[Erik Lindahl]

Yeah. I think it’s along the lines of:

HDD = 1X or 150 MB/s
SSD = 15X or 2 000 MB/s
RAM = 400X or 60 000 MB/s
VRAM = 3000X or 500 000 MB/s

Above has to be taken with a grain of salt and it doesn’t take into context latency or other things that impact different stages of cache.

Intels new memory tech being released next year might bridge the gap between RAM and and SSD but I don’t think we are there yet. And VRAM vs caching to disk, even an SSD, is a huge difference.

[Erik Lindahl]

A fast SSD will make life better for sure but at 3GB/s it’s still something like 1/10th or 1/20th of the speed of modern RAM.

[Erik Lindahl]

I think having “buttery smooth” editing with 5K is in the grand scheme of things quite easy with the insanely fast SSD the new machines have. I think RAM will be more of a problem when you have to compute or cache things, such as say 10 layers of 5K media with a bunch of effects or similar.

Being the MacBooks top out at 4-cores I’d say 16GB is “decent” but on the low end of the spectrum. 32GB would make far more sense. My MacPro 8-core now running After Effects and Premiere is eating 42GB of RAM so yeah… I’d say 16GB is really low for a lot of normal post-workflows.

[Erik Lindahl]

We can defiantly hope! The GTX 10-series are very impressive cards. That said nVidia has had a poor track record in the Mac. Heaps of bugs and relatively poor OpenCl performance. I also think the word on the street nVidia wasn’t interested in a custom GPU for the MacPro-class machine.

[Erik Lindahl]

The natural choice would be Motion, that said its sadly sort of dead in the water. It’s support – even from its developer Apple – is weak at best. In the past Motion has scaled increadibaly poorly. You get amazing realtime until you hit some wall where performance does.

Fusion might be a decent bet. At least it’s free to try out. And available for OSX / Windows / Linux.

Personally I’m happy with AE. I do however feel Adobe should and could do way more to improve things:

1. Unify their apps more. Consistencies with rendering, filters, format support – you name it. Today this is a massive head ache. Want an EPS in Premiere? Go from Illustrator to After Effects to Premiere. And remember to do the scaling in the right app as well as the CMYK > RGB conversion.

2. Make undynamic link dynamic. Copy & paste from any to any app. Today it sort-a-kind-a works here and there. But even simple things such as blurs don’t translate correctly from PP to AE.

3. Project management. Today I setup my projects and edits in Resolve, Premiere and After Effects. It’s sort of a pain. Adobes apps should be able to sort this better.

[Erik Lindahl]

What event would that be? The “Final Cut Pro X State of the Union” or something else?

[Erik Lindahl]

Very sad to see Episode exit the show. We’ve been using it since the Popwire-days when it didn’t even have solid output of QuickTime.

I’ll have to meet with Telestream at IBC to see if their offerings are valid replacements. I have a very hard time seeing that’s the case for us.

What other options are out there?

– Sorensson Squeeze will get another look for sure given recent versions from my PoV have been pretty dodgy.

– Adobe Media Encoder we use but it’s limited.

– Apple Compressor was garbage last time I checked but will investigate again.

[Erik Lindahl]

I wonder if the same presentation will be held at IBC this year? Would be interesting to see where FCPX is heading. Even if we jumped ship to Premiere a few years ago FCPX internals have always impressed.

[Erik Lindahl]

Work:
– nMP 2013 8-core / D700 / 64 GB / 1TB, external 8-big 24 TB RAID-5 + 1TB SSD – both Thunderbolt, Ultra Studio 4K, 2×27″ EIZO CG + 1×24″ SONY OLED

Home:
– iMac 27″ 2012 i7 / GTX 680MX / 32 GB / 1 TB Fusion Drive, external USB3 256 GB SSD.

[Erik Lindahl]

I think it’s two sided but primarily Apple wants control. Be it they make things better or not. But with the control comes options. A goal, as I understand it, with APFS is to make it scalable from the get-go instead of the “add-hoc” solutions Apple has been forced to use with HFS+. This would in the future mean super feature X might come 2025 but in theory the APFS from that point should work fine to at least read from ANY APFS-compatible device.

It’s also the whole scalable thing from the 512MB ARM-based Watch to the multi-terrabyte, super powerful Xeon machine they want to bake into “one modell that fits all”. I could imagine most filesystems today aren’t really built for that.

Encryption is also quite unique to APFS that it can be container, volume or file based – on the file system level. Things like “FileVault” in OSX are simply “add-ons” to HFS+, it’s not actually part of the filesystem. You will also get things like a true “sparse” filesystem and a true atomic filesystem.

If it’s better than something like ZFS it’s hard to say. I also hope Apple is open in terms of letting others work with the filesystem so Apple devices don’t become even more islands than they tend to be already.