Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Lance Bachelder] I wonder what kind of speed boost I’d get adding this (10 times more powerful than the Vega):
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/titan/titan-v/?nvid=nv-int-tnvptlh-29191
That crazy 110 TFLOPS number is for the specialized deep learning hardware, which isn’t useful for general video editing tasks. For the sort of graphics processing apps like FCP X and Resolve do, the relevant number is the single precision performance of 13.8 TFLOPS (per AnandTech) vs. 11 TFLOPS quoted by Apple for Vega 64 in iMac Pro.
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Digital Workflow, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here.
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[Oliver Peters] “One interesting tidbit is that a Logic Pro X update came down last night. In its notes is a comment that it adds support for up to 36 cores on the iMac Pro. Typo or sign of things to come. Hmm…”
This is just a reference to the 18 core iMac Pro. Xeon W supports Hyper Threading, so each physical core shows up as two ‘logical’ cores.
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Digital Workflow, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here.
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That will likely be a solid configuration for editing and color grading with non-raw formats.
For editing/grading with raw formats, for VFX work, or for heavy deliverables work (taking a master file and spitting out many other formats as fast as possible), it starts to make sense to pile on more cores.
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Digital Workflow, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Scott Cahill] “Are the Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapters necessary for each editing station when working with HD footage? From what I understand, I should be able to get a 100MBs hooked straight to the ethernet port on the iMac and since this is an easy upgrade at any time in the future is it needed now?”
Assuming you’re working with, say, ProRes 422 HQ at 1080p/23.98 (and not some uncompressed format or 60p footage), you mostly likely can get away with with not having 10GbE adaptors for each workstation, yes.
[Scott Cahill] “The Mac Mini that we are currently using is older and only has 1 thunderbolt port (which would not be thunderbolt 2). I’m assuming I can hook the drives into the Thunderbolt 2 Ethernet Adapter since there are 2 ports but does this present a bottle neck? Is an older Mac Mini going to be able to handle the file sharing needs of around 600MBs? Would it be worth getting the newest Mac Mini?”
Thunderbolt is full-duplex, meaning it offers 10 Gbps in each direction. For any given operation, data will be flowing between the Mini and the ethernet adaptor in opposite directions (e.g. when one of the clients reads data, on the server that data flows in from the disk array and then out through the ethernet adaptor), so this shouldn’t be a major bottleneck.
What you’re describing here has a pretty good chance of working. If you want guarantees, of course, you’d be better off buying a purpose-built system.
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Digital Workflow, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Thunderbolt probably isn’t going anywhere on higher end Macs for a while. As a replacement for PCIe, Thunderbolt 2 is already out ahead of USB 3.1, and the gap will widen significantly with Thunderbolt 3 later this year. I don’t think we should treat Apple declining to include Thunderbolt on a 2 pound computer with one port as a significant indication of their plans across the lineup.
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Digital Workflow, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Neil Sadwelkar] “Should have searched before posting, but this seems too new to have appeared in this forum.
Someone tweeted me about this company Indiestor which has shared storage solutions that apparently work with Avid MC as well. And they are available on flexible options, software, hardware without rives, or, the whole thing.Is anyone here using this? Any experiences?”
We looked at Indiestor last year, and decided to go in a different direction because our edit suite rental clients expect traditional Avid bin locking, which it doesn’t support. It seems like it’s definitely worth checking out though if you’re using it in-house and can get your editors on board with the approach it takes.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Joakim Ziegler] “Peter, which CPUs are these? I can’t find a Linux build guide listing anything bigger than 10-core Xeons.”
The E5-2697v3. These.
Not presently available Amazon Prime because I just ordered the last two that were last night. That’s going to make a bit of a dent in the bank account….
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “If Apple truly wanted a wide performance gap between the iMac and the Mac Pro, they would have built at least a dual-socket Mac Pro.”
Apple has done this, though. They’ve just done it with GPU instead of CPU.
[Walter Soyka] “Restricting the Mac Pro to a single CPU socket means throwing away the single biggest performance feature that Xeon offers over i7.”
Well, Xeon also offers much higher core counts on a single socket, especially vs. i7 on Socket 1150, which maxes out at 4 cores. You can get a Mac Pro with three times that many cores, and sooner or later Intel’s 14 and 18 core options will likely show up in Mac Pros. (Though their TDP is a little higher, so the cooling and power supply might need to be tweaked a bit before that happens.)
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Daniel McClintock] “I’m just speculating here… and I would love to hear all of your opinions… but I think the new 5K iMac was to be the original replacement for the old MacPro. My reasoning for this happened after I looked at the results of a Geek Bench review of the machine. In essence, the results indicated that the new iMac is faster than the current low-end MacPro.”
I don’t think Apple did something as elaborate as the new Mac Pro just to tide people over for a year until this iMac showed up. The fact that a maxed-out iMac is faster than a base-model Mac Pro has more to do with Intel’s product lineup than with anything Apple-specific, really. You can find the same thing with any PC vendor — their high-end ‘desktop’ (Core i7) systems will be faster than their entry-level ‘workstation’ (Xeon) systems. Sometimes the gap is much larger than it is with the iMac and the Mac Pro, actually, as Intel offers some very low-clocked Xeons that Apple doesn’t use in any Mac Pro model. (Intel does this because some customers need Xeon features like ECC, but don’t have huge performance requirements.)
it’s true that a lot of people who worked on Mac towers a decade ago are likely using iMacs or MacBook Pros now. That’s just a natural consequence of hardware advancing faster than demand for additional computing resources. But some of Apple’s customers still have significant use cases that can’t be accommodated by an iMac, and the effort Apple put into the new Mac Pro suggests Apple doesn’t intend to abandon them.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Dave Gage] “I finally got around to watching the 3 seasons of this show on NetFlix. Does anyone know what NLE was used to edit the shows? There is an effect in the opening credits that looks like the “Miniaturize plugin” from FCPEffects which appears to be only available for FCP X.”
Very unlikely a show at that budget level would be doing visual effects in any ‘offline’ NLE; any visual effects you’re seeing were likely created in After Effects, Nuke, or a DI system like Resolve or Baselight. Most of these tools could create a tilt-shift effect like that without a plugin; selective defocus is quite easy with power windows in Resolve, for instance.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.