Feature films were and still are edited on Macs, mostly Avid, but they have platform equality on Windows. If things don't change the Mac won't be the a factor. Creators are abandoning the Mac, very reluctantly, for Windows workstations.
You are suggesting that the 5% of Mac users who use Mac Pros are the only professional content creators? Mac Pros are definitely used in resource-intensive environments:
"Shot primarily on the Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital cinema camera, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" employed an all-digital workflow that relied on AJA's KONA 3 video capture and playback cards for digital dailies and as an integral part of the film's Apple Final Cut Pro editing platform. KONA 3 is AJA's top-of-the-line uncompressed capture card for SD, HD, Dual Link 4:4:4 HD and 2K formats for Apple Mac Pro systems."
"After having learned so much from our experimental workflow on The Social Network, we refined our pipeline for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, upgrading from a 2K post workflow to a 4.5K and 5K pipeline, resulting in a 4K digital master. Managing media four times the size used on The Social Network proved to be quite challenging.
The larger RED files were scaled down to 1920 x 1080 ProRes LT with a center-cut extraction for the editors, as well as 720p H.264 for PIX. The ‘look'' was established on set, so none of the RED color metadata was changed during this process.
Managing data was one of our biggest challenges, especially because we were working with half a dozen different VFX vendors. Kirk [Baxter] and Angus cut the film using Apple Final Cut Pro again, but when it came time to conform the film and create the digital master, we used Adobe After Effects CS5.5 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 software. We also brought data extracted from [Andersson Technologies] SynthEyes, a third-party 3D tracking program, into After Effects to create a cost-effective, desktop-based stabilization and tracking system.
Keep in mind that we were working with huge files (37.9 MB per single DPX frame converted from the RED ONE MX footage and 54.4 MB per DPX frame from the RED EPIC). We had a 4352 x 2176 image sequence with the RED ONE footage and we are extracting a 3600 x 1500 center. With our EPIC footage, we had a 5120 x 2560 image sequence and we were extracting 4122 x 1718. We matched those two center extractions in my After Effects timeline and scaled it down so we were outputting one single resolution. Plus, each of these cameras uses a different color science to process the data from the sensor. The RED files were set to the REDcolor2/REDlogFilm color space and gamma settings. Then I rendered out extracted DPX image sequences of the edited reels to be sent to Light Iron Digital, who did the DI again on this film.
Moving that amount of data around can be grueling, unless you have a few important technologies. We used a 48 TB Hitachi G-SPEED eS PRO RAID that turned out to be ultrafast and reliable. Combined with the 64-bit processing capabilities of Adobe''s video software, we were able to get real-time playback through the drives to make accurate decisions on the spot across the whole team. The setup was also really portable. At one point, I packed up my Mac Pro, two monitors, and the four G-SPEED eS PRO drives, which were about the size of two shoeboxes, and took everything to our online facility for a few last-minute renders and shot changes. It was just as if I had my entire office there with me."
These would be 2010 Mac Pros at best working on 4K feature films doing some VFX work too. A modern iMac or Macbook Pro can do that. There's an example setup here:
Top-end iMac, 32GB RAM, SSD, Kona 3 capture card same as the Mac Pro above but connected over Thunderbolt, storage also connected via Thunderbolt/ethernet adaptor.
There are downsides mentioned vs the Pro but it does the job and it's cheaper. Obviously the Mac Pro is designed to be a better machine so when you have a demanding task and a budget that accommodates a Mac Pro, there's no need to compromise performance for the sake of it. If you need to take a workstation with you as mentioned above, it could be a better option to use a mobile workstation (aka a laptop) than a 40lb tower.
If Apple did decide to stop making the Mac Pro, the worst case is that they'd lose 5% of their users and the reality, as you've mentioned, is that many people won't give up on Apple technology no matter what happens because the alternative involves Windows or Linux.
There's a responsibility on buyers to keep technology alive. If people don't want Avid to go bankrupt for example:
they need to keep buying Avid technology. If people want Apple to keep updating the Mac Pro often, there needs to be more cashflow and less of the big talk about how important creative professionals are and how exclusive they are to the Mac Pro. Look at how well creative professionals are doing for Avid.
They have a decent marketshare in this segment, it matches up quite well with their professional software lineup, the profit margins are healthy and it does give their brand a boost to be seen being used by creative professionals at the top of their fields so it makes sense for them to maintain this. It won't always require a Mac Pro however. The mobile or AIO workstation setups are in their early stages just now but in time, they will erode the traditional workstation market away. Apple always makes moves that reflect where the market will end up, not where it is. What they do this Summer will indicate where they think things are going.
It is small when it's worldwide and it's especially small when you think that it's the same number of non-iMac desktops they shipped over a decade ago. Zero growth in over a decade.
I typically click on all of your links and read your posts. I don't remember anything regarding that.
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I also base it on the sales numbers and how Apple treats the lineup. What are you basing the opposite conclusion on?
Having a more mainstream design doesn't require overlapping the lines. Even their G4 towers had a more mainstream design to them.
They've gone the opposite direction since the intel transition. If you recall correctly Apple dropped the imacs to TN panels at one point during the G5 era, and transitioned back away from that after many complaints about display quality. Since then they've slowly pushed higher end parts into the imacs. Much of the range that was covered by the G4 towers has really been allocated to the imac line, and Apple seems to hate overlap. They could alter the roadmap in this regard, but making it mainstream would mean overlap. It would also cut out the highest margin units, so to derive the same profit, the units sold would need to increase dramatically. You'd have greater overlap in price points with the other lines, so some estimate of how many are needed to overcome cannibalization would also be a requirement. If this is just an issue of moving people from the sub $3000 mac pros and EOLing the rest, a better strategy would be to look at what is missing for those customers in the imac line.
I think you just dislike the mac pro, and you're allowing that to influence the tone of what you write. The price is one of those things that I think will remain just because of how consistent they've been on its direction. HP isn't inexpensive either, yet they've had much more success in that market segment.
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I also base it on the sales numbers and how Apple treats the lineup. What are you basing the opposite conclusion on?
