[Bill Davis]

Just remember guys,

LED arrays DON’T CUT.

No clean edge from a barn door – just weird venetian blind effects.

EDIT: Just realized how late to this thread I am. Sigh. Too busy. Carry on!

FWIW.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

Well, if you do a modicum of research, you can find Tim Cook addressing this directly.

Turns out PART of why China is eating the US’s lunch in manufacturing is that their government has INVESTED in making them hyper-competitive in the leading edge skills that will support 21st century manufacturing.

Here’s Tim on the topic directly. Starts at about 1:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=3n4giig3-FY

So maybe the better question is why the US governing parties have pressed business policies that have made us so much less than competitive with other global suppliers of not just the machines, but the TALENT to run them.

Wait, heck, how bout we just re-train some displaced factory workers in Ohio, or maybe some West Virginia Coal miners and let THEM do the fabrication work? SURELY with a little low-cost community college re-training – those miners can do micro-electronics fabrication equally well, don’t you think?

You BECOME what you invest time and money to become.

And the US had just spent another 2 years investing almost NOTHING forward- looking and innovative. After 8 years under Obama where ANY initiative that involved spending anything got Mitch McConnell’ed into virtual oblivion.

The Modern American way ONLY allows debating the value of pouring billions of dollars into concrete and steel border lining fabrication in order to MAGA.

But HEY, pouring billions and billions of dollars into building reinforced concrete bunkers for US forces in IRAQ made a boatload of no-bid political connected defense contractors super-wealthy – and I’m POSITIVE that it can do the same for five or six well connected construction firms in the US.

So there’s that.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

Maybe for a “final edit” — maybe not.
I get a ton of work done while traveling with a simple laptop/iPad/USB hard drive rig like this.
Footage review and keywording.
Audio sweetening.
Even base grading and limited color correction that I can proof and perfect back in the studio.
I’m about to get on a train to LA in 45 minutes.
On the trip there and back tomorrow, I need to master two radio spots (Hooray for Auditions for helping me manage hundreds of line reading alternates!) – and organize and tag a 4K ProRes RAW video shoot for a financial institution from last week.

And I expect no issues with my MacBook Pro, as usual.

It’s just a different mindset today.

YMMV.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “Huh? Been hitting the merlot again? ☺
“

I wish.
It’s the 4K to 8K to (all too soon) 16K resolution curve.

The only thing it’s truly useful for at present is “push reframing” for HD delivery.
(Ergo the “enhance” quip – where badly written Forensic Files type shows classically had some lamebrained character take a 640×480 security camera feed, and magically “enhance” the footage to reveal the reflection of the killer in a Chrome trailer hitch across the street from a murder scene.

I’m betting that’s possible when all cameras (including our phones) get upgraded from 8K to perhaps 4800K…

Someday.

Maybe. ????

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Steve Connor] “[Oliver Peters] “they are already behind the eight-ball in terms of where the industry could be headed. ”

A small subset of the industry? I see your point though :)”

Resolution creep?

I see this as merely one large conspiracy generated by the Forensic TV shows.
Some wretched writer pened the line: “Enhance, enhance, enhance…” a decade ago — and since then video engineering has been desperately trying to make it come true.

Sigh.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

But, Shane, this is NOT an Apple thing and it’s not even an actual codec issue, per se.

It’s a OS issue.

If you need to access EVERYTHING you’ve ever shot, you have two utterly simple options.

First, stick with your current working OS and your existing software, just like generations of editors working in AVID (and other NLEs!) have.

Or (my preferred solution) keep an old laptop or desktop computer around that has a 32-bit compliant OS installed, That way if anyone EVER asks you to pull up old 32-bit content, just open it on that machine and transcode it into a 64-bit file – which will then work with ALL the modern NLEs.

This is simply NO different than when VHS tape, Betacam, DC-2000 backup cartridges, Syquist data disks or ANY other legacy technology fell out of favor. You move your stuff along, or you keep a machine capable of loading the old media around so you can keep moving forward.

This is NOT difficult. It’s simply the next in a LONG LINE of tech moves that enable progress.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Eric Santiago] “I hope this Afterburner card isn’t a one year pony.”

Not sure how it could be.

The whole point of an FPGA is that you can easily re-configure it to point it at accelerating other types of footage handling if your needs or formats shift.

As such, I’d expect this approach would have an extremely long life expectancy.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

I wonder if any of the Dashwood plug-ins could help?

When Tim went to work at Apple, he made his entire 3-D plugin set available for free download and they’re all still on-line.

I know there were a variety of stereoscopic viewers included that work as simple plug-ins inside FCP X.

I can’t remember if any of them let you take a “flat” file and “stereoscope-ize” that, but it might be worth checking out since they are all free.

FWIW.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “So what’s different now?”

The now publicly understood architecture of the New Mac Pros, obviously.
Why shouldn’t the research and code changes Apple is building into the next X version reflect these new hardware capabilities? And as others like developer Roger Bolton noted on other boards, some of the stuff like Infinity Fabric is more tied to the AMD capabilities than specific Mac Stuff. So putting code support for that into the next X release seems like a no-brainer that will potentially benefit lots of X editors, even if they don’t spring for CheeseGrater Redoux!

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “This has me a bit puzzled. Why should there be any rewrite? FCPX has “supposedly” been fully Metal-enabled all along. “

To best leverage the new pathways that the research they did leading to the adoption of Afterburner and Infinity Fabric. Clearly those require code in the software to implement. And just as clearly, whatever used to call just the CPU or the GPU will need to now integrate calls to these new technologies for the future.

I don’t understand why this is confusing.

Adobe spent a significant time encoding CUDA processes in the quest for increased performance.

Apple is doing the EXACT same thing for Metal. I expect Adobe is still working to leverage CUDA to the max – and it appears Apple is taking time to leverage Metal to the max.

Business as usual for everyone, isn’t it?

From reading Sarah’s post, it looks like there are some fundamental processing pathway changes that these new processes enable. An FCP X code refresh seems like just common sense. How much of X’s App needs to be revised to use these is WAY beyond my pay grade – but apparently it’s quite a bit.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.