[Tim Wilson]

It hadn’t really registered with me that I hadn’t heard anyone talking about the 2019 Editor’s Retreat, and looking at their Facebook page, it doesn’t look like it happened at all. There certainly aren’t any posts about it, or photos from it, but plenty of both for 2018.

In any case, we can assume that there’s nothing happening for 2020. ☺

Future Media Concepts, which had been hosting the Editor’s Retreat, has been going through some changes as they sort out how to organize their business around local training centers on one hand, and events and roadshows on the other. I can imagine a scenario where some form of the Editor’s Retreat returns, but I can also see how in their minds, Post Production World at NAB, plus major events for Adobe, Avid, and Blackmagic, and the rise of worldwide groups like The Blue Collar Post Collective, heck, even Facebook, have made it somewhat redundant.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I’m not disregarding that there aren’t really issues. It’s just that “evidence” presented always seems tainted in some manner. It could well be that the OS is perfectly fine, but not fully optimized for their own gear. Or maybe how you’ve got your security settings set.”

My assumption is the same as yours. Any test run on a machine that can support both an old OS and a new one is going to favor the old OS, because the older machine was tuned to the older OS. That means that new OSes will almost always be slower on old machines.

At the same time, the only test that CAN be run is the only that needs running. LOL If the question is, “Should I install Catalina on my old machine?” the answer is almost certainly no, for the same reason that you shouldn’t try to shoehorn Mojave onto a new machine, where it will surely gum up the works.

At the same time as THAT, “maybe how you’ve got your security settings set” sounds an awful lot like “you’re holding it wrong.” LOL “You’re holding it wrong” turned out to be a bald-faced lie, of course. Apple knew that the antenna was busted, and papered over it with free bumpers and hype. Do you think that they don’t know that the reports are at best mixed? The conclusion you reached in your article, “Mac owners who bought a recent 15″ MacBook Pro will see a definite boost, but probably not enough to refresh their systems yet” is hardly a ringing endorsement. 🙂

And yes, I’m teasing you a little by focusing on just one sentence, and I understand that you were talking about the laptop rather than Catalina. Some very compelling stuff in there, especially when comparing to desktop performance. My larger point is echoing the question you previously raised, filling in the answer as shaded a bit toward “not so much” than “hooray.”

We’re not talking about a brand new OS. That other thread you started was specifically to evaluate where we are at THIS point in Catalina’s development. And we’re still not at the point where very many people are universally recommending it. That wasn’t the case with Mojave, or really any recent release I can recall. Some OS updates are better than others, and as you observed earlier, this isn’t an issue unique to Macs. But when Apple releases a dud, it’s not unreasonable to ask them to do better.

Bringing this back on topic to THIS thread rather than THAT thread, I’d like to ask the class, what would you like to see Apple do to better enable remote workflows? Does it begin and end with creating robust servers again? Does it include virtualization? What else?

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “These solutions all seem like “heavy iron” approaches. I’d be willing to bet most potential customers want a “no iron” solution.”

To me, that’s like saying that most people would rather plug in a USB 3 drive and edit 8K. On the one hand, of course, why not. On the other hand, nobody who’s serious about 8K….or 6K or even 2K…or who needs to work in a shared environment, or a remote one, considers a no iron experience especially desirable except in a purely theoretical sense.

There’s a reason why a company as innovative as frame.io is showing this as a proof of concept. Even after they keep hoovering up all the VC money and can iterate through a whole bunch of half-steps on the way there, no real-world production is ever going to have the human and corporate resources that the HPA was able to assemble there for that fun little experiment. Not Cameron, Spielberg, Jackson, or some combination of them. I mean it’s cool, and every innovation has to start on one side of the quantum leap before it gets to the other side, but this was anything BUT a no iron solution. On the way to a commoditized one some day perhaps, but even the “cheap IP pipeline” that they had available to them is beyond the reach of an awful lot of people.

