Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Michel Gallone] “OpenCl is sadly way inferior to CUDA, as you might know.”
OpenCL’s performance is nearly on par with CUDA’s, and overall rendering engine performance between, say, Premiere Pro and FCP X can’t be meaningfully determined entirely on that basis.
What was Apple supposed to do, anyway? As an NVIDIA-only solution, CUDA would have been a terrible idea for FCP X. Apple needs the option to choose graphics vendors for its hardware; it would be extremely awkward if every time they chose Intel or ATI for a given model generation, it meant those machines couldn’t run Final Cut.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Peter Blumenstock] “And all that Apple can come up with is… silence.”
There’s no open letter from Steve Jobs on the Apple web site, but Apple has had product managers talking to people like Hodgetts, Pogue, and Jordan about future plans. People just aren’t listening, or they’re so firmly determined to see everything through the “Apple doesn’t care about pros” lens that they’re trying to poke holes in what Apple has said to these folks.
Incidentally, releasing information about future products like this is quite unusual for Apple. It should be taken as a sign that Apple is well aware of the perception problem.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Dan Stewart] “There was suspicion because of Apple’s shady behaviour.”
Could you explain what that means, specifically?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[John Chay] “I think the biggest thing that has people upset is pulling CS3 all together and forcing everyone into FCPX. If they would have just kept CS3 and allowed people to gradually transition into FCPX when it was ready for Professional Post work then you wouldn’t see the outrage.”
I kind of doubt you wouldn’t see the outrage, since as I noted the “Apple doesn’t care about pros” fear-mongering had basically a two year head-start on Apple even announcing FCP X, and it really kicked into high gear after the SuperMeet, well before anyone knew about Apple’s plans for FCS3.
In any event, Apple should have left FCS3 on sale, I think, but in practice it probably won’t be that hard for people to get copies.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Brian Mulligan] “For me personally, it’s the last point that kills it for me. Everything I do in post revolves around interchange. EDLs are 30 years old, but they work because they are incredibly simple. It should be so trivial to code EDL export for Final Cut Pro that I’m actually looking into doing it myself. But to “outsource” FCPXML -a specification created by Apple, no less – to third-parties, will just not work in the long term. Who will decide how the format grows (and unlike EDLs, it must grow)? Autodesk, Adobe, and others actively support the FCPXML format. That Apple are effectively abandoning it is bad news for the post industry.”
If they’re outsourcing even XML, this means they pretty much have to be panning some sort of API to allow third-parties to access sequence and event data in FCP X. They seem to have used the word “API” when talking to both Philip Hodgetts and David Pogue as well. This is potentially much more powerful than exporting a static XML representation, but it will require some rethinking of workflows.
I doubt we’ll see some third-party try to create a ‘standard’ interchange format around this. Instead, I think third parties will either modify their apps talk directly to FCP X via the API, or they’ll write plugins for FCP X that can export data in formats their apps can read.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michel Gallone] “This is relevant because I have the feeling Apple’s next move is to remove Pro functions in upcoming OS X releases.”
This whole “Apple doesn’t care about pros” narrative, which some people seem to be buying into as incontrovertible fact, is based wholly on data points that have entirely plausible alternative explanations. The really ironic thing here is that a year ago, the primary support being offered for this narrative was that Apple hadn’t rewritten Final Cut Pro as a 64-bit Cocoa app yet, but of course we now know that Apple was doing precisely that. Yet somehow, despite the fact that the very existence of FCP X undermined the chief reason people had come to believe Apple didn’t care about pros in the first place, many of those people have gone on to view the entire announcement and rollout through that same lens.
Here’s the actual reality:
Apple needed to rewrite Final Cut Pro. Pretty much everyone recognized this. People spent a couple of years freaking out because they didn’t have realistic expectations with respect to how long a rewrite would take.
Apple finished the rewrite, just above on the schedule I had guessed (~2x the length of a normal release cycle, counting from FCS2 since FCS3 wasn’t that big an update). Now a bunch of people are freaking out because they didn’t have realistic expectations with respect to how plausible it was that a 1.0 release of a new app would be an immediate drop-in replacement for a 12 year-old app.
We now know from what Apple has told Philip Hodgetts and David Pogue on the record that Apple is not unaware of what they left out of the first release of FCP X and is working to fill in the more important gaps.
The entire case in favor of the “Apple doesn’t care about pros” narrative, based on the latest available information, basically boils down to “Apple is acting like Apple”. Seriously. Every complaint about FCP X — that it shipped before having the full feature set everyone wanted, that Apple hasn’t presented a roadmap, that it sacrifices compatibility in favor of innovation — is just how Apple works and has worked for at least the entire Steve Jobs era. Examples of all of these abound, including with respect to products Apple manifestly does care about, a lot. There is simply no need to invoke an additional “And Apple doesn’t care about pros anymore” explanation for any of Apple’s behavior with respect to FCP X.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Keith Pratt] “Thunderbolt (in its current iteration) is slower than all four PCI-E slots in the Mac Pro. It doesn’t have the bandwidth for GPUs or Blackmagic’s Decklink 4K or AJA’s Ryker.”
GPUs don’t actually use anything close to 16x PCIe bandwidth when they’re not slinging textures around for high-end 3D games. And the highest bandwidth format the Decklink 4K outputs is 4096*2160 * 12 bits * 3 channels * 25 frames/sec, which is ~949 MB/s. Thunderbolt’s theoretical max is 1250 MB/s, and because it’s using PCIe, which has very low overhead, it can probably come pretty close to that.
That said, I do think Apple needs to keep shipping a system with at least two PCIe slots for the moment. Next generation Thunderbolt will likely remove that need in the long run.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Wall] “Quicktime will get pushed off the cliff in a few years. Adobe, Avid, etc. will be forced to change their underlying architecture, as will the plugin makers.”
QuickTime might get pushed off a cliff in few years, possibly along with the rest of 32-bit Carbon. But Adobe and Avid apps have their own internal media architectures. As far as I know, they just talk to QuickTime to handle I/O in QuickTime formats. They could talk to AVFoundation instead. In fact, I imagine they’d like to replace QuickTime dependencies; it’s pretty long in the tooth these days.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[ben g unguren] “In other words:
PUT YOUR [career, funds, facilities, future, reputation]
IN APPLE”It’s more like “If you a tool that already works, that you’ve been using for a long time and like, and you see promise in a new tool from the same vendor, then maybe you shouldn’t abandon that vendor a couple of days after that new tool ships just because it doesn’t have all the features you need yet”.
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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] “Exactly. Which is what I unfortunately discovered along the way in the course of my own productions, and why I no longer trust Apple to provide me with an accurate output solution. :-)”
Please be very specific about what you’re talking about here. Because you’re claiming Apple has done something that makes zero sense for them to have done. What specific tests have you performed that lead you to believe FCP X deliberately ‘enhances’ video in the display pipeline?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.