[Shawn Miller]

[Lance Bachelder] “That’s an old article and states: “Clock-per-clock, Core i7-5XXX and Xeon E5 v3 CPUs have identical performance”

My point was the newer 8 core i7 for instance, runs at 3.2Ghz and runs $999 – the older Xeon they tested was a 3.0Ghz model that would run you about $1299 on Amazon today. Of course if money is no object you can build a screaming dual Xeon system but I was just talking about a new i7 machine vs. a current Mac Pro – nothing else.”

Fair enough.

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Craig Seeman] “Is there a reason for Apple to stick with Xeons?”

If they want to keep 3D and VFX artists on their platform, then they should absolutely go back to building dual CPU machines. I know a few folks who would go back to Apple in a heartbeat, if they could get the hardware they wanted with OSX.

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Lance Bachelder] “But now we 6, 8 and 10 core i7’s which are much faster and cheaper than the Xeon’s of yesteryear.”

I think others might disagree. 🙂

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Intel-CPUs-Xeon-E5-vs-Core-i7-634/

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Simon Ubsdell] “I wouldn’t argue with that at all – it’s just that I find that Ae’s compositing abilities are often seriously oversold.”

I completely agree!

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Simon Ubsdell] “I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that for compositing Ae simply cannot touch node-based solutions.

(I always like a good argument.)”

I think there’s some truth to this – but I also think it’s fair to point out that it’s a narrow subset of compositing tasks that AE is less suited for; deep pixel compositing, using specialty AOV’s, reading OpenVDB sequences, compositing very complex scenes with thousands of elements, color space management per element/layer etc. For straight compositing and procedural animation, Nuke, Fusion, Mamba, et al are hard to beat… until you need to add complex animation and keyframe wrangling to the mix. This is why AE is so hard to replace (IMO), it’s a great animation tool with decent compositing capabilities… there just isn’t anything quite like it on the market.

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Walter Soyka] “David is pointing out the disparity in free availability for the products on Linux. Free Fusion is now tri-platform. A free Resolve has never been available on Linux, only on Windows and macOS. To get Resolve on Linux, one used to have to buy the $30,000 panels. It’s possible there is now a $995 Linux Resolve Studio dongle available for sale, but it’s somewhat unclear”

I guess I had a bit more faith in BMD. I always suspected that there would be a free version of Fusion for Linux users… despite the licensing scheme for Resolve. 🙂

[Shawn Miller]

[David Mathis] ” The surprise part is that even the free version is available for the Linux platform. I doubt the same situation will apply to Resolve though. Love to hear your thoughts on this.”

Why is that a surprise? Linux users make up a good chunk of the Fusion community, they’ve been waiting for an update since the acquisition.

[Shawn Miller]

[Tim Wilson] ”
Cool! I was meaning to ask this from other folks posting upthread who are working with ProRes and DNxXX — is your footage being shot in those formats, or converted for post”

Hey Tim,

I shoot DNxHD on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and the Pocket Cinema Camera. As soon as BMD releases the 4.0 firmware update for the 4.6k Ursa Mini, I’ll start recording DNxHD/HR on that camera as well. I also tend to convert smartphone footage to DNxHD for smoother editing. Lastly, I will start asking external venders to use alternatives to Prores where possible… I’m trying to lessen my dependence on PR as much and as soon as possible. 🙂

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

I’m an in house corporate guy, so I shoot about 25% of what I edit. My main acquisition formats are DNxHD (hopefully all DNxHR soon),Prores422 and Prores4444 from the Blackmagic Ursa Mini 4.6k, the 2.5k Cinema Camera or the Pocket Cinema Camera – once in a very great while, I’ll shoot with a Panasonic AF100, an HVX200, or an HPX500 – so P2 and AVCCAM are still in the mix. About 25 to 30% of the footage I receive is stock from Videoblocks, Shutterstock, Getty or iStock. 15% of my footage comes from vendors – .mxf from the Canon C100/C500 or XDCAM the Sony FS5/FS7 seem to be the most common formats I get from them. The rest is CG or motion graphics that I create with a combination of Cinema 4D, After Effects, Realflow etc. – I usually use .exr, .tiff and Cineform wrapped in .avi for motion graphics and CG.

EDIT: I meant to add that I get a fair amount of footage from co-workers shot on smart phones…

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Tim Wilson] “I used to laugh at Dell for many, many years.”

You should have… they were TERRIBLE for a good long while. I think their products started getting better after they went back to being a private company.

Shawn