[Keith Rocheck]

A few years ago we were faced with the same decision, except with Facilis in the mix as well. We were a Unity shop and that system was literally bullet-proof. I had experience with Facilis from another job and thought the same of the hardware, but not of their client software. The sense I got from EditShare was that the software layer was overcomplicated for our needs. In education, if there’s any way to break something (intentional or not) the students will find a way. Knowing that, seeing all 3 in action, we went with ISIS 5000.

We’re likely adding another chassis later this summer. Its bullet-proof just like the Unity. I’ve had students beating on it every which way and its never crashed or hiccuped in 3 years. We run Avid and PP on it, in the same workspaces, and its great. Quite honestly if I was a Premiere-only shop I’d use ISIS storage. Its well worth the expense to me.

[Keith Rocheck]

I’m going to recommend you look into an HP z230. Its a fantastic box and at a price you may not expect for an HP workstation, but depending on the options you click you can go over your budget.

https://resources.avid.com/SupportFiles/attach/AVIDHPZ230WorkstationTowerSFFConfigguideRevA.pdf

Pay careful attention to the processor and RAM specs. We bought a bunch of the small form factors and a few towers and they are fantastic. Our configuration is

– Xeon® E3-1245 v3 4C HT
– 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR3 1600 ECC memory
– Embedded Intel HD Graphics P4600 (read the guide about configuring for 512 MB vRAM)
– 120 GB SSD SATA 1st Drive
– 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA 2nd Drive

You have the K600 graphics option. The SFF motherboard has 3 DisplayPorts and the Tower has 2 DP + 1 DVI-I. I had a little fight with one of the SFF’s trying to get 3 monitors working the other day, but that may have been me being stupid. There’s something else I want to try, so I can report back if you’re interested.

~Keith

[Keith Rocheck]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “If you want some interesting reading, read through that. You might see what this could of been like if apple didn’t do things the way they do.”

It comes down to core-competency. Adobe is a software company. They have a general history of building great software and building on existing software they’ve bought. I was scared to death for my favorite Macromedia products, specifically Dreamweaver and Fireworks. I was 100% certain Fireworks would be on the chopping block when Macromedia was bought out, but it wasn’t. Dreamweaver could have been out in favor of Adobe’s own GoLive. It’s clear Adobe wanted Flash … they could have taken it and let the rest go, but they didn’t.

Adobe bought Syntrillium … I used Cool Edit Pro 2.0, then Audition 1.5, etc. I’ve been scared for it, but Adobe doesn’t have that history of being a company where good programs go to die. When Soundbooth came out I was sure that Audition would die, and I knew the reason: it’s too hard to port it over to Mac. Yet, even still they haven’t let it die, and have proven to me still yet they care. Now, I do want to be able to open my old projects, but now that its in CS I can do more through Premiere integration than hopefully ever before. There’s good and bad, but I have CD’s and other project created in Audition that I’d love to open again at some point.

The point is simple, though … Adobe is a software company.

Apple is not a software company. Desktop applications are not their bag … I honestly doubt they ever were. The apps were ways to compel people to buy their computers. It truly was/is (I guess). I’m not surprised with their moves because they do make good hardware, and great OS’s to run on them. That’s their bag … hardware and software platforms. Software is a means to an end for them. Reality it FCP7 did that job fairly well, but FCPX will do it a lot better, save the FCP7 users that will continue to use hardware … it’s still a win for Apple.

Point is … I trust Adobe when it comes to software. Apple, not so much.

[Keith Rocheck]

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/7930

I laid some of this out over there. The MacPro’s days are numbered though … how many years that will be is in question, but there’s no doubt in my mind it will die off with no replacement.

[Keith Rocheck]

It is very clear my point is still being missed. I obviously see the benefits for everyone involved. There really aren’t any downsides for anyone. I develop software as well as my many other talents … marketing and distribution are the two hardest things, and the App Store just makes sense that way. Its lucritive for the developers and for Apple for providing that platform.

I suppose the title of the topic should be: News Flash: Apple plans to make their money by having 3rd party’s develop and sell FCPX features through them.

But it just seems really shaddy to me that Apple’s model as a multi-billion dollar company is to not develop a fully featured product that services the needs of a wider user base, specifically the user base that got them to where they are in the market, and instead let others fill in their gaps AND STILL PROFIT OFF THOSE EFFORTS.

[Keith Rocheck]

I think the clear point here is that we should not have to wait for them to bring back features. It shouldn’t happen. Why can’t we open old FCP projects? I haven’t seen any indication that they will try to make this happen. Contrast that with Avid who has, except for color correction around the v3.5, v4 area, has maintained forwards and backwards compatibility in their product. Backwards capability can be meh depending on what you’re doing, but its there.

The only thing close to this travesty is Adobe re-writing Audition for inclusion in Creative Suite and not supporting Audition 3 and older projects. That’s the same non-starter for me.

[Keith Rocheck]

Missing my point. Certainly plugins being sold through the App Store is great for the end users.

Apple clearly made a product that missed a lot of features and they’ve said for a number of things that the 3rd party developers will have to fill those gaps. So lets be clear here, a multi-billion dollar company doesn’t want to develop some features that their user base wants and needs, but they’ll turn around and profit off other companies filling in their gaps.

That is just shaddy.

[Keith Rocheck]

[Chris Kenny] “Even these days, Mac Pros probably sell dozens of times as many units as the Xserve was selling. And Apple probably uses them internally.”

True, but when you consider how far the iMac has come and how powerful it is would you not agree that companies are buying more of them for production work in place of the Mac Pro than they would have … 5 years ago? Keep that trend up for 5-10 more years.

[Chris Kenny] “True, but I have to say I’ve noticed a remarkable amount offline editing happens on MacBook Pros these days, at least in the indie feature world.”

Yes it does, but when you focus on the pro’s (and I’ll include indie features in there) … it still comes back to an edit bay with all that good-old professional infrastructure behind it (regardless of scale and complexity).

[Chris Kenny] “And Thunderbolt changes a lot with respect to I/O on non-towers.”

Thunderbolt does not change all that much. Reality check here, and I’m being serious, one Thunderbolt port is the equivalent of a single PCIe x4 slot. I can’t put a high end graphics card on that. I can’t put anything better than a 2x4Gbps fiber channel card on that, not even 1x8Gbps. Most professional I/O are PCIe x4, but use a hefty amount of the bandwidth in those 4 lanes. Notice how none of the Thunderbolt I/O devices manufactured by BMD and Matrox have loop outs? The iMac has two of these ports, but reality is that they need at least 1-2 more and that still is not the same. We need at least one connector that gives a full 16 lanes before I’ll give in to iMacs and MBPs being suitable to living in an edit bay. Offline … have at it.

[Chris Kenny] “This has much more to do with Intel’s processor release cycles than with Apple. For instance, new Intel processors suitable for use in the Mac Pro aren’t due out until Q4 of this year. (Though there are rumors Apple might get early access, as they have with some processors in the past.)”

True, considered that when making the point, but still made it anyway.

Thanks,
Keith

[Keith Rocheck]

[Chris Kenny] “There is when Apple considers MacBook Pros with as much power as Mac Pros from a couple of years ago to be ‘mobile devices’. Which it does.”

Which is exactly the point. Apple has already clearly stated that laptop sales are driving the computer division well north of 50% of sales, but I believe I heard something like 75% in one of their keynotes (yes I could be wrong). Since we already know they drop off hardware products that don’t drive a significant piece of sales … it stands to reason that the MacPro would be the first to go.

Xserve-RAID got booted … which actually made sense since it was outdated and they’d have to start near from scratch anyway. The Xserve, though, is an amazing piece of hardware. They are the core heart and soul of my shop. I’m not going to replace them with honking MacPros that take up all my rack space. I can’t replace them with Mini’s because I need Xsan and fiber channel. Regardless though … both were killed off because of low sales – RELATIVE TO THE REST OF THE COMPANY.

I’m sure the iMac and Mac Mini will remain in the product line for years to come because they target … anyone .. who wants a nice robust machine. MacPro is too pricey and powerful for what MOST people need, and its showing in sales. So once the MacPro is gone, and we have no way to use Xsan on these all-in-ones … what are the Pro’s going to do? Windows here we come.

It’s not just one thing here, and that’s what people like yourself are hung up on. I love Apple, truly I do … I’m on a MBP right now, but they signaled to me as a professional a real disinterest in my professional needs when they got rid of the Xserve.

Back to your point … they are a ‘Mobile Devices’ company, but I have never seen a professional edit bay using a MacBook Pro for day-to-day with full I/O. It doesn’t happen.

Let’s take a quick look at Wikipedia for some data. Including early 2009, how many times have the following products received updates:
MacBook Pro: 4 (Early 2009, Mid 2009, Mid 2010, Mid 2011)
iMac: 4 (Early 2009, Late 2009, Mid 2010, Mid 2011)
Mac Mini: 3 (Early 2009, Late 2009, Mid 2010)
Mac Pro: 2 (Early 2009, Mid 2010)

I’m sure Apple cares about the Pro desktop market, but its a shrinking segment, and once its small enough the investment will be too big to keep up with it … poof to Mac Pro and Mac-based edit bays as we know them. And … to the original point … where does that leave FCPX? Hard to say, but I suspect what they are getting at is that, in reality, iMovie goes away and Final Cut becomes the sole editing app out of Apple. I honestly hope I’m wrong, but take a careful look at the historical precedent already set by this company.

[Keith Rocheck]

I’ve been using the product for over a year now. I didn’t see the clips at NAB, but none of the film restoration products are perfect. Most shops doing a lot of restoration have workstations for Revival and a competitor product for that reason. I have PFClean in house.

I adore both of the products. As I’m budgeting I very easily can split the work between Revival and PFClean based on a ton of factors. I can even tell you which product’s automated dirt tool will handle a specific kind of dirt in a scene better. I may even want to run something through both to fix different things.

I’m not particularly fond of Revival’s destructive workflow, relative to a PFClean where I can get a list of every paint-stoke or piece of dirt it found and disable or delete those as needed. However, we’ve come up with interesting ways to fix some really hairy problems leveraging the destructive workflow to our advantage. I can honestly say there are some things I don’t know how I’d fix as quickly as I can without it.

Revival, in general, I think could fix almost anything I throw at it. I can’t say the same of PFClean, however, it can do some things faster or more efficiently on an operations level than Revival, though not necessarily better. At the time, PFClean gave us more bang for our buck, but if Revival’s pricing now starts at $1,495, if I built my shop today I may have done it differently.