[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Finally! I knew it was coming.”

Good. Then you can probably also explain the advantages of dropping FW (and optical drives) from desktop machines so they end up a few mm thinner.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

You do understand that the FW-TB adapter will only work with non-storage devices if the driver for that device is TB aware. For hard drives that’s a non-issue, for most other devices, especially audio gear, scanners and cameras it is a big deal. Virtually none of them will work, and a lot probably never will. Great move again.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

And, of course, most of it is the usual Mac user bull from someone who says he used a Windows machine but actually hasn’t really used it in depth enough over a period of time.
We just finished building a little machine for Resolve based on an Asus PNX79 motherboard. It took about three hours and Resolve was rolling – stable and ready for productions work. There was zero tinkering with the bios, slots or anything.

[Chris Kenny] “- It takes forever to boot if you have a motherboard with lots of on-board features or many PCIe cards installed (since some of this stuff insists on showing screens at boot that take a few seconds to go away).”

Hmm, this machine I was talking about boots in approx 9 seconds from an SSD.
Oh, those pesky screens. You know you can simply switch them off in the Bios if you don’t care about the fact they give you useful info, right?

[Chris Kenny] “- Windows uses drive letters rather than labels in paths, and drive letters can change every time drives are remounted. This means nothing has a stable path (unless you manually assign a mount point, which takes way too many clicks). Media in projects will therefore need to be re-linked all the time, etc.”

Well, simply assign fixed drive letters to your external media. All paths are stable then.

[Chris Kenny] “- Explorer can’t show calculated folder sizes in a column, preview QuickTime movies, or do a bunch of other things one takes for granted on a Mac. QuickTime in general sucks on Windows, to the point where just opening a QuickTime movie, even on an extremely high-end system, takes much, much longer than you’d think it possibly could.”

In the same way as you’d have to install Perian or other tools to get OSX to pick up certain media for previews, same applies to Windows if you want previews for certain Quicktime movies in explorer. Calculated folder sizes: again, just install some freeware. Classic Shell works just fine and it’s free.

[Chris Kenny] ” If you build your own box you have to deal with installing lots of drivers.”

Let’s see, motherboard comes with ONE driver disc and is a one click install for chipset, Lan, audio, etc. Basically everything that’s on the motherboard. Then there is the graphics card. And then…. hmmm. That’s it I guess. Install time: 10 minutes.

[Chris Kenny] “- It takes longer to re-install, if you have to.”

Yep, full system image restore over network… 15 minutes.

[Chris Kenny] “- While the Windows version of QuickTime decodes ProRes, it can’t encode it, so if we need ProRes outputs we either need to render to uncompressed QT and convert, or simply move the whole project to a Mac to render.”

Or get Episode, or Promedia Carbon, or the free FFmpeg.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

We’ve switched fully to Edius with three edit bays with a bit of Premiere here and there.
There is nothing in X or in Apple’s hardware line-up that intrigues me these days and makes me want to go back; I dislike Mountain Lion and its direction, add the attitude issue to the mix and I doubt I’ll ever consider another Apple product. I couldn’t care less what’s coming or won’t be coming from them.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

[Craig Seeman] “This is where I expect Jonathan Ive and Apple engineering to do their miracle work. My prognostication but only geeks will get what they’ve done when they release the box. Their approach to cooling will be the kicker.”

Then they better step up their game because their current approach to cooling in the is seriously flawed and problematic.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

USB3 would have been no problem. All competing PC workstations utilizing new E5 Xeons have USB3.
And again, I don’t think next year will see a new Mac Pro. Apple has been very careful in their wording (“something” great); I doubt it’ll be “something” most potential Mac Pro customers will be happy with. And if a smaller form factor is what they’re going for… farewell PCIe and probably Xeons as well since there is no room for decent cooling.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

I’ll throw in my usually neglected and overseen new buddy Edius. Give the trial version a shot. It’s smoking even on middle class machines with little ram and older gpus, it’s faster than PP and Avid and takes everything native.
As an editing tool, it’s the closest to FCP classic that you can get (even considering PP CS6’s new features and enhancements).

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

“Hands down the best option for importing from tape is FCPX”
Unreal! Maybe it’s time for students to look for a new course and teacher asap.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

Sorry to hear that. 14 days sounds bad, but this is precisely the reason why I stay as far away as possible from all these locked down solutions. It all sounds great on paper; once things go down south you are done with no escape route.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I’m all for dumping QuickTime, but it’s currently not quite an option. The web is ready with mp4, the professional video industry seems poised to be ready with MXF, but there it sits. QuickTime is still extremely ubiquitous, even though it’s fairly outdated for today’s modern architectures.

Everyone stills asks for .mov. Not one entity has asked for an AVI. “The future” is clearly cross platform compatibility and AVI isn’t great on a Mac. “

Oh, I agree. Would love to see Quicktime fade away but it is and will be for quite some time the main container for delivery. Which is why you can also output to .mov from Edius; you just have to swallow the performance pill that also comes without prescription with Premiere or Avid. But if you CAN output to something else, or need to go to Tape, or encode to BD or whatever, you have a fast alternative that impressively showcases where the bottleneck of many NLEs is.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement