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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

New Mac Pro

Anyone planning to purchase RAM from Apple?

I spoke to an Apple rep and he hinted third party options would be available, perhaps not at launch but soon thereafter. We've tended to use Crucial so far and according to their web site, we're looking at circa £600 (approx. $1000) for 4 x 16GB modules. I'm sure Apple's prices will be considerably higher.

If Apple would be sensible with RAM pricing, they'd make more money for sure!

Scott
 
Robert Ruffo New said:
In my opinion a used "box style" Mac Pro is a much better deal.
Click to expand...

It's not a "much better deal," it's just cheaper. Performance wise, at least by all reports, they're not even remotely comparable. Not to mention that you will likely never have a Thunderbolt option on a current Mac Pro.
 
Apple's continuing commitment to the Pro Market

Apple's continuing commitment to the Pro Market

Marc Wielage said:
Traditionally, Apple has never tried to appeal to what I would call "cost-conscious buyers." But they do increase price/performance every year or two. My fear is that they're quickly becoming more of a consumer product company that sells computers as a small sideline, rather than a computer company that makes a lot of money with cell phones. I'm concerned about their long-term commitment to pro users.
Click to expand...

Mark, just wondering about your reasoning here and the basis of your "fear"?

The reason I ask is that I see things slightly differently and in fact, Apple's solid foundation in a huge market place (Consumer Land) actually gives me a high degree of comfort (albeit tempered with frustration at times) .... my reasoning for being delighted that Apple does not rely solely on the very small (tiny, some might say) "professional" content creation market is thus:

1) if you look at a company that is very dedicated to the professional market and has high-quality products which dominate the professional market place you see the dilemma that companies face that are dependent on a niche market. AVID have been making NLEs for 25 years (or so the Media Composer marketing guy at a Burbank professional event said last week) ... ProTools and Media Composer dominate the professional market and "pro users" ... and yet AVID the company hasn't made a Net Profit in over five years. They have not yet published their 2012 Financial results ... their stock is at an all time low .... their senior management team is in disarray and they are laying off staff left, right and center and selling corporate assets to stay afloat. If they don't publish their financial results soon they will be delisted from NASDAQ ... the SEC have already sent them several "reminder" letters ... here's a snippet from the latest AVID Corp Press Release of Nov 20th:

Burlington, MA, November 20, 2013 - Avid Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVID) today announced that on November 14, 2013 it received an anticipated letter from the staff of the NASDAQ Listing Qualifications Department (the “Staff”) noting that the Company was not in compliance with NASDAQ Listing Rule 5250(c)(1) due to its failure to file on a timely basis its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2013, which filing deficiency could serve as an additional basis for the delisting of the Company’s stock from The NASDAQ Global Select Market. As previously announced, the NASDAQ Listing Qualifications Hearings Panel (the “Panel”) granted the Company’s request for continued listing on NASDAQ through March 14, 2014, by which date the Company must evidence compliance with all applicable requirements for continued listing on NASDAQ, including the filing of all required periodic reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Click to expand...

See their Investor Relations page for more details on their five year track record:

http://ir.avid.com/financials-statements.cfm

2) At the event last week, the AVID marketing guy even made a point of stressing the fact that the latest version of Media Composer only costs $999 .... there was a time, not so long ago, when an AVID NLE system (hardware and software) would have cost over $50,000.

3) Unless you can charge high prices for premium products (for example, FilmLight with BaseLight) reliance on a wide consumer market for financial stability is critical ... look at the difference it means for a product like DaVinci Resolve now that it's a part of a broad-based technology company like Blackmagic compared to when it used to cost half a million dollars per seat and was only purchased by heavy-iron post houses ... the original DaVinci company eventually went bankrupt too.

4) at our monthly 'X Pro' meeting we discuss both the broader economic trends facing our industry as well as the latest and greatest in Apple's product roadmap ... it's been interesting to note the sea-change in people's attitude towards Apple and FCP X over the last nine months ... at NAB 2013 we were greeted with hostility and skepticism when we promoted our '4K Made Easy' platform based on FCP X and DaVinci Resolve ... now, there seems to be a much broader acceptance that Apple's approach is worth taking seriously.

5) the other smart thing that Apple is doing is that they do have a truly consumer level product called iMovie 2013 which costs $14.99 from the App Store ... millions of people worldwide are using iMovie 2013 to cut their YouTube home videos on ... guess what those millions of users are going to upgrade to when they get frustrated with the limitations of iMovie? ... you betcha! ... FCP X.

There's an interesting article by a guy who peeked under the hood of iMovie 2013 ... definitely worth reading ... not saying that he's got it right or wrong but wouldn't it make total financial and engineering sense to have the same underlying software code for two products that do very similar things? .... just saying.

http://alex4d.com/notes/item/imovie-2013-is-consumer-ui-on-fcpx

6) but the really smart thing that Apple is doing for the Pro market is not monopolizing all the functionality you need in one monolithic product ... they've focused on the key functionality of their next gen NLE and have published the APIs to allow other smart software developers to add functionality around the core set of services ... at the Burbank event last week after AVID and Adobe had finished giving their pitches on their NLEs, Philip Hodgetts (CEO at Intelligent Assistance, Inc) and I went over the functionality of FCP X and wider ecosystem available to professional editors and people were amazed at what you could do with FCP X now ... then you tell the it only costs $299 per license and you that can install as many seats as you like from the same Apple ID account all for $299 and then they start scratching their heads in true amazement.

There were over 60 professional people in the audience last week and I was surprised by how little they knew about FCP X and where Apple is going with Mavericks and Xsan as well as the Pro Apps ... I did some questioning of the audience and what transpired was that many of the attendees had looked at FCP X 10.0 about two years ago and come to the conclusion that Apple "was not serious" about the Pro market ... and quite frankly I agree ... Apple totally screwed up the way they launched FCP X and killed off FCP 7 (there's no excusing Corporate hubris) and many professional Apple editors immediately switched to MC or PremPro and have never revisited FCP X in the intervening 26 months ... however, once the audience understood the power of the latest version of FCP X and the available tools and plug-ins they were gobsmacked (English expression meaning their jaws dropped).

The combination of 64 bit Mavericks with 64 bit FCP X and Logic Pro X running on the nMP super-computer is going to be totally revolutionary in terms of price and performance ... Apple is one of the few technology companies that has totally understood the implications of Moore's Law and is building a platform for end to end video acquisition, processing and distribution ... make no mistake about it, these guys are serious about the "professional market" ... the only difference between them and AVID is that APPLE wants to make a profit servicing it.

At our special 'X Pro Open House' in mid February, we'll be highlighting the complete end-to-end Apple solution for 4K workflow featuring the new Mac Pro cylinders, FCP X 10.1, Logic Pro 10, Xsan 3 and the integration with DaVinci Resolve 10 .... if you're a Pro User involved in digital content creation and delivery, you won't want to miss it!

Stay posted for more details:

http://www.lumaforge.com/index.html
 
Neil W. Smith: Mark, just wondering about your reasoning here and the basis of your "fear"?

The reason I ask is that I see things slightly differently and in fact, Apple's solid foundation in a huge market place (Consumer Land) actually gives me a high degree of comfort (albeit tempered with frustration at times) .... my reasoning for being delighted that Apple does not rely solely on the very small (tiny, some might say) "professional" content creation market is thus:

1) if you look at a company that is very dedicated to the professional market and has high-quality products which dominate the professional market place you see the dilemma that companies face that are dependent on a niche market. AVID have been making NLEs for 25 years (or so the Media Composer marketing guy at a Burbank professional event said last week) ... ProTools and Media Composer dominate the professional market and "pro users" ... and yet AVID the company hasn't made a Net Profit in over five years. They have not yet published their 2012 Financial results ... their stock is at an all time low .... their senior management team is in disarray and they are laying off staff left, right and center and selling corporate assets to stay afloat. If they don't publish their financial results soon they will be delisted from NASDAQ ...

____________________________________________________________________________________________


Excellent Analysis on Avid, and hence the reason why we didn't pay the $1000 this year to upgrade
our Pro Tools rig from Version 10 to Version 11...

I saw Avid's new CEO do an interview earlier this year, and said, freeze the budget, he's simply a placeholder for some kind of transition...

We considered the upgrade fees to ProTools 11 exorbitant in relation to the value proposition and marketplace (which includes Logic Pro X),
and consider if Pro tools 10 was good enough to mix Dolby Atmos mixes for the Hobbit and Life of Pi last year,
we can get by for now on it until we know if Avid is going to be in business in what manner by the end of 2014,
and who will own their pieces next if/when that occurs...
 
Last edited:
Marc Wielage said:
My fear is that they're quickly becoming more of a consumer product company that sells computers as a small sideline, rather than a computer company that makes a lot of money with cell phones. I'm concerned about their long-term commitment to pro users.
Click to expand...

When the iPod came out I shared your concern, but they continue to assure us of their commitment and since then they have continued to develop and release some pretty intense hardware and software not withstanding a legit iMovie comparison or two.

I take it then that you are still unconvinced of their intentions RE: FCPX. Is that what drives your concerns? A thriving consumer division in an of itself is certainly no real reason for concern. As others point out that can be the engine that keeps the company alive. It did for Eastman Kodak.
 
Neil,

Always interested if you could put one of Those sessions available on the web for us, Europeans.
I'm already a happy FCPX user, and working with R3D's once in a while, but a lot of that help came from seeing Sam Mestman's great tutorials. Would be interested in seeing Those sessions you talk about too. I wouldn't mind paying for it if necessary.
 
Feb 15th X Pro Open House

Feb 15th X Pro Open House

Mathieu Ghekiere said:
Neil,

Always interested if you could put one of Those sessions available on the web for us, Europeans.
I'm already a happy FCPX user, and working with R3D's once in a while, but a lot of that help came from seeing Sam Mestman's great tutorials. Would be interested in seeing Those sessions you talk about too. I wouldn't mind paying for it if necessary.
Click to expand...

Good suggestion, Mathieu .... will definitely do it for our special February X Pro Open House event ... we'll have all the latest Apple gear by then and be able to talk about some of the projects we're working on and the work we're doing in our Workflow Integration Lab to develop the Digital Content Platform ... as well as filming the keynote speakers we'll do some mini interviews with the vendors and show you some of the cool things we're doing in our Workflow Integration Lab.

Glad you're a happy user of FCP X ... it continually amazes me how many people tried it out when it first launched and then never tried it out again ... it's really come a long way in 26 months. If Apple had launched 10.0.9 version 26 months ago we wouldn't be having half the friction we have now.

Going to be fun to take the new version out for a run on the new MacPro cylinder ... it's been a long time coming but Apple has really re-thought and re-engineered their whole approach to professional editing and finishing ... I'm sure there's going to be lots of folks who'll grumble about the new set-up but for those adventurous creatures who see it as the next wave of IT driven post it's going to be a tremendous opportunity to enhance their creative experience.

As soon as we have our nMP up and running we'll post some pixs and benchmarks.

Neil
 
I know. I switched for personal projects at 10.0.3, but still had a love/hate relationship with the software.
By 10.0.6 I switched completely, and also decided to switch the complete facility where I work freelance to X.
If Apple had released 10.0.3 or 10.0.6 to the general public, it would have been a completely different situation. (yes, I was one of those people who bought it and asked a refund. But I retried at 10.0.3 and found a lot to love. And it's a cliche but it's true: there are a lot of features that X doesn't have, but you also learn to think different, especially timeline-wise. Once you 'get' that, and learn how to use X in a different way, it's really a great app to use).

We are using Retina Macbook Pro's, tricked out first generation, with a Mac Mini Server connected to Pegasus RAIDS. It's a great combination and pretty low cost. We came from older Mac Pro's with FCP7 and with Local drives to edit on.
 
Pretty fly for a dead guy

Pretty fly for a dead guy

Do you really think that at this point Apple is incapable of developing/marketing consumer gadgets and professional apps/hardware at the same time?

That might have been true a couple years ago, but now that Apple is one of the largest corporations on the planet and is sitting on a pile of cash that would make Smaug blush I'm willing to bet they have enough organizational capacity to pull it off. From a PR perspective, even if the "pro" side only made marginal profits, it would make sense to make a super cool computer just to burnish the brand. I believe the auto makers call it the "halo" effect. Just sayin'

Cheers - #19
 
Apple philosophy change was the size of the sandbox they give us kids. They really shrunk the Sandbox with FCX at launch which had a direct effect on their customer's ventures. That changed the trust level between company and client. That is not earned back very quickly.
 
[h=2]http://www.macrumors.com/


Mac Pro Build-to-Order Upgrade Pricing Revealed[/h]Monday December 16, 2013 2:28 pm PST by Eric Slivka
mac_pro_2013-250x422.jpg
Late last week, we noted that Apple's business sales staff have been offering customers price quotes for build-to-order configurations of the new Mac Pro, providing the first glimpse at what these machines will cost beyond the$2999/$3999 base configurations shown on Apple's site.

Since our initial report, we've heard from a few other business customers who received price quotes, and that information has helped us to piece together what we expect retail pricing to be for the various upgrades. Due to varying discounts for business customers included in the quotes and in some cases currency conversions that we have attempted to take into account, we consider our listed prices to be estimates, but they should be very close to Apple's retail pricing for U.S. customers.

For upgrades beyond the $3999 high-end stock configuration, here is our estimated pricing (all prices relative to the stock model):

CPU (Stock: 3.5GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5)
- 3.0GHz 8-core: +$1500
- 2.7GHz 12-core: +$3000

Graphics (Stock: Dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB GDDR5)
- Dual AMD FirePro D700 with 6 GB GDDR5: +$600

RAM (Stock: 16GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC - 4x4GB)
- 32GB (4x8GB): +$400
- 64GB (4x16GB): +$1600

Flash Storage (Stock: 256GB PCIe-based)
- 512GB: +$300
- 1TB: +$800

As an example, for a customer looking to buy an 8-core Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, the machine would cost $3999 base + $1500 processor upgrade + $400 RAM upgrade + $300 storage upgrade, yielding a total price of $6199.

At the lower end, Apple's $2999 base Mac Pro model carries a quad-core Intel Xeon processor, 12 GB of RAM, and dual AMD FireCore D300 graphics, compared to the $3999 high-end stock configuration with 6-core processor, 16 GB of RAM, and D500 graphics.

We have not seen any exact breakdowns of how much each of those changes contributes to the overall $1000 price difference between stock configurations, but expect roughly half of the price difference to be represented by the processor upgrade, a somewhat smaller amount for the graphics upgrade, and a relatively nominal amount in the range of $100 for the bump in RAM.

The new Mac Pro remains scheduled to launch sometime this month, but Apple has yet to announce an exact date for either initial orders or availability.
 
nice GPU price!
 
Prices are not too bad, really. The 12-core CPU is the one option that seems out of line. Although, this just makes the decision to go for the 8-core that much easier. I was on the fence trying to decide between 12 and 8 core, but I think the $1500 additional to go from 8 to 12 just makes it easier to stay with 8, especially since the base internal clock on the 8 is 300MHz faster.

PCIe SSD pricing is better than I expected. GPUs are what they are and Fire GL D600's are no slouch GPUs and pricey in the regular PC world too.

RAM pricing is right where I expected it to be. 4 x 16GB 1866MHz RDIMMs should be right about $1K. So about 60% more than what it *should* be for the upgrade, but their pricing is right in line with HP, Dell, other workstation vendors so I wasn't expecting a deal here. Or anything different. In a couple months' time when this RAM is more plentiful and available from OWC and Crucial, I would probably buy the third-party RAM. For now, I'm planning to just order it from Apple so I can get it here and everything is ready to go.

So, I think for me and most R3D related workflow tasks or general workstation use. The 8-core is going to be the sweet spot. With 1TB PCIe storage, dual D600's and 64GB for me.

I would recommend the 12-core to people who have ample room in their budget and who will be spending most of their time in apps that can make use of that many cores regularly. For a system primarily used for Resolve or 3D apps like Maya where the extra cores can be readily utilized, the 12-core could be their ideal system. I will be running Resolve and Maya myself, but I run lots of different apps and the apps I use the most are not going to benefit from 12 cores over 8, especially when most will use fewer than 8 cores / 16 threads and could benefit from the faster clock speed of the 8-core CPU. The 6-core also has an advantage there as well, but I think 6 cores and 12 threads is cutting it a bit tight with some current softwares like Adobe CC.
 
Interesting take on the "sweet spot" I am also trying to figure out what I am going to get, should I stay with the 8 core and spend money on Ram? It seems like the highest end graphics is a must, anyone else out there have any suggestions?
 
Sweet, I need one ASAP
 
Any word on a shiny new monitor to come with this thing? Would love to see them release an updated monitor in the very near future.
 
I'm thinking 8 core, dual D700s 6GB, 1 TB flash storage, 32 GB RAM.

I fit Jeff's category of folks who just don't spend enough time in programs that can leverage the extra cores - so I'm Dick Van Patten (Eight is Enough ;-). GPU muscle will get a workout in a lot of image processing apps so that's not where I want to scrimp - plus, I'll happily take every GB of GDDR5 vRAM I can get get to keep 4K frames moving. Flash storage right on the PCI bus has the potential to speed up so many operations - I wonder if it could stand in for RAM cache in AE? Or RCX-Pro? I'll bump the RAM as soon as the price returns to earth, but will live with 32 to start.

Cheers - #19
 
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