Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Oliver Peters] “Yikes! That doesn’t sound very promising. You are describing something that has limited functionality for most facilities within a 5-year time frame.”
I’m making an educated guess, but yeah. If Apple would just let us store the Renders separately from the Projects, then facilities could have much smaller (and affordable) high-IOPS-optimized shared (or local) storage for the Project and Event databases and the usual large-capacity stream-optimized shared storage for the media.
The reason no other NLE has these problems is they are only writing to a flat project file upon user command, not constantly writing to a database for every little action the user takes in the app.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I think that as with any SAN that has a dedicated metadata master, that writing small files can throw the SAN for a performance slow down. I think that FCPX’s journaling system, or autosave, or whatever the hell it’s doing when you “make a change” might be the cause of some of those pauses.”
This.
FCPX Projects and Events are SQLite databases and all the constant I/O with those combined with the I/O for media streaming is a real strain on a typical small video SAN. For high-bandwidth media streaming, you need a wide pipe but not necessarily a lot of spindles. For I/O intensive transactions, you need lots more spindles, and preferably 10K or 15K RPM SAS spindles instead of the 7200 RPM SATA that is common in video environments due to its low cost and high capacity.
When Apple says FCPX is for the next decade, they aren’t kidding- it seems to want SSD-grade storage performance (high bandwidth and high IOPS) to be able to do its I/O. They could work around this pretty easily by allowing the Renders to be sent somewhere other than alongside the Project database files. You can already place media on its own optimized storage by not copying into the Events folder on import.
Best,
Andy -
M.I.C. Gadget has been reading these forums it seems.
Best,
Andy -
Last one, I swear.
[Tim Wilson] “At Microsoft’s equivalent of the WWDC, they presented their plans of Windows 8 in 2009, complete with an overview of key technologies. Their roadmap included the news that Windows 8 would be shipping in 2012. They were widely mocked for this at the time, but whaddya know, Windows 8 in 2012 is looking pretty likely, and while there are more technologies than were announced, there aren’t fewer.”
They were mocked because prior to that they had a pretty terrible track record sticking to their roadmaps around that time. Remember Longhorn?
Best,
Andy -
[Herb Sevush] “It seems like your trying to have it both ways. First you say HP doesn’t have a roadmap, now you say they have one and it’s causing them trouble.”
I already apologized and narrowed my scope to the classes of products Apple deals in. Apple does not deal in large enterprise infrastructure, so when companies that do issue roadmaps for those business units, I don’t consider that relevant to the discussion of Apple’s practices for its products. If HP is publishing roadmaps for its PCs, that’s different. I can’t find anything like that in my searches though.
[Herb Sevush] “The fact that HP might have some trouble because they were intent on sharing information with their customers makes me want to be one of their customers too.”
You want them to tell you they are going to continue building something even when they know they won’t? That’s the charge that Oracle is making and the reason Oracle is dropping support for HP-UX.
Best,
Andy -
[Tim Wilson] “HP publishes road maps all the time.”
And in one rather high-profile case right now, it is causing them a bit of trouble. Oracle seems to think HP is lying to its customers about the future of their Itanium-bsed HP-UX servers.
Best,
Andy -
[Tim Wilson] “HP publishes road maps all the time. Not for everything, but for plenty of lines, including, yes, EOL timelines. “
Can you point me to HP’s Z series workstation roadmap? I couldn’t find one googling.
[Tim Wilson] “That’s just not true. Microsoft and HP are among MANY companies who do.”
Sigh. Fine. Yes, MSFT also does roadmaps. They also don’t make PCs, so I don’t really think it is relevant to getting a roadmap for hardware (which I noted that Intel does), but I didn’t equivocate enough in my post, and for that I apologize.
So let’s try again.
Vis a vis hardware and specifically the classes of hardware Apple sells, none of their PC industry peers publishes a roadmap for future products or EOL. And you’ll recall Apple did issue an EOL for the Xserve, though only by a few months.
[Tim Wilson] “Sound familiar? No, it doesn’t, because Apple doesn’t keep products alive longer than planned based on popular demand.”
Apple has a long-standing policy regarding the support period for their products. Your example for HP is a non-commodity hardware platform dating back to the 70s that would have been used in big enterprise settings to support very old legacy software. Can you say the same about HP’s modern x86 stuff? Particularly the Personal division stuff?
[Tim Wilson] “HP and Microsoft seemed like good comparables to Apple’s place in the ecosystem, and couldn’t be more different in their approach.”
I agree they are necessarily very different in their approach and indeed are very different in their business model as well. Apple’s secrecy sucks for businesses trying to use their products, build around their products, sell their products. I just tire of seeing Apple criticized on a curve. They deserve criticism for many things, but carrying on the same policy about discussing future products they have always had is low on my list.
Best,
Andy -
[Steve Connor] “Nothing has changed, Apple have never given roadmaps on hardware, yet vast amounts of people including many on here still use their kit. The ONLY thing they have done differently is EOL FCP classic and re-imagine their editing software and it’s this that has lead to all the “sky is falling” speculation.”
You know who else doesn’t publish roadmaps? Everyone. HP’s and Dell’s paper launch of their E5 towers in the past couple months is not a roadmap. People complain about Apple not laying out some multi-year plan, but where is everyone else’s? Intel is where we get PC roadmaps, and that info is as useful for predicting Mac guts as it is for predicting anyone else’s.
The difference with Apple is that we all see their financials and we see they don’t live and die by the Mac anymore. The other guys, they don’t have massive post-PC businesses to overshadow their PCs and servers, so the armchair CEOs of the Internet just figure they’ll keep doing what they’ve been doing to make (far less) money.
[Steve Connor] “If people want roadmaps then they shouldn’t be on Macs in the first place”
Please, anyone, please post the roadmaps from any of Apple’s competitors. Over-eager marketers paper-launching the next rev of their products by a month or two is not a roadmap.
Best,
Andy -
[Craig Seeman] “He’s considered a very reliable source.”
Yep.
If Dalrymple says definitively something is going to happen it is because he knows it will.
Best,
Andy -
There is hope yet!
Best,
Andy