[Shawn Miller]

[Gary Huff] “You can get an ASUS board that has dual Thunderbolt 2 ports but I would wonder how much you’d be giving up speed-wise, especially with a Quad-core Xeon from the base model. I would imagine the difference is very little.”

Speed wise, you’re not giving up anything. The i7 and the Xeon are about the same in performance. The real advantage of the Xeon processors is that they can be used on multi socket boards.

EDIT: Now I’m sort of wondering why Apple opted to put a Xeon processor in the Mac pro instead of an i7… why go with the more expensive Xeon if you can only put one in the machine?

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Frank Gothmann] “There’s nothing out there that will be faster or equal to a Mac, don’t you know that?
Because it lacks the magic sauce from Cupertino. Remember, the one that made Photoshop run so much faster on PPC compared to the suckers from Intel. Or the amazing iDVD MPEG2 encodes in realtime while the loosers running other, much more expensive encoders still had to cope with old-fashined stuff like 2-pass encoding and quantization settings.
It’s the magic formula that’s in all of Apple’s products. The shrinkage in size which is directly proportional to the features and add-ons they simply dropped which in turn is propotional to the hidden increase in pricing, the reduced longevity and the super-duper lightning speed of it all. It’s all pure magic.”

Ha ha, I had forgotten about some of these claims. 🙂

[Gary Huff]
Is this sarcasm?

Yes, but it’s also (if I’m not mistaken) a jab at some of Apple’s past marketing claims. That Macs were faster than PCs… twice as fast in fact. I think there are people who still believe this, no matter what evidence you present to the contrary. And I think this is what Frank is making fun of. Frank, please correct me if I’m wrong.

https://showyou.com/v/y-Yc5Xws9TKlQ/classic-apple-commercial-the-intel-snail

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Phil Hoppes] “…and while you can build a 12 Core Xenon PC with dual Radeon cards I doubt very seriously that it’s performance would even come close to what the current raft of benchmarks are delivering for the MacPro.”

Why would a DIY computer using the same or similar components as a Mac Pro be slower than a Mac Pro? How much faster would my CPUs and graphics cards have to be to equal the MPs performance?

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Oliver Peters] “[Shawn Miller] “Ah, you’re using SF on the Mac. How do you like it?”

I like it a lot. I use it mainly for processing and mastering and some simple editing. With SF, I like that I can use third party plug-ins, too, like Waves and that you can build effects chains that can be applied as presets. Of course, you can do that in Audition, too. Another alternative is iZotope RX3 Advanced, though it’s not a file editor.”

That’s good news. I was curious to know if anyone on this forum would even try it. It’s a good application, I hope others will give it a chance. 🙂

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Oliver Peters] “Mix in X, export an AIFF, run it through SoundForge Pro for “mastering” and then re-import;”

Ah, you’re using SF on the Mac. How do you like it?

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Richard Herd] “To me, “audio mixing” means compression and limiters, and X’s are very superior. I’m not sure how you mix audio, but in 7, I used STP, in CS6 I use Audition, but in X there is no need to leave the NLE, for compression and limiters. They are very clean and amazing, combined with Compound Clips the workflow produces outstanding results, with flexibility, and speed.”

I think Andy already answered this… the difference between mixing and sweetening. But I wanted to add that Premiere also has very good built in limiters/compressors (iZotope’s Multiband compressor comes to mind)… along with EQs, reverbs etc. Where Premiere is more advanced (imo), is in it’s ability to stack channel effects, and to route those channels to multiple sub mixes (mono, stereo, 5.1, adaptive). This allows you to build up very complex mixes fairly easily. I think the only other NLE with better audio capabilities is Vegas.

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Bernard Newnham] “If I was into buying stuff for C4D and AE and didn’t want to just build something from parts, I’d have one of these -“

Are you sure you wouldn’t want a dual proc machine instead… something with as many cores as you could stuff into a box, 🙂

https://www.boldata.com/catalog/478/config

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Walter Soyka] “Maybe. But I think you’re being generous and I wonder if they’re just, you know, wrong. Here’s the text in question:

New levels of computational performance with AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU architecture
Take advantage of exceptional performance in intensive non-3D tasks such as effects processing and video rendering, without having to buy a second board. AMD FirePro cards based on the latest GCN GPU architecture use a 28nm design and deliver increased compute performance to handle such advanced effects and are the perfect match for the new physics tools in CINEMA 4D R14. This makes the effects of aerodynamic forces, springs and breaks look more authentic than ever. In the case of soft shadows, not only memory utilization increases but also the GPU is required to perform more complex calculations to add realism to your scene. The AMD FirePro W5000 offers over 1.2 TFLOPS of single-precision performance and packs the performance of a super computer into a single slot.”

(sigh)… I think you’re right, this is incorrect and misleading. It’s one thing to tout the compute power of AMD’s GPUs, and then talk about rendering and effects in the next paragraph… letting the reader draw the conclusion that one has something to do with the other (bad enough), but this is just untruthful. Thanks for pointing it out, Walter.

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Walter Soyka] ” I am puzzled by the references to GPU-accelerated dynamics calculations; I haven’t heard that anywhere else, and my own experience with dynamics-heavy R14 projects has been that the dynamics simulation caching was a slow, single-threaded, CPU-bound process. If anyone knows more, I’d love to learn.”

Maybe they mean third party plugins like Turbulence 4D? I have to admit though, T4D is the only plugin I know of that uses GPUs for dynamics calculations.

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Gary Huff] “Will people just ultimately end up bored with it knowing that it’s all for entertainment, and otherwise useless?”

I don’t think so, people like having their feelings and opinions validated. Pick the “news” that you agree with, and ignore the facts that make you uncomfortable. Seems to be working so far… 🙂

Shawn