Frank Gothmann
Forum Replies Created
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[Lance Bachelder] “Lightworks??? Yikes, have you tried it? It’s horrible! Don’t know how it can be any better on Mac? I swear to use nothing but FCPX for the rest of my life before using that turd.”
Lance,
you are quick calling apps a turd (you also did with Avid). I think it is important to differentiate between the general concept and design of doing things and the stability and behavior of a program. If you dislike the way an app works and wants you to do things that’s fine, you don’t like it and move on, but that doesn’t make it a turd in my book or rather it should be made clear that it’s a personal preference. Obviously, enough people trust very high profile jobs to Lightworks and they swear by it. For me, a turd is an app that doesn’t play nice even by its own standards – bugs, sluggishness, data corruption, features that don’t work as advertised. I, too, believe that people tend to cut Apple too much slack because its a rewrite (Apple in general gets that treatment). Imagine certain medical or military software behaving this way. -
[Gerald Baria] “It is my understanding that you can connect Top class multiple GPUs, RedRockets, RAID etc thru one of those thunderbolt adapters to any TB enabled mac right? So what the problem?”
In fact, you can’t connect even one GPU via Thunderbolt, let alone multiple top class ones. It’s 4x pipe is way too slow to allow for a GPU to deliver its full performance and it just isn’t possible under OSX at the moment at all, regardless of the bandwith limitation. As far as the rest is concerned, yeah, some options there, but video io, a raid and two monitors at the same time and there goes your bandwith and reliability.
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[Andrew Richards] ”
So let’s forget that Apple has nothing to gain from outsourcing a product they supposedly don’t want to make themselves. Let’s say they do it. What does an HP Z800 running OS X look like?It still has the same old OpenGL (this is an OS X problem, not a hardware problem)
It still has the same limited options for GPUs (if we are assuming EFI instead of BIOS for OS X)
It still won’t support Blu-Ray drives (not any more than a Mac Pro will today)
Same number of PCIe slots, same distribution of PCIe lanes as the Mac Pro today
Same number of HDD bays as the Mac Pro today
Same number of built-in NICs
More RAM slots (12 on the Z vs 8 on the Mac Pro)
One additional external 5.25″ bay vs today’s Mac Pro”No, no, some issues there:
– MacPros have full support for Blu-ray drives, ie. mount discs in finder, write to discs in finder. You just cannot view BD movies because copy protection scheme isn’t implemented in OSX. But as far as using the drives in the same way as you’d use any other blank optical media there is no issue. It is a purely political decission by Apple not to offer Blu-ray drives as a bto option.
– MacPros have four PCIe slots running at 16/8/4/4 lanes.
The z800 has one legacy PCI slots and 6 PCIe slots running at 16/16/8/4/4 so more expansion and faster
– You can add up to 9 internal drives in a z800. There are four at the bottom but are forgetting the expansion bays in the front for which you can get, from HP or elsehwere, hot-swap bays for additional five drives. And there are three of those 5,25 bays, not just one.
In addition to that, you have SATA and SAS headers on the mainboard (plus lots of them), a RAID chip on board including RAID5 as well as HP options for eSATA on USB3.
Of course, with the z820 things are a bit different. Even faster PCIe, USB3 built in etc. -
It just seems that people will have to make a choice sooner or later.
Go along and dance to Apple’s (i)tune or move away. The bigger Apple gets, the faster and more radical they will make their moves.
At the moment it all seems about buying time for many people. Wait till FCPX matures, one more update to bring features back and maybe tracks (won’t happen), one more workstation maybe before it’ll be shelved, if so, will PCIe be dropped, will ATI be dropped in favor of NVIDIA (next year, worrying that NVIDIA will be dropped again for ATI because they’ve been naughty boys), will Mountain Lion break FCP classic, will it break something else, will OSX eventually merge with iOS altogether, when will QT7 disappear, now that Lion killed Rossetta how can I run… and the list goes on.
And every couple of years the whole thing starts again from scratch, just with different players on the kill list.
Inovation can be nice but sometimes some constants also makes sense and for a good night’s sleep. -
Well, I agree with you on this 100 per cent. I love Avid’s editing toolset but the export functions need a serious overhaul.
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[Andrew Richards] “What about MXF? I thought that was Avid’s native DNxHD container these days. DaVinci supports DNxHD on Linux. FFmpeg can be called upon to encode and convert almost anything, including DNxHD (which is open source).”
Yes, but Avid doesn’t use MXF for its deliverables. You cannot export DnxHD MXF files from an Avid to work with most other applications, only QT. What would make sense though is to allow DnxHD in an avi wrapper, just like Cineform, so that would avoid QT on Linux (and on Windows).
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[Andrew Richards] “But with no Start Menu, you are slammed right back into Metro to do anything, though I suppose you can just saturate your task bar with the software you use most of the time and try to avoid the Start Screen.
