I like how you use the word "winddowns" as a put-down in the same post where you talk about having to wait 20 minutes to transcode 3 minutes of footage on OS X. I that is not a "downer" I don't know what is. I hope you're doing what you do purely as a hobby, and not allowing anyone to pay for your choice in "tools".
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Steve Jobs on Lack of Firewire in MacBooks
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As a professional photographer, I use Windows and Photoshop on a standalone computer, that I only connect to peripheral devices and the internet about once a year - merely for software updates. I keep using that one PC (an Acer), because I'm used to work with AcDSee for different rescaling and renaming tasks, and that wonderful programme does not exist (yet) for Mac. In these strictly controlled and limited circumstances Winddowns works OK, although it often happens that my back-up harddisk is not recognised and that Photoshop shuts down.
My customers pay for that computer, as well as for my two Mac's. I bought the two macs because video filming and editing is my hobby, and trying to do that on a winddowns-based computer is pure masochism, believe me. I never had one editing session that ran smoothly. Not with Adobe Première Pro, not with Elements, not with Pinnacle. On the Macs, transcoding may take some time, but at least I get a result. Moreover, I just transcoded AVCHD to help a friend. I myself am working with HD-tapes, captured in the conventional manner, and that process is not slower than the same workflow on a PC. Conclusion: the day I stop my photo agency, out goes the PC. I'll even throw a party to celebrate the event.
I teach high school video production. We have had a mixed lab of 20 Macs and 10 PC's (For next year I had them order 30 new PC's). I run Premiere Pro CS3 on the PC's and have fewer freezes than I do with FCP on the Macs. That said, we don't have many problems on either. We use Canopus' Procoder for transcoding on the PC's and it is a dream. No long sessions like the Macs.
For my own side event video business, I have now converted everything over to PC and I'm using Grass Valley's Edius for my primary editor. The transition from a nearly twenty-five year primarily Mac user to a primarily PC user has been seamless and painless. It just took a while to get over the sense of loss one has when they have been a loyal user of a product for so long. When I finally came to the conclusion that they were nothing more than tools, I chose the tools that best suited my needs. Unfortunately, that was no longer the Mac.
If you're having serious problems with your PC, something isn't configured correctly, because in 2009 there are little differences between the capabilities of the two editing programs and how they function on their respective platforms.
I'm afraid I just cannot share your enthousiasm. I'm not having problems with 'my PC', but I have been having problems with numerous different PC's, all bought brandnew, installed by professionals and operating with state of the art hard- and software. I'm glad to read that you do not experience the same misery, but for me, after 20 years of aggravation and unreliability, there's no way back.
The only thing I regret is that I didn't make the switch much earlier. I could have, because I owned an advertising agency in the 90ies and at the time, the agencies art directors were all working on Mac's. Solely for price reasons I purchased PC's for the rest of us, commercial and administration crew. Big mistake, I realise now. I lost count of all the instances in which these machines let us down.
Anyway, from the bottom of my heart: all the best!
Just took a look at their site, their 'key features' list is basically everything thats wrong or missing from Final Cut Pro.
I'm not wedded to any platform or software, and will mix and match as needed. The lack of realtime native multi format support is a huge pain for me, I have DV PAL, HDV PAL, HDV NTSC and AVCHD NTSC, and I expect to be able to bring them all together, and export to anything from youtube blurry to 1080p60 for Playstation 3, without constantly rendering and transcoding, or requiring 10x the original in HDD space (AVCHD -> AIC .mov @ 1080i60 .... grrrrr).
For now though, Apple still have me hooked, iMovie's Event viewer is compelling enough for organising / browsing 100+ hours of over a decades worth of footage, and FC Studio is a pretty powerful bundle, if a little unwieldily at times. I wait patiently for one more cycle of iMovie and FCP, putting up with their deficiencies, and hoping for native multiformat support, and a truly format-less timeline (not the hack they put in for FCS2) but I am definitely starting to look about a lot more, and it does not have to be on OS X. (Although, it would be nice if it was......)
Vegas Platimum, Edius Neo, Premiere Elements / Production etc. etc. there is a lot of affordable choice - which is cool, when last I looked around in March '05, the only HDV native editor was FCP, so I bought it. Good to see plenty has changed in the last 4 years!
Edius is great! if you get a chance to use it or go where it's being demo'd, do it. Many NBC stations around the country have picked it up because of it's real "realtime" and multi-format capabilities. Since my event video business is part-time and I frequently use mulitiple cameras, it's nice to have something I can playback for a client to show a rough cut that plays flawlessly to a monitor. I couldn't do it FCP or PPro CS3.
And that was part of the problem. You can't get a $400 desktop and expect it to perform at a high, reliable level.
Apparently we've gone in opposite directions. Nice meeting you in the passing.
And that was part of the problem. You can't get a $400 desktop and expect it to perform at a high, reliable level.
Apparently we've gone in opposite directions. Nice meeting you in the passing.
Make no mistake: the PC's we bought were, although less expensive than Macs, top of the line computers with extra RAM added, and OR from renowned makes OR assembled by professionals. The last one was a top notch Acer that cost us 1000,- euros, blu-ray writer included.