I do think you’re right that there need to be solutions at a multiplicity of scales and price points, but even here in the COW, there are plenty of folks who need solutions that can apply to hundreds or even thousands of clients (schools, corporate, military, enterprise-scale post, etc.), and if no iron means anything resembling computers connected to the regular-old internet, we’re a couple of generations of tech away before anything like this.

My point being that I wouldn’t presuppose that “most” people expect commoditized collaboration from a distance, any more than they expect commoditized collaboration on the same SAN. Sharing is nice, but costs money.

People using handycams, pocket drives, and laptops need solutions too, for sure, but anybody who can get by with a handycam, pocket drives, and laptops can get their hands on solutions that work out of the box, certainly for Adobe andAvid, maybe for Apple and others. A no iron solution that works for them may never scale up beyond a tiny workgroup at best. That’s important, and if that’s all we ever get it’ll be great, but I still don’t think that it covers “most” of us.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Your explanation doesn’t really quantify how Catalina is slower that Sierra high Sierra, or Mojave, which is what you started out saying.”

Hi Oliver,

This probably goes more on the Catalina thread, and I’ll add a longer discussion there, but there’s a LOT of talk about Catalina being slower out there. A quick Google search will turns up tons of results.

Our friend Larry Jordan did some tests with Compressor and Adobe Media Encoder in Catalina and Mojave. In this particular article, he hadn’t completed his AME tests, except to get a general result that AME is about twice as fast as Compressor overall, but his Compressor numbers show that Catalina is 8% slower for HEVC 10-bit, and 31% slower for H.264. Same computer, same files, same project settings.

Your mileage will vary depending on whether this is the kind of rendering you do and how you feel about five minutes on a 55 minute render of course, but certainly as we get up into the 30% range, I think you’ll agree that this lies outside the margin of error.

There are bunches of other articles that I’ll link to back on the “Catalina issues” thread, but I really am seeing a ton of articles talk about issues with slowness in Catalina, and not much o’ nuthin’ squawking about how much faster it is.

Needless to say, if anybody has render reports to illustrate how much faster Catalina is in specific conditions, I’d love to see those on the other thread!

[Tim Wilson]

The VES Tech Committee has released a Working From Home Best Practices document, along with invitations to comment. There’s a bunch of great stuff for both editing and VFX, pertaining to remote creation, collaboration, review, rendering, and much more.

I mean, it gets into “Wacom tablet pressure sensitivity is only supported on Linux” levels of detail, but the broad strokes are informative, and even just plain interesting if you’re generally curious about the state of things at the highest reaches of our market. Check it out!

Here’s how they summarize their top-ranked solution, Teradici PCoIP:

• Server / Workstation: hardware solution (Remote Workstation Card) on Linux or Windows, can be used on Mac with external PCIe cardcage (see solution from Amulet Hotkey). Software solution for Windows and Linux: Cloud Access Software Graphics Edition (needed for GPU support), bundled as Teradici All Access Cloud Access + subscription.
• Client: ZeroClient hardware solution (multiple vendors), connect monitors and peripherals directly to ZeroClient hardware. Software Client (no charge) for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• Teradici’s data stream is encrypted (if enabled). Check with the clients if they would authorize its use without having to have a VPN connection on top (which hinders performance). Depending on your network topology this may be secure enough for them.

Teradici have a dedicated page for Media & Entertainment, featuring this quote:

Because the Teradici innovations focus on pixel-level transmissions, our artists can achieve 100-percent color matching and take advantage of full-HD, lossless imaging over affordable IP networks.

Kevin Clark
Director of Engineering at Industrial Light & Magic – a division of Lucasfilm Ltd.

Dude. If that’s the quote, I’m looking at the word “affordable” as referring to the IP infrastructure, and NOT as referring to this service. I can’t imagine that “affordable” is in the mix for most of us for this….but I honestly don’t know. Do any of you?

But you can see that, like HP’s Remote Graphics Server, clients can be Macs, but not the server.

