fearless

I wonder if the same good souls who confessed that the 2013 Mac Pro was a fail for high end users, could be induced to apply the same thought to FCP X. I can't use a product where I can't lock tracks or timeline content to stop it sliding like jello. And I still can't send a presentable embedded AAF to a ProTools session that is anything like what a sound mixer might recognise. Sorry to harp on about this for 5 years, but yesterday I had to get content from DaVinci to Motion for a VFX job (am I the only person still using it for motion tracking fixes?) and the path was an XML to FCP7, "Send to Motion..." via Motion 4, then open that project in Motion 5 - won't even look at a raw XML, and even if I'd started in FCP X (which I wouldn't have, because this is on the back of a grade) I couldn't have done this because there's no way to Motion from FCP X.
Both Motion and FCP are now start-to-finish tools - minus decent audio mixing. Little wonder our facility does more business from Avid, Adobe and FCP 7 sources than FCP X. 

Having said that, getting a project into Resolve is a very well developed path - if anyone used FCP X for projects they didn't completely finish in some fashion on their laptop.

Perfect! For Resolve, and our offline suites. Throwing $50K at this one. Where do I order? There's huge pent up demand for this. We run 2011/2012 4,1 and 5,1 machines because the trash-can was just not flexible enough. Total re-equip roadmap for us.

"Full 4K is 3840 pixels wide, by 2160 pixels tall"

No it's not. Full 4K is 4096 wide. This is UHD, 4 x HD - the TV version that's "not quite 4K". By all means call it 4K if you want, but FULL 4K it ain't.

Yep, @gadetcanav2, what was @rfmac thinking? FCP X is AWESOME! In four short years Apple has taken FCP from an NLE Hollywood trusted in its post workflows, to a YouTube/Vimeo editing tool, to its new razor-sharp focus on what really matters in media - Apple's own devices. Forget 4K cinema - it's the iPad Pro, man.

So the "Pro" application that still can't make a decent audio AAF (don't bore me with that tech stuff, my clients just want AWESOME) and hides important things like timecode like they're just there to look at, not cue to or copy/paste, is getting very much better at working with media that really matters - "movies" from your iPhone. So what's iMovie again? Oh that ends at K12. After that, we're all Pros, here at high school. Yeah right.

FCP X is positioning itself as the perfect tool for people who think an unaffordably high end camera is made by GoPro. Arri's best Alexa is 3.2K? Puh! My GoPro's 4K man! Eats it for breakfast! FCP X for 45 second news snippets cut by journalists in the back of the car? Sure. Bentley commercials shot on iPhone? I suspect they went through Flame in a real facility, somewhere in Soho. FCP X has its place, but adding features like phone support before fixing the fundamentals is flawed.

Marvin said:

Mostly the appeal of the headless desktop is the resistance to modern form factors. Having to use an iMac is like being made to drive a Prius instead of a Mustang, it causes an emotional reaction in some people because they have to use it in front of other bros who will laugh at them. It bothers some people because they irrationally think that machines need to look monstrous to behave that way. If Apple made a headless tower starting around $1500-2000 that you could put an Nvidia PCIe GPU in, the highest volume of noise about a pro desktop would disappear but there would nothing more high-end about it than the iMac Pro. Eventually, this road ends with compact form factors like the iMac and Macbook Pro, anything that happens in the interim is temporary.

Agree with you to a point, but in high end video shops purchasing is driven as much by what's available and possible as by any actual need. The later 5,1 machines from 2010-2012 sold in small numbers precisely because they offered little in the way of a step up - and as I and others know, an 8-core 4,1 can become a 12-core 5,1 with just a CPU swap and a flash. Which stretches a piece of string from 2008 to 2013, when - as we know - things got even slower.

I and others were constantly disappointed with Apple's Mac Pro roadmap then - always rumours of new machines, always just a tiny bump - that we waited. And waited. If Apple wanted a healthy upgrade cycle from its Pro customers it needed to do more than it did, and the fact that everyone's spewing stats about how fast the iMac Pro is is testament to the fact that the Mac Pro 2013 is an underpowered prosumer can, throttled by a much-vaunted Thermal Core that isn't.

Most editors and colourists use two screens plus a colour-accurate display (yes I know it might be P3 but a Flanders DM250 it ain't). When Apple made an external TB display it didn't even match an iMac for height - we'd use old Avid manuals to prop up the second display. Give me a couple of DVI Dells please, that at least look like they belong together.

So it's not about a tidy desk - it's about having a Pro version of an Mac that does PCIe 16x which TB 3 doesn't, that lets you get maximum speed out of 3 or 4 Titan-class CUDA GPUs in a Cubix box, not OpenCL AMDs, that you can buy and improve and buy lots of and reconfigure as you need. @macxpress: no, there's seldom anyone but us in post houses to set these things up. We're not on your corporate upgrade cycles I'm afraid.

So I hope whoever said there was a modular Mac Pro coming wasn't just using air.

bitmod said:

This Mac Pro is a Formula 1 car. Designed for 1 purpose. What the usual cultists here don’t understand is that most of the market want a vehicle that can go on the Hwy, run on regular fuel, and have winter tires put on. Doesn’t mean we aren’t professionals just because we aren’t Formula 1 drivers.

The great thing about this machine is that it's adaptable for many purposes, including the most taxing that I can envisage in my world (multiple temporal noise reduction nodes at 8K in Resolve, and rapid 4K DCP encryption). Like the 4,1 and 5,1s we still use, very tweakable. 

No one's saying you're not a Pro, bitmod - just that there are many people and use cases where the 2013 Mac Pro just doesn't cut it. I still don't own one - and my 4,1s are starting to die. I'd rather not spend money and time cannibalising power supplies to keep 8-year-old machines going. So just in time for us, and the rack options are perfect. Well done Apple.

Yes! Kia ora, ANZ. Can't wait. 

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

Begs the question: What happens if someone pops in a pair of NVIDIA Titan RTX GPUs into this chrome monstrosity? Will Apple allow NVIDIA graphics drivers to live in their AMD centric world? If not, that kind of puts a damper on future upgradability. RTX hardware ray traces six times faster than non-RTX GPUs, all other things being equal.

Yes, good question - I run an outboard Cubix box that handles non-flashed Nvidia cards just fine via a 16x PCIe card - hopefully that'll slot straight in. So even if I can't have CUDA inside, I should be able to use it outside. Hoping!

You probably aren't going to grade 5K on a 32 GB MBP either. Likely not enough video ram for DaVinci.

Editing 5K on the new MBP with FCPX, presumably without using proxy, DOES validate high end validation of the MOBILE Mac platform. 

That the Mac Pro needs an update Is a good point but not related to the MBP update.

The article is called "Apple's new Touch Bar and the future of Macs", not just a critique of the MBP. You're right, you won't be grading anything much on an MBP. But 5K what? RED? Or something off a drone? My point is that the MBP used to be somewhere in the middle of a range of products that went from basic and portable, via the iMac, to professional machines with the expandability to tackle the media of the day as well as anything else. The current Mac Pro does many things very well, but has a reputation for letting its users down in key areas - like GPU artefacts that sneak in at random after a long period of rendering, requiring endless QA - the "Thermal Core" can't actually handle the heat. 

The bean counters will always find an excuse to limit development to a mass market model - but flagships are just that, rare high end flag wavers for the brand and it would be nice if Apple had one. Car makers know that, at least the good ones do.

Let's be clear on this Daniel, chatting to a Final Cut Pro user editing 5K H.264 does NOT constitute high end validation of the Mac platform. FCP X is optimised for current machinery, sure. It's the show pony for these machines.

But I'm ordering a projector worth $65K, I have a DaVinci panel that cost $30K, and my only-for-TV monitor was $12K from Flanders. My CPU/GPU combo will cost $10K+ if it's a new Mac Pro, and that's fine. But I want TB 3, this year's silicon, better-than-OpenCL graphics processing and the ability to chain stuff tidily in a rack box. Moving forward, that's clearly not about adding Nvidia 1080 cards into a 16-lane Cubix box on a 5,1 12-core - but until the Mac Pro does better, that's what I'll stick with, because a naked Mac Pro 2016 doesn't warrant the reinvestment - in new interfaces and limited GPU power.

Seriously, there's SuperMicro kit I could use running Arch that would eat a Mac on the things that matter (no, not nodes full of blurs, but temporal and spatial NR) but I'm a Mac guy. I like doing Mac things. Limiting the upper definition of "pro" users to FCP X speed cutters is to miss the point entirely.