Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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This sort of analysis doesn’t really mean anything n the absence of some standard to judge it against. So iMovie moves more units. OK, it’s 1/20 of the price; that’s not unexpected. The App Store stats don’t let you determine how many more units (save that it can’t be more than 20x as many, because FCP X grosses more than iMovie). Even if you could find this ratio it wouldn’t mean anything without some baseline to compare it to, e.g. how much iMovie previously outsold FCP 7.
If your point is simply that FCP X sales aren’t as high as when it was initially introduced, that doesn’t mean very much either. Most people who were going to upgrade probably did so early on. I imagine most software sees “bursty” sales surrounding new releases.
If we’re engaging in App Store kremlinology, though, two things lead me to believe FCP X is actually doing rather well. First, it’s outselling Aperture despite being 3.75x as the price and despite photography probably being a more common activity than video editing. Second, it’s consistently the first or second highest grossing app (not counting Lion, which isn’t really an ‘app’), often outselling Pages, which is kind of impressive. It’s 15x the price, but a word processor is so much more of a mass-market product that it’s surprising to see a $300 video editing app selling even 1/15 as many units as a $20 word processor.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I can’t speak to what’s happening in network TV, but we mostly post indie films, so I get a pretty decent idea of what’s being used for various projects there. Basically, nothing has really changed from a year ago. We still see Media Composer and FCP 7 in about the same proportions. We still haven’t seen anyone cutting on FCP X or Premiere. Though there are exceptions, people who didn’t follow the Internet drama around FCP X seem to largely have a wait-and-see attitude rather than a “Why has Apple forsaken us?” attitude.
In a way, it makes even less sense to make major changes in editing infrastructure now than in the immediate wake of the FCP X announcement. Software-wise, we’re substantially closer to the major update that Apple has promised will address most of the feature gaps in the initial FCP X release, and hardware-wise, Thunderbolt is changing the landscape very quickly. If there isn’t some extremely pressing need to deploy something new immediately, the most sensible choice is to see how things settle out over the course of this year.
In the meantime, one thing that’s settled is that Color is really dead. Learn Resolve; it’s what everyone always wanted Color to be anyway, and the free Lite version is sufficient for practically any project that doesn’t require 2K, 4K or 3D.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Mitch Ives] “I was wondering about the display cards. The release of FCPX had tower owners out buying new display cards for compatibility. Can you swap display cards in an iMac these days… didn’t use to be able to, which meant scrapping the entire iMac. That would be a rather expensive difference between an iMac and a tower?”
You still can’t upgrade the graphics. Though external GPUs via Thunderbolt might be viable. (Yeah, it’s only 4x, but if you look at GPU benchmarks with cards in slots of various speeds, this matters less than you might think.)
But anyway, an iMac probably costs half as much as a tower. Just buy a new one twice as often, sell the old one, and you’ll almost certainly come out ahead vs. trying to keep a tower twice as long and buying upgrades for it along the way.
And if you’re the sort of person who needs a laptop, a MacBook Pro is certainly a lot cheaper than a MacBook Pro plus a Mac Pro. You can probably afford to replace the MBP three times as often if you quit buying Mac Pros as well and just use the laptop for everything, which has now become remarkably viable.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Frank Gothmann] “Sure it does. When a company repeatedly drops features and flexibility from its soft- and hardware in favour of what they think might one day become a standard then such company is a liability for any business and I won’t play along. I want to decide what workflow and what hardware works best for my needs, I don’t want or need Apple bullying me into this.”
Apple has not yet canceled the Mac Pro, and by the time they do, there will be more Thunderbolt devices on the market.
[Frank Gothmann] “That statement doesn’t make sense.”
It does in the context of people talking about Apple “abandoning pro users altogether”. That implies Apple selling only machines that pro users couldn’t plausibly use to get their work done, not just machines that are a bit slower than what they could be offering (but still faster than what anyone was using to do that work a year or two earlier).
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Frank Gothmann] “I am complaining about “less choice”. We are talking about three small raid boxes atm compared to dozens and dozens of options. Same for video io, other connectivy etc. Give me TB but don’t drop PCIe.”
