[Andrew Richards]

A clean install means installing a fresh instance of OS X on an empty volume. That indeed means you would need to install all the apps that are not bundled with OS X, and you would also probably want to migrate your user from the old volume or Time Machine backup. Bear in mind you will need to create a bootable installer volume of anything newer than Snow Leopard to be able to do a clean install.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Craig Seeman] “Note the only third party apps to get market mention are Resolve and Pixelmator. So we know who Apple’s friends are.”

Pixelmator is an interesting choice, and I’d wager it is based on the fact that Pixelmator is Cocoa-native and will take better advantage of the GPU-heavy hardware compared to Photoshop, which is more CPU-bound.

Apple has had Adobe demo Premiere Pro for the OpenCL session of WWDC two years in a row now, so I don’t think there is any animosity to infer from the absence of Adobe apps in the Mac Pro marketing benchmarks (not that you said there was any).

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Michael Phillips] “I do like Pro Player a lot, but there is something to be said in workflow with the Quicklook feature.”

Good point.

[Michael Phillips] “And if they want to play really nicely with broadcasters and studio archives, publish AV Foundation as an open format.”

AVFoundation is a framework within OS X that developers can use to handle media in their apps. It isn’t a format or a container. What Apple needs to open up and publish is ProRes. They are unlikely to do so, but they still should.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[David Lawrence] “I’ve never liked QTX to be honest. Just too limited for my needs. If QT7 player gets phased out, I’m not sure what I’d do but I’d be in trouble. I guess this is an opportunity for a third party…”

Have you tried Digital Heaven’s Pro Player? I haven’t, but it claims to pick up the flag for the old QuickTime Pro, and for the same stand-alone price that Apple used to charge back in the day. Oliver endorsed it!

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Oliver Peters] “I presume Apple is migrating some of this support to AVF, so it’s only a matter of time before QT32-based formats simply won’t work.”

Mavericks is the first release of OS X where Apple has a complete media handling stack to replace QuickTime, albeit with a much more limited scope of format support compared to what QuickTime had. The best technical overview you can get for this is session 606 from WWDC13 called “Moving to AVKit and AVFoundation” (you’ll need to find the video listing on the linked page and login with a free Apple Developer account, as there is no apparent way to directly link to it).

The presentation gives a nice technical history of QuickTime before getting into what they are replacing it with and how they are handling that.

[Oliver Peters] “Pretty scary, since a lot of companies are migrating to ProRes deliverables as a de facto standard. Master to uncompressed MOV or DNxHD or JPEG2000 and you just might be in trouble later. The trouble is the QT container format, since it adheres to no actual open standard. DNxHD or JPEG2000 in an MXF wrapper might be safer, but that’s also unknown.”

I think the only truly future-poof method of holding masters to assume the format you are holding is not future-proof and maintaining an infrastructure capable of converting it to whatever comes next.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[John Davidson] “On the bright side, OS X really loves ProRes, so you’ll probably have a subtle performance increase by not using those older codecs anyways.”

Indeed you will. ProRes is a multi-threaded codec, so it will be processed by multiple cores. Using ProRes as your source will yield appreciably faster renders and transcodes if you have a system with a lot of cores at its disposal.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Apple deprecated all of the legacy QuickTime API in Mavericks, and that unfortunately includes support for a long list of legacy codecs including Animation. Here is a complete list of what legacy QuickTime-friendly codecs are not supported in AVFoundation (taken from this WWDC13 slide deck):

Cinepak (“Compact Video”)
Animation (“RLE” )
Video (“Road Pizza”)
Graphics (“SMC”)
Sorenson Video
Sorenson Video 3
Motion JPEG A
Motion JPEG B
H.261
Windows RAW
Microsoft Video 1
Pixlet
MACE 3:1
MACE 6:1
QDesign Audio
QDesign Audio 2
1-bit Indexed-Color RGB
2-bit Indexed-Color RGB
4-bit Indexed-Color RGB
8-bit Indexed-Color RGB
16-bit Direct-Color RGB
1-bit Grayscale
2-bit Grayscale
4-bit Grayscale
SGI
MacPaint
BMP
FLC
FlashPix
JPEG 2000
PDF
Photo CD
PNG
TGA
TIFF
Blit Codec

From what I can tell, there is still a way to do third party codecs, but it is handled differently. Flip4Mac at least supports Mavericks.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[John Davidson] “We’re thinking this is more a core issue in how Mavericks handles older QT media. It’s surprisingly gnarly. The process of having to convert a EVERY QT to a more mavericks friendly codec is terrible. “

Apple deprecated all of the legacy QuickTime API in Mavericks, and that unfortunately includes support for a long list of legacy codecs including Animation. Here is a complete list of what legacy QuickTime-friendly codecs are not supported in AVFoundation (taken from this WWDC13 slide deck):

Cinepak (“Compact Video”)
Animation (“RLE” )
Video (“Road Pizza”)
Graphics (“SMC”)
Sorenson Video
Sorenson Video 3
Motion JPEG A
Motion JPEG B
H.261
Windows RAW
Microsoft Video 1
Pixlet
MACE 3:1
MACE 6:1
QDesign Audio
QDesign Audio 2
1-bit Indexed-Color RGB
2-bit Indexed-Color RGB
4-bit Indexed-Color RGB
8-bit Indexed-Color RGB
16-bit Direct-Color RGB
1-bit Grayscale
2-bit Grayscale
4-bit Grayscale
SGI
MacPaint
BMP
FLC
FlashPix
JPEG 2000
PDF
Photo CD
PNG
TGA
TIFF
Blit Codec

Several of those are handled by other frameworks in OS X (like PDF, PNG, BMP, and TIFF), but this list is what QuickTime’s replacement (AVFoundation) will not handle.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

FYI, the price for the optical Thunderbolt cables is $330 for the 10m Corning and about $850 for the 30m Sumimoto (I got that by converting from Yen since I could only find them for sale on Amazon’s Japanese storefront).

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Greg Leuenberger] “I’m guessing it would look something like a Caldigit Supershare (maybe I’m wrong) – not exactly ‘house’ expensive.”

If that CalDigit box really is doing PCIe switching (those look a lot like Infiniband connectors), then from my understanding of Thunderbolt, a switch could be doable. It would probably take Intel developing the ASIC though. That would only happen if there were an enterprise application for Thunderbolt.

[Greg Leuenberger] “Cables are expensive – but still less than 10Gb Nics, right? Right.”

The most expensive NICs, maybe. The newer 10GBaseT NICs are regularly selling for mid $3XX range prices and work happily with your existing Cat-6 infrastructure.

[Greg Leuenberger] “The killer is the switch…except for that Netgear one which isn’t exactly getting rave reviews a 10GB switch is $10K and up.”

The switch is always the killer, be it managed Ethernet (even good gigabit managed switches still cost into the thousands), Fibre Channel, Infiniband, or a theocratical Thunderbolt switch. Then again, for a shop of less than 5 seats, you don’t need a switch—just a server with several slots for NICs to connect clients to directly.

[Greg Leuenberger] “I wired my facility in Sunnyvale with CAT6 3 years ago thinking 10Gb Switches would come down in price, they’ve hardly budge for what…..5 years now?”

This is what happens when enterprise tech does not find its way into the consumer space. Prices stay high.

Best,
Andy