[Erik Lindahl]

Good article.

One performance note is the fact that the MacPro’s GPU bumps are done both with 2 and 4 GPU’s if I understand Apples site correctly.

Cinema 4D
– Mac Pro Dual Radeon Pro Vega II Duo

FCPX
– Mac Pro Dual Radeon Pro Vega II

Not 100% this is the case but FCPX is 3X faster where Cinema 4D is 5X faster. The other issue here is 5X faster than the iMac vs 3X faster than the D700 MP. I’d imagine performance gains will very, a lot, on the new system. Apps that can use multiple GPU’s such as DaVinci Resolve will likely fly. The no fuss with massive amounts of VRAM in conjuncture of the Infinity Fabric could be an end to VRAM issues.

Let’s just hope the hardware is solid and no “ooops, the GPU’s burn up after 6 months”. I also lack the internal expansion of drives given a PCIe-card could hold a couple off SATA or NVME SSDs.

[Erik Lindahl]

On a 2018 MBP with the high end Radeon card (non-Vega) a Vega 56 eGPU more or less hands down makes it a much faster machine in Resolve at least. We’re talking around 2X increase or more in performance. Still can’t touch our old dual D700 MacPro’s.

[Erik Lindahl]

These changes are or can be painful. Affected codecs include:

3ivx MPEG-4
AV1 / VP9
AVC0 Media AVA0 Media
Avid DNxHD / DNxHR
Avid DV / DV100 / JFIF / Motion JPEG
Avid Meridien / 1:1x / Packed / RGBPacked
BitJazz SheerVideo
CineForm
Cinepak
DivX
Flash Video
FlashPix
FLC
GlueTools codecs for Cineon/DPX, Phantom Cine, ARRIRAW, Uncompressed RGB
H.261
Implode
Indeo video 5.1
Intel Video 4:3
JPEG 2000
Microsoft Video 1
Motion JPEG A
Motion JPEG B
On2 VP3, VP5, VP6, VP6-E, VP6-S, VP7, VP8, VP9
Perian collection of codecs (such as Microsoft MPEG-4, DivX, 3ivx, VP6, and VP3)
Pixlet
Planar RGB
RealVideo
REDCODE QuickTime Decoder (.mov)
SGI
Sony HDCAM-SR (SStP)
Sorenson 3
Sorenson Spark
Sorenson Video / Video 3 / YUV9
Streambox ACT-L2
Windows Media Video 7, 8, 9
Xiph.org’s Theora Video
ZyGoVideo

Oddly Animation is not in the list. But neither in the list of supported codecs going forward. From a production point of view I’d say that’s one of the major blows.

It sort of surprises me Apple doesn’t keep a fully uncompressed RGBA codec. I’d rather see them keep an extended array of these (I.e scale all the way to 32-bpp RGBA). But this isn’t Apples gem. I sort of get “we have to move forward” but uncompressed RGB seems fairly basic to keep around.

On the delivery side the killed support of Sorrenson could kill some legacy archives. That being said, those should have moved to h264 long, long ago.

[Erik Lindahl]

It sounds like this sums up some of the FCPX-head-aches. You need the app + a tool to get to a third party app to get sort of maybe the result you want.

I could also imagine the round-trip back to FCPX can be a source of issues as well if you use effects there. The whole idea is to consolidate a project to just retain used media with handles.

That said, no app is perfect. In this specific case, Resolve is very solid it it’s media management from my experiences where Premiere Pro is very hit or miss.

[Erik Lindahl]

This is definalty one of many short comings of FCPX for certain industries. I’d however claim most pros could use this as a media / project transfer and / or archive function, be it you’re doing Cinema features or vlog’s on YouTube.

Ping-poinging to Resolve tends to work like, sadly, garbage. Fcpxml in Resolve tends to end up with TONS of compound-clips which for the purpose of optimizing a project ruins everything. Decomposing these compound-clips tends to be a manual / time-consuming process.

[Erik Lindahl]

Yeah, it could be we end up with a middle ground.

– Fully Interactive Games
– Choose your story films / series
– Normal films / series

Looking at recent, fully freshed out RPG game today, we’re talking in the lines of 50-100 actors with more than 1 million words of dialogue, all recorded. Here all the images are generated in real-time hence keeping an interactive story as dense as that requires a very complex production.

Also, say something like the tv-series game of thrones. I’m not sure the audience wants that to be interactive.

[Erik Lindahl]

Well even if BMD had their SDK out the same day they released their RAW-format, no major NLE supports it, do they?

[Erik Lindahl]

You can also try the secret menu and purge cache quite often.

[Erik Lindahl]

This is true – even photoshop / illustration work has very limited requirements for a beefy GPU. However, simply having a “minimum” dGPU would make a world of difference even for general purpose computing. It would make the machine a perfect small Photoshop box for example. Now I think the Intel garbage might actually not even work with certain filters.

[Erik Lindahl]

Sad Apple completely overlooked the requirements for dGPU. The MacMini should have the Vega 16 / 20 options from the MBP AT LEAST if not better – even if that would mean a larger enclosure.