This is a consequence of Thunderbolt having been on the market for a very short period of time. It has essentially no relevance to the subject being discussed, namely whether high-end towers will continue to be necessary for professional video production in the future.
[Frank Gothmann] “This wasn’t even with regards to TB but with regards to Apple dropping dual-cpu towers. How would you want to work and render such files? On an iMac, your Laptop or on a cluster of dual-cpu workstations? That’s a serious question, please answer it.”
I’m not disputing that there are still some tasks better performed on towers, but I think people are overstating the extent to which this is actually necessary. It is, objectively, largely not necessary for any task you were performing prior to the last couple of years, because, as noted previously, today’s MacBook Pros are about on par with 2008 dual processor Mac Pros, and only really ~30% slower than today’s base-model 8-core Mac Pro.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Frank Gothmann] “No, external SAS is cheaper, faster and much more expandable. I posted about this earlier.”
This has not really been my assessment when a good controller is factored in, particularly with Mac-compatable controllers.
[Frank Gothmann] “TB Expansion is PCIe 4x, so half the performance you get from a modern Raid, Fibre or 10Gig Controller.”
Err… huh? You appear to be assuming that since PCIe cards that support those things are sometimes 8x, they actually require that bandwidth. But that’s not actually the case. Thunderbolt’s has two full-duplex 10 Gbps channels. That’s a total external bandwidth of 2500 MB/s. And higher-end iMac models have two independent ports. This is significantly more bandwidth than is required by e.g. 10 GbE.
[Frank Gothmann] “AJA’s forthcoming TB solution only handles 8-Channel audio which is useless to me. I need 12 so I need a Kona 3. “
You’re essentially going down a list of edge cases here. Perhaps it’s possible that Thunderbolt is useless to you, but it’s entirely suitable for the vast majority of pro video work. You’re not really complaining about Apple abandoning the pro video niche here, but about Apple supposedly abandoning a niche within that niche.
Blackmagic’s UltraStudio Pro Thunderbolt interface does 16 channels of audio over HD-SDI, incidentally. There’s no Thunderbolt-related limitation in play here; your complaint seems to be with the production features AJA has chosen to include.
[Frank Gothmann] “I don’t care what might be in 5 or 10 years. I need to run a business today.”
We’re talking about Apple’s future product decisions. Today, the Mac Pro is still on sale, and I’d be quite surprised if it didn’t receive an update in Q1 2012.
[Frank Gothmann] “Try running 4k DPX files off your TB raid on a laptop for film restauration and let me know if one or two weeks difference in render time matter to you and your business.”
Even most Hollywood feature films are not being finished at 4K. You are, again, not really talking about pro video editing here, but about a niche within a niche. 4K DPX is effectively the only format that Promise’s Thunderbolt RAID can’t handle in real-time, and Thunderbolt itself actually is fast enough for 4K DPX on paper.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Frank Gothmann] “You get an iMac for 2.000 dollars. Then a TB Raid enclosure for 6 drives that will set you back another 1.800 (the same amount of drives you can easily fit into a proper modern workstation), two TB expansion chassis to have 4 pci slots (running at a 25 per cent speed), another box for video io and another one for dual-link ethernet. And possibly another one for…”
More realistically, you buy a Thunderbolt RAID enclosure and a Thunderbolt video I/O interface, and that covers most pro video work. Maybe add a RedRocket in an external Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure if you’re working with that format. The Thunderbolt RAID is more expensive than internal storage, but probably cheaper than external SAS storage, and the Thunderbolt video I/O interface is probably the same price as a PCIe card serving a similar function. Either of these devices is far easier to move between machines within a facility, or bring on set, both of which are useful capabilities. And if being used with a laptop, there’s a lot of flexibility here. For instance, you can keep your online footage on an external RAID, with offline proxies on your laptop’s internal drive. Now you’ve got a solution that lets you edit sitting in the park if you feel like it, but can turn into a fairly serious online editing machine by plugging in a single cable at your desk.
[Frank Gothmann] “And when I say “modern workstation” I don’t mean the current Mac Pro with it’s outdated architecture.”
Err… current Mac Pros are using Intel’s latest. It’s not actually Apple’s fault (or a signal of neglect on Apple’s part) that Intel now seems to update its dual-socket workstation offerings last within a given processor generation. Actually, that’s probably Intel responding to some of the same forces that cause people to speculate about Mac Pro cancelation — high-end towers really are becoming increasingly niche items, and, in particular, dual socket machines are less necessary as the number of cores on each CPU (and general single processor performance) keeps rising.
[Frank Gothmann] “It’s a horrid scenario I certainly won’t persue. “
You might not “peruse” it, but in five years — certainly in ten — I’d be surprised if it weren’t just taken completely for granted. Pros used to routinely buy $10K+ systems just to run Photoshop, back in the days when 80 MB was a huge amount of RAM. These days, phones have way more RAM than that, and this typical Photoshop work is so easy for modern hardware that nobody thinks anything of pros in that field working on laptops. As hardware performance continues to increase, video will inevitably end up in the same place.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Lion has been pretty rock solid for us, in heavy use on a Mac Pro that processes dailies and does client-supervised grading sessions in Resolve. Incompatibility with new OS versions is a longstanding issue, on all platforms, and it’s kind of silly to try to attribute this round of it to Apple somehow neglecting pro users.
With respect to the Mac Pro, my guess is there’s going to be at least one additional revision once Intel has new Xeons (though there’s now some doubt, perhaps, about whether Apple will use Sandy Bridge E5 or Ivy Bridge E3, as they might be coming out at about the same time, and the latter, while only single socket, is probably going to be faster for typical desktop workloads).
18 months after that, who knows? Eventually, towers are going to fill the market niche presently occupied by refrigerator-sized computers, or perhaps the desk-side SGI workstations some high-end creative pros used in the ’90s. At some point before then, Apple is going to stop making them, probably a couple of years before many people are really comfortable with that.
The truth is, iMacs and laptops really are becoming suitable even for high-end video work. Today’s MacBook Pros deliver similar CPU performance to 2008 Mac Pro towers, and Thunderbolt enables access to high-speed external storage and video I/O devices that previously would have required PCIe slots. Professional editing, even in uncompressed HD, is now very viable on MBP/iMac, and if Apple offers an Ivy Bridge mini that has both dedicated video and is quad core (right now you have to choose), that will be in the running as well.
We online indie feature films, mostly shot on Red and Alexa. A significant fraction of these films are primarily being edited on editors’ laptops. About the only thing we do that still strictly requires a tower is color grading, and it’s not hard to see that even that won’t be true anymore in two or three years.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Clayton Burkhart] “I suspect that what you are looking for won’t actually be implemented until the Thunderbolt v2 comes out. Currently the speed of Thunderbolt (10 Gb/s) still can’t match the speed of your PCIe slots. With v2 that would become more of a reality as it will exponentially increase in speed (100 Gb/s).”
Even 3D games don’t suffer as much of a performance penalty as might be imagined when moving from 16x PCIe to, say, 4x. Perhaps a 10-20% hit to frame rate. If I understand the way Resolve uses GPUs, there should be even less impact there, at least with 1080p/2K. All you need, I think, is enough bandwidth to send an uncompressed video stream out to the GPU and get another one back, and Thunderbolt provides more than enough bandwidth to do that.
Thunderbolt PCIe devices even show up the same as internal PCIe devices to the host operating system, meaning graphics cards wouldn’t even require special drivers for this.
There may be some more subtle issue that prevents this from working well with Resolve, or I may be misunderstanding how Resolve uses the GPU. But at a first glance external GPUs via Thunderbolt seem quite plausible.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Lawrence] “If the geniuses in Cupertino really are debating persistent In and Out points and reading source timecode, I think the case of Apple of not understanding what editors do makes itself. “
Err… these are absolutely implementation details. Neither of these behaviors is in any way required by the process of editing in the abstract.
(And these UI issues are not a clear-cut as they might appear. Source timecode for clips in the timeline can be trivially found by using the ‘Open in Timeline’ command. I imagine the debate is over whether to allow the main timecode viewer to be switched to show source timecode, something that would be useful, but potentially confusing, thus the debate. As far as persistent in/out points, I suspect the ‘con’ argument is that explicitly marking favorites is better practice and not very hard to adapt to.)
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.