[Erik Lindahl]

Brilliant! Don’t forget to add support for all AMD-Mac GPUs also. Hacking the “approved” list can result in some buggy behavior at the moment. A Radeon 5870 should be quite decent at accelerating effects I’d imagine.

[Erik Lindahl]

I didn’t ask them about that sadly.

Traditionally Apple has always used desktop / consumer chips in their computers with possibly a “Workstation option” on their pro-desktops. I’d imagine the iMac will continue to match the MacBook Pro in performance.

A higher-end consumer card tends to beat the pro-cards with ease. It might be a different story on Windows however.

The only “awesome” Quadro-features are, in general more RAM and also the “video link technology”. The later means any video I/O card (BM, AJA for example) can direct link to the GPU for higher, lower latency performance. I don’t think the technology is widely used yet though. And you really pay a premium for these features.

[Erik Lindahl]

Talked to nVidia in Amsterdam and they are syncing the release of the Quadro K5000 for Mac with a coming OSX-release. The aim at the moment was “late october” but nVidia is apparently in the hands of Apple here to a degree. They wanted to avoid the Quadro 4000 issues with no OpenCL support and such hence doing it this way.

Further more it sounds like all PCIe 2.0 machines will handle the cards. I presume that is the MacPro 2008 and newer. The exact performance was a bit sketchy but it “should be the fastest nVidia offering on the Mac”.

[Erik Lindahl]

You can have two of these cards in the same system so the power-requirements are similar or lower than the Quardro 4000. However, since they hare 2 slots wide, having two of these cards makes for example it impossible (or at least hard) to build a editing system like that. It only leaves 1 slot for data i/o and video i/o where you’d need two.

Using 1 Quadro 4000 and 1 K5000 is an option but then one of the two might suffer. Resolve as I understand it prefers a powerful non-gui-card for acceleration where Premier Pro and Final Cut Pro X requires the gui-card for acceleration.

[Erik Lindahl]

I saw this also – very interesting indeed.

A note though is the fact that the cards takes TWO PCIe slots where a Quadro 4000 today only uses one. Still the added performance of the K5000 should outshine the use of two 4000’s hopefully. For a “general use online machine” you want CUDA and OpenCL accleration with-out soly relying on a dedicated processing card.

I’ll be at IBC from tomorrow so I’ll poke nVidia / Adobe / BlackMagic regarding this for sure. We also have two 2008 MacPro’s still running strong and this card would be a decent upgrade. However, looking at the fact the card costs well over 2000 dollar investing in a completely new system might be more “sane”.

[Erik Lindahl]

Speaking of scaling FCPX seems to outperform FCP7 by a long shot. I can’t say however if Compressor uses the same software engine as FCPX.

[Erik Lindahl]

There is a huge difference between different downscaling solutions. From my experience the Kona 3 hardware downscale is amazing at keeping solid details while removing issues like alining, moaré or flickering.

FCP7 can produce a sharp image but especially at the risk of moaré. Aliasing and flickering can be controlled with the “flicker filter” plugin quite well.

If you can I’d opt for going hardware out. It amazes me AJA hasn’t yet allowed users use the Kona 3 hardware for a file to file conversion.

[Erik Lindahl]

I found the ProTools, Logic and Color comments very odd in the article. For starters a lot of broadcast pros are dependent on I/O workflows to and from their editor. The audio-mixing in FCPX is very limiting. You don’t even have a multi-track or channel mixer.

And that Color is built into FCPX… This is not the case. Perhaps parts of Colors engine resides in FCPX but as a grading tool FCPX isn’t there yet. GUI is completely different and huge features are lacking:

– No curves support. Both RGB + LUMA as well as HSL.
– No key frame support at all
– Limited still-store or other comparison tools
– Limited matching if you disregard the “match grade” feature (which is quite unreliable). Even FCP7 is better here.
– No tracking support.

Not that I want to be the negative b-srd but a few comments came out really odd to me. That said, some features of the color correction / grading tools in FCPX are promising. The same can be said for audio-side of things. But they aren’t a ProTools or grading suite replacement by a long shot from my experience.

[Erik Lindahl]

A good tip when wanting to work low res for a later high res out put is working on “perfect downscale” of the full-res. For 1920×1080 HD that would mean 960×540, 640×360 or 480×270. That makes it much easier up-resing.

But try the above suggestion and see where that takes you!

[Erik Lindahl]

Very interesting! I would imagine a thunderbolt > minisas solution will come as well which won’t keep smaller desktops / laptops out of the solution.

– Server and finishing systems with PCIe running at the full 48 Gb/s
– Smaller editing systems and laptops with Thunderbolt running at 10 Gb/s.

Anyone know when this solution will be released? What’s the limitations of cable lengths?