See that is at least more logical. Picking forum posts of users who haven't updated in many years remains silly. Typically that means their attachment has little to do with cpu workload. It's more like an X piece of hardware will not work with an imac or mini. If it's a case of minimal growth in requirements and no other hangups in terms of hardware, they're more likely future imac or mini customers, regardless of whether either is 100% ideal. Typically it just needs to be good enough to sway them. I've said before that for a healthy line, they would need to steal from Windows. I never suggested it was as big as the consumer market in shipping volume, but the trends are independent of one another. You have the tendency to lump consumer desktops in with workstation designs, which stifles the discussion.
HP holds steady at #1, while Lenovo continues to make strides
With 41.4% of units sold, HP maintained unquestioned control over the workstation market, clearly separating itself from Dell at 30.7%, down from the previous quarter's 32.5%. Lenovo continued its record of steady growth, rising to 13.3%, while Fujitsu rounded out the Tier 1 rankings with 3.9%. Herrera estimates that second tier suppliers were responsible for the remaining 10.8%.
Professional graphics market perks up as well
The related market for professional graphics hardware had been stuck in the same doldrums as workstations, but the third quarter yielded good results for suppliers Nvidia and AMD as well. Sequentially, shipments fell 3.4% to around 1.06 million units, including both deskside add-in cards as well as mobile GPUs. But there were two sides to that coin.
Mobile GPU shipments dropped dramatically for the quarter, but that was likely one quarter's aberration, rather than indicative of any systemic weakness in the segment. Consider instead the 7.1% sequential gain in conventional professional graphics add-in cards, and the quarter's results do far more to bolster JPR's confidence than erode it.
I'm even having trouble seeing a meaningful place for the Mac Pro anymore. Mac software development won't stop if it stops being created, much less sold in one part of the world.
That wasn't always the case, but it is now. If Apple stopped selling it, they wouldn't even lose all of its former install base, as many have moved to the iMac, which can do exactly what they needed in the first place.
Total non-iMac/iBook sales based on old ratios of desktops outselling laptops 3:1 mean towers were at over 300k per quarter. 13 years later, Apple is at 250k per quarter or less with the Mac Pro. The market stats for the workstations showed fluctuations between 900k and 1 million per quarter across all manufacturers worldwide. That market is barely moving.
2005 worldwide shipments were at just over 2 million for the whole year. That's when the G5 tower was around. If Apple had around the same marketshare, they'd ship ~110k per quarter so an obvious decrease from 2000. Market growth overall has brought it back up to levels close to what they were 13 years ago.
I've said before that for a healthy line, they would need to steal from Windows.
How many buyers are they going to sway in a market where where they have 22% marketshare? Are they going to beat HP? There's very little growth to be had in that segment and the only way they'll get it is by cutting their margins, which they won't do or having a design that appeals to more people, which I hope they do. Either way, it's very low volume.
You have the tendency to lump consumer desktops in with workstation designs, which stifles the discussion.
People have a tendency to maintain an old-fashioned definition of a workstation, which similarly stifles the discussion because it assumes Apple doesn't have an option but to make a workstation exactly like the Mac Pro until the end of time. HP has demonstrated that's not the case.
- the workstation market is low volume
- margins are high because of the volume and that further lowers market appeal
- because of the high margins, workstation enthusiasts will continue to hold onto hardware longer making the situation progressively worse
- creative professionals don't exclusively use tower form factors and many will migrate to AIOs and notebooks as consumer hardware becomes more powerful
Apple isn't being malicious here. If tomorrow, they suddenly had 1 million orders for Mac Pros, you can bet they'd fall over themselves trying to satisfy the demand and so would Intel. That's not happening by a long shot. It's not just about bean counting either. It's good for Apple to make an impact on buyers and it's very hard to create any significant mindshare with a very expensive tower that only really applies to a small subset of creative professionals.
What does Apple get out of some unknown individual working on something important with a Mac Pro tucked under their desk hooked up to a 3rd party monitor? About $1500 profit at most every few years and a whole load of complaining in between. One day soon, it won't be worth the effort.
I'm even having trouble seeing a meaningful place for the Mac Pro anymore. Mac software development won't stop if it stops being created, much less sold in one part of the world.
That wasn't always the case, but it is now. If Apple stopped selling it, they wouldn't even lose all of its former install base, as many have moved to the iMac, which can do exactly what they needed in the first place.
I disagree. While the iMac certainly has caught up spec wise and become a truly fast machine, speed isn't everything. The MP is the only one that takes PCI cards (AJA et cetera) and large amount of RAM. This supposedly is still being used in video editing stations, or so I hear/read. I'm into photography and don't really need a MP, but couldn't stand the screen of an iMac. A poor point, perhaps, but I'm definitely not alone.
I disagree. While the iMac certainly has caught up spec wise and become a truly fast machine, speed isn't everything. The MP is the only one that takes PCI cards (AJA et cetera) and large amount of RAM. This supposedly is still being used in video editing stations, or so I hear/read. I'm into photography and don't really need a MP, but couldn't stand the screen of an iMac. A poor point, perhaps, but I'm definitely not alone.
Right, and it IS needed for that, but the argument that software development for OS X and iOS will collapse without the Mac Pro isn't valid.
Maybe we can get HP and Apple to collaborate on OSX on an HP built computer. (Tongue firmly in cheek) Workstations are one of the few areas in which HP continues to be profitable. Quality machines, too bad they run Windows. Also doing OK with printer ink. I still can't quite understand why a company with over 100 billion in cash can't do a decent revision of the Mac Pro or it's successor more often than they have. At their price point they would be profitable, not a charity for people who actually depend on them. And yes, I have been following Walter Biscardi. He has moved his "heavy lifting" projects to a decked out Windows machine where he can get a decent GPU, latest CPU and plenty of RAM, etc. Thanks for some good discussion. At least we are getting beyond the "just buy an iMac" stage.
Maybe we can get HP and Apple to collaborate on OSX on an HP built computer.
There's no reason for Apple to give up their 22% or so marketshare to HP. We know they aren't dropping the MP yet but if they did, they still wouldn't let HP fill the gap, they'd just expect the iMac and MBP to satisfy a portion of those users and let the others drift to other platforms.
