hank carter

lkrupp said:

kpluck said:

Yes, Apple abandoned the professional market awhile ago. -kpluck

No they did not. Professionals use the 5K Retina iMac these days. That’s what Alex Lindsay, the founder of PixelCorps and former Lucasfilm member, says about the Mac pro market. So many of you techie “wannabes but never quite” describe the so-called pro market as being machines with expansion slots. You live in some obsolete tower PC world that is fading quickly. Lindsay says PixelCorps’ 5K Retina iMacs outperform their Mac Pros significantly and he is a REAL professional whose company filmed in the White House recently. So your statement that Apple abandoned the professional market a while ago is ignorantly misinformed. How do you think all these movies and shows are being put together with FCP? On Hackintosh towers? Blathering nonsense.

Horsefeathers.

I've been working in Hollywood post production for over 20 years with A-list post production houses like Sony Imageworks, Weta, Digital Domain, MPC, Disney Feature Animation etc..

Many post houses have iMacs, but they are for the graphic designers or people running AfterFX / Photoshop. Some editing is done on the iMac in Premiere and a lot less these days in FCPX. Lots of audio is done on the iMac, except the damn fan makes it useless in many recording situations. Basically anywhere you need a mid range machine you will find an iMac.

Yes, there are people are out there doing visual effects on iMacs, but I can guarantee you that you would be laughed out of the room if you suggest that the next Star Wars or Iron Man be done on iMacs. We're taking about small shops doing relatively low end work.

The Mac Pro still is the tool of choice for anyone running OS X for professional software like Maya, Nuke, FCPX etc. All of these programs are heavily multithreaded and take full advantage of the multicore Xeon and the dual graphics cards and will smoke the iMac. No one serious is running something like DaVinci Resolve on an iMac. That's just silly and untrue.

The Skylake CPU packs a lot of punch, but the mobile iMac GPU is beat by even the basic D300 cards in the Mac Pro. Once you run programs that are properly multithreaded 64bit the Xeon will eat the Skylake. There are many other reasons why the iMac is not suitable for heavy duty use. The iMac has only one Thunderbolt controller that has to handle both ports and you will notice a hit on heavy load. The Mac Pro has 6 ports and multiple controllers and a system bus that is significantly bigger. And of course there are the heat issues with the iMac running under sustained load for extended periods of time. To be clear the iMac is essentially a Macbook Pro built into a monitor, not a workstation.

The ugly truth is that most visual effects houses like Double Negative, ILM, Digital Domain, Weta etc don't run Mac Pro's or OS X. It's mostly HP Linux boxes and heaven forbid Windoze running Maya, Nuke, Modo, Hondini etc. In these bigger houses the Mac Pro is usually relegated to editorial, matte painters, audio etc. 

The render farms, which can consists of thousands of blades, are usually Linux or Windows. No one is stacking trashcans in a machine room.

If you go into a digital intermediate bay at a post house you will find the rare Mac Pro 12 core / D700 running something like DaVinci Resolve to color time commercials, maybe a smaller budget movie. But ever since Apple went slot-less and single CPU post production houses have started to switch to HP or Supermicro boxes running Linux. Some of these machines pack 4 -8 Nvidia Titan X cards for realtime color grading of 2/4k RAW footage and 2 Xeon CPU. Try that with the current Mac Pro. Some places have held on to their silver 5,1 boxes and hot rodded them instead of switching over to the nMP or Linux.

If Apple wants to be taken serious again by professionals they need to bring back a high frequency dual CPU machine with PCI slots that can handle something like 4 Titan cards, sound cards, I/O cards etc.

But even at that the truth is that the Mac has never been wide spread in post production outside of editorial and a few specialized areas like design, AE/PS, matte painting and the audio departments. The price / performance ratio has never been there. In the past it was SGI, maybe SUN. Once the Pentium showed up everyone switched to PC boxes running Linux, Windows NT and eventually Win7. Pixar is one of the few bigger companies that deployed OS X on any kind of scale and believe me they are not sitting on iMacs.