[Tim Wilson]

[Joe Marler] “That was formerly my view, but as of this month the world’s fastest supercomputer is run by ARM CPUs, the 48-core ARM A64FX by Fujitsu. “

Well there you go! Thanks for that!

You’ve showed me something I didn’t know about what ARM can do today, but I have a feeling that both price and performance are higher than the ceiling that Apple is aiming for with their own approach.

And I do think that “their own” is key here. Apple has never liked being subject to the development cycles of its developers. I think that this move has more to do with Apple controlling its own destiny, and the release cycle of future products, without having to wait on anyone else.

[Joe Marler] “It’s not just a hardware transition but involves system software, application software, development tools, and educating and marshalling the development community.”

That’s for sure. That’s why I think that the next big turn of the crank at this end of the market is more like 5 years away than 2 or 3. Not that we have enough data to draw any conclusions about an actual “cycle”, which in the past would have had dependencies that the next round may not…if indeed the next Mac Pro is the first one to be Intel-less. We don’t know that either.

But as Dom pointed out, the PPC transition was 6-7 years, and the last two Mac Pros were released in 2013 and 2019. Call the cycle for platform transition AND Mac Pro redesigns 6 years, subtract a year because Apple has been working on things that we don’t even know about yet, and you wind up with….five years.

Which again, I’ve pointed out is irrelevant because nobody knows nuthin’. LOL But even apart from the technology itself, the amount of work to spin up the developer channel has just started. Hardly anybody has the seed machines yet. Then the marketing, sales, support, etc etc. This really is going to be a gargantuan effort.

[Herb Sevush] “So the consensus is that I wasn’t stupid before, but I am stupid now for starting this thread.”

LOL Not at all. Like I said in my first reply, EVERY Apple user (not just Mac, but also iStuff) should be looking over their shoulders all the time, because history has shown repeatedly that Apple WILL be biting you in the ass.

That shouldn’t be taken as any kind of criticism. Turns out that some people like that kind of thing. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Viktorija Osipova] “After doing a bit more research I have now purchased Wacom Cintiq 16 tablet “

Great choice! I was about to post this exact recommendation, so I feel proud for having helped, even though I did not help at all. LOL I got my first Wacom tablet in 1991 or ’92, and have always been a huge fan, especially of Cintiq in particular. I have a feeling that I am not the only one, too.

Good luck! And be sure to send us a link when you have posted some of the art you have made with it! ☺

Cheers,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Dom Silverio] “I expect Apple to support it with every OSX release for at least five years. G4 PPC was released in 1999, and the last compatible OS version was released in late 2007.”

I’m thinking that too. In my long post on the WWDC thread taking a look at the specifics of what ARM processors are doing, and how Windows has been living on ARM for the past decade, I think it could even be closer to 10 for machines like Herb’s.

The best Apple can do with an ARM processor today the same chip in the iPad Pro and Mac Mini. That’s a fine place to start, but Apple put a lot of effort into reshaping the top of their computing product line. They know better than anyone that these ARM chips aren’t ready for THAT.

So my vote is “not stupid”, Herb. LOL

But it’s certainly not unreasonable to recall that Apple has merrily EOL’d more products and partnerships than anyone else you can think of. They’ve never had more than a fraction of the market share they had before they EOL’d the most successful personal personal computer of all time in the Apple II to replace it with that ridiculous piece of garbage with a black and white screen in 1984.

They keep pulling the rug out from under ya, but it seems to work out fine for them in the long run, if maybe less so for some folks in specific circumstances. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “Feel free to call this a crazy idea. But until we have a reliable treatment/vaccine, I think the only practical way to get productions back up and on time is to not just do a closed set, but a closed lot; now everybody gets a trailer, not just the stars.”

That’s basically what the NBA is pitching by finishing the season in Orlando. Everybody comes to the bubble for a couple of weeks.

The players objected when they saw that support staff wasn’t also being required to live in the same bubble. I’ll be honest that I haven’t been following the current state of the conversation, but I think that this is exactly what needs to be considered right now.

I did see a headline that 16 players tested positive this week, which may also have some impact on the conversation. The thing that folks our age need to reckon with is that while deaths are going down, infections are going way, way up, and the consequences for survivors can be pretty dire. I’m sure you’ve seen stories of people in their 20s with no prior conditions winding up needing lung transplants, or the broad incidence of kidney failure and heart failure in people as young as their 20s and 30s.

That’s what athletes are objecting to. They know that they have the financial means and health support to not die from an infection, but the infection doesn’t care how much dough you have when it gets to your lungs.

I also saw a tweet from a technologist who’s shared some of her work with us at the COW, a producer at Nice Shoes in Hollywood, co-founder at Blue Collar Post Collective, presented at NAB and SMPTE, etc etc:

I’m not commenting on her politics and ask that you not do so here either, and look, maybe you think that math is political, but me, I think that math is more often the antidote to politics. The numbers are the numbers, and most of them are moving in exactly the opposite direction that any of us want. We (broadly speaking) are acting as if the numbers ARE getting better, when they’re really, really not, ESPECIALLY in Los Angeles, although Houston, Phoenix, New Orleans, and Miami also have some stories for you.

(The Phoenix story just came across my desk. Here’s how fast the numbers are rising: the new cases in the past seven days alone represent nearly a third of how many they’ve seen all-time: 66,458 all time, and 19,767 in the past week. Adding nearly 4000 a day, and going up. Yikes!)

[Neil Sadwelkar] “What I think will happen, is that people will form guidelines and start until one or more individuals get sick and then all of this will come to a halt.”

My post is a lot more gruesome than I intended, but I’ll end with a lighter note, also from Twitter. Matt Goldberg at Collider responded to news about the release date for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet being moved again with a meme from Arrival:

[Tim Wilson]

[Matthew Woods] “I like the new forum name. It seems a good place to ask this question.”

Thanks, Matthew! This is exactly the goal of the name change, to acknowledge the breadth of what we actually DO talk about here.

Coming soon: officially tying the forum into the rest of the COW as it is still currently tied into FCP and FCPX as a subforum.

[Mark Suszko] “I think Hitfilm gets little love here because the perception of it is that it’s consumer or pro-sumer-ware. That may or may not be fair. I know there are folks that swear by it.”

Still speaking in my administrative role, I hope that people who like Hitfilm or similar tools from, say, Affinity, DO speak up. There are a lot of tools, and a lot of reasons why we use them, and I think that tools like HitFilm, Affinity, Blender, et al are worth talking about as tools worth keeping in the bag, even if they’re not what the mainstream of the COW is building a career on in comparison to offering from Adobe, Avid, Apple, and Autodesk, just to stick with the letter A. ☺

Transitioning into my role as a nerd as well as an admin, I’m also thinking about how to open up other parts of the COW into things like our personal photography, the mobile apps we use, heck, even musical instruments and performance. As in, this isn’t the exact forum for it, but I spent half an hour yesterday talking about photo and video editing apps for my phone because I wasn’t as happy with Lightroom as I used to be, and I would think that the folks who pass through the COW have a better idea of what I need from such tools than at say, either a digital photography site or an app site.

I dunno. I’m still thinking about this. I have some more specific ideas that I’ll roll out in another conversation, but if anyone has any thoughts on it, maybe drop me an email. (You can use tim@ this here domain, or timothywilson at the gmail.)

Now in full nerd mode with no administrative shading at all as I turn back to Matt’s original question….

I’m curious, Matt — have you looked into Resolve? It costs less than HitFilm, which is crazy to contemplate. It’s FREE, and packs an absolutely BIZARRE amount of stuff into the package, including the formerly standalone applications Fairlight and Fusion. It’s only sub 4K in the free version, but the full version is a stupefying steal at $299.

I actually had to doublecheck that, certain that I was remembering it wrong. It wasn’t that long that it cost $1000-ish for far fewer features.

There’s no question that Fusion is a different beast than After Effects, but Simon Ubsdell’s tutorials here in the COW will take you a very long way toward the mograph goodness you need. There are plenty of folks here in this forum, as well as in the Resolve forum, who can also help you out with the editing, sound, and VFX aspects of Resolve.

My broader point being that for somebody doing this professionally for as long as you have, you may find more of what you’re looking for in Resolve for a price as low as ZERO, and no higher than $299 all-in.

And hey, mentioning again that if anyone is using HitFilm, Affinity, or any similar tools, I hope you feel free to chime in. Certainly on this thread, that’s as “on topic” as any other thread we’ve got.

Not that that’s saying much. ?

[Tim Wilson]

[Dom Silverio] “The question is, can they scale it to the desktop level of a Mac Pro. “

This is of course the question, and I think that Apple has used a number of methods to tell us the answer, “It will take years.”

I am struck that the system that they’re seeding with developers is a Mac Mini with 16GB RAM, using the same chip that’s in the iPad Pro.

This already tells you exactly what you need to know. Of COURSE it does some things well, but it’s also an utter non-starter with others. That’s not a negative, or in any way a criticism. For the vast majority of the process of building a bridge, it doesn’t even LOOK like a bridge. It doesn’t even start to function as a bridge for the people BUILDING the bridge until it’s almost done.

That’s exactly why Apple says that they’re going to be supporting Intel Macs for years. I’m sure that they have an end date targeted on an internal roadmap, even if it’s just written on a post-it note on a whiteboard, but there’s no real point in getting ahead of ourselves here.

Five years? Ten years? I haven’t seen anyone anywhere speculate anything remotely plausible yet, at least partly because I think there’s no way to know. But when Apple says “years to come” for Intel, there’s every reason to believe them.

When Apple talks about new processing platforms at WWDC, they usually include a slide or two with benchmarks. Not this time. Benchmarks aren’t the point. There is NO performance gain to be had here. NONE. iPads are awesome, and in many obvious ways, the ultimate fulfillment of the 1984-era vision of Mac that Steve had from the get-go.

For that matter, an iPad Pro is exponentially more powerful than that first Mac was LOL (and in color no less!), but it’s not even vaguely useful for building a COMPUTING PLATFORM on any time soon. Apple knows this, which is why is why they’re not talking about it for actual computing. For now, it’s a DEV platform, and for that, will be a gas. Those people are in for a fantastic ride. To the extent that I still have fond memories of my life as a developer (eg, mild to moderate LOL), I envy them.

So what IS Apple saying about ARM? As usual The Verge’s coverage of all this is blowing everyone else out of the water. From this article, this jumped screaming out of the page at me:

The company’s press release says very specifically that Apple’s new chips will “give the Mac industry-leading performance per watt,” and that’s a very deliberate turn of phrase. Apple’s arguing that by building the most efficient kind of chips it can — “the highest performance with the lowest power consumption” — it can achieve more raw performance by tipping the scales of that performance-per-watt formula toward more watts.

Look, I’m glad Apple is thinking about efficiency. Everybody should. But that’s not the biggest problem that most of us have solve.

Where it gets interesting for mobile, and for mobile ONLY, is that ARM allows more efficient integration of GPU functions into a single chip with the CPU. That’s cool, but one of the things we’re learning is that dedicated GPUs are actually WORTH something. So even after Apple has transitioned CPUs for all machines, including the priciest towers over to ARM, there may still be room for somebody’s third party GPUs. Maybe Intel and AMD, maybe somebody else — again, no way to know.

Here’s what we DO know. Microsoft has been running Windows on ARM for 10 years. This is absolutely nothing new.

In fact, I feel like one of the core messages of this WWDC is, “You know what? Everybody else is right. Microsoft has been going hard on ARM for a decade, and it’s about time for us to get serious about this too. And all that stuff we’ve been either mocking or ignoring on Android? Well, it’s time to take that seriously too.”

(Seriously, take a look at any “what’s new and exciting about iOS 14” article at a Mac site, then go look at a “here’s what Apple has learned from Android” article on an Android site, and they’ve never been more identical. Or I can save you the steps and point you to this article at The Verge that combines both into one handy place. “Some of the best new iOS features might look familiar”

And sure, we can play the “Everybody steals from everybody” game, and it’s always true, but it has never been MORE true that Apple is taking more of its moves from other people this time than anybody on the other side ever has from Apple. I mean, it really is stupefying, if also gratifying as somebody who’s been yapping for years that I bailed on Apple years ago for all this stupid stuff that they weren’t doing, or were doing more poorly than everyone else, only to discover Apple saying, “Yep, you’re right.” I KNOW lol)

So where has, and hasn’t, Microsoft been working with ARM. Surface is ARM, for sure. It’s like a Chromebook on steroids, which isn’t saying much. LOL Okay, and maybe more compelling than an iPad Pro (albeit less so since iPad Pro has taken so many moves from the Surface) or a low-end Macbook, but really not enough to build a future-facing platform on.

You know what’s not been happening in any huge way on ARM processors? 64-bit processing. Apple won’t be willing to live with that long term, and you can bet that this is going to be a big thrust for developer conversations in the breakout rooms.

MSFT’s approach to ARM is similar to their approach to everything, which is to say, “We’re going to dictate less rather than dictate more.” They support old stuff for a very, very long time. This is an impediment to progress, but continuity and reliability are values worth aspiring to, too. So they have explicitly said that they DON’T see a sunset for Intel yet, at least partly because they don’t need to.

But for the foreseeable future, there’s enough stuff that ARM isn’t good enough at, that’s at the bedrock of high-performance Wintel boxes for things like servers and science and such, that MSFT has NEEDED to support a multivalent environment. There are too many people doing too many different things to assume that one platform within the platform to be enough. It isn’t.

And this may remain the case for Apple, even in the post-transition world. Maybe some classes of software will always need some kind of emulator. Another great observation from another great Verge article, here:

Without getting too deep into the weeds, there are lots of different ways Apple could go. It could limit ARM Mac to iPad-like Catalyst apps. It could try to offer emulation for any app that expects an Intel processor. It could offer a relatively easy transition for developers using existing APIs. It could sunset some APIs while beefing up newer ones like Swift.

(“What Windows can teach the Mac about the switch to ARM processors”)

The same article includes the tail end of a massive Twitter thread from an Apple developer who also works with ARM in the Windows world:

I mean, there’s understandably an undercurrent of enthusiasm here for Apple’s own apps, but the top developer of sofware used on Macs isn’t Apple, it’s Microsoft. Even inside the creative space, I’d be willing to bet that it’s Adobe.

That’s one of the things that excited ME in the WWDC keynote. Mentions of software from Microsoft and Adobe running in ARM Macs. When Apple is talking about its own stuff, that’s fine, they should…but when they’re talking about other people’s stuff, you know that it’s actually important. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

I happened across this thread, and noted that the June 2020 update of the Creative Cloud applications includes a public beta of Scene Edit Detection in Premiere Pro. Adobe’s Eric Philpott told us about it in an article here: https://library.creativecow.net/philpott_eric/adobe-stock-audio-roto-brush-2-creative-cloud-updates/1

Here’s what he wrote about it:

Scene Edit Detection in Premiere Pro will leverage Adobe Sensei to analyze exported or archived video files and identify edits with pinpoint accuracy. Unlike existing histogram-based solutions, the new technology in Premiere Pro was built with machine learning, helping users to save time by delivering consistently reliable results. Scene Edit Detection will automatically add cuts or markers at each edit point, turning rendered files into editable timelines and enabling per-clip adjustments, such as color correction or reframing.

Learn more about installing the public beta software here.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Scott,

I’ll add that Boris FX has some text tools that LIVE for animating cast shadows as easily as drop shadows. Graffiti is the text-specific plug-in, but these features exist in pretty much all Boris products.

I was working at Boris FX when Boris (yes, there’s a dude named Boris) was developing these tools 20-ish years ago, and I gotta tell you, it was crazy exciting to watch. There’s been a lot of software come and go over the years, but nobody does cast shadows better than Boris, I say as somebody who started using After Effects and a heap of plugins in 1993. (I in fact used to run a website called Plugin Central, long since unplugged. LOL)

And a bit for your trivia notebook — my predecessor as the Boris FX product manager left the company to work for (then) Discreet (now Autodesk). Apple bought his entire team and turned their as yet unnamed product into Apple Motion.

Anyway, there are free trials of all of Boris’s stuff at borisfx.com, and tutorials out the wazoo at their website (as well as a goodly number here). If you want to animate cast shadows, Boris has what you’re looking for.

Good luck!

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Reed] “In my own forum I have”

You have a forum?!?? What is it? Let’s have a look, man! LOL

These are all great ideas. I’ll definitely start rolling up some of these ideas into a revised version of this forum. We’re definitely be going to have maps as part of member profiles in the next few months.

Some of the introductory stuff you mention above is included in people’s member profiles. Here’s yours, for example. https://my.creativecow.net/Michael-Reed2/about

And here’s my mine. https://my.creativecow.net/Tim-Wilson/about It’s sorely out of date. I noticed that parts of my TV watching profile talked about how excited I was by my new HD TV. LOL I updated it a little, but I definitely need to do more.

In general, you can get to people’s profiles by clicking on their name above their posts. You’ll see all kinds of interesting stuff.

This is great stuff, though! Thanks!

[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “Very true, I’ve looked in on quite a few and I’ve haven’t been impressed with ANY of them”

Professor Zelin is right to bring up Grant Petty in this context, though! I absolutely adore those webcasts of his! Endearingly low tech in some ways, but rock solid and very entertaining. Even though I don’t “cover” these as part of my job at the COW, I watch them because I enjoy Grant’s presentations so much.

And indeed, basically wrote a 2500 word love letter to Grant’s introduction of the ATEM Mini Pro and updates to the Pocket Cinema Camera to make it a broadcast camera, just a couple of months ago.

In general, though, I’ve seen the work that YOU folks do, and know that there are literally thousands of people in the COW who could do a better job than what I’m seeing from these humongo corporations who don’t know enough about cameras not to point them straight at windows. It’s crazy.

And it’s not like these people haven’t had plenty of time to prepare to do something GOOD. They’ve certainly had plenty of time to look at all the garbage ‘casts out there.

Now that I type that aloud, I wonder if they’re seeing what their colleagues and competitors are doing and thinking, “Yeah, that’s what a remote presentation is SUPPOSED to look like.” Yikes! I hope not.

(This is a whole ‘nother rant, but somewhat related: has Microsoft ever seen what a web conference call is supposed to look like? Because those Teams commercials are the WORST.)

Anyway, you all know that in plenty of other contexts, I have no love for Apple at all, but I’ve sure got my hopes up for this! As a presentation. The only thing I wear less often than pants these days is an Apple Watch. LOL