I still can't quite understand why a company with over 100 billion in cash can't do a decent revision of the Mac Pro or it's successor more often than they have.
Not much reason to really when the sales are so low. Selling the latest hardware regularly would cut into their margins. The Sandy Bridge update was expected and then Intel delayed it and they didn't bother.
I have been following Walter Biscardi. He has moved his "heavy lifting" projects to a decked out Windows machine where he can get a decent GPU, latest CPU and plenty of RAM
That's not all that much faster than the top iMac CPU-wise if at all. The Xeons are on the last -gen Sandy Bridge architecture and the iMac is on Ivy Bridge and higher clocked. The CPUs are measured here:
"the iMacs are fast becoming my machine of choice. my plan is to replace the remaining 3 Mac Pros in Edits 1, 3 and 4 with 27? iMacs and AJA T-Taps. The only place you’ll notice them to be a bit slower than the absolute fastest machine is when you go to render. So we’re keeping our two 12 core Mac Pros and simply using those to do heavy lifting renders. for news stories and even our documentaries, those are being rendered directly on the iMacs.
I need the best performance vs. cost not only to upgrade all the suites, but also maintain competitive rates vs. other post facilities in the area. I need a bunch of machines that can cut fast and are reliable no matter how much data we throw at them. So far, the iMac is proving more than capable of that and most of all, the clients have not noticed any change in the day to day operation of our shop. Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop all work efficiently on the iMacs and that’s about 90% of our work right there."
"the iMacs are fast becoming my machine of choice. my plan is to replace the remaining 3 Mac Pros in Edits 1, 3 and 4 with 27? iMacs and AJA T-Taps. The only place you’ll notice them to be a bit slower than the absolute fastest machine is when you go to render. So we’re keeping our two 12 core Mac Pros and simply using those to do heavy lifting renders. for news stories and even our documentaries, those are being rendered directly on the iMacs.
I need the best performance vs. cost not only to upgrade all the suites, but also maintain competitive rates vs. other post facilities in the area. I need a bunch of machines that can cut fast and are reliable no matter how much data we throw at them. So far, the iMac is proving more than capable of that and most of all, the clients have not noticed any change in the day to day operation of our shop. Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop all work efficiently on the iMacs and that’s about 90% of our work right there."
Quadro cards are an interesting point. Sometimes they are slower, but it isn't always the case. They aren't designed for games at all, and the comparison isn't always the same. An example would be that a lot of people were using the GTX 570 successfully, yet the 680 wasn't immediately embraced as NVidia seemingly gimped the gaming cards on CUDA calculations this round. I have noticed they don't a wall with high polygon counts like some of the gaming cards do in 3d paint and modeling apps. This doesn't mean that it's slow. My own choice if suggesting one for heavier workloads would be the one with more memory. Hitting that wall is really a wall as opposed to one being a bit faster than the other. That blog link is very cool. Thanks for that.
6. Less focus on compute. All of Nvidia's changes have resulted in what is, overall, the fastest and the most electricity-bill-friendly single-GPU gaming video card we've yet seen. But this title hasn't come without one sacrifice: compute. Fermi GPUs were sold, at least partially, on their ability to perform mathematical calculations à la CPUs, and displayed impressive facility doing just that, but Nvidia stripped some of those abilities away in order to improve power efficiency. Using LuxMark 2.0, an application designed for testing OpenCL compute performance, we compared last generation's GeForce GTX 580 (based on an updated Fermi-style GPU) with the GTX 680, and the earlier card came out ahead in every test—and AMD's new cards, like the Radeon HD 7970, did even better. If you want a card that's every bit as good for work as play, Kepler-based GPUs may not be the way to go. But the GTX 680 is the runaway champs for playing 3D games on your PC.
Just to add this, he did have a different suggestion for the one man shops. This guy is running a much larger one.
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I know some folks out there look down on the iMacs because they ARE less powerful than a desktop and they are less configurable. I’ve seen articles of late showing all you all the technical reasons why you really need to consider more than just processor speed and RAM for maximum performance and that’s correct. If you need ONE machine, and you only work with ONE machine in your operation, you probably want a desktop. Something beefy with dual graphics cards, 12-16 cores and gobs of RAM so you can get your work done and rendered as quickly as possible.
And @ Wizard note the lack of forum rage. It's well thought out why he won't return to Apple. For me personally, I don't deal too much with a non-linear editor, and Premiere is part of Creative Suite. When it comes to bundled software I use what is there unless it's something I need regularly.
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For me, I see no reason to switch back to FCP. It’s amusing to see Apple touting the “new features” such as Drop Shadow and the Dual display. In my mind, those are simply corrections and an admission from Apple that X was released before it was ready for prime time. In the interim, we’ve switched off to other NLE platforms and in my mind, both Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid are superior to what FCP X is today and certainly superior to what FCP 7 was back in the day. There are certainly some good concepts in X but as a whole package, it falls short of my needs today.
"We’ve had at least one iMac in production for over 6 months now and they are fast machines. The only place you’ll notice them to be a bit slower than the absolute fastest machine is when you go to render. Depending on what you’re rendering out, it might take a bit or a lot longer than a 12 – 16 core machine. So we’re keeping our two 12 core Mac Pros and simply using those to do heavy lifting renders. When a project is done on the iMac, we can simply open it up on the 12 core and render away. But for news stories and even our documentaries, those are being rendered directly on the iMacs.
I know some folks out there look down on the iMacs because they ARE less powerful than a desktop and they are less configurable. I’ve seen articles of late showing all you all the technical reasons why you really need to consider more than just processor speed and RAM for maximum performance and that’s correct. If you need ONE machine, and you only work with ONE machine in your operation, you probably want a desktop. Something beefy with dual graphics cards, 12-16 cores and gobs of RAM so you can get your work done and rendered as quickly as possible."
Can't do that with an iMac.