Nice meeting you too.
I think my point, is that if you have gone tapeless for new footage (and I have) now is a great time to bring all your tapes onto a drive, and give that old footage the same accessibility, flexibility and backup options as the new file based formats give you. Use your existing machine (that has firewire), and a cheap, huge drive, and be ready for whatever happens going forward.
I did all this so I could (re) discover footage I have not had time to look at since I shot it and chucked it in a box - there are now no more tapes to discover, I made sure I got it all, and I now shoot tapeless - which eventually, everyone will too, from the super pro's shooting 4K HD uncompressed direct to RAID (e.g. RED ONE), to pro's shooting to P2's flash cards, to consumers like me shooting 25mbit/sec AVCHD to SDHC cards.
There are devices that can record digital tape (DV, HDV) to disk (Sony make one) and then you can mount that HDD, and use ClipWrap to create .mov's - so it would not be impossible to get tapes onto a firewire-less computer, just rather inconvenient and expensive!
However, once you have files, the internal formats just become a software problem, you no longer need to worry about keeping the physical media intact, and devices to read them working. Just keep copying the files. (TimeMachine, Mozy etc. etc.)
Like you, I really hope they put Firewire back onto the MacBook, or better still, put ExpressCard/34 onto all their computers and then we can add whatever interfaces we each need, I would like eSata on an iMac, for instance. (Or any machine other than the MacPro, for that matter)
I think it was too soon to lose firewire, but then people said that about the 1998 iMac not having a floppy disk drive, and only having USB and FireWire instead of Serial, Parallel and SCSI, and that bold move prompted a shift away from legacy ports for the entire computing and peripheral industry.
It's funny you mention "back-up options" as a 'pro' to going tapeless when in actuality reliable archives of tapeless formats is w/o a cheap and easy answer. HDDs fail and aren't designed for archival usage. DVDs are too small. BR-DVDs are bigger but unproven. The consensus among professionals is that the best archival solution for tapeless acquisition is... drum roll... data tape (oh, the irony). Obviously a big hurdle here is the initial cost of a data tape drive. Using your shot video tape as an archive is inexpensive, reliable, and not prone to catastrophic failure (a bad spot on a tape won't make the whole tape unplayable and in the unlikely event of an entire tape going bad you just lose that tape not whole library of tapes). Unlike a HDD where if your 1TB drive dies you can kiss all of the data on it good-bye unless you pay a data recovery service to try and get it back for you.
Also, I'm not sure why you think Apple is moving away from FW when, except for the shiny MB and MBA, all of their machines have FW and some new machines have been bumped up to FW800 only.
Lethal
Its not that ironic - data tape is much more suited to archival storage than video tape is, its much larger (400Gb/LTO-3 vs. 13Gb for a video tape), and dramatically faster (LTO-3 at 250Gb/hour compared to DV/HDV at 13Gb/hour) (I picked LTO-3 at random, there are several)
I had 10 year old DV tapes that were in bad shape, high quality tape, recorded once, stored well, but still dropped a fair amount on capture, most of the tapes were perfect though, I'm happy to report, but they were still only 1 copy in one location. A fire/flood/theft could have lost it all.
Or, umm, buy 2 drives, and copy the data onto the second one... (did I miss something?) - To do the same with 100 hours of video (tape to tape) is an enormous and time consuming task (Camera + Deck + lots of rewinding, checking etc.) not to mention the cost of 100 good quality video tapes....
I don't think they are either, but I can see how I might of come across as thinking that, but this (huge) thread is about Steve job's assertion that consumer videographers don't need firewire anymore - and my post was about how I've taken this opportunity to get rid of video tapes, as I, like Jobs said, don't shoot new footage onto them anymore.
I was trying to say how liberating it was, to have all that footage well organised by iMovie and available on a drive, rather than a bunch of badly labelled, unused, unseen video tapes in a box.
And I made a copy of my 100+ hours of effort onto a second drive. It copied overnight, while I slept. And, if I was really paranoid, I could do that again, and again, and again.....
I find it pretty ironic when I hear people parroting (and I mean in general, this isn't directed towards you) about how tape as a format is dead only to later realize that the best format for archiving all of their tapelessly acquired media is tape.
Mirrored HDDs are the only way I'd even remotely think about storing things on HDDs long term, but you've still got to spin both drives up periodically to keep them in proper working order and take into account migrating them to new drives, or new technology, every 5-10 years as well as worry about bad batches of HDDs, or firmware in the recent case of Seagate, turning entire shipments of drives into unstable time bombs. But the same is true for most digital archiving methods, having to migrated everything every 5-10 years, because the technology is changing so fast. It wouldn't require too much effort for me to find a place to play back video tape from 40-some-odd years ago and convert it into a modern tape format but good luck doing the same w/software.
From a workflow stand point, personally, my favorite format out there right now is Sony's XDCAM/HD. It shoots to professional quality BR discs so you get the speed of tapeless w/the ease of archiving of tape. And in a professional situation you have a physical piece of media that you can hand off to a client at the end of the day if need be. Once flash memory gets cheap enough that an hour or two of storage can be had for $3-5 then I think all the advantages of tape will be surpassed because you can afford to use a card once then put it on the shelf as a master copy.
Lethal
Agreed. But I don't see it as a sign of Apple beginning to systematically remove FW from all its computers.
Lethal
Yes. The inclusion of FW800 in all computers (but 2 for different reasons) I believe signals the strong position FW has on the Mac. If Apple can use it as the feature that differentiate two products, it must be valued.
Having only 1 FireWire port on iMacs is a huge loss, especially if you want to run a FireWire 400 chain and a FireWire 800 chain. Personally, I'd rather have 3 FireWire 800 ports on an iMac.
There IS ALREADY a dangerous trend towards removing FireWire from Macs and we need to let Apple know in-no-uncertain-terms, that this will not be tolerated.
________________________
Capitalism is were you give people's taxes to corporations. Socialism is where you give the taxes back to the people.
There was a move here in Australia to charge everyone 1% tax and the rich and the corporations didn't want it, because they'd be paying more tax than they actually are now!
FW is not the feature differentiating them. THere is screen size, resolution, Expresscard slot, and - although I'm not sure if this is still the case - kb backlighting differentiating them too. So to pick one of those, and make believe that FW is "the" differentiator is really reading something in there that isn't there.
To make matters worse, for some of us, the 15" and 17" MacBooks don't even have FW. Well, they may have the port, but because of the cheapo chipset used, it's as useful as a speaker cabinet without a driver.
Edit: They have also removed firewire (in essense a hub) from the 24" Cinema Display.
Going on pretending they firewire is still massively present is rather optimistic, bordering on blind naivity.
When's the last time you sent apple feedback about adding Firewire to the next revisions?
Apple Feedback: Enhancement Request
Write them and tell them you want to see Firewire 800 in the next revision!
Apple Feedback: Enhancement Request
Write them and tell them you want to see Firewire 800 in the next revision!
Screen size can be an advantage or disadvantage as it makes the foot print for the notebook larger, not everyone wants that. You've already said Expresscard slot doesn't work very well. Higher resolution while it might be good to have is not usually needed on a notebook that can be connected to an external monitor. The MB has kb backlighting as well now.
Apple: "Sure they're already different, but why not throw FW/lack there of in there and see how many more people will buy the MBP instead of the MB simply due to wanting/needing FW."
Of course not everyone wants a given size and/or resolution. Hence me saying that it's _also_ something that differentiates them (i.e. that there are differences). It has nothing to do with me thinking one "version" is preferred over another.
Under OS X it doesn't. It works fine under windows. Again, it's still something that differentiates just as much as the - to me - almost useless Agere-equipped FW port.
Again, I'm not talking about taste or preferences. I'm saying that there are MORE differences than the respective inclusion and exclusion of firewire. I am saying that Firewire is not the only thing that is different between models.
Oh, okay. I was in doubt about that one. Thanks.
And I'm saying, that since there are more than firewire differentiating the "pro" from its smaller sisters, you don't know if people bought it because of the Agere FW, the expresscard slot, the bigger screen, the higher resolution or something else.
Pretending that all else is equal and fw is the only thing differing between models has nothing to do with reality. And your post prove it: You talk about preferences and how some might want something else. That is, in effect, backing up my argument.
While only having one port can be a pain in the butt since you'd need to buy a FW hub to plug more tings in the functionality hasn't really changed because all Macs only use one bus for their FW ports. So if you have have 1 800 port and 1 400 port and you have devices plugged into both you are basically running two devices at FW400 speeds over a single "connection" since both ports share the same bus.
You can do a lot of a/v work w/a smaller screen, no expresscard slot, and a kb w/o a back light. You can't do a lot of a/v work w/o FW. That's not reading into something that isn't there that is a fact. I'm not sure why you are so resistant to the idea that Apple does things that for-profit companies do like make changes to products to help differentiate between product tiers. I mean, this isn't some crazy, off the wall theory like thinking soda manufacturers intentionally design bottles that are too easy to tip over so you are more likely to spill your drink thus forcing you to buy another bottle of soda.
Lethal
Surely that depends on who you are and what needs you have. Let's say you need to use an audio card that plugs into the expresscard slot, or you need a certain size to read the screen or a certain resolution to do your job properly, that too can be a dealbreaker. The backlit shouldn't be a dealbreaker, of course. Of course I can do my job without firewire. The problem is, I can't do it properly and I can't do it without buying inferiour usb products) having to constantly work around the shortcomings. Just like someone needing a big screen having to work on a too small screen, or someone needing an expresscard slot for whatever reason.
That's trying to say that everything else is equal, and that only firewire is the differentiator.
Apropos reading things into things that aren't there. I'm not opposed to it. In fact, that is what they do and have always done. I am saying that to some (me included) it's not even in the runner up as a differentiator because for all intents and purposes the port on their bigger models are only there for show (we can't use it because of the Agere chipset), AND many people who choose, say, the 13" over the 15" or 17" do so for a variety of reasons not merely because of firewire or the lack thereof.
No, but it's a theory based on ignoring what else describes the given computers. In short - to quote Erasmus Montanus: