yes. Would using his machine (for the sake of argument assume it could run FCPX) speed up your workflow? Probably some, but mostly it would be expensive overkill (like buying a 50lb bag of sugar from Costco when all you need is cup). An editor friend of mine only uses Mac Minis in his home setup and hiss reasoning is since he’s only offline editing (or editing smaller projects) from home the extra power in a faster machine would just be wasted.
Being Mac-centric does skews things though because all of their computers (aside from the aging nMP) use laptop parts so the potential performance difference between a Mac laptop and a Mac desktop isn’t going to be as extreme as the potential difference between a PC laptop and a PC desktop.
[Bill Davis] “The thing is, Tim Cook expressly said very recently that they still “Love” the Mac and that they have big plans for it.”
Unfortunately he only name checked the iMac, but not the Mac Pro. Hopefully that was just an innocent omission and not a foreshadowing of things to come (or in this case, not come).
[Bill Davis] “So you get a head tracker before you get a trackpad under your home row thumbs where you don’t have to move your whole arm to actuate it? It’s always trade offs. “
Says the guy with big enough hands. ???? I certainly can’t accurately or comfortably reach the trackpad on my MBP while keeping my fingers on the home keys.
For a gaming setup though you are going to be using a mouse so the trackpad wouldn’t be a primary input device. The fact that trackpad can be flipped over (since it’s held in by magnets) to reveal a number pad on the other side is pretty cool, and the number pad is probably more useful on a such a machine.
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[Bill Davis] “In fact the delta between my MacPro Cheesegrater and my current MacBook Pro is actually upside down. The laptop runs rings around my old desktop because – equipment advancements in virtually every area from GPUs to SSDs and beyond.”
A stock cheesegrater is pretty dated, but it is also upgradeable. Slap in a new GPU, SSD and USB 3.0 card in it and you’ve got a much improved machine for around $600-$700 (higher if you want a beefier GPU or a PCIe SSD of course).
[Bill Davis] “Just an interesting question to contemplate.”
It is, and I think to varying degrees editors have been contemplating it for the past twenty years or so. From NLEs vs linear suites to the DV/Desktop NLE Revolution to today where, given the right circumstances, one can shoot, edit and post one’s videos using just a smartphone or tablet.
For example, in Dec. of 2007 I flew to Vegas and spent a weekend cutting 3min-5min web videos non-stop in a hotel room at the Mandalay Bay. I used a then current MBP and FW drives (I also might have had a small HDV deck ’cause I don’t think the company was shooting on cards then). It all fit in a backpack and worked fine (worst part was the hotel’s insanely slow upload speeds). Would I have preferred a desktop (and a comfortable chair)? Of course, but flying out with a desktop was unrealistic, and renting from a local facility was out of the budget, so doing it with a laptop was the next best thing, and it was good enough to get that particular job done.
That brings up another point; the difference between ‘ideal’, ‘good enough’, and ‘I guess you could, but why would you voluntarily’. All three can get the job done, but the experience is certainly different depending on which route you choose take (or are forced to take because sometimes life throws curveballs).
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[Gabe Strong] “People sure are spoiled…..$50/month for 20Mb expensive? Wow.”
Not so much spoiled as getting gouged less than you are for Internet access. In many other first world countries $50/mo will get you gigabit speeds plus TV and/or phone service. I think the typical the markup on data costs by US ISPs is something like 2000-5000% and the ‘wholesale’ cost of data keeps getting cheaper as computer equipment gets faster and less expensive.
Of course if you live in the sticks you are pretty SOL because ISPs aren’t required to provide service they way telephone companies are.