The issue for Apple is that something like this is the definition of “edge case”, and they’re really not in that business. Apple will likely say, “Okay Mark, buy one HP, and use it with a hundred or a thousand Cheese Grater Macs. Problem solved.” Heck, if you go with Teradici and Unix, your Mac IT whizzes can probably set up the Linux server themselves.

HP workstations otoh, edge case are the ONLY business they’re in, and they have an insanely deep commitment to M&E. (Their messaging to science, architecture, and other fields is very different, because they’re in the business of THOSE edge cases too.)

It shows in bunches of aspects of their development, including RGS. Whereas it’s the M&E community that’s insanely deeply committed to Macs, with insanity amplified by Apple’s LACK of commitment to M&E needs, apart from a small dev team that may or may not be working on new releases of FCPX.

This new Mac is a course correction, to be sure, because of how many former Mac-lifers Apple knows they lost with the Trash Can, and for whom the iMac Pro wasn’t getting it done for some folks. You can see in the COW that some people who left Apple altogether, or who haven’t given a new Mac the time of day for nearly a decade are excited again….

….but the OS limitations remain, starting with lack of support for virtualization. Oliver’s right that Apple CAN solve this problem without emulating HP’s solution or anyone else’s. There’s no shortage of brains or imagination there.

But I’m not convinced that OUR problem is ever going to seem like THEIR problem to Apple, if the problem can be solved with one PC server and all the Mac clients you care to attach.

You’re the one who’s been testing it, Mark. Do you have a sense yet if Mac clients are somehow lesser-abled on the network?

And goodness knows that I’d love to be wrong about Apple dismissing this out of hand. I WANT them to apply their brains to this, and come up with a solution that really shows how committed they are to the needs of M&E customers to adapt to how the world is changing, because I really do think that’s what this is. Not an event to be passed through and forgotten, but a potentially epochal change agent for most areas of our lives and work.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “I could be wrong (and I usually am) – but in the same way that the old writers strike spawned reality television – this current incident could spawn the future development of real life full time remote editing.”

I think you’re right about this! More than full-time remote editing, though, I think of flex time remote editing. I don’t know that many of us, including folks like me who’ve worked remotely for a long time, are thinking that most people will want or need to be able to edit from home or from a remote set location or what have you, 100% of the time. The problem is that in many circumstances, it’s possible 0% of the time right now. That won’t do.

I don’t even know what thread this belongs on anymore since we’re talking about on several of them, but in addition to the infrastructure points you raise, Bob (we need a LOT more fiber buried out there, or access to the gazillions of miles of fiber that’s right now being sold only to private networks), I think that are some conceptual ones.

For example, the Visual Effects Society’s Technical Committee has released a public document and inviting comments on Best Practices, and there’s a lot of great stuff about products and platforms for remote collaboration for both VFX and editing for review, rendering, you name it. Many folks here will find helpful stuff in it, so take a look.

But there are studios and facilities who would no more allow VPN access to their works in progress than the man in the moon. I think it’s mostly coming from studios, in that many VFX and post houses are contractually forbidden from connecting media machines to the internet, making copies, etc. But I also think that no post house wants to be identified as “leaky” if the worst happens and even a single frame escapes into the wild.

Some people at the tops of some pyramids need to agree that the world will keep spinning if we see Spider-man’s new unitard a few months ahead of schedule, while also deciding that if VPN is good enough for defense departments and private industry, it’s probably okay for movies and TV too. Or along with laying better fiber, creating more secure protocols than publicly available VPN-style authentication. This isn’t rocket science, just regular old science. LOL People are smart. They can figure it out.

But first comes identifying it as a problem to be solved. There are bosses who just don’t see it like that yet. Hopefully it won’t take a bunch of people dying to change their minds. I could also imagine them saying, “Sorry, people getting sick isn’t the problem we’re trying to solve. We’re trying to protect billions of dollars of IP and shareholder value, and if that means a few hundred post production minions have to come into the office, whaddya know, we’ve already solved the problem. What we’re doing is working.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Eric Santiago] “However, between my D700 vs 2019….wowza!!”

Can you elucidate on that? Assuming that they’re similarly spec’d of course….and of course, which is the wowza, and is this good or bad? ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “And don’t think 5G is a savior.”

Not me man. I’ve been using the same phone for almost four years, so I’m definitely due for a change. I’ll surely get a 5G phone, just because that’s all they’re selling for new phones, and I’ll bet that I’ll be on the NEXT phone after that and 5G STILL won’t be in my neighborhood. I agree with you, the hype about 5G isn’t really going to matter much for individuals.

Besides, I’d imagine that most of us are using the most data on our devices while we’re on home Wifi. It’s going to keep coming back to the last mile of copper into the house for a loooong time.

[Tim Wilson]

[Morten Carlsen] “The pandemic IMO will blow over and the web will be up to full speed again in month or two !”

I think that the pandemic blowing over in a month or two is optimistic, but nothing wrong with optimism as long as it isn’t compromising people’s commitment to helping that scenario come to pass! It’s going to require diligence that especially here in the US, I’m not seeing very much of. (I’m thinking less here of politicians than spring breakers.) My family is Italian. I’ll be happy to connect you with any of them to speak to the advisability of getting too optimistic about being out of the woods too soon.

But I also think that going back to “normal” might be a stretch. I think that there are a lot of people who hadn’t dipped as far into streaming TV options as they had before, and studios are taking advantage of this to make their offerings as attractive as possible. Sure, maybe people will be watching fewer hours during the day once they go back to work, but I don’t see people getting out of the habit of heavy streaming.

And as much as people are excited about getting back to seeing movies on the big screen, I think that there’s also going to be more and more demand for tentpole releases in homes, definitely for the rest of 2020, and why not beyond? Most moviegoing experiences are terrible. Even a $350 “4K” TV from Target with the motion smoothing still on is pleasanter. Day and date availability for maybe everyone but Disney and James Bond-scale blockbusters IS the new normal.

I’m also wondering whether people are going to be willing to return to working in the office every single day. Not working from home every single day — I think we’re already seeing the limits of that — but there’s no getting around that people are going to see the benefits to productivity, creativity, and general sanity of not commuting every day, and they’re going to insist on being able to do it more often.

So I don’t have any doubt that loads will lessen somewhat, but I wouldn’t want to place bets on when, or how much “better” things will get….but to bring up issues coming on the “Cupertino, we’ve got a problem!”
thread, the current group of circumstances are also exposing fundamental inefficiencies and limitations that we’re no longer willing to live with.

And to bring this part of the topic back to this thread ☺I think one thing happening here is that people are feeling differently about throttling. It used to be something that companies could hide in the fine print (I just saw in a commercial last night “AT&T will reduce speeds during periods of increased network activity”), and I think most people will tolerate SOME throttling, but there’s a reason why people are gravitating toward Zoom instead of Skype. As a platform, Skype has lots of cool features, but Zoom handles throttling better.

In the longer run, governments have understood roads and bridges as part of national DEFENSE infrastructures as much as public SERVICE. You do it because the nation’s survival depends on it. I think that all countries are going to be thinking about the internet the same way, if they’re not already.

I know that mobile companies are already preparing for this, with phones that support 5G before networks do. This will help drive demand for new antennas that communities may have been dragging their heels on. The ability of mobile devices to do what we need them to do in the near future depends on it.

That is, my theory is that this isn’t just a blip in the system. My feeling is that it represents dozens of forks in the road — for how we think about schools, health care, work, food, entertainment, travel, and yes, the internet, but many many more as well — and that for each them, this is a before-and-after moment. If we’re actually learning from this experience, then virtually nothing will be the same afterward.

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks so much for sharing this, Jeremy! Man, I’m sorry things are so brutal for you. You’re definitely not alone, though. I’m hearing from folks saying the same thing, including not being especially psyched to talk about this in a public forum.

[Jeremy Garchow] “There is nothing out there at the moment. Everything we did have on the books has cancelled, and the few ongoing gigs have already been paid in ‘19. I’m not sure what’s next. “

[Jeremy Garchow] “Working harder isn’t going to do anything at this moment. Said another way, I do not think I will be able to work myself out of this moment, at least not in a way that I am used to working.”

