Frank Gothmann
Forum Replies Created
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Since everybody here seems to be so much in favor of the so called democratization of editing and postproduction in general, let me be the devil’s advocate and say that I am not.
If you are a business owner, what’s there to like? It may not be a “nice” point of view in such a forum but it is one that makes economic sense. Is it futile? Sure, nobody’s gonna changes that evolution (no “revolution” in my mind, rather a devaluation).10 years ago, you had to pay a premium for an Avid. Spruce DVD Maestro cost in the 80.000 dollar range if I remember correctly. But you could also charge good prices for work so you could pay back the bank AND make a decent living.
If you’re spending 100.000 and more for your studio gear, chances are very likely you are both determined, trained and experienced in what you were doing – not just with regards to the actual work itself but the process of running a business in general. And it was all f***ing template free.
By the time you are able to buy such gear, you were ready to use it, run a business with it AND create stuff that is worthwhile creating.
Downloading a 300 dollar app from the app store is a whole different story.
While I do editing now and then (we mainly do various post work but not so much editing as most people here do on a daily basis), I would never call myself an editor. And editor is trained, first as an assistant, then slowly moves up the chain. It takes years. And it shows. Same for camera people, DPs or directors.Coppola, I think, said at the beginning of the the the whole digital video revolution how great this trend will be because somewhere a kid may pick up one of those inexpensive dv cameras and make a film. And it’ll be like a cinematic, young Mozart.
While that may be true, for every Mozart there are 1000 hacks and that’s the reality I am seeing all the time. Do we have better films compared to previous decades when it was a job exclusively done by seasoned professionals. I don’t think so. I strongly argue that the opposite is true.
Is there better graphic design out there compared to previous decades. No, again, I think the opposite is true.The work we do mostly involves regular feature film stuff for various rights holders and licencees. If any one of you have been to Cannes or the American Film Market, now and 15 years ago, the difference is like night and day. There is a vast amount of sub-standard, low budget material out there, essentially shot by a bunch of guys without proper background, with prosumer cameras, edited with FCP 7 and thrown onto the market. And it’s full with issues and problems that were unthinkable 10 years ago. There is so much of it, the market is over saturated. Prices go down, good product gets overlooked and sits on the shelves cause the pipes are blocked.
Unfortunately, the market doesn’t regulate itself really – ie. sub-par stuff isn’t rejected. The cheap stuff cost little and doesn’t rely on returns at any box office, they are sold in packages by the dozen because markets have grown but people can still only watch so much and the day only has 24 hours. Most of it is genre material, spectacular artwork and trailer to attract attention goes along with it and it then is’s thrown in a license packages together with 30 other titles for dvd, blu-ray or pay-tv world wide. It’s sold like porn, by the cover and by the pound.
Compressor costs 50 dollars – and it does DVD and Blu-ray encoding, it even does (sort of) format conversion, right?. Cinemacraft costs 60.000 and it ONLY does DVD and Blu-ray. An Alchemist is well beyond 100.000k. Is the quality the same? No, it isn’t, of course. But for the average person Compressor’s results looks decent enough (sometimes!!!!). It is hard to explain to a customer (who often is clueless and even more often doesn’t care as long as it fits the specs and is CHEAP) why you charge more (and have to charge more) then somebody who spent 50 dollars on such an app. If you are lucky you can make a good niche for yourself with some primetime companies that do care about such things and are prepared to spent the money. If not you are having a hard time or you’re going with the cheap stuff, too.I think the quality of product out there goes down. There are exceptions but in general I feel it’s true. And because CHEAP rules, that trend makes it hard for those professionals and companies who do care, invest and pay for top quality software and gear to remain profitable. And then people wonder: “Why don’t look my encodes, my downscales, my put-whatever-you-like-here look like the Hollywood stuff I can buy out there?
Apple’s motivation in all that is, of course, not democratization of anything but the sales of hardware. I just don’t think it is doing any of us – as company owners, freelancer or simply an audience – any favour in the long run, five to ten years from now. -
[Jeremy Garchow] “This will change rather soon, no? I thought Apple had an exclusive for only a short while.”
Maybe. If I look at the product page of Blackmagic it seems they clearly make a destinction in that area. USB3 for win, TB for the Mac. No cross platform drivers for either of them. And very few pc makers have anounced support for TB at this point. It may well become another FW800 with little adoption.
What’s the point of the exclusivity anyway? The more widespread a new technology becomes the more likely new devices will pop-up. -
I hear you, and it’s a choice everybody can and has to make. With TB devices largely not being cross platform it would tie me even more not only to Apple hardware but to OSX exclusively. Several key apps I use are Win only so that alone means it is a no-go. Open, compatible, flexible, freedom of choice or walled-in and proprietary. It’s the whole age-old Apple thing that I thought we had left behind with the move to Intel and that now comes back full-swing with virtually everything that Apple does these days.
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[Chris Kenny] “This is a consequence of Thunderbolt having been on the market for a very short period of time. It has essentially no relevance to the subject being discussed, namely whether high-end towers will continue to be necessary for professional video production in the future.”
Sure it does. When a company repeatedly drops features and flexibility from its soft- and hardware in favour of what they think might one day become a standard then such company is a liability for any business and I won’t play along. I want to decide what workflow and what hardware works best for my needs, I don’t want or need Apple bullying me into this.
[Chris Kenny] “It is, objectively, largely not necessary for any task you were performing prior to the last couple of years, because, as noted previously, today’s MacBook Pros are about on par with 2008 dual processor Mac Pros, and only really ~30% slower than today’s base-model 8-core Mac Pro.”
That statement doesn’t make sense. I want to get things done quicker and faster today on top of getting them done at all. If I can save 40 per cent render time by using a tower today then that’s a of money saved stretched out over a year or two, regardless of wether a 40 per cent longer render time was normal and acceptable years ago.
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[Chris Kenny] “Err… huh? You appear to be assuming that since PCIe cards that support those things are sometimes 8x, they actually require that bandwidth. But that’s not actually the case. Thunderbolt’s has two full-duplex 10 Gbps channels. That’s a total external bandwidth of 2500 MB/s. And higher-end iMac models have two independent ports. This is significantly more bandwidth than is required by e.g. 10 GbE.”
We get a good 800 Mbs throughput with our SAN, 1.300 with individual SAS Raids. The 6-drive TB enclosure peaks at 550 Mbs as various benchmarks show. So, it is substantially slower then other solutions. These are real-world tests and easily verifiable. The theoretical bandwith is of no use to me.
[Chris Kenny] “You’re not really complaining about Apple abandoning the pro video niche here, but about Apple supposedly abandoning a niche within that niche.”
I am complaining about “less choice”. We are talking about three small raid boxes atm compared to dozens and dozens of options. Same for video io, other connectivy etc. Give me TB but don’t drop PCIe.
[Chris Kenny] “Blackmagic’s UltraStudio Pro Thunderbolt interface does 16 channels of audio over HD-SDI, incidentally. There’s no Thunderbolt-related limitation in play here; your complaint seems to be with the production features AJA has chosen to include.”
Again, I am talking about “less choice”. If TB only is the future I’d have exactely ONE product to go with. Great!
Most of theTB stuff isn’t cross platform so… all the work that requires windows via bootcamp. Need to buy it all again plus another windows workstation.[Chris Kenny] “You are, again, not really talking about pro video editing here, but about a niche within a niche.”
Yes, I am. So? That’s the kind of work that I do. This threat isnt called pro video editing but pro users. A 6000 dollar workstation obviously isn’t a mass market product but for a niche. And if Apple doesn’t want to serve that niche anymore… let people know so they can move on.
[Chris Kenny] ” 4K DPX is effectively the only format that Promise’s Thunderbolt RAID can’t handle in real-time, and Thunderbolt itself actually is fast enough for 4K DPX on paper.”
This wasn’t even with regards to TB but with regards to Apple dropping dual-cpu towers. How would you want to work and render such files? On an iMac, your Laptop or on a cluster of dual-cpu workstations? That’s a serious question, please answer it.
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[Chris Kenny] “More realistically, you buy a Thunderbolt RAID enclosure and a Thunderbolt video I/O interface, and that covers most pro video work. Maybe add a RedRocket in an external Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure if you’re working with that format. The Thunderbolt RAID is more expensive than internal storage, but probably cheaper than external SAS storage, and the Thunderbolt video I/O interface is probably the same price as a PCIe card serving a similar function. Either of these devices is far easier to move between machines within a facility, or bring on set, both of which are useful capabilities. And if being used with a laptop, there’s a lot of flexibility here. For instance, you can keep your online footage on an external RAID, with offline proxies on your laptop’s internal drive. Now you’ve got a solution that lets you edit sitting in the park if you feel like it, but can turn into a fairly serious online editing machine by plugging in a single cable at your desk.”
No, external SAS is cheaper, faster and much more expandable. I posted about this earlier.
Also, I need shared storage for some machines, 10Gig Ethernet and Fibre for others. TB Expansion is PCIe 4x, so half the performance you get from a modern Raid, Fibre or 10Gig Controller.
AJA’s forthcoming TB solution only handles 8-Channel audio which is useless to me. I need 12 so I need a Kona 3.
I don’t want to move any devices in the facility. That’s the whole point of shared storage. And we don’t edit or do any other work on Laptops.
If you do, great. I don’t want to take either your Laptop or TB away. But I need and want PCIe and a tower. If it’s not on a Mac we’ll go elsewhere.[Chris Kenny] “Err… current Mac Pros are using Intel’s latest. It’s not actually Apple’s fault (or a signal of neglect on Apple’s part) that Intel now seems to update its dual-socket workstation offerings last within a given processor generation. Actually, that’s probably Intel responding to some of the same forces that cause people to speculate about Mac Pro cancelation — high-end towers really are becoming increasingly niche items, and, in particular, dual socket machines are less necessary as the number of cores on each CPU (and general single processor performance) keeps rising.”
You are talking about CPU. I don’t. I am talking about no GPU variety, speedier PCIe (currently 1×16, 1×8, 2×4, it should be 16,16, 8,8) and preferably more slots, shared Firewire bus is a joke, no Esata and, yes, a TB port for the sake of it.
[Chris Kenny] “You might not “peruse” it, but in five years — certainly in ten — I’d be surprised if it weren’t just taken completely for granted. Pros used to routinely buy $10K+ systems just to run Photoshop, back in the days when 80 MB was a huge amount of RAM. These days, phones have way more RAM than that, and this typical Photoshop work is so easy for modern hardware that nobody thinks anything of pros in that field working on laptops. As hardware performance continues to increase, video will inevitably end up in the same place.”
I don’t care what might be in 5 or 10 years. I need to run a business today.
You are talking about editing. Again, I don’t. Try running 4k DPX files off your TB raid on a laptop for film restauration and let me know if one or two weeks difference in render time matter to you and your business. -
And what’s the advantage of all that?
You get an iMac for 2.000 dollars. Then a TB Raid enclosure for 6 drives that will set you back another 1.800 (the same amount of drives you can easily fit into a proper modern workstation), two TB expansion chassis to have 4 pci slots (running at a 25 per cent speed), another box for video io and another one for dual-link ethernet. And possibly another one for…
So, you end up with up with 5 external boxes or more that have sit within a three meter range from your machine. Same cost, same size, same price, more clutter and a lot less performance than a modern workstation. And GPU and multiple monitors didn’t even come into play here.
And when I say “modern workstation” I don’t mean the current Mac Pro with it’s outdated architecture.
It’s a horrid scenario I certainly won’t persue.
I’d have to replace all the tried and tested gear that simply works, has zero compatibility issues, is backwards compatible with older machine and cross platform – buy everything again at a premium price to get 70 per cent less performance. Brave new world. -
Actually, your mentioning of Soundtrack Pro here is scary and brings back very unpleasant memories of working with it.
SP shares some code borrowed from Logic but it has been written by a completely different team at Apple. Logic still has veteran guys from the original Emagic on board.
The differences in performance and stability between the two apps is like night and day. So much so that it is hard to believe they were sold by the same company. -
No Thanksgiving Holiday in my part of the world but best wishes to everybody here nevertheless.
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Yes, it hooks to 8x Pci-e controller. That’s the beauty of those new 8x Areca controllers. They can expand to a hell of a lot of storage, still occupying just one slot. Their larger Raid controllers are even faster.
The Pegasus is a great box and it is freakin’ fast, don’t get me wrong. This is by no means an attempt to diminish the TB potential. But it just isn’t faster, smaller, cheaper. And for some purposes it isn’t fast enough when you have one port and several high-bandwith devices chained together.
That was my point.Plus, there simply isn’t a lot of hardware out there atm. It may come, it may not. I don’t want to bet on things that may come when I know I have a variety of options right here, right now and they work and do what I need them to do.
So, give me TB in addition to pci-e any day but not instead.