Bernard Newnham
Forum Replies Created
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I don’t know about anyone else, but I find myself lost for words.
Bernie
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One has to wonder, Bill – what do you get out of endless praise for Apple? Are you are speculator, forever making a killing buying and selling stock and getting ever richer?
Apple’s huge fortune hasn’t been made selling Macs or FCPX, it’s been made selling expensive phones to people who haven’t worked out that they can buy similar products for a third of the price. That includes lots of my “poor” students. I have no idea why.
Apple have also made a fortune – just like Amazon and others – by not paying a moral amount of tax in the markets they serve. “We pay all our taxes in every country we sell in” – but we exploit every loophole in the differences in between laws to keep money that should be benefiting those countries. I read that Apple stash it away on some desert island – billions of dollars. At least Bill Gates is doing good with his Microsoft money.
I’m sure FCPX is a perfectly good editing system (though not for me) but there are lots of others, and they don’t lock you in to being a vassal of the great vampire squid of computers. Resolve is my current choice, but I have no loyalty to Blackmagic, it’s just convenient, for now.
I’m older that Bob, have spent all my life in television, and took my BBC pension a while back now. Technology has come and gone, and for many years I was at the leading edge, an early adopter at one of the world’s greatest broadcasters. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to lock themselves in to one company. And that’s the Apple philosophy – buy one bit and you have to buy the lot. I’ve always picked what worked, and still do. I don’t care who makes it, but I won’t be dictated to by a manufacturer.
What’s in it for you Bill, and all those other Apple cheerleaders here?
Bernie
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In the UK we use both. Long ago it was decided that we were going metric, starting with money, but we’ve never quite got there. Babies are pounds and ounces but bags of sugar are kilos. Petrol is in litres, but beer is in pints. . Distances are in miles, but lengths of wood tend to be bought in 2.4m, don’t know why. Floor coverings are square metres.
We do tend to do the serious scientific stuff in metric, like pretty much everyone else, because it’s easier.
Of course, all the basic tv standards are based on mains frequencies – 50Hz most places, 60Hz in the US. That’s so old you can’t really complain, it’s just what someone did over a century ago.
Should the US go metric? Should we in the UK complete the process? Well, for us we just have to wait. My 24 year old son has never measured in imperial – though he does know distances in miles. He doesn’t know most imperial units though. For you – well, it might be sensible that your science people forget feet and inches when working with satellites and stuff.
Not surprisingly we don’t celebate the 4th July here, but lots of people are celebrating an England win against Colombia in the World Cup yesterday. Can they keep it up and repeat 1966? Probably not.
Ok – now I’m going to download the latest Da Vinci Resolve beta for Windows, none of that old stuff for me.
Bernie
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Randy Ubillos turned up at the DigiLab at BBC Television Centre and gave us a 0.8 beta (or some nought point) in about 1998 . I loved it, even though it crashed all the time
Bernie
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[Robin S. Kurz] “That’s just not what Apple is about, but everything that PCs are about. A patchwork of single components just barely glued together with spit and gum and an endless array of (mostly incompatible) drivers for maximum performance in some singled out, very specific task… for 20 bucks. “
Yes – as I said, just a teeniest bit scary.
At the uni where I teach there are hundreds of pretty standard PCs in large classrooms. There’s a jukebox system for applications – currently 184 of them, of many different disciplines – and the expectation is that they will all work for the hundreds of students that use them . No incompatible drivers, no glue or spit, just standard industry gear. They just work.
Here at home, I’ve built all my desktop PCs since 1998 – in fact it was the same case with new bits, till I needed more drive bays a few years ago. It isn’t difficult to build PCs, nor does it take a huge amount of time, and you get exactly the spec you want for considerably less than any Apple equipment. And you can change bits as you wish. Last year I updated from a GTX460 to a GTX960 GPU on this machine. Pull one one, put one in. No new drivers, works straight off. Runs Resolve in HD without a blink. I don’t need, so haven’t tried 4k, but if necessary, I’ll just get a new motherboard, processor and memory and bung them in the box . Keep all the other stuff, as they work fine. I have a Hackintosh on the floor behind me, and a Mac G4. Neither has been turned on since FCP7 went away.
Oh – and my last full time job was senior producer at BBCtv – what’s yours, since you’re asking people?
Bernie
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Just the tiniest bit scary…….
Bernie
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And SSDs and lots of RAM – just like any other PC of that spec.
It’s something I can never understand. There are huge amounts of variations in PC parts – motherboards, processors, GPUs etc etc. They are updated pretty much every week, and anyone who puts in a little effort to understand what’s in there can spec their own, build and change as necessary. Stick with Apple gear, and you wait …. and wait …. and wait. Then they give you a tube thing that needs endless stuff hung on the outside. But inside it’s still a PC, one that is very difficult to adapt. Why bother with the stuff?
Bernie
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He did make quite an epic of building what is, after all, a standard PC. He did go for the expensive stuff too. I’ve built two Hackintoshes, though not lately – I don’t have a use for a Mac any more – and they went as straightforwardly as any other PC build.
I used the files from https://www.tonymacx86.com/ and a copy of whatever the current operating system was from an Apple shop. They both ran fine, just as his did – because under all the pretty stuff that you buy at great expensive, and wait with baited breath for a long awaited new release, your Mac is just another PC.
Bernie
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[Robin S. Kurz] “Resolve? I doubt it, unless it improves and is adopted A LOT more. Great price tag, sure. Just too bad that you can’t get any video signal IN OR OUT without buying… you got it… BMD hardware. Oops. Not so cheap after all.”
Given that a BlackMagic Intensity Pro 4k costs £165.98 here in the UK, it would seem to be rather cheaper than subscribing to Adobe. Runs on PC or Mac.
Bernie
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I tried the Fig Rig – jolly uncomfortable, you didn’t miss anything. You had to hold the thing out in front of you with all those bits hung on it. Your arms didn’t last too long. I worked a large number of hours, days and weeks with a Sony VX1000 – hand in the standard handhold, gun mic on a stills photographer’s flash bar. A whole lot better and a whole lot cheaper.
Bernie