I am a one man shop, as are many others. I want that one desktop to do everything, not just documentaries and news. It needs to be fast with multiple PCIe slots for Kona video card, eSATA interface, and fastest GPU, even two best for color correction with Resolve.. Premiere requires NVidia for realtime multiple layer and accelerated effects playback. Also check out the OWC Accelsior here http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html for large Photoshop processing. Being able to slide in up to a 4TB drive in a few minutes with the Mac Pro is also quite nice,.. No Thunderbolt yet, or USB3. Things I would like to see in a new Mac Pro.
Sorry for the slight repetition, but I think the second paragraph is important. I have been corresponding with Walter on several sites for the last couple of years. Moving to Adobe Premiere Pro group on Facebook and several forums on Creative Cow. His research has been very valuable in this time of transition in the video world.
This is about staying on OSX, not moving to Linux. The software we use is written for OSX and Windows other than the Apple Pro Apps such as Final Cut X, Aperture, and Logic Pro. Most of us desire to stay on the Mac. Personally, I'm not even considering Windows, let alone Linux. Pixar also has the best computer professionals in the business, not available to one man post shops. I suppose that should be obvious.
Just to add this, he did have a different suggestion for the one man shops. This guy is running a much larger one.
He's saying if you only want one machine then go for the fastest you can afford. A one man shop could similarly have an iMac and two quad-core Mini servers to offload processing to. Total processing power would be faster than the $6200 Pro for just $3800. You can't run more than 1 high-end graphics card in the Pro because it has a 300W power limit on the PCI slots.
I want that one desktop to do everything, not just documentaries and news. It needs to be fast with multiple PCIe slots for Kona video card, eSATA interface, and fastest GPU, even two best for color correction with Resolve.. Premiere requires NVidia for realtime multiple layer and accelerated effects playback. Also check out the OWC Accelsior here http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html for large Photoshop processing. Being able to slide in up to a 4TB drive in a few minutes with the Mac Pro is also quite nice,.. No Thunderbolt yet, or USB3. Things I would like to see in a new Mac Pro.
Adobe should write out lossless compressed files but still, everything you mentioned is possible on an iMac. The Kona card works over Thunderbolt, you don't need an eSATA interface with USB 3 but there are both TB and USB 3 adaptors, the iMac has one of the fastest GPUs and the Pro is mostly limited to 1 high-end GPU simply because of the 300W power limit. A single high-end GPU is around 200W.
The PCI SSD is fast but it's about the same as TB storage. You can get over 1GB/s with TB:
Cheap fast storage can be added over USB 3 or TB. TB will also double to 20Gbps in 2014. The Mac Pro really doesn't have much left that can't be done with an iMac or MBP.
"You could [change directory] ‘slash’, net ‘slash’ or walk across the network and log into Ed Catmull’s machine or Steve Job’s machine if you wanted to. Not that Steve ever did do any work on the film directly, but you could do that.”
The common way to prevent an accidental command like this being run on an entire project is to lock users down with permissions to only the files they need. But, because of the way a project like a Pixar film works, almost everyone working on the show needed permissions to read and write to the master machine. This was their job."
Maybe that was why they came up with Time Machine.
Linux is fine for servers and workstation environments where you can't have hardware and software license limitations but when you have to run things like the Adobe CS Suite, you have to run it in virtualization software, which isn't ideal. OS X is by far the best incarnation of a unix system that's ever been made.
You can see in the studio they have it's all iMac workstations and they take their Macbook Pro workstation on set. They use Maya and control V-Ray on the cloud. On the movie Flight, they spent $25,000 rendering the VFX footage vs spending over $1m on the equivalent internal hardware. They have done 250,000 render hours this way so far.
There are different resource contraints for different jobs but feature film production is widely used in these threads and these creative professionals are right up there with the best and have chosen to use iMacs and Macbook Pros.
You can run two cards in the Mac Pro, the ideal setup for Resolve color correction is one high end NVidia combined with a GT120 for computer display and a Black Magic video card (required) for color critical video out to a Flanders or other critical (up to 4k now) display. 3 cards. Can't do that with an iMac. Color grading (correction) is high art as well as high tech. Resolve used to cost tens of thousands of dollars as recently as NAB (biggest video show) two years ago. Now affordable software, HD version is actually free! Many people are running two single slot 4000's with power splitters, and that seems to work for them, although not officially supported. Haven't read of failures on the forums.
If you read Mac Performance Guide carefully, he has fully tested all forms of cache storage for Photoshop, and the OWC Accelsior is by far the fastest. His recommendation if, you can afford it, is two of them striped RAID 0. By using the PCIe slots, you get much better transfer speed than the internal 3G SATA bus the Mac Pro is currently hobbled with. Roughly 270 MB/sec realistically for internal drives on 3G (need current 6G). You can run one on Thunderbolt, but you have to admit, you are then cut out of Resolve, the current affordable and likely to remain for a while, color grading solution. It is also true the Mac Pro could use more fast slots. HP has them. Many do Photoshop and video up to 4k now and film transfers. Even just HD is much easier to configure with the Pro.
Why all the resistance to the Mac Pro? Seems like envy. Or perhaps people who don't need one don't like to admit that Apple is not the best at everything anymore. Other than that, I can only think it is just (innocent) ignorance. Sure won't hurt Apple's bottom line, but it will a lot of very dedicated video pros (sorry, I said pro again) who have to move to Windows to stay current.
Still hoping for an internally expandable Mac Pro type machine this year, along with about 19,000 other "Pros" on the Facebook page "We want an New Macpro". They were the ones that got Tim to finally say "something really great was coming later next year" (2013) when Forbes reported on the movement there. If that many signed up on Facebook, you know it has to be a small fraction of the people who want and need such a machine.
Also, not interested in render farms with minis. More complexity equals more headaches and excuses from support lines, sfw and hardware, that your setup is at fault because "it hasn't been tested".
Comments
You are suggesting that the 5% of Mac users who use Mac Pros are the only professional content creators? Mac Pros are definitely used in resource-intensive environments:
http://www.aja.com/en/articles/user_stories/30/
"Shot primarily on the Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital cinema camera, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" employed an all-digital workflow that relied on AJA's KONA 3 video capture and playback cards for digital dailies and as an integral part of the film's Apple Final Cut Pro editing platform. KONA 3 is AJA's top-of-the-line uncompressed capture card for SD, HD, Dual Link 4:4:4 HD and 2K formats for Apple Mac Pro systems."
http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/feature/conforming-and-compositing-girl-dragon-tattoo/53880
"After having learned so much from our experimental workflow on The Social Network, we refined our pipeline for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, upgrading from a 2K post workflow to a 4.5K and 5K pipeline, resulting in a 4K digital master. Managing media four times the size used on The Social Network proved to be quite challenging.
The larger RED files were scaled down to 1920 x 1080 ProRes LT with a center-cut extraction for the editors, as well as 720p H.264 for PIX. The ‘look'' was established on set, so none of the RED color metadata was changed during this process.
Managing data was one of our biggest challenges, especially because we were working with half a dozen different VFX vendors. Kirk [Baxter] and Angus cut the film using Apple Final Cut Pro again, but when it came time to conform the film and create the digital master, we used Adobe After Effects CS5.5 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 software. We also brought data extracted from [Andersson Technologies] SynthEyes, a third-party 3D tracking program, into After Effects to create a cost-effective, desktop-based stabilization and tracking system.
Keep in mind that we were working with huge files (37.9 MB per single DPX frame converted from the RED ONE MX footage and 54.4 MB per DPX frame from the RED EPIC). We had a 4352 x 2176 image sequence with the RED ONE footage and we are extracting a 3600 x 1500 center. With our EPIC footage, we had a 5120 x 2560 image sequence and we were extracting 4122 x 1718. We matched those two center extractions in my After Effects timeline and scaled it down so we were outputting one single resolution. Plus, each of these cameras uses a different color science to process the data from the sensor. The RED files were set to the REDcolor2/REDlogFilm color space and gamma settings. Then I rendered out extracted DPX image sequences of the edited reels to be sent to Light Iron Digital, who did the DI again on this film.
Moving that amount of data around can be grueling, unless you have a few important technologies. We used a 48 TB Hitachi G-SPEED eS PRO RAID that turned out to be ultrafast and reliable. Combined with the 64-bit processing capabilities of Adobe''s video software, we were able to get real-time playback through the drives to make accurate decisions on the spot across the whole team. The setup was also really portable. At one point, I packed up my Mac Pro, two monitors, and the four G-SPEED eS PRO drives, which were about the size of two shoeboxes, and took everything to our online facility for a few last-minute renders and shot changes. It was just as if I had my entire office there with me."
These would be 2010 Mac Pros at best working on 4K feature films doing some VFX work too. A modern iMac or Macbook Pro can do that. There's an example setup here:
http://www.biscardicreative.com/blog/2012/08/anatomy-of-an-imac-suite/
Top-end iMac, 32GB RAM, SSD, Kona 3 capture card same as the Mac Pro above but connected over Thunderbolt, storage also connected via Thunderbolt/ethernet adaptor.
There are downsides mentioned vs the Pro but it does the job and it's cheaper. Obviously the Mac Pro is designed to be a better machine so when you have a demanding task and a budget that accommodates a Mac Pro, there's no need to compromise performance for the sake of it. If you need to take a workstation with you as mentioned above, it could be a better option to use a mobile workstation (aka a laptop) than a 40lb tower.
If Apple did decide to stop making the Mac Pro, the worst case is that they'd lose 5% of their users and the reality, as you've mentioned, is that many people won't give up on Apple technology no matter what happens because the alternative involves Windows or Linux.
There's a responsibility on buyers to keep technology alive. If people don't want Avid to go bankrupt for example:
http://www.macroaxis.com/invest/market/AVID--fundamentals--AVID
they need to keep buying Avid technology. If people want Apple to keep updating the Mac Pro often, there needs to be more cashflow and less of the big talk about how important creative professionals are and how exclusive they are to the Mac Pro. Look at how well creative professionals are doing for Avid.
They have a decent marketshare in this segment, it matches up quite well with their professional software lineup, the profit margins are healthy and it does give their brand a boost to be seen being used by creative professionals at the top of their fields so it makes sense for them to maintain this. It won't always require a Mac Pro however. The mobile or AIO workstation setups are in their early stages just now but in time, they will erode the traditional workstation market away. Apple always makes moves that reflect where the market will end up, not where it is. What they do this Summer will indicate where they think things are going.
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Originally Posted by Marvin
It is small when it's worldwide and it's especially small when you think that it's the same number of non-iMac desktops they shipped over a decade ago. Zero growth in over a decade.
I typically click on all of your links and read your posts. I don't remember anything regarding that.
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I also base it on the sales numbers and how Apple treats the lineup. What are you basing the opposite conclusion on?
Having a more mainstream design doesn't require overlapping the lines. Even their G4 towers had a more mainstream design to them.
They've gone the opposite direction since the intel transition. If you recall correctly Apple dropped the imacs to TN panels at one point during the G5 era, and transitioned back away from that after many complaints about display quality. Since then they've slowly pushed higher end parts into the imacs. Much of the range that was covered by the G4 towers has really been allocated to the imac line, and Apple seems to hate overlap. They could alter the roadmap in this regard, but making it mainstream would mean overlap. It would also cut out the highest margin units, so to derive the same profit, the units sold would need to increase dramatically. You'd have greater overlap in price points with the other lines, so some estimate of how many are needed to overcome cannibalization would also be a requirement. If this is just an issue of moving people from the sub $3000 mac pros and EOLing the rest, a better strategy would be to look at what is missing for those customers in the imac line.
I think you just dislike the mac pro, and you're allowing that to influence the tone of what you write. The price is one of those things that I think will remain just because of how consistent they've been on its direction. HP isn't inexpensive either, yet they've had much more success in that market segment.
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I also base it on the sales numbers and how Apple treats the lineup. What are you basing the opposite conclusion on?
