Marcus Moore
Forum Replies Created
-
If not for Monitoring, what could the rationale behind an HDMI 1.4 port be?
Granted, even if it does give users a 4K display out, it likely won’t be compatible with some 3rd party products like Resolve, which still require a BlackMagic I/O for monitoring from DaVinci.
-
Apple has in the past held back features from hardware where it doesn’t feel the the user experience would be a net benefit- even though it’s “technically” possible to run a feature on hardware X, Apple says the experience doesn’t meet their threshold for “good”.
For example, see how certain features at staged from one iPhone model to the next. Even if you can run iOS7 on your iPhone4 some features aren’t deemed compatible based on the speed of the device.
I think unrestricted background rendering would definitely qualify here.
-
As I said, dedicated GPU background rendering is one possibility- and it’s a possibility that’s even hinted at in the MacPro blurb. Besides that, I don’t know.
But you know how the best way to find out would be? Let’s wait and see what comes out with the MacPro in a couple months. Then we can argue about if what they’ve DONE classifies as optimization, vs talking in the future/abstract.
-
Until proven otherwise- why not? That’s the official word. Both from Schiller and from the MacPro website. And I wager he has more conversations with the dev team that you do, so on the sliding scale of informed opinion I’ll lean his way for the moment.
Didn’t we just finish a year’s worth of these semantic arguments about Tim’s email about the MacPro? People parsing his words to try and pick apart what he REALLY meant- that it wouldn’t be a MacPro at all, but something for the MacPro crowd… After all that, and what did we get? A new MacPro. Maybe not what everyone might have wanted (it couldn’t have been no mater what it was) but it was a new MacPro.
Optimized for the machine means it will be in some form optimized for the machine.
-
To be fair, that’s what Phil Schiller made a special point of saying at WWDC.
“The Final Cut Pro team is hard at work on a version of Final Cut Pro 10 that will support all the performance and graphics capabilities of this machine”.
What this means specifically beyond support for all the CPU cores and GPU power– who knows. There’s been some suggestion that one GPU will be tasked specifically with background rendering in this configuration. That would be sort of swell, and would only be possible in a Dual GPU machine.
-
Sorry- the way I read it Walter seemed to be inferring a performance deficit from Machines running the same hardware config.
Do I wish that Apple would allow for dual 12core CPUs- sure, why not. For those that could benefit from that CPU power and want to use a Mac? It must really suck.
As an editor, am I likely to feel the pinch performance-wise with this machine? Probably not, I’m apparently under the ceiling for what niches Apple is wiling to cater to.
On the GPU side I really do hope that Apple leaves room for external GPU expansion- again, from my 2011 iMac to the new MacPro is probably going to feel like lightspeed.
But again, the word has been so good from the few people that have actually used this thing (Resolve, Foundry) that performance discussions seem a bit pedantic.
But is a MacPro going to be the fastest machine you can buy- no.
-
Not to lawyer-y about it, but a dual processor machine isn’t the same or similar to a single processor one. That second CPU isn’t free – you’re going to pay for it, and not an insignificant amount from what I’ve read.
Can you get a more powerful configuration than this MacPro with a PC, you probably will, but let’s compare Apple’s to Apple’s here (no pun intended).
-
[Walter Soyka] “Macs have been prevalent in broadcast graphics and 3D motion graphics via C4D.”
Sorry, I was making a distinction between 3D character animation and more traditional motion graphics (which can absolutely involve 3D elements). I was meerly suggesting I’ve never seen the animation side of an animation studio built on Macs. The design department, yes, but not the animators themselves. At least that’s been my impression.
T[Walter Soyka] “he Mac Pro has been pretty competitive here since its first release in 2006 until recently. The next Mac Pro will be outclassed by machines that have two of the same processor it has: slower by half. The performance gap had never been this big”
I’m not sure how you’re getting to that conclusion, can you explain? Why would this MacPro run the same hardware at half the speed. Are you talking GPUs? Isn’t that a conclusion we can’t come to until we see some benchmarks on specific application tasks?
-
Yikes! Not me-
With a majority of the corporate and commercial work I do, the ability to zoom and reframe is not only useful simply from a compositional point of view, but practically when I have to integrate titles, lower3rds, bugs, etc… being able to play around with negative space is a godsend.
This was the case when we started shooting 1080 but were still posting 480, and it the case with 4K/1080 now.
-
To be fair, Mac have always been an “also ran” in 3D animation. They’re not abandoning anything here that they had a serious investment in.
Even Jobs being the CEO of both Pixar and Apple must have realized the futility of trying to satisfy such a specialized market. There has never been a concerted push that I can think of that Pixar ever worked on Mac, or with Final Cut.