You are in the field (a soccer field, in my case) or onsite at an event.
-- With your camera you capture your video onto SD cards.
-- You plug these into a SD Card reader and transfer the compressed card* to the Mac (or iPad)
-- With FCPX you begin processing the SD card in compressed form
-- In the background, you can transcode (expand) the video to ProRes Proxy if desired
Might be a situation for amateur videographers but my only point is that if you require the services of a render farm, you are a professional and in a professional environment, you would probably not be transferring data to a MBP or an iPad in the field as an interim step in production. Maybe for the director to carefully analyze the shot while on location, but that is not the original version which is saved. It might also be reasonable to question why you would even be using FCPX in a professional environment, but that is even farther off topic.
Off topic ... p.s. Am I the only one that goes between Mac and iPad and wishes for consistency in the auto correction?
Most of our Macs run Lion. The Mac in my bedroom is one of the original Developer Replacement iMacs -- it can't run Lion so it is running the latest SNL.
Some of our iPads and 1 iPhone run iOS 5 beta -- the others are running standard iOS 4.3
Crazy, who Me? Between scrolling, autocorrection, dictionary lookup and Safari's unanticipated page reloads....
As in physically injured? Did they get holes punched into their fingers by a tape machine?
Well, that depends on whether the hole punch was skin or skinless, does't it? If I remember correctly, Skin is the one without any -- and Skinless is the one with some.
Alas my HD Camera, a Sony HDFX is still tape based ... I think I'd better sell this and although not as good at many things go for a Nikon DSLR with HD ... Oh but all those tapes and no way to re digitize if I sell it! Groan... (I'm torn between Canon and Nikon but the HDR stills and auto focus options on video are not yet there on Canon ... last time I checked.)
I have a new video camera but I am in the market for another DSLR camera. I like the Canon lenses better but the Sony chips are rated higher. Difficult decision although there is supposed to be a Nikon announcement on the 24th. Should be interesting.
You are in the field (a soccer field, in my case) or onsite at an event.
-- With your camera you capture your video onto SD cards.
-- You plug these into a SD Card reader and transfer the compressed card* to the Mac (or iPad)
-- With FCPX you begin processing the SD card in compressed form
-- In the background, you can transcode (expand) the video to ProRes Proxy if desired
* A compressed 8 GB AVCHD card yields about 56 GB uncompressed data.
Then, back at the ranch, you transfer the compressed SD card to RAID and let the ProBoxes do the heavy lifting:
-- transcoding to better ProRes codec
-- analysis of clips for color correction
-- analysis of clips for camera shake and roll correction
-- analysis of clips for sound defects (wind noise and camera hum)
-- analysis of clips for people
-- analysis of clips for closeup, intermediate or wide shots.
This is all going on while you sit at your laptop or a kb/mouse/display and process the ProRes Proxy files.
As the ProBoxes finish their work the advanced FCPX automatically uses the advanced ProRes files instead of the Proxy files.
-- You flesh out your story line.
-- You insert some cut-away clips based on the people and distance analyses.
-- You do color correction, then grading, then color matching.
-- You do sound correction.
-- You add titles and effects.
Ta Dah!
Why wait to get back to the ranch? Do it in the field with the iPad. Ancient thread post alert, me from April 2006, but all this has been roughly progressing this way for a long time. I wanted a different aspect ratio, but iPad is essentially the beginnings of
I want a tablet that's actually a tablet -- think steno pad sized. That gives you a form factor of 6.5x9.5 and 5/8" thick. 1.5lbs/680 grams.
Full wireless connectivity, and auto-synching with your desktop or laptop if it knows where it is on the network--worldwide. Uses your laptop/desktop on the network to get heavy duty tasks done, not quite thin client, but more X-grid/remote desktop like.
Put a 9.5 to 10" widescreen touch sensitive display on it, that's bigger than the original Macintoshes had with about a 1/4" bezel and a great size weight for on the go video. Usually, but not always streamed from your own home/work machine! Gotta be able to have enough local storage to watch on a plane/train, or kids in the back seat crossing the wastes of Nebraska.
A battery good for 12 hours in a reasonable conservation mode, 100% non-moving storage. Tons of RAM and lots of flash. It's all local cache for more speed on less power draw.
Killer app? - Sound recording capability and built in sound editing/voice parsing for post meeting/class processing. Farm that work out to the laptop/desktop and save battery. Now you can sit in a meeting or lecture, take time stamped notes and drive a auto-transcript generation utility. This gets even better if you make it Keynote syncable. Just import any PPT slides to Keynote and get the full auto synch for later playback/review. Yeah, there are implementation details here but you get the idea. Never again have some asshat be able to wriggle out of a statement made in a meeting or lecture. Never again have to lug something more than a pound an a half to do notes on or handle quick jottings.
Killer app 2?. When sitting on the desk next to the laptop/desktop and docked for recharging have a mode that would work like an intelligent input device/second monitor simultaneously. I can't begin to tell you how slick that would be for prototyping ideas, or marking up homework, etc.
Throw some other cool app stuff in to boot, I'm sure some of you have some more great ideas. Bottom line is this is not a primary machine replacement, and not a repackaged form factor of anything currently in the market today. It is a new set of functionality in a form factor that could be positioned as the ultimate must have lightweight extension of the current machine into a worldwide computing asset. You are essentially taking your office/home machine's capabilities with you in the size of a steno pad. I probably won't do great for FPS dynamic graphics games, but could probably handle most other genre's just fine, and that's OK because that's FPS is not what it would be designed for.
It would probably also drive a little ecosystem of accessories like on-the-go keyboards, optical drives, GPS navigation and other I/O devices [universal semi-self programming home theater remote? interface] to add things some folks want that others don't.
Shoot for the $499-$599 price point. We are't far off from the capability right now, battery life/form factor and some of the remote software design are the biggest issues right now. Apple already has the underlying technological pieces, just not stitched together in one cohesive manner.
Now just add the rest of the cloud connected remote computation and change the game as to what you can do with an iPad and what you need in a laptop.
I just said they aren't *that* portable, not that they weren't portable. Everything that isn't bolted to the floor or tied to a power supply the size of a room is technically "portable" including a Mac Pro.
A laptop is truly portable - unless you're incredibly weak. I have a 17" MBP that I carry with me all the time when I travel. An iPad isn't powerful enough. So what do you recommend?
Obviously, laptops have a place. The fact that you don't use one doesn't mean that they're useless.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody
I never liked laptops or used them much because it's a trade-off of power vs. portability. They don't sync with another computer, so if you buy a laptop it only makes sense if it's your main computer. As a main computer, the trade-offs are many. There is processing power for one, but also the screens are small, the ergonomics are bad, and the connectivity is somewhat less than a desktop overall.
You keep saying that they don't sync with another computer - which is a total lie as I pointed out earlier. There are a number of options allowing them to sync.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody
As portable devices, they are the heaviest of the lot, and require one to basically carry a large heavy bag full of stuff around most of the time (power supply, mouse, spare batteries, dongles etc.). Battery life has never been stellar until very recently, hard drive space is small etc.
My MBP is 3 years old and has a 500 GB drive. That's more than enough for anything I need. But if the hard drive on a MBP is small, how do you manage on an iPad?
As far as large, heavy bag full of stuff, I'm really grateful that I'm not as helpless as you claim to be. I carry mine through airports around the world - and never found it to be painfully difficult.
Screen? 17" is more than adequate for millions of users. Heck, 11" is enough for lots of people.
Just because you prefer a larger screen doesn't mean that a laptop screen is useless. Just that it's not useful for you.
Battery life is more than adequate today. Feel free to live in the past if you wish, but if I buy a new computer, it's going to be a 2011 model, not one from 2005.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody
I've always used a Mac Pro (and before that a G4 tower), with a large screen, at a desk. With that as your main computer, portable devices don't make much sense unless they sync so for mobile I have used Palm's, PocketPC's, iPaq's etc. until the iPhone came along and blew them all out of the water.
I love the way you think that everyone must be like you. The fact that YOU don't like portable devices doesn't mean that they don't make sense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody
Now I do about 50% of my work on the desktop and the other half on the iPad. If you could draw on the iPad and do any kind of serious graphic work, I would probably only need the Mac Pro about 10 or 20% of the time.
That's nice. As soon as everyone is like you, then your complaints might become valid.
Or, make it something like a Mac Mini with hard disk. (would probably need to be slightly larger for CPU cooling and a faster hard disk).
Now, what it really needs is ZFS. My understanding is that ZFS reallocates storage space dynamically. You could set this up so that each box has a hard disk, CPU and RAM. When you plug in a new one, ZFS creates a new RAID adding the new disk to the old ones without losing data. (you could do the same thing with SSD, but it would be far more expensive).
Yeah, I was all hot for ZFS a while back -- played with it but it was really hard to setup and administer... not used to using the CLI anymore.
I was hoping that Apple would provide a simplified (mainly invisible) front end.
AIR, there were some IP and or licensing difficulties -- so Apple abandoned it. Maybe that Apple would need to open-source its code,
Wasn't this owned by Sun -- and now belongs to Oracle.
As to each box having its own HD -- I think a separate RAID with hot-swappable drives is a better solution.
"FireWire 800 is really slow." So we enter the next phase BTW is your iMac using a 7200 or 5400 drive?
I wonder if this new Family product, all dreaming aside on my personal wishes, if not an HDTV maybe a server with local storage that auto communicates with the cloud for those items tagged for remote backup.
7200!
Lok at this:
The Pegasus appears as a SAS SCSI device.
But there is a hardware designation for a RAID device.
Hmmm... TTBOMN, Apple doesn't make any hardware with a RAID device...
and when you select the Hardware RAID item it shows:
"This system doesn't contain any supported hardware RAID devices. If you installed hardware RAID devices, make sure you installed them properly."
... (random insults, vitriol, personal attacks and general frothing at the mouth) ....
My only question is why you are being some kind of hyper-aggressive a-hole here.
I wasn't "dissing" laptops or making fun of people that use them or anything of the sort. I thought I thought I was calmly describing what I use and why it works for me.
Then you come back with this shite? WTF?
There are trade-offs to using a laptop versus a desktop. Everyone knows this. I described a few.
Maybe you should take a valium and go suck your thumb in the corner somewhere.
Might be a situation for amateur videographers but my only point is that if you require the services of a render farm, you are a professional and in a professional environment, you would probably not be transferring data to a MBP or an iPad in the field as an interim step in production. Maybe for the director to carefully analyze the shot while on location, but that is not the original version which is saved. It might also be reasonable to question why you would even be using FCPX in a professional environment, but that is even farther off topic.
The lines between amateur, prosumer and pro are blurring, AFAICT.
If you don't want to begin culling clips in the field, at least you could transmit the compressed media to a computer at the office or station-- where transcoding and analysis can begin.
I have used FCP for several years -- as a Prosumer. Now, I am using FCPX and Motion 5.
Because of the way these apps exploit the hardware, you can do things that are not practical with FCP 7 and Motion 4.
I have a friend, a high-level exec an a major Broadcast Network, who says (emphasis mine):
Quote:
FCP is actually a powerful program but I still think iMovie does the job for most less than 10 minutes productions. Its real value is revealed when using After Effects or Motion, integrated tight in the production. Content is still king and video 'direction' makes a video look pro... not really the 'editing' tools in most cases.
If you ever travel to NY I would love to give you a tour of some of the edit suites and see how the product is integrated in the workflow. FCP is not the main edit tool, however as a FCP fan you will see its value when connected to graphic virtual sets and tapeless video ingest servers. Pretty amazing in capable hands. But you will also see how simple on & off-line systems (equiv. to iMovie) does the bulk of the work.
I submit that there all kinds of pro tools and pro users -- what may be good tools for a Movie may not be good for a daily show, or a sports highlight... or even some ads and interviews.
That doesn't make them less pro -- just different.
As to FCPX -- that is a story yet to be told -- but it shows promise.
You should be aware that it took several years for FCP to become "good enough" to be used by the "pros".
I have a new video camera but I am in the market for another DSLR camera. I like the Canon lenses better but the Sony chips are rated higher. Difficult decision although there is supposed to be a Nikon announcement on the 24th. Should be interesting.
I just said they aren't *that* portable, not that they weren't portable. Everything that isn't bolted to the floor or tied to a power supply the size of a room is technically "portable" including a Mac Pro.
I never liked laptops or used them much because it's a trade-off of power vs. portability. They don't sync with another computer, so if you buy a laptop it only makes sense if it's your main computer. As a main computer, the trade-offs are many. There is processing power for one, but also the screens are small, the ergonomics are bad, and the connectivity is somewhat less than a desktop overall.
As portable devices, they are the heaviest of the lot, and require one to basically carry a large heavy bag full of stuff around most of the time (power supply, mouse, spare batteries, dongles etc.). Battery life has never been stellar until very recently, hard drive space is small etc.
I've always used a Mac Pro (and before that a G4 tower), with a large screen, at a desk. With that as your main computer, portable devices don't make much sense unless they sync so for mobile I have used Palm's, PocketPC's, iPaq's etc. until the iPhone came along and blew them all out of the water.
Now I do about 50% of my work on the desktop and the other half on the iPad. If you could draw on the iPad and do any kind of serious graphic work, I would probably only need the Mac Pro about 10 or 20% of the time.
No two people's needs are identical but you have to recognize that the laptop/desktop sales ratio keeps climbing to the point where laptops are the vast majority of computers sold now. They must be meeting people's needs. A lot of people's needs.
For me, I go all over the place with a laptop and don't have a problem. Don't bother carrying a mouse. At home, it get's docked so I have in an instant a larger monitor, full keyboard, mouse, etc. Works pretty darn well.
The only new line up I'm waiting for are the new macbook pros with the air design.. besides that the 1 thing we can count on with apple is getting "new products" every few years.. so when will those macbooks will be available is what i'd like to know.
Or Steve crammed an AppleTV into a TV AND expanded its capabilities to make the TV work like a giant iPhone screen, besides the existing Apple TV functions.
It's like a 55" iMac running iOS thru a remote and a Bluetooth keyboard.
Come on, it's kindda obvious!
Just imagine your iPhone turns into one of these 40"-55" ATVs remote and you can control a lot of stuff on the jumbo screen with your iPhone!
Imagine that it in fact becomes a 55" iPhone!
Imagine that your iPhone serves as keyboard and remote for the jumbo ATV!
Some videogame producers have kind of demonstrated this with a cable connected between the iPad/iPhone and the TV.
Now imagine Apple develops the software on the ATV end that integrates and complements the iPhone/iPad end.
Can you imagine the possibilities? Can you see all video-games makers making games that take advantage of a 55" screen mated with the iPhone/iPad screen?
You easily presenting you newly taken photos from your just ended trip to this amazing resort on the big screen without any transferring or connecting? The professional slide-show presentation to the board of administrators of your big company? The videos downloaded from the cloud or iTunes?
Can you see this in light of Apple's post-PC era new strategy? These kind of Jumbo iMacs working direct with the cloud?
All Apple devices tightly integrated?
This will inevitably happen but Steve will make it a reality in an amazing way.
Talk about differentiating the iPhone and iPad from it's competitors! People will definitely not be able to compare the iPhone or iPad with other devices because
IT'S THE ECOSYSTEM, STUPID!
If there's any substance for this rumor, it can't be anything but the new line of Apple 55" insert new name here (iOS iMac).
JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS!!! Christmas = consumer products => TVs
It wont stop them from existing, but without the MacPro the professional market would be sorely pissed and Apple would miss out on a giant chunk of the media creation market its worked so hard to cement itself into over the last few decades.
Professionals need workstations. MacPro is a workstation. 2+2 = 4 (etc.)
The trouble is that I have already bought it. I own the iMac. Now I'm being abandoned because they've changed the interface rules. It's one thing if you introduce a new product with a new way to interact with it. It's another to change existing systems. Yes, today I can undo many of those interface changes. But we all know Apple. Eventually, they will remove the tools to return the Mac to its classic interface.
Stop clinging to the past and get with the future. The only thing worse than change is stagnation.
If the rumor points to something true, I guess Apple will release a redesigned Mac Pro with less Pro oriented hardware but still good enough to satisfy demand of content creators, gamers and good enough for some server needs. But hey... this is more of a wish than an educated guess :-P
Does Apple fill their own data centers with Mac Pros and Mac Minis sitting in racks?
Comments
Do you think Apple would dare call such a TB based CPU add on 'Thunder Box'?
(I hope that joke translates from UK English to American ...)
Perchance, are you referring to Boomer at the Trepedating Pole?
Yes, consider this:
You are in the field (a soccer field, in my case) or onsite at an event.
-- With your camera you capture your video onto SD cards.
-- You plug these into a SD Card reader and transfer the compressed card* to the Mac (or iPad)
-- With FCPX you begin processing the SD card in compressed form
-- In the background, you can transcode (expand) the video to ProRes Proxy if desired
Might be a situation for amateur videographers but my only point is that if you require the services of a render farm, you are a professional and in a professional environment, you would probably not be transferring data to a MBP or an iPad in the field as an interim step in production. Maybe for the director to carefully analyze the shot while on location, but that is not the original version which is saved. It might also be reasonable to question why you would even be using FCPX in a professional environment, but that is even farther off topic.
Off topic ... p.s. Am I the only one that goes between Mac and iPad and wishes for consistency in the auto correction?
Most of our Macs run Lion. The Mac in my bedroom is one of the original Developer Replacement iMacs -- it can't run Lion so it is running the latest SNL.
Some of our iPads and 1 iPhone run iOS 5 beta -- the others are running standard iOS 4.3
Crazy, who Me? Between scrolling, autocorrection, dictionary lookup and Safari's unanticipated page reloads....
Nah! I've always been borderline sane!
As in physically injured? Did they get holes punched into their fingers by a tape machine?
Well, that depends on whether the hole punch was skin or skinless, does't it? If I remember correctly, Skin is the one without any -- and Skinless is the one with some.
Alas my HD Camera, a Sony HDFX is still tape based ... I think I'd better sell this and although not as good at many things go for a Nikon DSLR with HD ... Oh but all those tapes and no way to re digitize if I sell it! Groan... (I'm torn between Canon and Nikon but the HDR stills and auto focus options on video are not yet there on Canon ... last time I checked.)
I have a new video camera but I am in the market for another DSLR camera. I like the Canon lenses better but the Sony chips are rated higher. Difficult decision although there is supposed to be a Nikon announcement on the 24th. Should be interesting.
Yes, consider this:
You are in the field (a soccer field, in my case) or onsite at an event.
-- With your camera you capture your video onto SD cards.
-- You plug these into a SD Card reader and transfer the compressed card* to the Mac (or iPad)
-- With FCPX you begin processing the SD card in compressed form
-- In the background, you can transcode (expand) the video to ProRes Proxy if desired
* A compressed 8 GB AVCHD card yields about 56 GB uncompressed data.
Then, back at the ranch, you transfer the compressed SD card to RAID and let the ProBoxes do the heavy lifting:
-- transcoding to better ProRes codec
-- analysis of clips for color correction
-- analysis of clips for camera shake and roll correction
-- analysis of clips for sound defects (wind noise and camera hum)
-- analysis of clips for people
-- analysis of clips for closeup, intermediate or wide shots.
This is all going on while you sit at your laptop or a kb/mouse/display and process the ProRes Proxy files.
As the ProBoxes finish their work the advanced FCPX automatically uses the advanced ProRes files instead of the Proxy files.
-- You flesh out your story line.
-- You insert some cut-away clips based on the people and distance analyses.
-- You do color correction, then grading, then color matching.
-- You do sound correction.
-- You add titles and effects.
Ta Dah!
Why wait to get back to the ranch? Do it in the field with the iPad. Ancient thread post alert, me from April 2006, but all this has been roughly progressing this way for a long time. I wanted a different aspect ratio, but iPad is essentially the beginnings of
this.
I want a tablet that's actually a tablet -- think steno pad sized. That gives you a form factor of 6.5x9.5 and 5/8" thick. 1.5lbs/680 grams.
Full wireless connectivity, and auto-synching with your desktop or laptop if it knows where it is on the network--worldwide. Uses your laptop/desktop on the network to get heavy duty tasks done, not quite thin client, but more X-grid/remote desktop like.
Put a 9.5 to 10" widescreen touch sensitive display on it, that's bigger than the original Macintoshes had with about a 1/4" bezel and a great size weight for on the go video. Usually, but not always streamed from your own home/work machine! Gotta be able to have enough local storage to watch on a plane/train, or kids in the back seat crossing the wastes of Nebraska.
A battery good for 12 hours in a reasonable conservation mode, 100% non-moving storage. Tons of RAM and lots of flash. It's all local cache for more speed on less power draw.
Killer app? - Sound recording capability and built in sound editing/voice parsing for post meeting/class processing. Farm that work out to the laptop/desktop and save battery. Now you can sit in a meeting or lecture, take time stamped notes and drive a auto-transcript generation utility. This gets even better if you make it Keynote syncable. Just import any PPT slides to Keynote and get the full auto synch for later playback/review. Yeah, there are implementation details here but you get the idea. Never again have some asshat be able to wriggle out of a statement made in a meeting or lecture. Never again have to lug something more than a pound an a half to do notes on or handle quick jottings.
Killer app 2?. When sitting on the desk next to the laptop/desktop and docked for recharging have a mode that would work like an intelligent input device/second monitor simultaneously. I can't begin to tell you how slick that would be for prototyping ideas, or marking up homework, etc.
Throw some other cool app stuff in to boot, I'm sure some of you have some more great ideas. Bottom line is this is not a primary machine replacement, and not a repackaged form factor of anything currently in the market today. It is a new set of functionality in a form factor that could be positioned as the ultimate must have lightweight extension of the current machine into a worldwide computing asset. You are essentially taking your office/home machine's capabilities with you in the size of a steno pad. I probably won't do great for FPS dynamic graphics games, but could probably handle most other genre's just fine, and that's OK because that's FPS is not what it would be designed for.
It would probably also drive a little ecosystem of accessories like on-the-go keyboards, optical drives, GPS navigation and other I/O devices [universal semi-self programming home theater remote? interface] to add things some folks want that others don't.
Shoot for the $499-$599 price point. We are't far off from the capability right now, battery life/form factor and some of the remote software design are the biggest issues right now. Apple already has the underlying technological pieces, just not stitched together in one cohesive manner.
Now just add the rest of the cloud connected remote computation and change the game as to what you can do with an iPad and what you need in a laptop.
I just said they aren't *that* portable, not that they weren't portable. Everything that isn't bolted to the floor or tied to a power supply the size of a room is technically "portable" including a Mac Pro.
A laptop is truly portable - unless you're incredibly weak. I have a 17" MBP that I carry with me all the time when I travel. An iPad isn't powerful enough. So what do you recommend?
Obviously, laptops have a place. The fact that you don't use one doesn't mean that they're useless.
I never liked laptops or used them much because it's a trade-off of power vs. portability. They don't sync with another computer, so if you buy a laptop it only makes sense if it's your main computer. As a main computer, the trade-offs are many. There is processing power for one, but also the screens are small, the ergonomics are bad, and the connectivity is somewhat less than a desktop overall.
You keep saying that they don't sync with another computer - which is a total lie as I pointed out earlier. There are a number of options allowing them to sync.
As portable devices, they are the heaviest of the lot, and require one to basically carry a large heavy bag full of stuff around most of the time (power supply, mouse, spare batteries, dongles etc.). Battery life has never been stellar until very recently, hard drive space is small etc.
My MBP is 3 years old and has a 500 GB drive. That's more than enough for anything I need. But if the hard drive on a MBP is small, how do you manage on an iPad?
As far as large, heavy bag full of stuff, I'm really grateful that I'm not as helpless as you claim to be. I carry mine through airports around the world - and never found it to be painfully difficult.
Screen? 17" is more than adequate for millions of users. Heck, 11" is enough for lots of people.
Just because you prefer a larger screen doesn't mean that a laptop screen is useless. Just that it's not useful for you.
Battery life is more than adequate today. Feel free to live in the past if you wish, but if I buy a new computer, it's going to be a 2011 model, not one from 2005.
I've always used a Mac Pro (and before that a G4 tower), with a large screen, at a desk. With that as your main computer, portable devices don't make much sense unless they sync so for mobile I have used Palm's, PocketPC's, iPaq's etc. until the iPhone came along and blew them all out of the water.
I love the way you think that everyone must be like you. The fact that YOU don't like portable devices doesn't mean that they don't make sense.
Now I do about 50% of my work on the desktop and the other half on the iPad. If you could draw on the iPad and do any kind of serious graphic work, I would probably only need the Mac Pro about 10 or 20% of the time.
That's nice. As soon as everyone is like you, then your complaints might become valid.
Or, make it something like a Mac Mini with hard disk. (would probably need to be slightly larger for CPU cooling and a faster hard disk).
Now, what it really needs is ZFS. My understanding is that ZFS reallocates storage space dynamically. You could set this up so that each box has a hard disk, CPU and RAM. When you plug in a new one, ZFS creates a new RAID adding the new disk to the old ones without losing data. (you could do the same thing with SSD, but it would be far more expensive).
Yeah, I was all hot for ZFS a while back -- played with it but it was really hard to setup and administer... not used to using the CLI anymore.
I was hoping that Apple would provide a simplified (mainly invisible) front end.
AIR, there were some IP and or licensing difficulties -- so Apple abandoned it. Maybe that Apple would need to open-source its code,
Wasn't this owned by Sun -- and now belongs to Oracle.
As to each box having its own HD -- I think a separate RAID with hot-swappable drives is a better solution.
"FireWire 800 is really slow." So we enter the next phase
I wonder if this new Family product, all dreaming aside on my personal wishes, if not an HDTV maybe a server with local storage that auto communicates with the cloud for those items tagged for remote backup.
7200!
Lok at this:
The Pegasus appears as a SAS SCSI device.
But there is a hardware designation for a RAID device.
Hmmm... TTBOMN, Apple doesn't make any hardware with a RAID device...
and when you select the Hardware RAID item it shows:
"This system doesn't contain any supported hardware RAID devices. If you installed hardware RAID devices, make sure you installed them properly."
... (random insults, vitriol, personal attacks and general frothing at the mouth) ....
My only question is why you are being some kind of hyper-aggressive a-hole here.
I wasn't "dissing" laptops or making fun of people that use them or anything of the sort. I thought I thought I was calmly describing what I use and why it works for me.
Then you come back with this shite? WTF?
There are trade-offs to using a laptop versus a desktop. Everyone knows this. I described a few.
Maybe you should take a valium and go suck your thumb in the corner somewhere.
Might be a situation for amateur videographers but my only point is that if you require the services of a render farm, you are a professional and in a professional environment, you would probably not be transferring data to a MBP or an iPad in the field as an interim step in production. Maybe for the director to carefully analyze the shot while on location, but that is not the original version which is saved. It might also be reasonable to question why you would even be using FCPX in a professional environment, but that is even farther off topic.
The lines between amateur, prosumer and pro are blurring, AFAICT.
If you don't want to begin culling clips in the field, at least you could transmit the compressed media to a computer at the office or station-- where transcoding and analysis can begin.
I have used FCP for several years -- as a Prosumer. Now, I am using FCPX and Motion 5.
Because of the way these apps exploit the hardware, you can do things that are not practical with FCP 7 and Motion 4.
I have a friend, a high-level exec an a major Broadcast Network, who says (emphasis mine):
FCP is actually a powerful program but I still think iMovie does the job for most less than 10 minutes productions. Its real value is revealed when using After Effects or Motion, integrated tight in the production. Content is still king and video 'direction' makes a video look pro... not really the 'editing' tools in most cases.
If you ever travel to NY I would love to give you a tour of some of the edit suites and see how the product is integrated in the workflow. FCP is not the main edit tool, however as a FCP fan you will see its value when connected to graphic virtual sets and tapeless video ingest servers. Pretty amazing in capable hands. But you will also see how simple on & off-line systems (equiv. to iMovie) does the bulk of the work.
I submit that there all kinds of pro tools and pro users -- what may be good tools for a Movie may not be good for a daily show, or a sports highlight... or even some ads and interviews.
That doesn't make them less pro -- just different.
As to FCPX -- that is a story yet to be told -- but it shows promise.
You should be aware that it took several years for FCP to become "good enough" to be used by the "pros".
I have a new video camera but I am in the market for another DSLR camera. I like the Canon lenses better but the Sony chips are rated higher. Difficult decision although there is supposed to be a Nikon announcement on the 24th. Should be interesting.
Have a look at this... it's funny:
An open letter to Canon from a disgruntled DSLR owner
I just said they aren't *that* portable, not that they weren't portable. Everything that isn't bolted to the floor or tied to a power supply the size of a room is technically "portable" including a Mac Pro.
I never liked laptops or used them much because it's a trade-off of power vs. portability. They don't sync with another computer, so if you buy a laptop it only makes sense if it's your main computer. As a main computer, the trade-offs are many. There is processing power for one, but also the screens are small, the ergonomics are bad, and the connectivity is somewhat less than a desktop overall.
