[Paul Dickin]

[Bernard Newnham] “What were the issues in setting up a Hackintosh?”

Hi
Not trivial….
In my case installing OS X on the ‘most hackable’ laptop, the Dell Mini 10v, took about 2 months of my time. Not every day of course, but as each install failed (about 2 dozen in all before I was successful) I abandoned it for a few days before gathering enough motivation to try to crack it again.

Debugging the failures isn’t a case of noting where things go wrong, because as there is no real documentation on the procedures (just hundreds of random conflicting/outdated blog postings).

Part of the problem is that manufacturers change the actual hardware and bios firmware without any documentation.

The other problem is that the software hackers who post their kext-installer freely onto the web don’t/can’t help with support when would-be users find their installation attempts have failed.

Dozens of people post ‘solutions’ on the various Hackintosh forums, and assessing the merit of their ‘successes’ was for me an inordinately lengthy process of trial and error error error error….
So, like SCSI in the old days, building a hackintosh is a matter of Karma.
Like meditation, set aside plenty of time.

But I now have a very nice and stable mobile SD Card-to-USB drive location backup set-up 😉

By the way the reason I wiped Windows off its drive was because every time I booted I got a succession of error messages about various Dell software management programs that were missing vital .dlls etc, which Google had no clear solution for.
I decided installing OS X was probably a simpler solution (for me) than attempting to debug Windows. And if I was going to do an OS reinstall it might as well be OS X.
I was only partially correct in that… 😉

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Maybe the 1.7-2.4 times speed-up that AVX brings to vector/image processing on Sandy Bridge+ CPUs is the reason for the difference?

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
It may have sounded like feature editing but I only ever edited documentaries for BBC TV etc, From 1965- to the last film project in 1988. I will stand or fall by the BBC’s reputation 😉

I tend to regard it as ‘wrong’ in FCP Legacy if you break tidy Media Management, and multiple clip instance in the browser risks breaking subsequent MM – and definitely breaks it if you drag clip instances between projects, as they become orphans. Extra care is needed to avoid problems down the line.

Still I made good money clearing up other people’s FCP project spaghetti when it wouldn’t export LOL. I don;t remember their commissioning producers being very happy with their workflow ‘preference’….

[Paul Dickin]

[Herb Sevush] “Then why do it?”
Hi
Because viewing disparate clips in a timeline disassociates them from their binning and browser-column information – which are easily searchable in the browser, much less easily in a sequence.

As a film editor big rolls got broken up into labelled clips in bins. To have to join them back up at random into a long roll to view on the steenbeck was counter-productive. Everything had to be broken back up into the bins again to proceed with the editing process.

Instead the bins were placed near a bench with a handcranked viewer to work on in/out points and to get an assembly. Only when assembled into meaningful sections was the steenbeck’s viewing process valuable.

In NLE terms the same applies in the sort of stuff I edit, and making random ‘select’ timelines for viewing is very inefficient. In fact I always regarded it it a sign that the editor wasn’t really cut out to be an editor if he spent all his time ‘viewing’ at the steenbeck 😉

The art of editing in film and paper-offline linear tape days devolved around the ability of the editor to ‘memorise’ the initial impact of the first viewing of the footage, and thereafter working from the ‘metadata’ notes to build the final edited end-product.

Having to disassociate the clips from their metadata – restricting accompanying clip-info to what is accessible when you have it in a random-select timeline – seems to me to be very very counter-productive.

I just don’t have the powers of memory to be able to recall everything in a long ‘selects’ timeline days/weeks later as the edit proceeds. (So I never do it).

The browser and bin structure is where I want to go to find and quickly view stuff as I need it.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi

Here’s Bill’s links:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/27/860446

The BBC item is a cut-down rework of an excellent Channel 4 TV one hour documentary analysis of the subject, dealing with the subject in some scientific depth, presented by Michael Johnson (200m gold at Atlanta in 1996). I speculate that Johnson brought the subject to the notice of senior BBC editoral staff covering the Olympics.

Johnson was in the presentation studio when the BBC aired this item – his comment was that although 90-something percent of the population of Jamaica carry the ‘sprint’ gene, 8% of the human race in general also have the gene, so, for those 8%, ‘nurture’ (ie training) could produce a sprint performance comparable to descendants of the slave trade.

Johnson has been one of the lead in-vision commentators during the Athletics coverage – I speculate the VO of this cut-down was modeled on the delivery of Michael’s original reading, he being otherwise occupied with his in-vision stuff.

Here’s what the original sounded like 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKqbpZv1vB0

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[Paul Dickin]

[Mitch Ives] “Does anyone know if laptops, iMacs, MacPro’s, etc . that are older than “mid 2011″ can use AirPlay?”

