[John Davidson]

[Bret Williams] “I’m not immediately clued into what app I’m in.”

Try looking at the top left of your screen? 🙂 I like the new look (surprise). I don’t think Mavericks will get a significant visual overhaul until next year, but at least they got rid of that awful denim login screen background. interestingly, the iCloud page uses bokeh circles, very much like my favorite guilty pleasure from FCPX.

Since IOS 7 is coming out tomorrow and I have been beta testing it since it came out I suggest you guys try two things. Go into settings/accessibility and turn on “Larger Type” (I drag it about a bump to the right of center) and also turn on ‘Bold Text”. Leave ‘reduce motion’ and ‘increase contrast’ off. Increase contrast makes the backgrounds of notification center and control panel completely black with no opaque bleed through. What can I say, I dig a little see through action :).

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I can’t post client content. We basically are having to build it at 1080p 60p, and then importing that into FCPX for conversion to 29.97. Hopefully our graphics won’t look too video-y.

This is a pretty common problem that lots of people have posted about over the years. The previous solutions are ‘turn on motion blur’ and ‘add a blur to the overall comp’. I was just curious if anyone else had figured out a better solution.

Thanks!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Call Bob Zelin.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Looks sweet but I hear nobody’s using that in London.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

If you go the SSD route, and maybe others can help me with my memory, but the SSD in the current iMac is not the same as the SSD in the new Macbook Air. I’ve never seen this kind of SSD performance like the air gives. I would want that performance in my iMac – but if the iMac doesn’t offer that version of SSD yet, then I’d wait till it did.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Installing the RAM is the easiest thing on earth to do – and a great way to save $200. OWC even makes videos for how to do it. It takes no more than 5 minutes.

No one really knows what is coming, but the new iMacs could have Retina screens for pixel to pixel resolution = or that could be part of a new Mac Pro / Thunderbolt Cinema Display 4k. They could feature Thunderbolt 2.0 for faster speeds. They could be Matte instead of Glossy. I always suggest holding fast when we’re this close to new releases.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Hey Howie,
I’m still happy with the Fusion drive. It gets around 200-300 MB/s on avg depending on file size. I don’t use it to store media other than iTunes and photo libraries. For everything else we use a Server with 10GbE connections via Thunderlink. If you’re using it as a standalone I’d recommend a Promise Pegasus RAID via Thunderbolt.

I got 32 Gigs of Ram from OWC. It does not void applecare warranties.

Now, with this said, I also picked up a Macbook Air 3 or 4 weeks ago. Let me tell you – that SSD 512 is something else. It’s getting about 700 MB/s. Obviously, it’s too small to edit with, but wow is it fast.

With all of this in mind, I don’t think now would be the best time for you to buy an iMac if you can hold off. It’s very close to refresh time (2-3 months) for iMacs, plus we have Mac Pros coming out in that time frame as well.

We edit short form commercials and on air promotions. We work with full-res media in 30-60 minute ProRes quick times. The drives in our 16 drive array are Hitachi 4TB Enterprise striped in RAID5 with an ATTO R680. I would suggest an Areca 1882x instead of an R680, but if you get a Thunderbolt array, you won’t need this at all. We also have a Promise Pegasus 8 drive and it’s been flawless.

I selected the Fusion over standard 1TB drive because it’s got a larger storage capacity and a built in SSD that lets it get faster speeds on heavily used applications and media. Also, you can’t upgrade the internal drive easily, so a 3TB drive made sense for my future media needs (photos/iTunes).

That help?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Just to put it out there, but we’re pretty close to Maverick’s release. I’ve been using the beta for a few months now and am really excited about upgrading to it. If you can hold off till 9/10 and see if Apple announces the launch date, it might save you the hassle of doing this all over again in a few months.

Granted, 10.9.1 might be the best upgrade to take when it’s released, but we jumped into Mountain Lion 10.8.0 last year and didn’t have any negative results from that.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Remember that network user account thing I mentioned? Yeah….never do that.

OS X Server is good for lots of stuff but not so much with the network user accounts – we had problems getting Profile Manager to work. Ended up just keeping users local and using OS X Server for services and intranet hosting.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Yeah, ask my anything you’d like. Happy to help.

One other interesting thing I’m doing that is still in the experimental phase is setting up a Mac Mini running OS X Server. Right now it’s hosting a website, messaging service, corporate wiki, intranet, calendars, contacts, FTP, software update storage and caching (so you only download programs once from the App store) etc. The coolest part of it is that we’ve created network user accounts that allow anyone in any room to log in to any machine and voila, there’s their desktop. This is super awesome because if you want to add an iMac for editing you just plug it in, log into the intranet, download a profile for local users, and you’re pretty much working.

Obviously this takes some annoying setup time and I’m still learning how to do it, but we’re already realizing the potential. Today we swapped machines so that a new designer could use a more powerful mac pro for 3D rendering and our editor could leverage the FCPX Optimized power of an iMac. We had outgrown iCloud and I’m not in love with Google Apps, plus this is a pretty painless way to swap systems.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.