[Paul Harrison]

The best way to pre-judge this would be to look at the relative performance of the MacBook Air and the Retina MacBook Pro 13. These can be obtained in (Air) Dual-core, quad-thread vs (MBP) quad-core, 8-thread configurations. Both sport AVX in the cpu instruction set, and use Intel HD Graphics on board. So you get _some_ idea of the relative power of additional cores with the modern instruction set, and aren’t too distracted by differences in discrete GPU.

The important measures would be relative performance, not absolute, as the ability to bump a Pro up to more insane memory, the Xeon level of chip optimization and the dual Firepro gpus will make a world of difference.

Comparing machines with and without AVX (pre Ivy Bridge) would generally not be so indicative.

[Paul Harrison]

Walter & Jeremy: you both raise several good points. I am still liking the idea. If Apple were really clever they might build some cluster services into OS X, since that is probably the one thing other computer manufacturers can’t clone. Just as parallelism is supported now with Grand Central Dispatch, XPC Services and OpenCL/OpenGL interfaces, an MPI capability built in would let a Phi-equipped MP act as a little personal renderfarm. FCPX could be extended to utilize this capability. More importantly for Apple, it opens up the opportunity to sell MP’s into a bigger market: turnkey High Performance Computing at the desktop level. Sort of a re-imagining of the XGrid and XServe models on a personal scale and usable by any software developer who wants to supercharge their application.

Today’s macs utilize integrated and discrete gpus and can determine the level of OpenCL or OpenGL support provided. To be revolutionary, Apple would need to make the Phi not just a 2k powerful graphics coprocessor, but expose these broader x86 capabilities through something like an embedded clustering capability.

On the one hand, this is getting pretty fantasmagoric. But on the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the shrinking of HPC clusters in space, power and cost is going to continue. Apple could have their MP future sights on a market much bigger than NLE’s pushing more pixels around faster.

[Paul Harrison]

Jeremy,

You may just be onto something. An MP with a Xeon in 2013 will be able to support the Phi coprocessor which has a Jan ’13 general availability date. This combo can be sealed Apple style into a unique “magical” product which outperforms all nVidia/AMD GPU’s and with t-bolt connectivity doesn’t rely on extra PCIe slots for anything. In my speculative fever tonight I predict it will be sold as a desktop “super computer” based on the Phi becoming the goto coprocessor for top clustered true supercomputers. The Phi is supposed to run OpenCl, and CUDA ports are supposedly quite manageable, and mainstream x86 code, too. This gets Apple out of the perennial angst over multiple, esoteric gpu programming models. AMD and nVidia can fight over orders for the next iMac/MBP on-board gpu socket space. And Intel can be held somewhat more accountable by Apple for the Phi working with the Intel Xeon main cpus.

It wont be cheap, with the Phi going for 2k, but as a one-size-fits-all, sizzle-core beast Apple may be able to crank out good margins at a pro-affordable price. What BTO options will be left? It will come with SSD and user upgradeable memory. I am liking this fantasy. Why not, guys?

[Paul Harrison]

I guess that while I understand 16 = 4 x 4 with regard to PCI lanes, I don’t know whether this is a big deal. The “gamer” community has settled on not caring about PCI bus speed for maxing out their frames per second in demanding video games. The question is really, “what are the bus requirements for NLE / VFX operations?” If the work done by CUDA or OpenCL routines deep in the heart of your post software is shuttling data back and forth from CPU to GPU at too high a rate, then 16-lane PCIe 2 or even PCIe 3 becomes critical and Thunderbolt becomes a bottleneck. But if the software is transferring chunks of work in units that don’t send so many gigabits of data per second back and forth, the TB strategy could still be a winner.

I also suspect that with SSDs replacing optical and moving-head disks in MBPs, Minis and iMacs, and with Ivy Bridge some thermal capacity becomes available to Apple to put heavier duty GPU’s in these smaller machines. Nvidia and AMD are also shrinking dies for their GPUs so we get more shaders per watt.

So, it may be that the MacPro is EOLed real soon now, and that the only people who would actually care are folk who have long since moved their graphics processing to huge farms of Linux-based specialty boxes and supercomputer clusters. Technology and Apple may truly be at this tipping point now in 2012.

[Paul Harrison]

iMovie for the (New! Improved!) iPad may not be “pro” but it could be a gift to the YouTube generation. It introduces the cut to the masses. Home videos are now just a few greasy finger swipes from becoming highlight reels instead of interminable bores.

If someone would just write an app for a skimming cloud videos then Vimeo and YouTube could become tolerable.

[Paul Harrison]

You may well be right that legacy FCP will not be supported on Mountain Lion OSX 10.8. However, your evidence is not compelling. The definition of “deprecation” in the software context is not “no longer supported”, but rather (from Wikipedia)

“to indicate that they should be avoided, typically because they have been superseded. Although deprecated software features remain in the software, their use may raise warning messages recommending alternative practices, and deprecation may indicate that the feature will be removed in the future. Features are deprecated—rather than immediately removed—in order to provide backward compatibility, and give programmers who have used the feature time to bring their code into compliance with the new standard.”

So, your quote from Apple is more likely to mean that Mountain Lion will be the last OSX version to allow legacy FCP to run.

[Paul Harrison]

For what it’s worth, “The Places…” was shot and edited by Ted Saunders, a young professional photographer and film maker working out of LA (TedShots). He says he shot this on a Canon 7D and his Linked in Profile mentions only Final Cut Pro as an NLE skill.

In my opinion Bill is right that this shows how guerrilla media production has become. The playa is not a good place for lenses, cameras and sound equipment. And a sound truck is not even an option. But he pulled off a very clean product.

I also think that there is a compelling trend towards short-format media. People may each have a half-dozen or more personal small screens available to them (TV’s, ipads, phones, laptops) as well as public screens (movie theatres, billboards, ubiquitous hanging lcds). But we only have 24 hours per day. So do you watch one or two 2-hour dramas, or fifty 3-to-7 minute items? Short forms can be integrated into our new multiple screen mobile lives more easily too, even if we can increasingly rent/stream/timeshift long form.

In the end, Turner Studios may be Gulliver in a land of Lilliputians.

[Paul Harrison]

From Support.Apple.Com:

Final Cut Pro X: Version 10.0.2 release notes
Last Modified: November 16, 2011
Article: HT4589

Summary
Final Cut Pro X version 10.0.2 is an update to Final Cut Pro X.

Products Affected
Final Cut Pro
What’s new in version 10.0.2:

Fixes an issue in which a title may revert to the default font after restarting Final Cut Pro X
Resolves an issue that could cause files recorded with certain third-party mobile devices to play back incorrectly
Addresses a stability issue caused by changing the start time on a Compound Clip
This update is recommended for all users of Final Cut Pro X. For more information, visit https://www.apple.com/finalcutpro.

[Paul Harrison]

The new pull distribution model is about ubiquitous consumption of moving images, and immediate consumer feedback. A publisher posts a movie on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, or Twitter and immediately and continuously knows how many viewers he/she has. And gets critical review as well. Tomorrow, the publisher can post new content that reacts to the critique and popularity. (e.g., look at CollegeHumor. New movies daily.) Think like local tv news channels in competition. The creative/editorial question now is how to provide compelling, exciting movies faster that are reactive to demand and micro-targetted to audience.

In the Walter Murch past, the creative/editorial question was how to provide compelling, exciting movies that would appeal to a movie or dvd buying audience a year or more in the future. Big plans, big risks, big costs, mass appeal.

It makes sense to ask whether editorial tools need a different feature set for an instantaneous, networked world.