“Well, the new start menu is metro, I’d just get rid of all the social networking crap, live tiles etc. and have all the app shortcuts there. It’s actually not bad from a navigational point of view; it just looks goofy. A bit like launchpad, but fully customizable with regards to ordering, layout, color etc. But, frankly, I don’t mind as long as it runs my stuff and it runs it well.
[Andrew Richards] “Do you mean tweaking of Linux or tweaking of the apps? Neither Adobe nor Avid rely on QuickTime. They both have their own playback engines. Pro Res would be out though.
“No, the apps. Avid doesn’t rely on QT internally, but you need to output your content at a certain point and that is pretty much QT in Avid. No avi wrapper for DnxHD, only QT. Reference files rely on QT etc. etc.
Same for Premiere. Neither DnxHD, Prores or Cineform exist on Linux so unless you want to export as uncompressed and up your storage space bigtime its a problem. -
I also don’t think Apple will ever licence its OS again. It’s just not in their DNA plus they’d have to modify OSX to really use all features of a z800.
There are guides out there of people who have turned a z800 into a hackintosh but some features don’t work (they also don’t work on a MacPro with Bootcamp).
I had a Umax clone back in the days, it was a much better machine than Apple’s own offerings. They wouldn’t want to repeat that negative perception again.I guess I am different from the rest here because, frankly, don’t care too much anymore about what Apple does and doesn’t do. Windows works more than just fine for me, it’s rock solid on the HPs, all the apps are there and running at their full potential so I wouldn’t even install it if X was an option for the HPs. Actually I have less fuss with the HPs than with my MacPros, and that’s on a machine with 2 video io cards, Raid card, 10GB Ethernet nic, different NLEs and a trial for Edius plus lots of other utilities, drivers, apps installed and hardware connected.
So, If Apple is in the post pc era I happily pursue my post Apple era.Windows 8 doesn’t bother me. Metro on a Desktop machine is stupid and I’d rather not have it but it’s one click on a tile and I am on the windows desktop as it used to be. Under the hood, there a are things that I actually like and welcome very much (new ribbon functionality in the explorer, new modern file system) plus early reports indicate no compatibility issues with apps and hardware that works with Win7. Plus I can always just continue using Win7 for years to come as I am not shut out by a hardware vendor to just use a specific OS version.
Avid/Adobe on Linux – unfortunately I can’t see that happening. Too much that would need to be tweaked to bring functionality on par with the other OSes, Apple would have to port Quicktime to Linux (and Quicktime is dead) etc. etc.
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Well, in case there are no new MacPros, HPs has just announced its E5 Xeon based Z820.
6 PCIe slots, five of them Gen3 plus one legacy PCI, USB3 built in, 16 memory slots that can hold up to 512 GB of Ram. -
[Bob Cole] “1. There are heavy costs to archiving: a heavy initial investment, time, attention, and even the tapes themselves. If you archive a client’s work, do you bill the client for that service, or is this part of your overhead?
If a client wants a back-up to LTO5 I will bill him. Most of my clients are regulars and I know I need to repurpose and revisit stuff all the time so this is part of my overall agreement with them.
2. It is often stressed, when transferring XDCAM footage, for example, that verification of the copied media is critical. If you are just using drag-and-drop to send data to an LTO-5 tape, is there any verification?
If you use tools such as BRU then verification is an option. If you just use drag-and-drop LTFS then there isn’t. I never had an issue restoring a backup from tape.
3. You write:
[Jeremy Garchow] “At that point, we can plug a hard drive right on to the ache system and archive straight to tape. I tend to “stage” media in tape size pieces. Once I have around 750 GBs of data, I make a tape, then I immediately make another one which is taken home (offsite).”Are you saying that you make an LTO tape immediately, or that you don’t make any LTO backups until you have accumulated 750GB of data? I guess that would be okay, if you had a very steady and predictable flow of data. But it would mean being exposed to the vagaries of hard drive failure for some period of time, at a stage when the project was most important.
In my case, I wait till I can fill-up a tape. I am working off RAID6 so I’d have to experience three drive failures for things to go up in smoke.
(The sad truth is that for the vast majority of commercial projects, the finished product is the only thing the client really has much interest in, once the project is done. I would think that the most critical period for LTO backups would be during the editing phase, not after.)”
Depends on the nature of your projects and what you do. My stuff ends up on HDCAM-SR for the client plus Blu-ray for replication/stores. I know I will need to revisit the projects all the time, often just the final product for slight modifications. So I could either put another 250 dollar SR Tape for 120 minutes on the shelve and recapture when necessary, pile up external hard drives or use an 80 dollar LTO5 to store 10 hours without the need to recapture. Obviously the latter makes more sense and is more economical both for me and the client. They save money, I save time.