[Frank Gothmann]

And why 2013? Doesn’t make any sense at all? Virtually all PC makers are shipping workstations with new Sandy Bridge Xeons.

——
“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]

Hell yes.
HPz820, Lenovo D30, Promax One, Dell T7600, Fujitsu Celcius etc.
Basically, all the big players have systems out there that completely smoke the “new” Mac Pro. Great entry level card for PP is a Quadro 4000.

——
“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]

[Erik Lundberg] “They mention the word “Xeon” not only once, but five times. If my counting skills are up to date.”

Yeah, but that’s not what he meant. The magic word is Westmare, ie, the old stuff from yesterday we gonne give you for your hard earned cash.

——
“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]

[Steve Connor] ”
Because some people must be buying it, not sure who though.”

Because, as the past days clearly showed, there are quite a few people who just want a Mac tower. So a lot will bite the bullet and buy the old fart rather than going PC. They are also very likely to have a modern Macbook, which will fly compared to the old tower design. So they’ll slowly but surely agree that towers are not necessary anymore, all can be done one a Laptop and often even faster, and after a while they’ll happily move on while having never known the performance of a modern tower system compared to a laptop. Clever move, Apple.

——
“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]

Not too surprised but I feel bad for the people who really wanted a new tower, especially after wet knicker mania set in when the rumor mill opened the floodgates last week.
I overflew the event ticker, seems crystal clear where they are heading. All mobile is what Apple wants to be.
Bold prediction: all mobile they will be within the next three years.

——
“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]

[Gary Huff] “[Steve Connor] “If these specs were correct would you be happy with them? Providing we get a reasonable choice of graphics cards of course.””

Although I am out of the Mac game I dare to ask: what specs? It doesn’t say anything about wether dual cpu configs will be available, how many PCI slots at what speed, how man usb3 and TB slots and controllers, if the memory slots will be a weird as in the previous model etc.
If the pictures hold true they have essentially swapped mainboard and cpu and that’s it.
I find it hard to believe they’d be oh so secretive about something everybody else has announced month ago. I am not really buying into the story that this will be it.

——
“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]

[Herb Sevush] “Where are the limitations with Edius? For me it’s the multi-cam implementation, which does not lend itself to my workflow, but I was wondering where you see it’s strengths and weakness’s.
“

Strengths:
– absolutely rock solid video io. Broadcast monitoring and capturing is as solid as an Avid with Nitris hardware. It’s the only other NLE I know that seems to have zero latency. There are no hickups, glitches, delays, stuttering or anything like that. The timeline behaves like a butter, no matter what is on it and how you interact with it.
– has its own intermediate codec (HQX) that you use either in an avi container or mxf container (and, in 6.5 probably due this month) also in a Quicktime container which makes the codec cross platform. It’s 10bit, does hd and sd unlike DnxHD, you can push compression to go beyond HDCAM-SR quality and it’s freaking fast and full on multi-threaded. Oh, and it’s free unlike Cineform.
– It eats everything native and it does it well. Quicktime, AVC, AVI, MXF (v. 6.06 RED), mix and match framerates, resolutions, it doesn’t bog down and blink an eye with lots of effects and layers on the timeline. And it does it all without Cuda.
– 64bit wav support (just like Vegas) in- and out and full broadcast wav support. This is my saving grace for audio workflows. It only exports interleaved .wav. If it could export stems I’d be in heaven.
– Can downscale HD using Lanzcos (again without CUDA) so hd to sd actually looks ok.
– Exports and renders are just extremely fast. It is the fastet NLE out there. Rendering to HQX utilized all 24 cores on our HP at 90 – 95 per cent. It’s really the dream NLE for powerful workstations as it actually utilized the power and leaves nothing idle.
– Great trim tools, very flexible and beautiful UI that is functional and customizable to your heart’s content. Can be driven either by mouse or shortcut people very well.
– Lots of concepts very similar to the way FCP thought, ie. setting up sequences, projects, audio etc.
– native stereoscopic editing (as of 6.5)
– Collaborative workflows just like Avid/Unity with its own shared storage environment, editors working on the same projects and media management software.
– AAF export that allows transcoding to unified codec.
– Very active community with participation from Grass Valley guys all the time.

Downsides:
– Video IO only with its own hardware (which is probably why it works so well, the hw is only for Edius and there is probably also acceleration taking place with HQX as the system load is next to nothing during capture). However, you can also use a BMD card for monitoring now.
– Not all that many plug-ins from third parties available. Magic Bullet Looks etc. works via an After Effects bridge. New Blue and other stuff is available, too but nowhere near as many as for FCP or FCP X. I am not using all that many so I don’t really care but Neat for Edius would be nice.
– Doesn’t mix 5.1 or 7.1 (but it can export multichannel audio, it just doesn’t allow any surround panning in its current version).

All in all, it’s a extremely capable app. It has a big news media background so its written for 24/7 hardcore editing operations, fast and stable turnovers.

——
“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 have, not for everything, but I have/am using it for regular day-to-day jobs now, together with Edius, depending on the type of work..
What do I think. It is a big step forward from CS5.5, it like it a lot, promise of greater things to come plus I feel I am in good hands with Adobe as far as the future is concerned.
Downside: some things are still rough and need fixing, tweaking and refinement, audio workflows are still driving me absolutely nuts and there are some bugs.
It’s hard to understand virtually no NLE is capable of implementing this in a sane way. Exporting stems is hell on earth, especially when working with modified frame rates. FCP was golden and sooooo easy for these things. The only NLE that is halfway capable of doing this is Edius although it, too, requires one extra step compared to FCP.

——
“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] “What do you I mean when you said I “overestimate crash potential on new hardware”?”

What I meant was that Apple isn’t slow to implement new hardware because it migh impose stability issues. hence my remark about Linux.
They’re slow to implement it because of internal politics (eg. esata, usb3).

[Jeremy Garchow] “I know what you mean about Linux, but what NLE are you using with which capture card?”

I am not running any NLE under Linux. I have a Linux partition in one of our HPs for film restoration software, using it with DPX only. Stuff comes in via BM Decklink card or, beyond 1080, from hard drives.

——
“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] “OK. So what is it? Just because?”

It’s a number of things. Certain choices of architecture (Graphics rendering, memory management, the Darwin kernel is also known to be a slow dog, networking is slow an painful), on top of that animations left and right (which, I agree, probably is more the perceived feeling of slow) but most importantly it’s the “innovation” instead of evolution. Few things in Apple land have time to grow and mature. By the time they have come out of puberty they are flushed down the toilet and things restart from 0. We’ve gone from OS9 to X, from PPC to Intel, apps get eoled internally shortly after having reached a point from where they could become truly great.
This is actually my biggest grief with Apple. Lots of stuff their stuff has tremendous potential but they loose interest after a while and things get left behind.
Windows, on the other hand, has matured with compatiblity in mind and it shows with certain under-the-hood technologies that are just damn solid (although some “surface” stuff could use more logic, I agree). The amount of times a software update from Apple has broken important things is insane compared with the Win side of things.

[Jeremy Garchow] “I do think that a long time ago when windows was BSOD land, that Macs were more stable and Apple advertised this capability, they don’t refresh computer lines right away when the fastest/newest processor comes out. They have not been in the CPU race, ever.

They have never been as fast as windows machines, all things being as equal as possible, for pure CPU revs.”

Yeah, but a lot was also marketing hype. I remember the OS9 days only too well. Not too stable to say the least. And the odd kernel panic on X is also just a few kernel extensions away.
I think you overestimate the crash potential of new hardware. Look at Linux. Runs rock solid on bleeding edge hardware, out-of-the-box kernel support for tons of raid cards, network cards, fibre etc. and no billion dollar giant making it all happen.

——
“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