[Paul Dickin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “If you look at this page, then look towards the bottom, you will see the desktop version, the mobile version, then the OEM version (called the A300 here).
https://www.fireprographics.com/adobe/index.asp
That seems to be what would be in the MacPro if it is a closed GPU system, right?
“
Hi
According to that page’s links the A300/A320 are ‘”accelerated processors” only using DDD3 memory, so don’t seem to fit the info that Apple have sneak previewed.

[Paul Dickin]

LOL
That’s what I said. Put an iMac’s bits inside….
Price it like the iMac.

[Paul Dickin]

[Gary Huff] “If you’re going that low, you might as well get an iMac”
Hi
An iMac is fine for people with minimalist connectivity needs.
A 1080i/p edit suite doesn’t need sizzle-core power, but it still needs a raft of connected devices – video I/O, audio I/O, legacy I/O adapters, RAID boxes, backup boxes (disk or tape) and even maybe more than one Gig-E port for NAS and networking at the same time.
All that is compromised by an iMac’s two TB, one Gig-E limit.

Make a Mac Pro with specs just slightly faster than the top end iMac and that would be ALL a ton of edit suites would need: a 4 or 6 core Xeon with turbo top speed just better than the Haswell iMac will have, Two of the same Haswell iMac graphics sub-systems mounted by Apple into the Mac Pro internal cards, and a hard drive (or two BTO) from the new MacBook Air.

That would be MUCH BETTER for my edit-suite needs than an iMac…
Why should it cost any more than the iMac? The new Mac Pro case doesn’t look more costly to make than an iMac.

[Paul Dickin]

[Walter Soyka] ” who you think will buy this”
Hi
Anyone who finds two TB and one Gig-E ports causes them juggling problems with their connectivity needs.
In the SCSI era workstations were always smallish boxes with external storage as fast as internal.
Now we’re in a 4K video age anything smaller than a Promax box is always going to need external storage as fast as internal.

The era of Apple deviating from a simple box with good external connectivity has been confined to the era of the current G5/Mac Pro form factor – until 2005/6 there were only 2+1 internal drive bays.

Anyone who says their ‘workflow’ demands a single large box can only have worked in the last few years.
On lots of different levels (energy consumption etc) is that sustainable?
Or are our grand-children going to be saying: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!”

On a different tack: if the current high end graphics cards (like AMD 7990) are two lesser graphics engines combined into one package (presumably driven by one 16x PCIe slot) why can’t the engines be separated and each connected by one 8x TB channel each? Wouldn’t that give the same throughput? Obviously with rewriitten GPGPU drivers.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
It’ll have a new name too: the new Mac Pro(wles) 😉

“Maverick Prowles
Had Rumbling Bowels
That thunder(b)’d in the night.
It shook the edit-suite all around
And gave the folks a fright.”

from Spike Milligan.

[Paul Dickin]

[Herb Sevush] “I don’t understand that comment. “

Hi
Bernard’s “sweet spot, with Walter’s amendment, doesn’t even give a quarter of what you want 😉
But they are PCIe 3.0, if you swap your cards in for newer v3.0 versions…

Quote:
Core i7-3770K PCI Express Configurations 1×16, 2×8, 1×8 & 2×4
https://ark.intel.com/products/65523

Presumably the commas are ‘or’ alternatives – 1×16 or 2×8 or 1×8 & 2×4.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
[Herb Sevush] “at least 4 16x PCIe slots plus another 2 to 4 slower slots…”

How does that work with Bernard’s Core i5 “sweet spot”?
Isn’t that part of Jeremy’s problem as well?

[Paul Dickin]

HI
Quote:
Final Cut Pro X version 10.0.7
This update improves overall stability, performance, and compatibility. Updates include:

The Letterbox effect “Offset” slider is restored.
Fixes an issue that could occur when creating a single layer DVD.
Fixes an issue in which some third-party effects could cause Final Cut Pro to stop responding during background rendering.
Fixes an issue in which some third-party transitions would incorrectly use black instead of source media.
Adds support for editing MXF files that are still ingesting.
Fixes an issue with rendering Motion Templates containing Image Units.
Fixes an issue with the display of the Modify RED RAW settings button in synchronized and compound clips.
Fixes an issue with the upload of clips that are larger than 1 GB to Vimeo.
Fixes an issue in which an incorrect frame size is used with filters on two adjacent clips with different pixel aspect ratio.
https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4589??

[Paul Dickin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “…people aren’t using the FCPX browser as it was designed and intended. They do not understand the dynamic nature of it (dynamic meaning ever changing) and must be locked in to fixed bin and viewer like behaviors. Old habits truly die hard.”
Hi
“…very eloquently and precisely summed up…” 🙂

[Paul Dickin]

[Oliver Peters] “there is ZERO database functionality outside of the Events currently visible inside FCP X”

[Jeremy Garchow] “The event and project structure is real close to what you find in the Finder and its all in one place. “

[Aindreas Gallagher] “in essence an event is neither, and can be neither, a classical bin within a project super structure, or a classical project containing footage and sequences.”

Hi
For historical reasons I am stuck in FCP 5-7 with an extended (2005-2012) project cluster derived from an archive of 3000+ digibeta tapes. In FCP 7 media managing the hundreds of mini-projects using and reusing this footage is really problematic.

Identification (= correcting misidentification in the original digibeta tape logs) has created a huge metadata pool. Ditto fragmentation – putting original footage back into one metadata bin. Archiving each individual mini-project’s media (with shortened handles) creates further fragmentation. The magnitude of all these data stores isn’t manageable within FCP 7, nor easily in the Finder. CatDV helps, also the dozens of notebooks I keep.

How would I want to go forward with this? And how would Apple’s reincarnation of FCP X help? What sort of data-management/database do I need?

One thing I don’t need is each assembly of related shots which comprised one mini-project in FCP 7 to continue to exist as a ‘project’. All I need is a ‘movie file’ in a container (at Finder level) that would allow me to break it open to see the individual component clips and read the clip’s source metadata. Isn’t that what FCP X’s Combined Clips are?

In my utopian view the Finder (tablet stylee) is hidden – except to ‘developers’ ;-), and the OS has a movie container format viewer (son of QuickTime) that directly opens Compound Clip movies in read-only mode.
But for an editor like me these CC’s are editable in an application (FCP X)…

So in FCP X I would need a ‘Finder-view’ to show appropriate files on hard drives etc, which would include CC-like clips. Isn’t this what the Event library is?

BUT. When I’m writing I don’t want my books defaced with my metadata scribbling and with pages torn out and pasted into a work-in-progress scrapbook – the books get ruined in the process…

What I need for writing is a (digital) COPY of the original books etc. So in FCP X the Event is my view of the source assets, but I don’t want my scribbling and page tearing (PIOPs) to apply to Event assets directly, but to Clip Collections created for my specific edit project.

I’ve been writing in a program called Scrivener which allows every sentence that I write to be annotated on associated metadata pages – its a five+ window application, file browser, text entry page, summary outliner, Inspector with added metadata fields like origination date and URL etc. and a separate document viewer window. This workflow is really productive.

So I’m looking at FCP X’s workflows in the same way: It seems right to me that any editing metadata (PIOPs) I want to add to the project has to be achieved by a deliberate action – creation of a Favorite or metadata range etc.

As the Event is a ‘global’ creation (like books on a shelf) the core assets need to be kept intact and unaltered. But the Event can be added to by metadata creations – Collections and CCs etc which are added to the (virtual) shelf of my library.

The Projects are a separate entity – my thesis created from my reading of my library. The timeline, which can be turned into a CC and put in the Event library for future use.

In my utopian view I hope the puck is headed towards a YouTube/Google-like future where video assets are compound clips that can be broken down to be recycled, and documents, like web pages, have inbuilt metadata linkages that lead to all relevant source assets – text, pix etc.

I don’t know enough about database structures to know how all the metadata associations inherent in this utopia ‘relate’. 😉