[Chris Kenny]

[Peter Chamberlain] “Note; in both cases we tested the i7 as the CPU is used for ProRes and DNxHD decoding, and both systems had 16GB of RAM. The NVIDIA GeForce GT650M would comfortably play 3 nodes with color correction and some blur at 24fps while decoding HD DNxHD and the NVIDIA GeForce GT680MX 9 nodes.”

Three nodes is what I’d expect from the 650M based on the performance I’ve seen on my rMBP, but 9 nodes on the 680? Wow, that’s not bad. If that holds up while doing Thunderbolt video and disk I/O, the computer in the smaller suite we’re planning now might end up being an iMac.

This kind of performance is especially exciting for what it implies we can expect a year or two down the road, with the GPU performance increases we’ve seen.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Rafael Amador] “Personally I don’t see the parallelism. Even considering the big changes from MacOs 9 to 10, it was part of a natural evolution. Nothing to do with the jump from FC.7 to FCPX.”

I don’t know about that. I was around and participating in various Mac forums during that transition, and there was definitely a contingent that was of the opinion that OS X was completely “unMac-like” and that Apple had, in fact, ruined the Mac and there was no reason not to switch to Windows.

It’s a little over a decade later, and Apple sells four or five times as many Macs now.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “You’re trying to set up an overly narrow system of definitions where costs somehow don’t come into play in the decisions people make.”

No, I’m trying to set up a system of definitions where the costs people decide to pay are based on where capabilities stand relative to expectations — rather than including cost itself as an expectation, which obfuscates shifts in purely technical capabilities vs. purely technical expectations.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “You seem to think that talking about budgets in a discussion about price and performance obfuscates the point. I think that failing to consider economics in a conversation about price and performance and considering only the technology is fallacious. “

If we look at the history of this market, we can see periods where prices aren’t really dropping, because products at the same price still aren’t doing everything users want them to. We can also see periods where prices are dropping, because products at lower price points become sufficient for user needs. We’re presently seeing the latter. That was my point. You’re trying to set up a system of definitions under which this latter scenario can’t be described as capability advancing faster than expectations, but that’s essentially just a meaningless argument over definitions.

[Walter Soyka] “And I see you are now willing to include budget in the conversation.”

I’ve continuously included it in the conversation, I’ve just argued that when you’re discussing whether capabilities are advancing faster than expectations, mixing budget into technical expectations makes it very hard to figure out what’s happening. Rather than being an expectation itself, budget is better understood as a consequence of where capabilities lie relative to expectations. When capabilities advance faster than expectations, things get cheaper. When expectations advance faster than capabilities, they get more expensive.

[Walter Soyka] “No, it’s not an implication. I’m explicitly saying that retained value is a direct consequence of slow-growing expectations and fast-growing capabilities. It’s not until competition forces the expectation back up that the value is forced free and is able to flow downstream from the producer.”

This construction is contingent on your inclusion of cost in expectations; see above.

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[Chris Kenny]

[MIke Guidotti] “Except run Avid, a Red Rocket and Pro Tools HDX on the same box.

Or large Pro Tools HDX systems with extra process cards and third party cards like UAD…”

This is a consequence of the peripherals currently available, not the fundamental capabilities of the hypothetical system that has been proposed. A single Thunderbolt channel has the bandwidth for thousands of uncompressed audio channels, for instance, and the machine that has been proposed would have eight of them (it’s two channels per port). In fact, audio might be one of those instances I was discussing, where you’re better off with external Thunderbolt devices than internal cards, because the number of physical slots is more of a bottleneck than bandwidth is.

[MIke Guidotti] “Last time Apple tried to “define the paradigm” they pooped out FCPX and forced the bulk of their Pro customers to Avid and Adobe…”

There is absolutely no systematic data available showing that any such thing has occurred.

[MIke Guidotti] “This is of course assuming there will even be a new Mac Pro. Magic 8 ball says “Signs point to no.””

Tim Cook says yes. At least, he indicates there’s something coming next year for pro customers. What it will be called, I can’t say, and as we’ve been discussing I believe it may differ significantly from the current Mac Pro.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “Resolution is interesting to study, because resolution increases step-wise (we jump discontinuously from one raster size to another), whereas Moore’s Law ultimately suggests that computational power will increase exponentially. This means that as the time from any resolution increase progresses, computers will become drastically more powerful. In isolation, this would support your theory that capabilities are rising faster than expectations (computers get faster while resolution remains constant), but look at what actually happens industry-wide after resolution jumps: expectations grow, too, in the form of reduced budgets and compressed schedules.”

I think we’re talking completely at cross-purposes at this point. Including reduced budget as a form of higher expectation obfuscates what’s occurring here. The reason budgets are falling is precisely because hardware capabilities are growing at a rate that exceeds the growth of people’s technical expectations.

[Walter Soyka] “What if expectations grew faster than capabilities? Expectations can’t reasonably grow faster than capabilities; without the capability, there would be no justification for the expectation.”

Again, you’re confusing the issue by mixing price expectations in with technical capabilities. Expectations can hypothetically outpace increase in technical capabilities. If it used to be the norm that action movies had x visual effects shots, and now it’s the norm that they have 2x visual effects shots, but VFX shots haven’t gotten any cheaper to do, that’s an instance of expectations advancing faster than technical capabilities — and you deal with it, in this case, by just spending twice as much.

[Walter Soyka] “What if capabilities and expectations grew at the same rate? Producers and consumers, through a functioning market, could get better products cheaper, better products faster, or cheaper products faster. Basically, as something desirable becomes feasible to produce at a low-enough cost, the market demands it, and competition squeezes out excessive profit, passing the savings on to consumers.”

There seems to be an implication here that I’m arguing such value won’t be passed onto consumers. Though I think there are some issues with that in the current market (bottlenecks in distribution, general inertia with respect to industry practice), I do believe this is what will eventually end up happening.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Phillips] “A few companies have tried this – a concept of “virtual KeyKode” Where KeyKode was a unique identifier for every frame in a production. In all my years of dealing with Kodak based production did I come across two frames in the same production with the same number. Fuji film was more apt for that to happen.

The issue is settling on a format that encapsulates the identification as well as ensuring it is unique.”

Obviously getting everyone on board with the same solution is quite non-trivial, but the technical problem is pretty simple. Just generate a full-on UUID for the first frame of every captured clip, and increment it by one for each subsequent frame of that clip. That gives you unique frame IDs — just just on a given production, but globally (from Wikipedia: The probability of one duplicate would be about 50% if every person on earth owns 600 million UUIDs), but they’re still sequential, meaning that an app trying to figure out which of a bunch of media files contained a given frame would only have to read the first and last frames’ UUIDs out of each file it was examining.

Of course UUIDs are not easily human-readable, being 128 bits long and usually represented in hexadecimal, so you’d probably still want to keep more human-friendly identifiers like reels and timecode around. But when push comes to shove, software should have a reliable way to uniquely identify frames.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “Likewise, the capabilities in the high-end of color grading (convergence with vfx and compositing, evidenced in technologies and techniques like 3D geometry-based re-lighting) has become the high-end expectation.
“

I don’t know that these things have become the high-end expectation, though. As far as I can tell they’re still used on relatively few projects even at the high-end.

It might clarify things to look at image resolution, since it’s more objective. A substantial fraction of Hollywood films are still finished at 2K, even through 4K now is undoubtably cheaper than 2K was when DI started becoming standard. Why would this be so? I think it’s fairly clear that it’s because capability really is advancing faster than expectations. Put another way, given two systems with similar capabilities and performance, one that works in 4K and one that tops out at 2K, the former would be over-serving a large fraction of the potential market.

[Walter Soyka] “Put another way, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You, as a content producer, cannot solely capture the benefit (like cost savings or quality improvements) of a new capability. You must pass it on to your client. If you do not, efficient markets will punish you and reward your competitors who do pass on the benefit.”

Well, ultimately this results in a larger quantity of cheaper, better content being available to consumers, but more innovation in distribution is probably required to make this materialize. Until then, I think various market participants are in fact managing to capture value they wouldn’t in a perfectly efficient market.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “There’s also the question of how to actually integrate discrete graphics cards with video-carrying Thunderbolt ports on the motherboard — we haven’t touched on that yet.”

There’s a motherboard on the market already that I believe solves this problem just by having DisplayPort input on the motherboard, to which you simply run a DisplayPort cable from the graphics card. That’s a simple enough solution, and with a case designed with it in mind it wouldn’t have to be ugly.

Another possible option is to just include some halfway respectable on-board graphics and use that video signal on Thunderbolt. This would also give Apple the option to offer versions of the system without a discrete graphics card at all, which makes a lot of sense if there’s a new form factor that’s rack-mountable and is intended to also fill the gap left open by the Xserve’s cancelation. It would be nice for Resolve too, since while Resolve runs pretty well now with one GPU, it still likes two GPUs more; a moderately decent on-board GPU that could be used to drive the GUI would free up the ‘real’ GPU completely for CUDA processing without tying up a slot.

Of course doing things that way would mean you couldn’t use a Thunderbolt screen if you wanted it directly attached to your fastest graphics card, but the main appeal of Thunderbolt for screens is that you can hook up the screen and a bunch of peripherals plugged into it with a single cable; that’s cool for laptops, not so exciting for towers.

[Walter Soyka] “Expectations escalation is about much more than price or performance. Look at the client side: as soon as we can accomplish something new, better, or faster, it becomes expected that we will do it. “

But new things take a while to show up. Color grading used to be a ‘heavy iron’ task, now in most cases it doesn’t need to be. It’s not like everyone said ‘Well, sure, we can now get 10 nodes in real time on commodity hardware, but we’re going to stick with $200K specialty systems because now we want 40 nodes on every shot”.

Or look at the progression of standard resolutions. There’s some minor pressure to move some productions 4K finishing, but almost nobody seems to want to pay what it would cost, even though 4K now is probably cheaper than 2K was five or six years ago. You don’t see crashing prices in a market where users are being under-served; in that market, they’re willing to pay more for more capability. You see crashing prices in a market where users are being over-served.

There’s some interesting discussion of this here:

Disruption (low-end or otherwise) happens when a product over-shoots the market. It makes sense to compete on a new basis, be it low price or convenience or customization, if the prevailing basis of competition has led the prevailing products to be more than good enough. If you look through all the examples of low-end disruption, you’ll find that the incumbents were motivated to flee up-market and to continue to improve their products even though they exceeded the demands and expectations of mainstream buyers.

This article is about the iPad, but the above paragraph applies almost perfectly to the post production hardware/software market. The whole reason you’re seeing things like Mac versions of Resolve and Smoke in the first place is because the pricy turn-key versions were overshooting the market, and were vulnerable to low-end disruption.

And I suspect this is a one way process. That is to say, I don’t think users usually move back upmarket, even when new capabilities arise that they could exploit earlier by doing so. For instance, let’s say someone perfects machine vision technology and designs some software that can analyze footage, understand the scene in full 3D, and let you virtually move lights around. That would be pretty cool, it’s something we could imagine happing in the next decade or so, and it would require a lot more processing power than today’s color grading software. But I predict that if, when this technology hits, it requires expensive specialty hardware, practically nobody who has gotten used to finishing projects on cheap commodity hardware will use it… until it’s possible to do on cheap commodity hardware.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “I am responding to the point you raised about what “a ‘pro’ Mac should do.”

Major engineering changes to the Mac Pro may result in it becoming a less suitable choice in some production niches. There would be people who were well-served by the 2006, 2008, and 2010 Mac Pros at their respective launches who would be ill-served by a 2013 with limited expansion.”

I’m just not sure that’s really true, at least not to a large extent. For instance, you could stick multiple graphics cards in a 2008 Mac Pro at launch, but graphics cards are now so much faster than they were in 2008 that whatever you were doing with multiple cards then can probably be done with a single card now. Maybe there might be some hit over the immediately previous generation, but then again, maybe not with NVIDIA playing with ideas like sticking two GPUs on a single card (the GTX 690, not that there will be enough internal power connectors in any Mac Pro for one of those).

Another thing to consider is that in many instances you run out of physical slots long before you run out of bandwidth. Video I/O and more ‘mainstream’ RAID (i.e. RAID systems in the range of ~300-800 MB/s) are not all that bandwidth intensive by PCIe standards, yet the cards to do them still take up valuable slots. In this sort of scenario, trading off slots for daisy-chainable Thunderbolt devices is a big win.

So while a system with a couple of PCIe slots and four Thunderbolt ports isn’t the best possible Mac Pro Apple could build for every pro customer, I think it really would be better in absolute terms for the vast majority of their pro customers than any previous Mac Pro.

[Walter absolte] “I do understand that I’m a niche within a niche, but I used to be all Mac, and now I don’t feel that I could be anymore even if I wanted to be.”

I’m not going to tell you otherwise, and I don’t think Apple would either. The truth is, the Mac Pro, though a sort of inertia of just putting in the latest increasingly powerful parts and not really thinking about the scope of the product, was, I think, carrying Apple into rarified high-end niche territory that the company hadn’t traditionally played in. That was quite useful to some people, but I don’t think anyone should be too shocked to see it ‘corrected’.

Then again, maybe I’m crazy, and the move upmarket was completely deliberate, and Apple’s next Mac Pro is going to be the most beastly thing they’ve ever shipped, with a $5000 starting price.

[Walter Soyka] “Soyka’s Law: Expectations rise at the same rate as capabilities.”

I think expectations rise faster than a naive view might expect them to, and for a very long time they did rise at the same rate as capabilities, but they’ve started falling behind now. This is why the average sale price of personal computers has crashed over the last decade (Apple has resisted this pretty well, but largely through means unrelated to performance), it’s why people are now more willing to trade off performance for portability than they used to be, and it’s why people now use commodity systems for many professional tasks that they used to buy expensive specialty gear to perform.

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