See that is at least more logical. Picking forum posts of users who haven't updated in many years remains silly. Typically that means their attachment has little to do with cpu workload. It's more like an X piece of hardware will not work with an imac or mini. If it's a case of minimal growth in requirements and no other hangups in terms of hardware, they're more likely future imac or mini customers, regardless of whether either is 100% ideal. Typically it just needs to be good enough to sway them. I've said before that for a healthy line, they would need to steal from Windows. I never suggested it was as big as the consumer market in shipping volume, but the trends are independent of one another. You have the tendency to lump consumer desktops in with workstation designs, which stifles the discussion.
http://www.jonpeddie.com/publications/workstation_report/
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HP holds steady at #1, while Lenovo continues to make strides
With 41.4% of units sold, HP maintained unquestioned control over the workstation market, clearly separating itself from Dell at 30.7%, down from the previous quarter's 32.5%. Lenovo continued its record of steady growth, rising to 13.3%, while Fujitsu rounded out the Tier 1 rankings with 3.9%. Herrera estimates that second tier suppliers were responsible for the remaining 10.8%.
Professional graphics market perks up as well
The related market for professional graphics hardware had been stuck in the same doldrums as workstations, but the third quarter yielded good results for suppliers Nvidia and AMD as well. Sequentially, shipments fell 3.4% to around 1.06 million units, including both deskside add-in cards as well as mobile GPUs. But there were two sides to that coin.
Mobile GPU shipments dropped dramatically for the quarter, but that was likely one quarter's aberration, rather than indicative of any systemic weakness in the segment. Consider instead the 7.1% sequential gain in conventional professional graphics add-in cards, and the quarter's results do far more to bolster JPR's confidence than erode it.
Originally Posted by Jim W
Spoken like a bean counter.
I'm even having trouble seeing a meaningful place for the Mac Pro anymore. Mac software development won't stop if it stops being created, much less sold in one part of the world.
That wasn't always the case, but it is now. If Apple stopped selling it, they wouldn't even lose all of its former install base, as many have moved to the iMac, which can do exactly what they needed in the first place.
You read this one before:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/01/19Apple-Reports-First-Quarter-Profit-of-183-Million.html
Total non-iMac/iBook sales based on old ratios of desktops outselling laptops 3:1 mean towers were at over 300k per quarter. 13 years later, Apple is at 250k per quarter or less with the Mac Pro. The market stats for the workstations showed fluctuations between 900k and 1 million per quarter across all manufacturers worldwide. That market is barely moving.
http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb041806-story08.html
2005 worldwide shipments were at just over 2 million for the whole year. That's when the G5 tower was around. If Apple had around the same marketshare, they'd ship ~110k per quarter so an obvious decrease from 2000. Market growth overall has brought it back up to levels close to what they were 13 years ago.
I don't think it would have a price below $2000 so it doesn't overlap.
How many buyers are they going to sway in a market where where they have 22% marketshare? Are they going to beat HP? There's very little growth to be had in that segment and the only way they'll get it is by cutting their margins, which they won't do or having a design that appeals to more people, which I hope they do. Either way, it's very low volume.
People have a tendency to maintain an old-fashioned definition of a workstation, which similarly stifles the discussion because it assumes Apple doesn't have an option but to make a workstation exactly like the Mac Pro until the end of time. HP has demonstrated that's not the case.
- the workstation market is low volume
- margins are high because of the volume and that further lowers market appeal
- because of the high margins, workstation enthusiasts will continue to hold onto hardware longer making the situation progressively worse
- creative professionals don't exclusively use tower form factors and many will migrate to AIOs and notebooks as consumer hardware becomes more powerful
Apple isn't being malicious here. If tomorrow, they suddenly had 1 million orders for Mac Pros, you can bet they'd fall over themselves trying to satisfy the demand and so would Intel. That's not happening by a long shot. It's not just about bean counting either. It's good for Apple to make an impact on buyers and it's very hard to create any significant mindshare with a very expensive tower that only really applies to a small subset of creative professionals.
What does Apple get out of some unknown individual working on something important with a Mac Pro tucked under their desk hooked up to a 3rd party monitor? About $1500 profit at most every few years and a whole load of complaining in between. One day soon, it won't be worth the effort.
I disagree. While the iMac certainly has caught up spec wise and become a truly fast machine, speed isn't everything. The MP is the only one that takes PCI cards (AJA et cetera) and large amount of RAM. This supposedly is still being used in video editing stations, or so I hear/read. I'm into photography and don't really need a MP, but couldn't stand the screen of an iMac. A poor point, perhaps, but I'm definitely not alone.
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
I disagree. While the iMac certainly has caught up spec wise and become a truly fast machine, speed isn't everything. The MP is the only one that takes PCI cards (AJA et cetera) and large amount of RAM. This supposedly is still being used in video editing stations, or so I hear/read. I'm into photography and don't really need a MP, but couldn't stand the screen of an iMac. A poor point, perhaps, but I'm definitely not alone.
Right, and it IS needed for that, but the argument that software development for OS X and iOS will collapse without the Mac Pro isn't valid.
Maybe we can get HP and Apple to collaborate on OSX on an HP built computer. (Tongue firmly in cheek) Workstations are one of the few areas in which HP continues to be profitable. Quality machines, too bad they run Windows. Also doing OK with printer ink. I still can't quite understand why a company with over 100 billion in cash can't do a decent revision of the Mac Pro or it's successor more often than they have. At their price point they would be profitable, not a charity for people who actually depend on them. And yes, I have been following Walter Biscardi. He has moved his "heavy lifting" projects to a decked out Windows machine where he can get a decent GPU, latest CPU and plenty of RAM, etc. Thanks for some good discussion. At least we are getting beyond the "just buy an iMac" stage.
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Originally Posted by bluedalmatian
More EU red tape. Hopefully we'll be out of it soon
Yes, I fully agree. The best thing for the EU would be to get rid of the UK.
There's no reason for Apple to give up their 22% or so marketshare to HP. We know they aren't dropping the MP yet but if they did, they still wouldn't let HP fill the gap, they'd just expect the iMac and MBP to satisfy a portion of those users and let the others drift to other platforms.
Not much reason to really when the sales are so low. Selling the latest hardware regularly would cut into their margins. The Sandy Bridge update was expected and then Intel delayed it and they didn't bother.
