[Rick Lang]

Búi, that may not help increase your Arri raw renders, but the experience of a few people here indicates that there is a general performance boost with the larger flash memory. I don’t think it’s been discussed much, but considering your configuration, you want to keep everything in balance. Peter’s suggestion of separating your input from your (render) output may help significantly if you can keep the drives on a separate TB2 controller. As you know, you have three TB2 controllers that support the six TB2 ports plus the HDMI port. And I’m sure we all really need at least two Promise Pegasus2 R8s! Seriously though, just putting the rendered data on an external SSD may help and try to keep that on a separate TB2 controller.

Perhaps Peter Chamberlain knows if your next project will perform faster renders after you upgrade to Resolve 11.

I didn’t realize there was a second generation of the Mac Pro yet, but I’ll look into that. I assume it was minor.. If you have a moment, you can tell me what was improved. Improving the price, I’m thinking be nice.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

What is the size of your internal flash? Did you go with the 1 TB option?

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

David, have you ran the latest versions of FCP X and Resolve 11 on 10.9.4?

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

[Mitch Ives] “As for the cloud, I want to be in charge of when I use it. I don’t want Apple to force me to use it. This is still America right?”

I agree and I’m in Canada. Surely I don’t want all my photos in the cloud, only those I select that I want to share. All the photos in the cloud forces one to buy a lot more cloud storage. What’s to like about that?

If Photos forces everything in the cloud, that’s a showstopper from a financial standpoint as well as distaste for all things that belong to me being kept ‘safe’ by someone else. The only thing that I subscribe to keeping safe is money in the bank and as we know, that’s hardly safe at all. If Lightroom has an option not to use their cloud and Photos forces everything to the cloud, I’m switching.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Last Aperture minor version update I have: 3.5.1 November 12, 2013

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Does everyone know what Apple ProRes 4444 XQ offers? Data rates for HD video (no alpha) are 495 Mb/s compared to 330 Mb/s for ProRes 4444 and 220 Mb/s for ProRes 422 HQ. From the June 2014 ProRes White Paper:

Apple ProRes 4444 XQ: The highest-quality version of Apple ProRes for 4:4:4:4 image sources (including alpha channels), with a very high data rate to preserve the detail
in high-dynamic-range imagery generated by today’s highest-quality digital image sensors. Apple ProRes 4444 XQ preserves dynamic ranges several times greater than the dynamic range of Rec. 709 imagery—even against the rigors of extreme visual effects processing, in which tone-scale blacks or highlights are stretched significantly. Like standard Apple ProRes 4444, this codec supports up to 12 bits per image channel and up to 16 bits for the alpha channel. Apple ProRes 4444 XQ features a target data rate of approximately 500 Mbps for 4:4:4 sources at 1920 x 1080 and 29.97 fps.

https://images.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Apple_ProRes_White_Paper.pdf

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

If there’s any silver lining in this for Aperture users, the Photos app on the desktop could have an ‘Advanced’ preference option that turned on a lot of extra functionality and menu options compared to the typical desktop consumer. Of course the desktop version of Photos will likely be a superset of the iOS versions of Photos. If that’s the way the transition is done, the maybe the change is not a concern. We’ll see later this year.

Interesting to compare to the relationship of Garageband and Logic Pro as well as iMovie and Final Cut Pro. There are other threads on the topic. But until today, I would have compared iPhoto and Aperture in the same way. To think iPhoto and Aperture are both replaced by an application with its roots in iOS does give me less certainty that Garageband and Logic Pro could not just as easily find themselves replaced by an as yet unknown app.

At the heart of all this concern is the nagging evidence that Apple has lost its way in its relentless pursuit of very high margin products at the cost of serving the high-end niche for any of its software or hardware (the new Mac Pro running against that argument though). It mystifies me why a company that has amassed huge cash reserves, can’t find any pride and glory in supporting excellence in the products that don’t garner mass appeal. You know I’m a Mac addict, but quo vadis?

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Wait until the camera is shipping, which may be in July, 2014. There is no sample footage available for URSA. We don’t know if all the published features will be implemented at the release of the camera. This camera is quite heavy at 16.5 pounds, so you need to access how that will impact you. You may wish to join BMD’s own forum or the BMCuser forum where there is a lot of information to help you decide if the camera is right for you.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Iain Anderson on MacProVideo has some interesting posts about reducing your export time. Not rendering before is one of the hints but there are others related to the exports if the destination is the web and Vimeo for example. In essence you can reduce the bit rate and number of passes to 15 Mb/s and 1 respectively.

Hope I’m allowed to post this link:
https://www.macprovideo.com/hub/final-cut/final-cut-pro-x-performance-test

and this:
https://www.macprovideo.com/hub/final-cut/fcp-x-and-compressor-hardware-encoding

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Now about that internal flash storage… get as much as your budget will allow.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB