Larry Jordan believes in a new Mac Pro...

Redering farms

All the big boys use rendering farms with UNIX in the cloud. Desktop power and workstations is so 80's ..... Mac Pro is just a consumer product that will be a Mac Pro Mini soon.

http://www.slashfilm.com/cool-stuff-a-look-at-pixar-and-lucasfilms-renderfarms/

http://www.rebusfarm.net/en/

Headtalk said:

All the big boys use rendering farms with UNIX in the cloud. Desktop power and workstations is so 80's ..... Mac Pro is just a consumer product that will be a Mac Pro Mini soon.

http://www.slashfilm.com/cool-stuff-a-look-at-pixar-and-lucasfilms-renderfarms/

http://www.rebusfarm.net/en/

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Yet all of the artists for the "big boys" still use high powered workstations to design and create.

Don't get me wrong, they're great, but there's more to the equation than sending a batch render out to a render farm.

clamnectar said:

Really? The same Larry Jordan who said FCPX was going to be the best? His faith in Apple's blandly positive PR statements is laughable.

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While he definitely keeps a positive tone to his commentary ( he wouldn't get pre-release looks at FCP if he was constantly critical. ) not sure where the "great" comes from

October 2010 ( probably before he saw it )

"...’Im not saying that Final Cut can’t be improved. It certainly can and I hope it is. But I am saying there are a lot of steps between top-of-mind and dead. ..."
http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1284


Also in October 2010

" ... Philip Hodgetts has written a detailed, and I think, essentially accurate account of what’s going on behind the scenes with Final Cut Studio.

Neither he, nor I, are privy to any Apple secrets. Philip is just very, very good at reading tea leaves.

You can read it here. [ actually here: http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2010/09/what-should-apple-do-with-final-cut-pro/ ] ..."
http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1270


After the NAB demo

"... How could anything that radically different equal what we already had in Final Cut Pro 7?

I knew this new version was far more than iMovie – but, at that time, I didn’t think it was Final Cut Pro, either.

Its no secret that Apple gave me rare access to the software by inviting me to a demo of an early build of the software in February this year. However, what is not known, is that they also gave me permission to contact their development team to discuss the new version.

After NAB, and after my presentation at that April LAFCPUG meeting, I finally had time to follow-up on Apple’s offer. And I did. A lot.

I peppered them with questions:
..."
http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1498

If there is something to fail Larry Jordan with is why didn't he start peppering them with questions sooner. He waited many months. I think Apple picked a number of people to talk to that didn't do much talking back ( probably in part due fear of loosing access for future previews and also in part they know isn't really a open discussion of general direction. ) . Apple should have gotten alot more "don't you think the release process is going to blow up in your face" commentary before the release. There were lots of assumptions that dotting the i's and crossing the t's was going to be done and it wasn't. And frankly never going to expose that if don't ask questions.




Or after the announcement and release he had lots of positive things to say, but no he didn't join in the silliness of the "Apple hates Pros" bandwagon.


" ... THINGS I DON’T LIKE

Final Cut Pro X is very impressive, but it isn’t perfect. There are a variety of design decisions that I disagree with – and I’ve shared these many times with Apple.

There’s no multicam support.

The audio capabilities in FCP X are far superior to FCP 7 in terms of technical specs and filters. But a completely unintuitive method for adding audio cross-dissolves and lack of support for track-based audio mixing leaves me fondly missing the power of Soundtrack Pro.

The process of adding an audio cross-fade is dangerous, unintuitive and dumb.

Worse, there’s no native way to export a project to send it to either Soundtrack Pro or ProTools for sound mixing.

I’ve already mentioned there is no native ability to layback to tape using timecode control. ..."
http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1505


So this "it is going to be great" (implicitly in one giant leap) thing .... when did that happen? Different? yes. An evolutionary major shift? Yes.

If I didn't need a new Mac Pro myself, I would almost enjoy it if Larry Jordan were completely wrong about this one, just for the comedy value.

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He is wrong in promoting the notion that somehow Apple "has to" do a Mac Pro because of some myriad of indirect entanglements with the rest of the product line up. They don't. If there is no market to support the Mac Pro by itself it will likely stop.

It appears that Apple is going to take another shot at finding out if there is one or not. But they aren't going to do it "just because". The rest of the Mac line up gets more capable every year. Over time that shows no signs of stopping. The upper end of that line up has always been eating away at the lower end of the Mac Pro line up. Apple will loose some if don't have a Mac Pro but won't loose all.

I just wish Apple had asked more actual editors about FCPX instead of digital media "gurus" like Larry Jordan. For every smart thing he says, he misses the point three times. Let's put it this way - if Larry Jordan believes in something, my skepticism increases.

deconstruct60 said:

It really wasn't changes as much as simple economics. The problem with most of the distributed file systems is far most costs and availablity to clients than anything else.

All PCs ( Winows, OS X , Linux ) come being able to mount SMB/CIFS. AFS isn't that expensive to add (if not already built-in). NFS is in a similar context also (probably 'free' or not hard to add). These are the common NAS export interfaces. It is all ready to go "out of the box" for vast majority of clients which will consume/produce files.

In contrast, until relatively recently the distributed file systems were prohibitively priced. $500-900 for a file system per client??? Whole operating systems don't even cost that much. Extremely few folks are going to find a value proposition in paying more for something that has substantially narrower scope. Plus throw in on top of that some much higher per client network layer that many SANs lean toward.


Fine grained locking and arbitration isn't that hard to add to NAS (e.g., NFS v4.0 pNFS extension ).

NAS traffic can travel at greater than or equal to 10GbE and higher speeds just as well as SAN traffic so there is no real speed gap now either. (speed is not really the heart of the difference but often folk's "rule of thumb" made it so, because historically there have been pragmatic gaps. )

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Is there a reason why you think you are disagreeing when you repeat what you are 'disagreeing' with?

You are clearly a capable and intelligent individual, and it's because of that I wonder why you constantly strive to bend my (and other's) statements to be things that they aren't. You might want to try and undertstand what people are saying rather than parsing their statements for keywords to disagree with. What about the concept of SANs isn't resultant from a timesharing computing mindset that was once defacto? It went out of favor with computing changes (economics, as you put it), but it's coming back now with the cloud, essentially. All of this parallels NAS' of course.


And by the way, I'm struggling to understand how you can read my post and bother to say that it wasn't 'changes in the industry' but 'economics'. It seems like a semantic point at best.

freejazz-man said:

Is there a reason why you think you are disagreeing when you repeat what you are 'disagreeing' with?

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If you haven't noticed the pattern, deconstruct60 always disagrees. Every post is "actually, you are wrong. __________________." Regardless of the amount of agreement

freejazz-man said:

Is there a reason why you think you are disagreeing when you repeat what you are 'disagreeing' with?

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Because I'm not.

It went out of favor with computing changes (economics, as you put it), but it's coming back now with the cloud, essentially. All of this parallels NAS' of course.

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Economics existed long before the computing industry did. They are not the same forces at all. The devices and/or the software are not the prices charged for each. SAN file systems were not priced on technology forces. They were priced on what folks thought they could get folks to pay ( with very large and substantive profits margins. Which goes to show just how decoupled it is from the technology).

Headtalk said:

All the big boys use rendering farms with UNIX in the cloud. Desktop power and workstations is so 80's ..... Mac Pro is just a consumer product that will be a Mac Pro Mini soon.

http://www.slashfilm.com/cool-stuff-a-look-at-pixar-and-lucasfilms-renderfarms/

http://www.rebusfarm.net/en/

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This only matters if every "Pro" is someone who has a workflow supported by rendering farms.

My work, for example, isn't well served by clusters about 70% of the time, so I rather like my high firepower desktop.

yup, and NAS's are only popular today because everyone figured out the trick

I guess you didn't really get my point about attempting to understand someone as opposed to making trite semantic responses that are contextually relevant only in appearance.