Hi
Quote:
“The reason you need a 2011 Mac to make use of AirPlay Mirroring in OS X Mountain Lion is because the graphics in older Macs just don’t cut the mustard.

It’s simple: the secret sauce that Apple requires to make AirPlay Mirroring work is on-GPU H.264 encoding, or the ability to compress video on your device’s actual graphic chips without calling upon the CPU.
Without physical hardware support, mirroring eats a huge chunk of CPU, which means performance would be hindered to a point Apple would never allow.”

It’s not just Macs that can’t use AirPlay Mirroring if they are older than 2011: even on the iOS side of things, you need a minimum of an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2 to use AirPlay Mirroring on your Apple TV.Because older iOS devices don’t have on-GPU H.264 encoding either.

For the modern chipsets Apple has written drivers to access the on-GPU H264 encoding. Since the image of whatever is on screen is already in your graphics’ frame buffer, all Apple needs to do is the scaling (the most expensive part of AirPlay Mirroring, which is why you have ‘Best for AirPlay’ resolutions that are 1:1), the color conversion (H.264 video needs YUV color space vs. RGB), and the actual encoding itself right on the GPU. Then, Apple only has to transmit the relatively small encoded video stream to the Apple TV.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible for Apple to do AirPlay Mirroring on a Mac without on-GPU H.264 encoding. AirParrot is an app that proves exactly the opposite: all that is required is a multi-core CPU. But things can definitely get hot, and Apple hates that.

The H. 264 encoding is actually plenty fast enough on any modern multi-core CPU, but the scaling and colorspace conversion processes are still pretty intensive.The compromise is that on older machines, AirParrot uses a non-trivial amount of CPU, which can result in the fans kicking and the machine getting a little warm… but even with on-GPU AirPlay Mirroring, 2011 MacBook owners will still notice the heat.

Whether you use AirParrot or AirPlay Mirroring, on a newer Mac or an older one, though, the real bottleneck for most users isn’t going to be whether the H.264 encoding was done on the CPU or on the GPU… it’s going to be your network.

You really need a top-notch network to do Airplay Mirroring of say, a web-based video player, with smooth low latency audio and video, That means an AirPort Express N router or any other high-quality brand router, and a pretty uncongested network.

Read more at https://www.cultofmac.com/178460/the-real-reason-why-macs-before-2011-cant-use-airplay-mirroring-in-mountain-lion-feature/#O8rXcpE9fLQPGvii.99

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Well Walter’s Promax One is $17,664.
rMBP + Promise Raid + SSD’s? More than $17,664?

Anand was trying to determine the speed of the ‘pipe’, with whatever was to hand to attempt to saturate it.

[Paul Dickin]

And the rMBP’s TB ports give even faster RAID storage access than Walter Biscardi’s ” don’t know about you, but 1100MB/s Write and 1300MB/s Read is about as fast a RAID as I’ve ever tested…” Promax One benchtests.
Nice 🙂

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Fascinating stuff!
As to ‘later in 2012″, this from page 8:
“Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge were both good steps for Intel, but Haswell and Broadwell are the designs that Apple truly wanted.”

That led me to:
“Haswell’s AVX2 integer support is particularly useful for processing visual data commonly encountered in consumer imaging and video processing workloads.”
https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2011/06/13/haswell-new-instruction-descriptions-now-available/

Also:
“In addition, it will support OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.2, which will improve performance in certain general purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) supported applications. The iGPU will feature new Auto-Stereoscopic 3D (AS3D), which will provide 3D support that is typically only available through the use of discrete GPUs. It will support up to three independent displays: HDMI 1.4, DVI, Display Port, VGA.”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-Haswell-iGPU-DirectX_11.1-OpenCL_1.2,14700.html

I also found a page (which I’ve lost the link to) discussing Intel’s strategy to get its next-gen IGP graphics ‘certified’ for applications like Nuke which now run need to run on nVidia Quadra-type external graphics cards…

Seems a lot is ‘going on’ for delivery ‘later in 2013’ 😉

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I don’t need portability.
The problem for me with using the 15″ Unibody MBP is the lack of a PC Express slot and only one TB for everything else faster than FW/USB3.

What would suit me very nicely is the Retina MBP without its screen and battery in a Mac Mini form factor.
The two TB ports + HDMI + USB3 would be fine.

I’m wondering how much the RMBP top case +screen and bottom case + battery would make on the resale spares market? I could fit the guts I need in an old dead G5 tower case 😉

The old style Unibody models are so close in price to the new RMBP to make them uncompetitive IMO.