[Jeremy Garchow] “My son’s school district is shut down for at least the next 30 days, and I imagine it will probably be the rest of the school year. I have been working with him to keep his schooling going as much as possible (2nd grade). His district pulled together a lot resources very quickly, for which I am thankful. So far, he’s doing a good job of it, and it’s pretty amazing to watch. He is working really hard at it, so therefore I am trying my best to help him to keep working hard at it. It’s the only work I have right now, so why stop now?”

I broke out these three quotes in particular because I know that they speak directly to a reality that a lot of people are going through. It’s not a matter of will. The work isn’t there for now, and nobody anywhere has any kind of idea when it might be again.

I also know that as much as people love their kids, not many school districts or parents really had any plans for something that might stretch on as this looks like it might. I can’t imagine how much more difficult it is for the millions of families who have also been relying on schools for food. The School Nutrition Association says that more two-thirds of the 31 million students who regularly eat school lunches, or 22 million, have that free or reduced-price meal as their main source of nutrition for the day. We have the resources to keep feeding those kids, but there are very narrow legal limits to what’s allowed to offer to kids who aren’t actually in class. (More about this Catch-22 here.)

With a gentle reminder that we can’t have the forums spin into directly political conversation, I definitely agree that there are wide swaths of trouble that feel too big for politics to solve, certainly with any of the currently available tools — and they’re pretty much ALL tools. LOL (Sorry.)

[Tom Sefton] “Look after your family, your friends and your elderly neighbours. Stay healthy, stay sharp and then when this is over, wreak your absolute f***king last on doing your job in the best way possible FOR THE LEAST AMOUNT OF TIME you can.”

Tom, this times a MILLION.

Here’s the thing about edgelord discourse about how cool it is to be relentless. There are 350,000 members in the COW. Ten million people pass through here a year, and I’ll bet you a real pony that maybe six of them have the least interest in working normal hours. (Six people, not six million.) There are whole careers that are famous for short, regular hours — they don’t call ’em “bankers hours” for nothing.

None of that has anything to do with why Creative COW is still here 25 years later. If we were counting on normies to pay the bills, we’d have been gone long ago. Heck, we never would have started! Every even halfway creative person is DRIVEN.

Sometimes it feels like we’re driven to work like demons by actual demons, because sometimes they ARE demons, and anybody who’s read much about angels knows that they’re not much better. Demons used to BE angels. Same dudes, different uniforms.

That’s why being driven isn’t special in this industry. It’s not unique, and it’s not hard core. It’s certainly nothing to brag about. Relentlessness is as common as dirt in these parts. It’s the cost of admission. It’s the bare minimum.

To the issues that Jeremy raises, and what hundreds of thousands of people in the world’s production capital cities are experiencing, we’re facing a condition where relentlessness is a force that can’t be applied, because there’s nothing to apply it to. The existence of production jobs right now is a binary. Used to be there, now gone until they’re back.

What I categorically reject is that there’s a binary choice between hyperdrive and empathy, between wanting to grind your competitors into dust and deep connection to the larger human community.

Looking out for elders is certainly part of it, but I want to observe again that the most frequent underlying conditions in people who are dying of coronavirus aren’t necessarily age, but high blood pressure (found in a whopping 75% of victims, twice as much as for diabetes, three times as much as for cancer) and being male (twice as likely to die as women).

I don’t have any way of knowing about high blood pressure in our community, but i know that just over half the folks who come to the COW are male, and I’m willing to bet that the incidence of hypertension is at least a little higher than average. So maybe more than for most careers, it’s true for US that the lives we save by not being jackasses may be our own. No point in winning if you’re not alive to enjoy it.

And really, even if you’re nuts enough to think this job is worth dying for, you’re just plain wrong if you think it’s worth killing for. Stay home for as long as it takes. Don’t be the reason somebody’s parents or grandparents die.