Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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 :)

Thoughts on Mac post future? (and why I think the next Mac Pros will rock for RED)

Bruce Allen said:
.. which means in badly threaded apps like (cough) Adobe After Effects (cough)...
Click to expand...
a topic that I hoped someday we can all jump on. Adobe must have a huge collection of my crash reports from CS4 to CS5 :P aack!! maybe save it for another day...
 
Eric - yep, Adobe After Effects multi-threading issues drive me nuts!

Especially after you play with something like Nuke... which just divides the frame into a bunch of scanlines and sends 'em to each core and threads quite beautifully. Meanwhile After Effects is still plodding away, using about 1/8th of the cores of my machine.

Processing multiple frames at once is a really bad and memory-inefficient hack. I don't want it to render 5 frames slowly. I want it to render just the frame I'm on, quickly. Divide the frame I'm on into little quadrants using an automated region-of-interest tool?... I don't know... it's just depressing. If this thing had a half-modern render engine it could be a Flame killer.

...But then just when you're sick of After Effects, someone makes some plugin that makes cool optical flares that's AE-only and I'm back on it again because it's so damn easy to make a movie title that has that "expensive" look to it, ya know? And I still like the ol' image shatter plugin that they introduced back in 2003 circa AE 5.5... that's what the Clash of the Titans trailer title is - I just slapped a ton of After Effects 2D image shatter passes on a 3D render!

But yes, I despair for AE in the future when we have like 24-core Mac Pros and massively-powerful GPUs... I think Nuke time is coming. I dunno? Someone from Adobe please chime in if you want to. We need multi-threaded rendering within a frame. We need decent GPU support. We need a proper 3D renderer, not this Photoshop nonsense. Great 3D renderers are a dime a dozen - why did Adobe think it was a better idea to write their own non-GPU optimized one from scratch based on what appeared to be an Introduction To Raytracing textbook instead of buying one of the many many amazing ones from companies who are practically giving them away? Plus real Stereo 3D OpenEXR support, like Nuke. Oh and please speed up OpenEXR loading to the point where it is actually usable. Tweaking a 3D render with a bunch of beauty, shadow passes etc in After Effects is actually slower than re-rendering the thing in Maya. I'm serious. I timed it. Feel free to increase the price if you have to.

Alexander Ibrahim said:
Resolve 8 has way more features than I expected.
First off, it appears to be a very reasonable NLE in its own right.
Second, users are building real composites in it, including building complex animated masks and so on.

In other words, Resolve is becoming a viable Online NLE/Finishing application, at least for picture, not "just" a world class color correction suite.
Click to expand...

Alexander, we definitely think alike!

I was thinking about the whole Mac thing again tonight and it comes down to... wherever Resolve goes, so do I!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
I'll most likely discontinue using FCP (in the meantime) and start heading over to adobe as far as the next year is concerned. The only reason I ever went to FCP was the tighter integration it had with the Power PCs in early 2000s.

Premier seems like an obvious choice for me now especially with the seamless integration to After Effects and the whole CS bundles which I use a lot. Probably the only reason why I never left FCP was the familiarity of using it, as well as the direction I thought it was heading 3 years ago with Studio and the types of companies they were acquiring (Final Touch)—I thought they would replace or position themselves to compete with Autodesk, Da Vinci type applications. Boy was I wrong!

But I'm pretty sure Apple has something in the works, they often bounce back, and maybe some things were lost in the shuffle for this "revolutionary" new way of editing. At first I thought it was kind of odd they have an export for youtube, but it makes sense for speeding up the feedback loop which I seem to be still suffering from in terms of getting a rough cut to a client. Traditionally I would export, compress, create a zip file, and FTP it, e-mail a client and copy and paste a link, then make sure that link worked. If they can make that into one step, and have youtube or some online site do that all for you—I would be happy.




Bruce Allen said:
What do you guys think?
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Elan Gunos said:
At first I thought it was kind of odd they have an export for youtube, but it makes sense for speeding up the feedback loop which I seem to be still suffering from in terms of getting a rough cut to a client. If they can make that into one step, and have youtube or some online site do that all for you—I would be happy.
Click to expand...

Hi Elan, That functilonality is pretty much already there in FCP7. Just select the Send to YouTube option. Once you set it up with your account info, it renders your timeline at the proper YouTube setting (same as in Compressor), then uploads it to your YouTube account. They also had settings for MoblleMe, but nobody uses that.
 
Bruce Allen said:
Eric - yep, Adobe After Effects multi-threading issues drive me nuts!

Especially after you play with something like Nuke... which just divides the frame into a bunch of scanlines and sends 'em to each core and threads quite beautifully. Meanwhile After Effects is still plodding away, using about 1/8th of the cores of my machine.
Click to expand...
Is that why im constantly crashing almost every hour in AE?
A few times I had to create a new user in OS X so I can regain the render speed.
Certain docs would take 1.5 hours but when moved to diff user 5 minutes.
CS4 was the worse for me though. There was no explanation as to why it crashed at any given time.
It finally fixed itself over the months and were talking just before CS5 was released.
Then with CS5 it was minimal (6 x a day) but that stupid 2GB file limit screwed up our workflow so now I have to spend resources on moving files around daily.
Im holing off for another month for CS5.5 due to Lion and other purchases, such as Resolve 8 :)

Hey its almost July where is that app?
LOL!
 
keeping this short -

The Final Cut Lull leading up to FCPX broke my heart. I was pass due for a hardware upgrade, realized Premiere Pro was so much more mature at the time, and then crunched the numbers of building a new PC myself VS buying a comperable Mac Pro and, since things were tight and a client was providing me with CS5 Master Suite, I jumped off the Mac bandwagon for the first time in 10 years!

I miss OSX so much, and even now I use my MBP to write this and do everything BUT editing / graphics. But my new quad core i7 machine cost me $1400 less than the Mac Pro would have, and its faster. A lot faster. Here's why:

Mercury Playback Engine.

If you put a GTX 460 or an equivalent Nvidia consumer graphics card, in a PC, using CS5, my renders went from 20+ minutes to less than 2 minutes. It is AMAZING. the only "trick" is either making sure you have a mercury playback approved card, or look up the hack that lets any cuda card work (it took about 15 seconds for me to do it).

So now, until Apple has BOTH FCPX back up to full speed AND every bit as much horsepower and integration, I may be playing in the Crappy WIndows world for awhile.

It really does make me seriously sad to be off OSX. Its so solid and just truly NOT WINDOWS... but my productivity and the power of my tools at the moment are unattainable on the Mac side. :-(
 
George Butterfield said:
Hollywood is now ... out of the equation! Unless Hollywood can unite with Governments and restrict the Internet, (actually by making it an essential right), a great new world of moviemaking has arrived!
Click to expand...

Riiiiight. There are some very smart people in Hollywood and it's true that a situation like the 60's might occur when Hollywood was making Doris Day movies and Easy Rider exploded on the scene. BUT Hollywood adapted. Business is Darwinian and Hollywood isn't just one dinosaur but has some dinosaurs in it that will disappear.
 
Alexander Ibrahim said:
The iPad 2 would have been the top supercomputer in the world in 1993-1994, and its more powerful than desktop computers well into the 2000's.
Click to expand...

Not quite. As a hardware guy, I want to set the record straight.

iPad 2 is about 161 MFLOPS (http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/03/ipad-2-the-ars-review.ars/5). The top supercomputer in 6/1993 was 131 GFLOPS. So the iPad 2 is 0.001% of the performance (http://top500.org/system/performance/651).

At 160GFLOPS, the iPad 2 CPU falls short of of the Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz which did 372 MFLOPS. The 1GHz Thunderbird was released in 2000.
The 500Mhz Slot-A Athlon was 180.79 GFLOPS. That was a 1999 model.

So the safer statement is that the iPad2 is as fast as the fastest desktop 12 years ago (or when Star Wars Episode I was out).

Tegra2 does ~40 MFLOPS (I'm rounding up). Quad G5 did 21 GFLOPS. NVIDIA's Project Stark (2014) is supposed to be 100x as fast as Tegra 2, which means it'll do 4000 MFLOPS, or 4 GFLOPS. Still 1/5th of a Quad G5. I don't think I'd want to try to do any 4K work on a G5...

I agree that tools will melt away in importance, but technology and computational power give the artist the freedom to realize their imagination.

Alan
 
Thanks Alan, that really does put things into perspective. Another interesting number - today's top graphics card - Radeon HD 6990 - has a theoretical throughput of 5099 GFLOPS. If your numbers are accurate, that single graphics card is 30,000 times faster than an iPad 2. Pretty incredible.
 
Alan Dang said:
Not quite. As a hardware guy, I want to set the record straight.

iPad 2 is about 161 MFLOPS (http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/03/ipad-2-the-ars-review.ars/5). The top supercomputer in 6/1993 was 131 GFLOPS. So the iPad 2 is 0.001% of the performance (http://top500.org/system/performance/651).

At 160GFLOPS, the iPad 2 CPU falls short of of the Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz which did 372 MFLOPS. The 1GHz Thunderbird was released in 2000.
The 500Mhz Slot-A Athlon was 180.79 GFLOPS. That was a 1999 model.

So the safer statement is that the iPad2 is as fast as the fastest desktop 12 years ago (or when Star Wars Episode I was out).

Tegra2 does ~40 MFLOPS (I'm rounding up). Quad G5 did 21 GFLOPS. NVIDIA's Project Stark (2014) is supposed to be 100x as fast as Tegra 2, which means it'll do 4000 MFLOPS, or 4 GFLOPS. Still 1/5th of a Quad G5. I don't think I'd want to try to do any 4K work on a G5...

I agree that tools will melt away in importance, but technology and computational power give the artist the freedom to realize their imagination.

Alan
Click to expand...

I overstated matters a bit the iPad 2 would merely be on the top 500 list that late.

You may want to take the rest up with Jack Dongarra, professor of computer science, researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and oh yeah ... the guy who originated and maintains Linpack. He seems to think an iPad 2 runs at 1.6GFlops. Here is the article I read.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/the-ipad-in-your-hand-as-fast-as-a-supercomputer-of-yore/

It seems that Ars is running Linpack in Safari via Javascript ... I'm not so sure that thats the best way to get performance out of a computer. Still the LinPack apps seem to not give the 1.6GFlop answer either.

Maybe that estimate includes utilizing 100% of both cores and the GPU? (Which you can't do in iOS)

Maybe that estimate was a unit error by the journalist, and the other stuff about the top500 was something the journalist added.

<shrug>
 
Alexander Ibrahim said:
I
Maybe that estimate was a unit error by the journalist, and the other stuff about the top500 was something the journalist added.
Click to expand...

Maybe just ike the amount of iron in spinach…
 
Bruce -

I can edit multiple layers of 4K r3d's natively in cs5.5 with effects - no rendering, or transcoding. Shrug. Pretty good for a cheap PC with a gaming GPU wouldn't you say? ;)

I still have to use final cut to edit for clients quite often, so mac is not going away... but I'm just saying. The temptation to stay Mac is getting smaller for me daily. Honestly, it confounds me. I am neither a mac guy nor a PC guy, and I have found places for both of them in my regular workflows.

Currently:

i7
12GB corsair Ram
raid 0 SSD startup drive.
lots of teras of storage
gtx285 (soon to be upgraded)

My machine is a killer. And 2-3 times cheaper than a MacPro :)

Mind you, the new MacBook Air is purty. I'm twiddling the thumbs on that one!

For what it's worth,
Ivan
 
Ivan, I totally agree with you - a cheap gaming PC is the best bang for buck, by far. But are you taking into account the cost of the software you're running?

For example, at work we have around $8000 worth of software per computer (Resolve, Avid Media Composer, Cinema 4D, Adobe Master Collection, $3000 worth of plugins). Plus storage, Blackmagic card, RedRocket card ($4750), Flanders Scientific monitor ($4000), MC Color trackballs ($1000), MC Transport ($500), desk, egonomic chair...

So even though you get best price/performance with a $1000 gaming PC, the chassis and CPU is just a small part of a way-over-$10,000 system.

Sure, there is not a linear performance increase between a $1000 PC and a $4000 Mac Pro.

But we don't think of it that way. We think of it as going from a $15,000 system to a slightly faster $18,000 system. Because you really need to think about the total system (software, hardware, accessories) and the value you get out of it.

Also - when you talk about 4K realtime with lots of effects.... what kinds of effects? And are you talking about 4K full resolution? And are you previewing to just a desktop monitor, or HD-SDI out as well?

On a Mac Pro with Resolve, you can do multiple complex secondary corrections, with nice silk/sharpen effects, realtime GPU accelerated, with HD-SDI out from a Blackmagic card at half res. Bottleneck is actually the RedRocket card. MacPro CPU decode on DaVinci is almost the same speed and feels a bit smoother actually. Most of the time we run half-res R3D decide.

I haven't seen Premiere do anything close to that. Especially when you turn out video output.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Bruce Allen said:
Ivan, I totally agree with you - a cheap gaming PC is the best bang for buck, by far. But are you taking into account the cost of the software you're running?

For example, at work we have around $8000 worth of software per computer (Resolve, Avid Media Composer, Cinema 4D, Adobe Master Collection, $3000 worth of plugins). Plus storage, Blackmagic card, RedRocket card ($4750), Flanders Scientific monitor ($4000), MC Color trackballs ($1000), MC Transport ($500), desk, egonomic chair...

So even though you get best price/performance with a $1000 gaming PC, the chassis and CPU is just a small part of a way-over-$10,000 system.

Sure, there is not a linear performance increase between a $1000 PC and a $4000 Mac Pro.

But we don't think of it that way. We think of it as going from a $15,000 system to a slightly faster $18,000 system. Because you really need to think about the total system (software, hardware, accessories) and the value you get out of it.

Also - when you talk about 4K realtime with lots of effects.... what kinds of effects? And are you talking about 4K full resolution? And are you previewing to just a desktop monitor, or HD-SDI out as well?

On a Mac Pro with Resolve, you can do multiple complex secondary corrections, with nice silk/sharpen effects, realtime GPU accelerated, with HD-SDI out from a Blackmagic card at half res. Bottleneck is actually the RedRocket card. MacPro CPU decode on DaVinci is almost the same speed and feels a bit smoother actually. Most of the time we run half-res R3D decide.

I haven't seen Premiere do anything close to that. Especially when you turn out video output.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
Click to expand...

Bruce - This is my home studio so I have no necessity for much other gear than my eizo, my editing system. my tablet and a pair of kick ass audio monitors. And that does me fine. My work pattern is to get my edit out to clients as quick as possible whilst being arm-length from the fridge and hence beer (j/k)...and given that Premiere integrates so nicely with after effects which I heavily use as well, it is the logical solution for me.

At the studio? Sure - 60 inch pansonic, blackmagic, multiple redrocket, beanbags, stressballs... that has all been fun for me, and hell, why not get the gear to make more money if it is tax deductible.

As I said, I also use Mac for work to this day, and will probably continue to... however, at home I am with PC for workstation, and possibly soon a mac-cy type of laptop for location work... May your MacPro predictions come true and win me over however ;)

Oh and Premiere easily handles primaries, curves, secondaries, sharpening on several layers of the edit at 1/2 rez realtime... Minimal experience with Resolve so I have no opinion on that.

Hey, side note, you know Sayaka, right?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top