[Jason J rodriguez]

[Craig Seeman] “It would seem for you the issue is lack of roadmap.”

Pretty much every company we’ve ever dealt with was able to give us some semblance of a reliable roadmap. Apple is the exception to that rule.

[Craig Seeman] “Now they’re talking about MXF support.”

Yeah … I remember at NAB 2005 being in a private suite in the Las Vegas Hilton with some top Apple Pro Video brass pretty much begging for a roadmap on MXF support. At the time all we got were obfuscations about “following industry trends” and “Now you know we can’t tell you what Apple is planning in the future”. After seven years they’re finally getting around to implementing that feature.

At this point I think all Apple is worried about are iPads, and iPhones. As soon as it no longer makes economic sense to have OSX running on “real” computers in order to support iOS products, I’m willing to bet those products will get the boot too … either that, or iOS and OSX will become one-and-the-same.

[Jason J rodriguez]

[Chris Kenny] “Will a significant number of high-end FCP 7 customers for whom X is a good choice on its merits really choose something else as they finally do start to migrate away from 7 just because X had a rocky introduction that’s now more than a year in the past?”

I work at what I feel is a fairly large broadcast production facility (Approx. 40 FCP seats in full-service editing suites, with another 40+ seats as offline “producer” seats), and as of right now we’re not planning any other major Apple software purchases. While some of the producers or departments on their own may choose to migrate to FCPX, there is no over-arching plan to convert our FCP seats to FCPX. Instead the plan is, as machines and suites enter their upgrade cycles, to transition over to Adobe. This can be done as a pretty seamless transition process over the course of the next two-plus years since PPro will run on both Macs and PC’s, so there is no need to replace all the Mac hardware with PC’s and PPro at once. Additionally, Apple notebooks are still top-rank, so it would be nice to have the option of both platforms for the foreseeable future. In the end though, the years of Apple spurning our requests for forward-looking information and roadmaps has taken it’s toll, and FCPX was the nail in the coffin that Apple created for themselves. We’re tired of waiting for “secret” hardware updates (i.e., new Mac Pro’s), and also tired of being left out of the feedback loop on their software roadmap. At the moment, Adobe is listening, Apple is not, so it’s really not a difficult decision on our part.

[Jason J rodriguez]

[Christopher Travis] “I could probably get RT playback by dropping the playback resolution right? Would this be less taxing on the HD?”

No, you still have to decode all the data in each DPX file before it can be subsampled and displayed on the screen at half-resolution. So the hard-drives will be getting hit either way.

I’m not so sure that 3x7200RPM drives will do the trick across the entire drive. Something to consider with DPX files is that the data-access pattern is not the same as it is for an uncompressed QuickTime file. In other words with individual files sequences, especially if you start editing them together, you are emulating more of a random-access pattern rater than sequential access pattern on the disk-drive. In other words, a QuickTime file that is 2GB in size is generally going to take up a 2GB contiguous chunk on a disk unless the file-system was badly fragmented. Thus accessing the file from disk will happen in a contiguous reading fashion. A DPX sequence on the other-hand will not necessarily be laid down in a contiguous fashion on disk. Thus reading one file and then the next file in the sequence may require you to “skip” around the disk, and as a result, the streaming performance of the disk is reduced to someone between the speed of a continuous read and a random read. In general, a random read on a 7200RPM drive will be slow. Even stripping together the drives does not alleviate the latency required to access a different part of the disk. So you may “get away” with a single stream, but I doubt you’ll get that performance across the entire disk. I would recommend 10K or 15K drives if you can swing the increased cost of the drives. You’ll get much better random-access performance, especially in the reduced amount of latency required to skip from one area of the disk to another.

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

[Herb Sevush] “Many of my deliverable are in ProRes and there’s no good way to encode it on a PC that I’m aware of. “

FFMPEG now supports ProRes 422 encoding and decoding on all platforms (OSX, PC, Linux).

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

[Scott Thomas] “A node based compositor from … Apple has been an oft talked about holy grail.”

Yes, it was called Shake

It was created by a company called Nothing Real, and then Apple bought Nothing Real, dropped the price by 10x so anyone could afford it, and then mercilessly killed the product. How amazingly productive.

IMHO Apple is not interested in Pro’s … at least not when they don’t need us anymore.

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

Thanks everyone for the responses!

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

Premiere Pro will support up to 32-bits per channel in both RGB and YUV color-spaces … this is what is typically referred to as “32-bit float”, since those 32-bits are used to store a floating point value that can range from at least 1e-37 to at least 1e37 in increments of at least 1e-9 (i.e., 1/1,000,000,000) … these numbers are platform specific, but suffice to say PPro is capable of some very precise arithmetic. Since it supports 16-bit Photoshop files, and the values in such a file can be described within the much larger 32-bit floating point format that Premiere’s internal engine works at, it will not dither them down to 8-bits per channel. That being said, in order to enable all renders to take advantage of PPro’s deep pixel support, you have to make sure that you’ve turned on “Render at maximum depth” in your preferences … otherwise some truncation/dithering could occur, although Adobe’s never been exactly clear what the criteria that would cause truncation to occur is.

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

Curious if there is anymore information on this topic from Blackmagic … it would be really great to know when investing in a 10-bit+ monitor that the information being sent to the monitor is not being truncated back to 8-bit.

Thanks,

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

I have the same question too, especially for the Display-Port version … I saw in the press-release that it mentions “deep-color” for the display-port version of the HDLink Pro, but it does not actually state anything about 10-bit support in the spec-sheet which makes me wonder if the Display-Port or HDMI port, etc. are just outputting 8-bit precision video, or if indeed they do support 10-bit precision.

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

What GPU model are you using in your source PC to input into the HA5 for conversion to HD-SDI? For instance, is it a Nvidia Geforce, QuadroFX, or an ATI Radeon video card? Or are you using another type of GPU?

Thanks,

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA