Bernard Newnham
Forum Replies Created
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I bought Edius from DVC the other week at half price.
I build my own PCs with parts that usually come from dabs.com, and my current one has a Core i5 2500, Asus P8Z68-V LE, GeForce 460 and 8Gb RAM. You’ll see a lot of posts on here talking about Xeon this and that and chat about expensive workstations, but actually you don’t need all that stuff to do most editing jobs. The thing I’m working on in Edius at the moment is big on effects, though only in SD, and it takes a lot of layers to need any rendering at all. I expect if I was doing this one in HD the machine go a bit slower, but thinking time is always good.
You’ll also see a lot of stuff about the horrors of Windows, but I sit here switching back and forth between a Hackintosh running OSX and a W7 PC. Neither crashes, there are no BSODs on either machine, and people talk an awful lot of b****cks. I keep the Mac because I use Soundtrack pro and Motion.
Personally I prefer Windows because I like my applications to close when I close the window, I like to be able to delete things by pressing the delete key, I like Alt to be called Alt and not Option, and I like to be able to cut and paste as well as copy and paste. But that’s just me.
Bernie
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I’m endlessly amazed at the loyalty shown to this product – FCPX that is.
Do all of you do the same to everything other product? Mt wife was a big Nissan buyer, till they brought out a line of vehicles that didn’t suit her. But she didn’t buy a Qashqai and hammer it till it got to the shape she wanted, she bought a Toyota instead. Isn’t that what normal people do?
Personally,I’m happily working away with Edius now, on a PC which runs faster and has better graphics – and an SSD – than your ancient MacPros.
I loved FCP for ten years, but now we’re divorced and I’m moving on.
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It is just a little odd to find myself keep coming back here. I suppose I’m endlessly amazed that people are still talking about this – including me of course.
I think its part of a wider amazement that people continue to buy this stuff – IThis and iThat, when it costs far more than the competition and is far less flexible. Why on earth would you pay a huge amount of money to be locked into Apples arms? In London recently they released some new version iPad, and they were queueing round the block again. Why do they do that? They could wait a couple of days and just walk in, there’s no shortage. Better still, walk in to Carphone Warehouse where there are half a dozen competitors to choose from at lower prices.
If I was a very rich company like Apple, I would be looking now to loose myself from Intel, and the descendents of the 8086. RISC chip architecture is the way to go, with ARM in the lead (I have shares in them). I know that OSX could run on it, as Linux will run on the ARM Raspberry Pi. So perhaps a MacPro running ARM? That might tempt me to buy an Apple product, if it had a decent editing system like FCP8, and they didn’t charge stupid prices.
On a wider note, doesn’t anyone else see a bubble here? “Largest Richest Company in the World” is always the headline which sensible people regard as a signal to get out whilst they can, don’t they?
B
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…and mine in Edius
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“Without naming names, I’ve noticed the increasingly pervasive use of analogies as tools of argument here.
(Gratuitous Apple / car analogy included for illustration purposes.)”
Well, you can feel free to name me. An analogy – NLE/car for instance – is a much quicker way of making a point than going endlessly and boringly into theories and practice of convergent design styles. “The accelerator pedal is on the right” avoids a very long and boring paragraph.
B
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I don’t know about the Z800 in particular, but most PC builds by most manufacturers change almost by the week. Memory and drives especially are just commodities, bought by the thousand by large companies. So it’s very likely that the computer that company X tested a product by company Y on, isn’t now buyable by you, as they’ve changed the spec weeks ago. If HP hold the spec on a Z800 for more than a few months, its old stuff.
So, as the man above says – “what the point of buying a specific model PC when you can build a better one cheaper”. And why would you want a Xeon processor for video editing? They are incredibly expensive and don’t add anything. For the very large majority it’s like buying a Ferrari for going to the shops.
And why on earth would anyone be afraid of Windows? It runs the very large majority of personal computers in the world. 15 years ago and more it had its bad times – and so did OS9 – but that’s a long long time ago.
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bernie
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Of course, I couldn’t resist coming back for one last time to see what people said. I would have left it longer, but Cow has a rather average board system in which any given subject disappears very quickly. Perhaps time for a new paradigm in bulletin board technology, or perhaps be like all the others…..which brings me neatly to –
First, thanks for the Edius links. It’s interesting to see so much praise in this particular forum. I’ve been playing some more with it, and though I can’t seem to place a wipe transition at the moment, I expect I’ll manage it soon. I’m sure that back a long time ago Edius was pretty basic, and that has really changed – the more one looks the more there is to see. A serious system.
Now to Mr Sanders, who says –
“From his own post Bernard makes it know he retired/went freelance in 2001 – I don’t know what he’s up to now nor seek to belittle him or his views. I do know that in the intervening 11 years the tools for television production, the stories people tell and how they tell them have changed and have changed dramatically.”
Well, I think I noticed that life moves on. TV isn’t black and white any more, and last time I was at Television Centre I couldn’t find a 2″ machine anywhere. But actually an awful lots stays the same. I’m always slightly amazed at the size of studio cameras. I stopped being a studio cameraman in 1977. The cameras were heavy and moved around on Vinten peds with steering rings. The viewfinders were about 7″ and the length of the camera was around 3 feet. They had panning handles, focus knobs and a place to put your shot cards. If one looks now, they are pretty much the same only lighter, and they’ve been mostly the same since tv started. The design parameters long ago settled down to what worked.
And that’s the thing about NLEs – after a time of trying out various ways of doing things, everyone settled down to a common way of working. Not much is different between one screen and another. A bit like cars with the accelerator pedal on the right – it works so don’t screw around with it. Anyone, even Apple, change things at their peril. Ir’s an amazingly arrogant thing to do.
And Mr Sanders says –
“I really can’t believe that almost a year later we’re still having this basic argument.”
It’s because people still can’t believe they’ve been so betrayed by a company they relied on, even believed in, in some cases. Simple as that.
Back at the BBC, I don’t know much about what they’re up to. A current member of staff told me about the Salford editing problem. I imagine whoever decided to equip the place with FCP is feeling as betrayed as everyone else. I can’t imagine the arrogant people at Apple are going to listen to the BBC.
Just for fun, something else that didn’t work –
https://tech-ops.co.uk/next/2010/09/the-vinten-peregrine-stories-6/
and something that much much later did –
https://www.tech-ops.co.uk/page164.htmlTa Ta
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“But his point was that Quadro cards are “built” to last. They can be used all day every day, while GTX cards will give out sooner under these kinds of conditions.”
Well, I have two GeForce cards. One of them runs from 0700 to 2330 every day of every week. It shows no signs of giving up in any way. I rather think that salesmen in search of a bigger profit will tell the gullible punter anything. I’m surprised we don’t have “professional” dics drives – or maybe we do.
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I read on Tech ARP that a Quadro is pretty much the same as a normal GeForce card, with extra drivers to support 3D applications like 3D Studio Max, which are what make the card “professional” – and expensive.
It seems likely that anyone who is working as an individual and doesn’t mind a bit of an experiment could probably install a GeForce CUDA card and make it work, getting a card a year newer and much cheaper.
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“are we allowed to say the words hackintosh?
I’d never buy one, and one person I don’t know doesn’t have a Hackintosh working rock solid for a year as a Smoke Nuke Adobe FCP station at home.”
I definitely don’t have a Hackintosh humming away next to me – ‘cos it’s switched off at the moment. If you follow the tonymac86 iBoot Multibeast tutorial, they’re easy to build, and run all the software. I usually load all the updates, but they now seem to be all about preparing me to move to Lion, which I don’t plan to do.
B