The spec he went with wasn't all that high:
http://www.biscardicreative.com/blog/2012/03/its-not-a-mac-our-windows-testing-part-2/
8-core 2.4GHz Xeon
48GB RAM
Quadro 4000
SSD
That's not all that much faster than the top iMac CPU-wise if at all. The Xeons are on the last -gen Sandy Bridge architecture and the iMac is on Ivy Bridge and higher clocked. The CPUs are measured here:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2609+@+2.40GHz
The i7-3770 is in the iMac. Obviously 2 of the Xeons is in the same region. I'd have expected it to be higher but it's comparable anyway.
The main difference is the Quadro card and if Apple allowed this to work easily over Thunderbolt like the following video:
[VIDEO]
it would be largely the same and you wouldn't have to look at this sort of thing:
The Quadro isn't as fast as the 'gamer' cards either and probably slower than the 680MX in the iMac:
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1019643
It would be interesting to find out why he went for the Windows workstation because he seems to be sold on iMacs:
http://www.biscardicreative.com/blog/2012/12/workflow-update-imac-adobe-and-the-x-factor/
"the iMacs are fast becoming my machine of choice. my plan is to replace the remaining 3 Mac Pros in Edits 1, 3 and 4 with 27? iMacs and AJA T-Taps. The only place you’ll notice them to be a bit slower than the absolute fastest machine is when you go to render. So we’re keeping our two 12 core Mac Pros and simply using those to do heavy lifting renders. for news stories and even our documentaries, those are being rendered directly on the iMacs.
I need the best performance vs. cost not only to upgrade all the suites, but also maintain competitive rates vs. other post facilities in the area. I need a bunch of machines that can cut fast and are reliable no matter how much data we throw at them. So far, the iMac is proving more than capable of that and most of all, the clients have not noticed any change in the day to day operation of our shop. Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop all work efficiently on the iMacs and that’s about 90% of our work right there."
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Originally Posted by Marvin
The Quadro isn't as fast as the 'gamer' cards either and probably slower than the 680MX in the iMac:
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1019643
It would be interesting to find out why he went for the Windows workstation because he seems to be sold on iMacs:
http://www.biscardicreative.com/blog/2012/12/workflow-update-imac-adobe-and-the-x-factor/
"the iMacs are fast becoming my machine of choice. my plan is to replace the remaining 3 Mac Pros in Edits 1, 3 and 4 with 27? iMacs and AJA T-Taps. The only place you’ll notice them to be a bit slower than the absolute fastest machine is when you go to render. So we’re keeping our two 12 core Mac Pros and simply using those to do heavy lifting renders. for news stories and even our documentaries, those are being rendered directly on the iMacs.
I need the best performance vs. cost not only to upgrade all the suites, but also maintain competitive rates vs. other post facilities in the area. I need a bunch of machines that can cut fast and are reliable no matter how much data we throw at them. So far, the iMac is proving more than capable of that and most of all, the clients have not noticed any change in the day to day operation of our shop. Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop all work efficiently on the iMacs and that’s about 90% of our work right there."
Quadro cards are an interesting point. Sometimes they are slower, but it isn't always the case. They aren't designed for games at all, and the comparison isn't always the same. An example would be that a lot of people were using the GTX 570 successfully, yet the 680 wasn't immediately embraced as NVidia seemingly gimped the gaming cards on CUDA calculations this round. I have noticed they don't a wall with high polygon counts like some of the gaming cards do in 3d paint and modeling apps. This doesn't mean that it's slow. My own choice if suggesting one for heavier workloads would be the one with more memory. Hitting that wall is really a wall as opposed to one being a bit faster than the other. That blog link is very cool. Thanks for that.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402021,00.asp
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6. Less focus on compute. All of Nvidia's changes have resulted in what is, overall, the fastest and the most electricity-bill-friendly single-GPU gaming video card we've yet seen. But this title hasn't come without one sacrifice: compute. Fermi GPUs were sold, at least partially, on their ability to perform mathematical calculations à la CPUs, and displayed impressive facility doing just that, but Nvidia stripped some of those abilities away in order to improve power efficiency. Using LuxMark 2.0, an application designed for testing OpenCL compute performance, we compared last generation's GeForce GTX 580 (based on an updated Fermi-style GPU) with the GTX 680, and the earlier card came out ahead in every test—and AMD's new cards, like the Radeon HD 7970, did even better. If you want a card that's every bit as good for work as play, Kepler-based GPUs may not be the way to go. But the GTX 680 is the runaway champs for playing 3D games on your PC.
Just to add this, he did have a different suggestion for the one man shops. This guy is running a much larger one.
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I know some folks out there look down on the iMacs because they ARE less powerful than a desktop and they are less configurable. I’ve seen articles of late showing all you all the technical reasons why you really need to consider more than just processor speed and RAM for maximum performance and that’s correct. If you need ONE machine, and you only work with ONE machine in your operation, you probably want a desktop. Something beefy with dual graphics cards, 12-16 cores and gobs of RAM so you can get your work done and rendered as quickly as possible.
And @ Wizard note the lack of forum rage. It's well thought out why he won't return to Apple. For me personally, I don't deal too much with a non-linear editor, and Premiere is part of Creative Suite. When it comes to bundled software I use what is there unless it's something I need regularly.
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For me, I see no reason to switch back to FCP. It’s amusing to see Apple touting the “new features” such as Drop Shadow and the Dual display. In my mind, those are simply corrections and an admission from Apple that X was released before it was ready for prime time. In the interim, we’ve switched off to other NLE platforms and in my mind, both Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid are superior to what FCP X is today and certainly superior to what FCP 7 was back in the day. There are certainly some good concepts in X but as a whole package, it falls short of my needs today.
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Also from Biscardi's blog 12/10/2012 :
"We’ve had at least one iMac in production for over 6 months now and they are fast machines. The only place you’ll notice them to be a bit slower than the absolute fastest machine is when you go to render. Depending on what you’re rendering out, it might take a bit or a lot longer than a 12 – 16 core machine. So we’re keeping our two 12 core Mac Pros and simply using those to do heavy lifting renders. When a project is done on the iMac, we can simply open it up on the 12 core and render away. But for news stories and even our documentaries, those are being rendered directly on the iMacs.
