[John Davidson]

We’re driving up Monday morning. I always thought the trip up the 14 was a super secret way around all the east LA traffic. Should be a beautiful drive!

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

[John Davidson]

We’re closing down the office Mon-Wed and everybody here is going. Schedule is already slammed but maybe we’ll see you guys!

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

[John Davidson]

You’re going up a single generation. Things that will be more noticeable will be the improvement of USB 3.0, apps will open a little faster (usually) and the less reflective screen will make you cry like childbirth. In terms of render speeds, proc speeds, it may be noticeable but not as much as the other things, IMHO.

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

[John Davidson]

Assuming you updated from .07, I’d just suggest you make sure you have something exportable selected? Like a comp, or a project? Maybe set an in/out range and see if it pops up? Otherwise I’m at a loss.

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

[John Davidson]

Did you install that Procut X application for ipad and the associated keyboard set with it? I found that was messing me up a little for a few things.

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

[John Davidson]

Aigh! I just did a test upload and the upload works – just the download fails. That’s totally not scary. At least FTP still works.

Stupid interwebs!

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

[John Davidson]

You know if you’ve never updated that HD since buying, there’s a really strong chance the drive is dying. After 2 years I start getting really nervous with laptop drives. I’ve seen an insane amount of them die in the last year or two. I would recommend you run a time machine backup ASAP if you can.

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

[John Davidson]

HI Aaron, that sounds terrible. Have you considered updating to 10.08 and installing Mountain Lion?

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

[John Davidson]

Charlie it sounds like your setup is pretty similar to ours. Are you doing sparse disks? I’m sure you probably told me all about it the other week and I completely forgot. Last few months have been a blur!

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

[John Davidson]

Thanks dude! I will absolutely take credit for the gfx smart collection trick. Compound Clips was suggested to me by one of the network post production heads we work with. One day I’ll be able to credit him publicly when they officially switch, but until then I’ll take that, too!

My problems with 3rd party plugins aren’t completely based on sluggishness. A lot of it is with 1 or 2 seat licensing issues that are doing all kinds of network snooping on my systems that could be doing who-knows-what by accident. We avoid the matter entirely by not using them at all. I can say that anything that’s doing a massive amount of color correct, vignetting, clamping, etc, is going to need a render to play back properly. I think everybody knows that on pretty much any system. Julian said he was working with MLooks and Easy looks later after the post you linked to, so that’s why I pointed them out.

There was one particular project a few weeks back that was doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I could literally watch the RAM usage creep up until it maxed it out. This occurred on pretty much every system we opened it up on. It wasn’t a ‘work’ project, but a personal one with all kinds of crazy stuff going on. We experiment with personal stuff to beta test possible workflow updates. We were using internal media vs referenced, had all kinds of plugins applied (3rd party ones too I think) and while I can’t remember what it was, I think we ended up making a new event and copying what we needed from the bad Event. In terms of sluggishness, Mac Pros don’t work as well as iMacs. We have the 2010 Mac Pro with 64 gigs of RAM in one room and while it should be the best, it’s absolutely not. It’s bluetooth signal is terrible despite numerous backplate replacements, it’s had networking dropoffs that other systems don’t have, and it just doesn’t feel as robust as the imac. My overlying plan is to swap out every system with iMacs eventually and put the towers in the server room.

(cue the coldplay background music)
I love the simplicity that this software on an iMac suite has. It’s just the imac, mic, speakers, and a monitor. We keep our workflow light and robust to try to match. Some people think our sparse disk image is a hack, but when you think about it, sparse disk images will instantly show you on the finder sidebar exactly which project you’re working on is going to be in X before you open it. That’s a finder level project viewing solution built into the operating system. That’s pretty awesome.

Sorry, I don’t know where all that came from!

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