As portable devices, they are the heaviest of the lot, and require one to basically carry a large heavy bag full of stuff around most of the time (power supply, mouse, spare batteries, dongles etc.). Battery life has never been stellar until very recently, hard drive space is small etc.
I've always used a Mac Pro (and before that a G4 tower), with a large screen, at a desk. With that as your main computer, portable devices don't make much sense unless they sync so for mobile I have used Palm's, PocketPC's, iPaq's etc. until the iPhone came along and blew them all out of the water.
Now I do about 50% of my work on the desktop and the other half on the iPad. If you could draw on the iPad and do any kind of serious graphic work, I would probably only need the Mac Pro about 10 or 20% of the time.
No two people's needs are identical but you have to recognize that the laptop/desktop sales ratio keeps climbing to the point where laptops are the vast majority of computers sold now. They must be meeting people's needs. A lot of people's needs.
For me, I go all over the place with a laptop and don't have a problem. Don't bother carrying a mouse. At home, it get's docked so I have in an instant a larger monitor, full keyboard, mouse, etc. Works pretty darn well.
It's the new Apple TV line of IMacs.
Or should I say iOS based TVs?
Or Steve crammed an AppleTV into a TV AND expanded its capabilities to make the TV work like a giant iPhone screen, besides the existing Apple TV functions.
It's like a 55" iMac running iOS thru a remote and a Bluetooth keyboard.
Come on, it's kindda obvious!
Just imagine your iPhone turns into one of these 40"-55" ATVs remote and you can control a lot of stuff on the jumbo screen with your iPhone!
Imagine that it in fact becomes a 55" iPhone!
Imagine that your iPhone serves as keyboard and remote for the jumbo ATV!
Some videogame producers have kind of demonstrated this with a cable connected between the iPad/iPhone and the TV.
Now imagine Apple develops the software on the ATV end that integrates and complements the iPhone/iPad end.
Can you imagine the possibilities? Can you see all video-games makers making games that take advantage of a 55" screen mated with the iPhone/iPad screen?
You easily presenting you newly taken photos from your just ended trip to this amazing resort on the big screen without any transferring or connecting? The professional slide-show presentation to the board of administrators of your big company? The videos downloaded from the cloud or iTunes?
Can you see this in light of Apple's post-PC era new strategy? These kind of Jumbo iMacs working direct with the cloud?
All Apple devices tightly integrated?
This will inevitably happen but Steve will make it a reality in an amazing way.
Talk about differentiating the iPhone and iPad from it's competitors! People will definitely not be able to compare the iPhone or iPad with other devices because
IT'S THE ECOSYSTEM, STUPID!
If there's any substance for this rumor, it can't be anything but the new line of Apple 55" insert new name here (iOS iMac).
JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS!!! Christmas = consumer products => TVs
I rest my case!
Edit: I got the name - it's the 55" iPlay!
Why do they need a Mac Pro to keep existing?
It wont stop them from existing, but without the MacPro the professional market would be sorely pissed and Apple would miss out on a giant chunk of the media creation market its worked so hard to cement itself into over the last few decades.
Professionals need workstations. MacPro is a workstation. 2+2 = 4 (etc.)
Touch does not work - ergonomically - on vertical screens.
And a single menu bar does not work - ergonomically - on Macs with multiple displays.
And a single menu bar does not work - ergonomically - on Macs with multiple displays.
That has nothing to do with ergonomics.
The trouble is that I have already bought it. I own the iMac. Now I'm being abandoned because they've changed the interface rules. It's one thing if you introduce a new product with a new way to interact with it. It's another to change existing systems. Yes, today I can undo many of those interface changes. But we all know Apple. Eventually, they will remove the tools to return the Mac to its classic interface.
Stop clinging to the past and get with the future. The only thing worse than change is stagnation.
Maybe the Mac Pro isn't going so Pro anymore...
If the rumor points to something true, I guess Apple will release a redesigned Mac Pro with less Pro oriented hardware but still good enough to satisfy demand of content creators, gamers and good enough for some server needs. But hey... this is more of a wish than an educated guess :-P
Does Apple fill their own data centers with Mac Pros and Mac Minis sitting in racks?