I know some folks out there look down on the iMacs because they ARE less powerful than a desktop and they are less configurable. I’ve seen articles of late showing all you all the technical reasons why you really need to consider more than just processor speed and RAM for maximum performance and that’s correct. If you need ONE machine, and you only work with ONE machine in your operation, you probably want a desktop. Something beefy with dual graphics cards, 12-16 cores and gobs of RAM so you can get your work done and rendered as quickly as possible."
Can't do that with an iMac.
I am a one man shop, as are many others. I want that one desktop to do everything, not just documentaries and news. It needs to be fast with multiple PCIe slots for Kona video card, eSATA interface, and fastest GPU, even two best for color correction with Resolve.. Premiere requires NVidia for realtime multiple layer and accelerated effects playback. Also check out the OWC Accelsior here http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html for large Photoshop processing. Being able to slide in up to a 4TB drive in a few minutes with the Mac Pro is also quite nice,.. No Thunderbolt yet, or USB3. Things I would like to see in a new Mac Pro.
Sorry for the slight repetition, but I think the second paragraph is important. I have been corresponding with Walter on several sites for the last couple of years. Moving to Adobe Premiere Pro group on Facebook and several forums on Creative Cow. His research has been very valuable in this time of transition in the video world.
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This is about staying on OSX, not moving to Linux. The software we use is written for OSX and Windows other than the Apple Pro Apps such as Final Cut X, Aperture, and Logic Pro. Most of us desire to stay on the Mac. Personally, I'm not even considering Windows, let alone Linux. Pixar also has the best computer professionals in the business, not available to one man post shops. I suppose that should be obvious.
He's saying if you only want one machine then go for the fastest you can afford. A one man shop could similarly have an iMac and two quad-core Mini servers to offload processing to. Total processing power would be faster than the $6200 Pro for just $3800. You can't run more than 1 high-end graphics card in the Pro because it has a 300W power limit on the PCI slots.
Adobe should write out lossless compressed files but still, everything you mentioned is possible on an iMac. The Kona card works over Thunderbolt, you don't need an eSATA interface with USB 3 but there are both TB and USB 3 adaptors, the iMac has one of the fastest GPUs and the Pro is mostly limited to 1 high-end GPU simply because of the 300W power limit. A single high-end GPU is around 200W.
The PCI SSD is fast but it's about the same as TB storage. You can get over 1GB/s with TB:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-review/6
Cheap fast storage can be added over USB 3 or TB. TB will also double to 20Gbps in 2014. The Mac Pro really doesn't have much left that can't be done with an iMac or MBP.
I'm sure they regretted it on occasions:
[VIDEO]
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/
"You could [change directory] ‘slash’, net ‘slash’ or walk across the network and log into Ed Catmull’s machine or Steve Job’s machine if you wanted to. Not that Steve ever did do any work on the film directly, but you could do that.”
The common way to prevent an accidental command like this being run on an entire project is to lock users down with permissions to only the files they need. But, because of the way a project like a Pixar film works, almost everyone working on the show needed permissions to read and write to the master machine. This was their job."
Maybe that was why they came up with Time Machine.
Linux is fine for servers and workstation environments where you can't have hardware and software license limitations but when you have to run things like the Adobe CS Suite, you have to run it in virtualization software, which isn't ideal. OS X is by far the best incarnation of a unix system that's ever been made.
http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-editors/real-life-story-behind-flight-plane-crash-204839184.html
http://www.motionvfx.com/mblog/vfx_studio_that_worked_on_flight_and_transformers_moves_to_the_cloud,p2047.html
http://www.motionvfx.com/mblog/kevin_baillie_of_atomic_fiction_on_vfx_for_looper_flight_and_cloud_rendering,p2196.html
You can see in the studio they have it's all iMac workstations and they take their Macbook Pro workstation on set. They use Maya and control V-Ray on the cloud. On the movie Flight, they spent $25,000 rendering the VFX footage vs spending over $1m on the equivalent internal hardware. They have done 250,000 render hours this way so far.
There are different resource contraints for different jobs but feature film production is widely used in these threads and these creative professionals are right up there with the best and have chosen to use iMacs and Macbook Pros.
You can run two cards in the Mac Pro, the ideal setup for Resolve color correction is one high end NVidia combined with a GT120 for computer display and a Black Magic video card (required) for color critical video out to a Flanders or other critical (up to 4k now) display. 3 cards. Can't do that with an iMac. Color grading (correction) is high art as well as high tech. Resolve used to cost tens of thousands of dollars as recently as NAB (biggest video show) two years ago. Now affordable software, HD version is actually free! Many people are running two single slot 4000's with power splitters, and that seems to work for them, although not officially supported. Haven't read of failures on the forums.
If you read Mac Performance Guide carefully, he has fully tested all forms of cache storage for Photoshop, and the OWC Accelsior is by far the fastest. His recommendation if, you can afford it, is two of them striped RAID 0. By using the PCIe slots, you get much better transfer speed than the internal 3G SATA bus the Mac Pro is currently hobbled with. Roughly 270 MB/sec realistically for internal drives on 3G (need current 6G). You can run one on Thunderbolt, but you have to admit, you are then cut out of Resolve, the current affordable and likely to remain for a while, color grading solution. It is also true the Mac Pro could use more fast slots. HP has them. Many do Photoshop and video up to 4k now and film transfers. Even just HD is much easier to configure with the Pro.
Why all the resistance to the Mac Pro? Seems like envy. Or perhaps people who don't need one don't like to admit that Apple is not the best at everything anymore. Other than that, I can only think it is just (innocent) ignorance. Sure won't hurt Apple's bottom line, but it will a lot of very dedicated video pros (sorry, I said pro again) who have to move to Windows to stay current.
Still hoping for an internally expandable Mac Pro type machine this year, along with about 19,000 other "Pros" on the Facebook page "We want an New Macpro". They were the ones that got Tim to finally say "something really great was coming later next year" (2013) when Forbes reported on the movement there. If that many signed up on Facebook, you know it has to be a small fraction of the people who want and need such a machine.
Also, not interested in render farms with minis. More complexity equals more headaches and excuses from support lines, sfw and hardware, that your setup is at fault because "it hasn't been tested".
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