Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
-
[Geo Monterosa] “To create more storage, is the idea of transcoding all footage to H264 a good idea?…especially due to its size and quality?”
Avid can work with h.264 via AMA, but it isn’t a panacea. It tends to work on short, simple projects but struggles for longer more complex projects. Best practice for a happy Media Composer is still to ingest/transcode to DNxHD.
Regardless of your NLE, I would not recommend compressing your footage to try to fit more onto your existing storage. That approach won’t work forever (you’ll fill your storage again anyway) and it can cost you a lot in terms of time and trouble.
[Geo Monterosa] “The transcoding from H264 to other formats, such as apple pro res, mpeg2 and broadcasting… how will the quality differ?”
It depends on the flavor of h.264, but in general it is considerably lower quality than Pro Res, DNxHD, and other 4:2:2 I-frame codecs. For one thing, h.264 tends to be 8-bit 4:2:0 while Pro Res and DNxHD are 10-bit 4:2:2 (or better). This means much less color information is maintained, which limits your latitude in color grading and compositing. As mentioned above, you also give up a lot of performance when you try to edit with h.264. There is also a lot of transcoding time you’d need to account for.
[Geo Monterosa] “What solutions are people using to archive large amount of footage?”
LTO-5 is becoming pretty popular, and I like Cache-A’s implementation for its ease of use and flexibility. It strikes a lot of people as expensive since it is in the high four figures and up, but when you consider what it is and what it does, it is very reasonably priced. You’ll also find them on this forum.
Sony has a new optical drive this year that stacks several BD-R platters inside a cartridge. No word yet on pricing, but count on it not being cheap since it is aimed at the enterprise storage market.
The cheapest (though riskiest) archiving method is to buy bare high-density HDDs and load them via a “toaster” and store them in an anti-static case on a shelf. The risk is that HDDs are not designed for this kind of duty and have been known to simply not spin up after years of sitting on a shelf. You can mitigate some of the risk by storing to redundant HDDs.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I will need thunderbolt storage, though. :(“
What are you using now?
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “It still works, you just have to hold the “Quote” button until you get the JavaScript popup.”
So it does, thanks!
Posted from my iPhone
Best,
Andy -
[Erik Lindahl] “On iPhone so quouting is a bit scetchy but here goes:”
It used to work in iOS 4, but it broke in 5. Curses!
[Erik Lindahl] “Where CoreMedia or AVFoundation falls short is with a lot of given solutions that work with QuickTime (and have for years) but Apple hasn’t implemented in their new media platform. For exmple GlueTools I think will be completely broken in 10.8 since the hooks just aren’t there for that kind of a solution.”
Anything that relies on the old QT APIs is going to stop working whenever they ultimately drop support for them. Same goes for Carbon. I’m not sure what Glue Tools is calling on, so I can’t really say if they could be duplicating their functionality with AVFoundation.
[Erik Lindahl] “It also seems the “smart rendering” that’s been in QuickTime since the 90’s is gone.”
I’m not sure if “smart rendering” is a QuickTime API dependency thing or an app implementation thing. From what I understand about AVFoundation, there is more flexibility in terms of assembling and ordering movie atoms, not less.
[Erik Lindahl] “Is there even a I/O function like QuickTime has?”
CoreMediaIO. It is how FCPX does broadcast monitoring and was new in Lion, hence the Lion requirement for FCPX broadcast monitoring and the associated device drivers from AJA, BMD, etc.
[Erik Lindahl] “It seems somewhat so so made quite work-in-progress.”
Isn’t everything? I’ll say this, Apple’s developer documentation on it is pathetic.
[Erik Lindahl] “Its replace a lot of iMac where you want a speedy GPU and you want the choice of displays. And you don’t loose thunderbolt. This is very much of interest for image-professionals.”
I’d buy one! I wish Apple put more effort into OS X, it really does show who’s boss in Cupertino these days. Their claims of being the “most advanced desktop OS on the world” haven’t been defensible since Snow Leopard was new. Right now it looks like a house mid-renovation.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Is it silly to buy this thing or is it silly to buy an older 17″?”
I think it boils down to the GPUs and the ports. If you don’t mind the older AMD GPU and you really want built-in GigE and FW800, get the refurb 17″. If you’d rather have the new NVIDIA GPU and two Thunderbolt ports, get the Retina.
I suppose you can mod the 17″ for more internal storage, but it won’t be fast storage unless you pay a ton for a big SSD.
Not an easy decision.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “I’m not sure that OpenCL is the clear path forward for GPGPU over CUDA any more than OpenGL was the clear path forward for graphics over DirectX.”
A key difference in this case is Microsoft wasn’t the principal sponsor of OpenGL the way NVIDIA is the principal sponsor of OpenCL. Then again, NVIDIA can abuse their position to favor CUDA… But AMD and Intel should be able to keep them honest.
[Walter Soyka] “Developers will need a reason to switch existing applications away from CUDA and over to OpenCL. This incentive may go away in our niche if Apple dumps AMD graphics and goes steady with NVIDIA for a while.”
Adobe has already adopted OpenCL, and are using it in more apps than CUDA already in CS6. Photoshop CS6 uses OpenCL, but not CUDA. Premiere Pro CS6 uses both, though their CUDA implementation does enable four more filters for GPU MPE than their OpenCL implementation at this point.
[Walter Soyka] “I think it may be some time yet before we see a clear winner here.”
I don’t think CUDA will disappear, but I do think that its grip on GPU-accelerated software is will be loosened considerably over the next couple years. CUDA isn’t going away, but it also isn’t going to be the deal-breaker it had been the past couple years.
Best,
Andy -
-
[Erik Lindahl] “OpenCL (this did get a boost in 10.7.4 so maybe there is hope)”
As far as I know, OpenCL 1.1 support is there today in Lion. Given that the OpenCL 1.2 spec was only announced last November, I’d expect to see it in Mountain Lion since that is right around the corner.
[Erik Lindahl] “not sure the “state” of how CoreMedia is in OSX 10.8 but in 10.7 QuickTime and CoreMedia is half-developed it seems. “
Well QuickTime is long deprecated at this point. AVFoundation is all there is moving forward. CoreMedia sits beneath AVFoundation. Where do you see it coming up short?
[Erik Lindahl] “All these fundamental technologies accelerate more and more pro apps. And even if the GPU is the only thing lacking that’s huge. And, it’s not just lacking, it’s around 1/8th of the performance it *should* be. And the fact Apple doesn’t offer the choice of AMD or nVidia graphics render CUDA-apps useless as well. “
I agree Apple’s GPU offerings are weak, though I think CUDA’s importance is going to fade pretty quickly now that OpenCL has matured as quickly as it has. CUDA was the only GPGPU game in town for a while, but OpenCL is the clear path forward for GPGPU. Why stick with CUDA when OpenCL code is so much more portable?
[Erik Lindahl] “I don’t see how and iMac or a Mac Mini is in any way better than for example the ASUS-board for general to high-end media creation and consumption.”
I never intimated the iMac was better, and I never even mentioned the Mac mini (which unlike the iMac actually is made of laptop bits). I said the iMac, excluding its underpowered GPU, offers roughly equivalent I/O options (and it does). That ASUS and its Z77-based peers can be entry-level workstations, but you really have to max them out to call them that. My real point is that the iMac and any of these gamer-spec rigs is not even remotely in the same class as the Xeon stuff. There is quite a wide gulf between the Z77 and an i7 and a dual E5 Xeon system in every respect.
Best,
Andy -
[Erik Lindahl] “It’s actually quite ironic the OS is lagging pretty much as far behind as the hardware is.”
For OpenGL. Which is really only for realtime 3D rendering. Games and Maya, that’s about it.
OS X does recently look pretty stale in terms of its underpinnings though- the atrophy from the early years of iOS when Apple was stealing dev cycles from OS X is still showing today, including Mountain Lion.
Best,
Andy -
[Erik Lindahl] “I mean “if only” the iMac had the current generation desktop CPU AND GPU it would be so much more of a robust system especially considering the giant screen that poor GPU has to power.”
The Ivy Bridge i7 3700 chips we should expect in a 2012 iMac haven’t even been shipping for two months at this point. If the iMac doesn’t get its Ivy Bridge bump in the next few weeks around the release of Mountain Lion, I’ll be pretty surprised. They’ll probably get current-gen mobile GPUs as well, and of course those pale in comparison to desktop-class GPUs.
[Erik Lindahl] “I thought there was a 6-core version of the IvyBridge CPU but I might be mistaking”
There isn’t yet. They are probably coming later this year.
Anyhow…
Really, the only performance gap is the class of the GPU, right? Once you really start going down the list of what you want in a desktop pro video work, you quickly surpass what that ASUS mobo and its peers can support. Those are gamer boards. They only really care about driving GPUs and not much else. There is not enough PCIe pipe in the Z77 for serious storage I/O (x8 PCIe 2.0) and video I/O (x4 PCIe 2.0) and a big desktop GPU (x16 PCIe 3.0).
Best,
Andy