Phil Hoppes
Forum Replies Created
-
Workstations, as a percentage of the total available market of desktops is around 1%. Apple has, at best, only a few percentage points of the workstation market, which last year was 1 million units world wide. At best…. Apple sold $100M of MacPros, which I highly doubt. You have to realize that while large, $100M is 0.097% of 109Billion dollars or what Apple sold last year. MacPro revenue is below Apple’s round off error on their financials. It’s nothing.
-
Well my experience with OSX networking vs Windows networking is OSX simply connects and finds things easy. To make Windows find things let alone mount is a major PITA. I have a linux file server and I’ve worked with Linux/Unix for close to 25 years so I’m very familiar with it. Samba, while it works, is a major PITA. Configuring Samba shares for anything more than a simple share take’s a Ph.D. and then some. NFS is great and works fine Linux to Linux but can also be tricky with multiple OS’s. NFS really sucks with Windows because you MUST purchase Windows Ultra Premium Extreme Suck Your Bank Account Dry For No Good Reason version because they won’t give you the NFS client on any other version, specifically Windows 7 Professional. Yea, …. your Professional but just not enough to warrent an NFS client.
All that being said, I run OSX on my MBP because FCPX is great for some projects and there is still some legacy FCP7 stuff I have to deal with. My MBP is bootcamped to Windows 7 because my 3D and CAD software either only runs on windows or runs better. My compute servers are Windows 7 because that is the cheapest and easiest to deal with and universally runs all of the software I need for rendering. My file servers are Linux because that works best and they cannot be rendering servers because not all of my software has a Linux version. So in the end, yea, it’s a complicated hodge – poge of OS’s and computers but each one for each need is tailor made to do what it does best. A note…. I can make it work because in my previous life I was a tech geek and I know all of the low level crap to keep it all running. If I had to pay to keep all of this going I would have a much simpler setup as I simply could not afford to do it any other way. I sympathize with those that must do this.
Lastly, my 2cents is HP makes crap and so does Dell. I had HP servers I managed at my last company and their reliability was atrocious. There support is way overpriced and abysmal at resolving issues. Dell support was passable, only because the subcontracted to local people who’s lively hood depending on doing a good job so my experience was I found they always worked to keep the customer happy even if it screwed Dell. They did not care about Dell they cared about the customer. I build my own PC’s and servers but still believe Apple hardware, in general, is a very good deal (sans overpriced MacPro’s) as it delivers a quality design at an affordable price. For those who really need a MacPro I hear your pain but you have to move on. I’ve said it before, MacPro revenue is less than %0.01 of Apples revenue. They don’t care about the product line. They don’t care you believe you need a tower and they will never license the OS or platform. You need to figure out an alternative solution to your problems.
-
[Thomas Frank] “They would be stupid if they drop it… the reason why everybody wants Apple product is because it is and might have been used by the high end.”
Sorry but no. 99.9% of Apple customers would not know what FCP or FCPX is let alone who uses it. Last years revenue was $109B of that, on a sun shine day with the wind to your back, MacPro and FCP sales combined probably did not top $100M. Apple customers know what an iPhone is, an iPad, an iPod and an iMac. That’s it. $100M sounds like a lot…. until you realize that it represents %0.0917 of their annual income and heading LOWER. Get over it, this market, as crucial and important as it is to you and everyone else on this board, means nothing to Apple. If you can use iMacs and FCPX to do your work, Apple is very happy to have you on board. If you need something outside of what they have determined are THEIR target market needs, then you will be SOL as they say. This is not a personal attack it is simply a statement of fact.
-
I heard the Stiletto TB15SS came with an SDI port an a single mono XLR port on the bottom of the handle but there were no plans for it to be compatible with FCP7. WTF???? Just another vendor pushing us to FCPX. I’ll never get my studio framed at this rate.
-
This is one of my favorite videos on Vimeo. A truly touching and amazing video. I think it is a proto for Maya 2020…. 😉
-
Just started using it. Use PP also. FCPX is blazing fast and efficient and perfect for some of my work. PP is more convenient for other jobs. At the end of the day, I’m a total agnostic. Use what tool gets the job done best and fastest and move on.
-
If you know someone who has Nuke (I do) there is a trick for dealing with chroma sub sampled data. You feed your original track into a colorspace node and break it into YUV data, or in the case of Nuke it is YCbCr. Your Luma in now on the red channel and your color is on the green and blue channels. Take and put a blur on just the green and blue channels. Now put in another colorspace node and convert YUV back to linear. You will find that when you key you have a lot more edge data in your color space and you can get a much cleaner key. It does not really require Nuke but a compositor that can break your RGB to YUV and then add selected blur to just the color and put YUV back to RGB. Not 100% sure if this will fix your problem but it is worth a shot.
-
Never met him but I purchased his lecture series (back in my engineer days) and his lecture series on tape on Fundamental Physics. A wonderful individual and just incredibly smart. The world is just a tad smaller due to his departure.
-
Well, it’s really not a trick, it clearly is Apple’s policy or something that is completely related to their policy. As I said, I tried to pay again but could not. It is the way it is. In the total scheme of things I’m sure my lost revenue did not make a dent in their quarterly earnings. 😉 They just made it back with the new iPads I got for me and my family anyway.
-
You should be logged into the App store with your Apple ID. Open the App store application and go to the purchases tab. You should be able to simply click install on the apps you purchased and it will install.
Now….. If you happen to be like me, and I actually purchased FCPX the day it was released. I decided after a week it was not for me and Apple said they would offer refunds. I took them up on the offer and they did refund my $299. I’m an honest person and I did delete FCPX from my MBP. Now, fast forward about 2 months and I decided I had probably been too rushed with my judgement and decided I really wanted FCPX. I went to the App store and clicked to purchase FCPX again. Low and behold AFTER I clicked the buy button the app store came back and said I was due a free upgrade and proceeded to download to my MBP. I thought, well this is cool but I do pay for what I use. I did not know why it was downloading and I assumed there was some hidden residual file somewhere on my MBP tell the app store I had purchased FCPX. I knew my wife was getting a brand new iMac in a month so I figured, well, when she gets that, I will actually rebuy it then. Her new iMac arrives and I go to purchase FPCX and boom, again it says I have a new download and proceeds to install on my wife’s brand new clean iMac. Ok so now I have no idea what is going on so I write Apple support and explain that I appreciate the free software but I really don’t believe in ripping people off and wanted to pay them for it and have it actually show on my registrations (FCPX, Motion5 and Compressor 4 do not show up under my Apple ID as actually been purchased). I received a very nice letter from Apple support basically explaining to me that once an item has been purchased from the App store and monies returned they have no way in their accounting system to allow that item to be purchased again. The letter literally ended with “This is your lucky day, enjoy”.
As a former geek I have to laugh as what is probably going on here is whom ever set up their order entry management system never set the tables up with a one to many relationship for items to be purchased. There is no way in their tables to account for this. $100B in the bank and you can’t deal with refunds??? Wow. Oh well. I tried, I really did.
So if you purchased FCPX, got a refund, and now you want to install again, click on the buy button and you will actually get a download prompt. On apps you have purchased from the app store you are allowed 5 installs.