#20 "Breaking Down the Options for the New Mac"

December 20, 2013 01:08:52
#20 "Breaking Down the Options for the New Mac"
The Workflow Show
#20 "Breaking Down the Options for the New Mac"

Dec 20 2013 | 01:08:52

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Show Notes

The Workflow ShowThe powerful new Mac Pro is now available for sale, and it's been quite awhile since we've been so excited about the release of a new Apple product. Yet, as has been the trend with Apple computers over the recent past, there are fewer areas that you can "expand" down the road, so the choices you make at purchase become ever more critical. In this episode, Nick Gold and Merrel Davis "get granular" in sharing their insights as to what factors you should keep in mind when considering adding this revolutionary computer to your digital video workflow. Hint: it boils down to four areas: CPU, GPU, storage, and RAM. The guys also discuss the release of Final Cut Pro X 10.1  While some folks are still holding a grudge regarding Apple's abrupt pullback a couple of years ago from the professional video editing space, Nick and Merrel are starting to feel like many others in the field that perhaps time can heal the wounds. While FCP X, when first introduced, was considered a rather lame "next step" after FCP 7 -- in essence "adding salt to the wound," this latest version release of FCP X is going a long way in convincing many that Apple indeed is dedicated to being a player in the professional video editing realm. And when teamed with the new Mac Pro? Well, listen to the episode. Episode length: 1:08:52 Remember that you can also listen and subscribe to The Workflow Show in iTunes. Show Notes: (Items touched upon but not fully-fleshed out in the podcast) Netflix to launch 4K in 2014 Pegasus2 Thunderbolt 2 hardware RAID storage Your comments are welcome below, or feel free to email us. And we invite you to contact Nick Gold or Merrel Davis at [email protected] to discuss your particular digital video workflow needs further.
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. I'm Meryl Davis alongside with my cohost, Nick gold and it's episode two Oh four. And it's a big one. The Mac pro it's here, Mary Mac pro day to each and every one of us or as we marry Mac pro miss, something like that. Yeah. Um, today, as of this record, we are sitting here on the very first day of the new Mac pros being available. Well, quasi available Apple has finally decided to take orders for these new tubular Mac pros. And we have all of the pricing. We can put orders in first thing, I'm going to just throw out there folks be patient on this one. Like the days of yore, when Apple introduced new pro workstations, and it could take a month or two for them to arrive, this is going to be a similar circumstance. These things are going to be highly constrained. Speaker 0 00:55 Apple's actually assembling them in Austin, in the United States of America. And it's a new manufacturing facility. The parts are going to be constrained. So if you get your orders in just be patient, they will arrive, but it's probably going to be late January or February timeframe to be sure. So it's pretty exciting. You know, they're manufacturing these in the U S and then of course there is an Apple care center that, uh, that was just opened up in Pennsylvania. So the East coast contingent of Apple, um, is a little bit stronger now, too. And, uh, I figured let's just get to the meat of it. Let's talk about this bad boy. Yeah, well, and you know, the funny thing is Apple decided to do something a little atypical a few months ago, and essentially unveil the machines and, and paint a portrait of what the possible specifications will be. Speaker 0 01:46 But now we know how they price, what the true set, uh, set of options are. And it's not really taking us by surprise because we knew what the variables were going to be in these macro macro configurations. But, you know, it's a little more, it feels a little more real now it's getting real because now we can actually put orders in and people will have to make these decisions and decide, is this the pro machine I've been waiting for? And if so, this is how much I budgeted for it. And out of the available options, what do I want to get for my money? These things, you know, in some ways there are a lot like an iMac or a Mac mini in that we don't expect there to be a lot of aftermarket upgradability. So while this may end up not being true, it's probably best to assume that the machine you order, maybe with the exception of the Ram configuration, that's going to be the machine that's going to be there in front of you until you get a new one, because we're not expecting you to be able to do CPU, upgrades, graphics, processor, upgrades, and probably even storage upgrades. Speaker 0 02:53 You know, the one thing that's clearly user replaceable is the Ram, and this is going to be the machine that you're with. So you want to make sure you spec it out appropriately. And to add to that when we're talking, specking it out appropriately, the things to think about you are currently working in a 10 80 P workflow, but, and you don't even have a two K camera, four K camera, but you might just in two years, but the idea is to inspect something that you can really sort of anticipate what your needs are. 4k is a reality, you know, from a consumer perspective, from a professional perspective of, there are four K monitors that are compatible with the new Mac pros and a nickel. Talk a little bit about them in a second, but, um, what are you anticipating the kind of workflows that you will have if you need to natively work in those larger formats over time, you might want to bump up that GPU acceleration to six gigs out of the gate, because three gigs might just work for you now until whatever the new camera codec is that you receive for the camera that you purchased a year in the future. Speaker 0 03:57 It's really true. I mean, we typically are trying to recommend our clients, you know, build headroom into these types of things because, you know, digital media is changing very quickly. We, we obviously went through the standard Def to high Def you know, transition. And now it very much seems like 4k could be a reality if not for delivery, at least for camera acquisition. And, you know, even if you're not planning on delivering 4k shooting in 4k, even if you're downloading to HD leads to some just very gorgeous looking HD footage, but also, you know, think about it with, with a 4k frame size, that's basically like four, 10 80 P frames all put together. And so in the post production side of things, if you're shooting in four K, it's kind of like how it's still cameras. We have these very high megapixel counts, but one thing that those extra pixels gets you, even if you're distilling it down to a significantly smaller picture is you can crop and still maintain a huge amount of quality. Speaker 0 04:58 Uh, I think a lot of people who are used to shooting in, in HD are used to kind of thinking of everything that the camera is picking up is going to more or less beyond screen. But if you're shooting in four K, you can do pan and scan. You can do cropping of the, of the frame and basically buy yourself a lot more wiggle room and be able to manipulate that content in postproduction. And really just zoom in on the portion of the overall 4k frame. That is, is what you want there in the frame. And 4k buys you that in post, whereas with 10 80 P or seven 20, you really don't have that extra room around the center of your frame to work with. So these are things that are just going to start to become a reality. And a lot of people said, Oh, well, I do video for the web. Speaker 0 05:47 Mostly I'm never going to need HD. And just look at the last few years, I mean, nowadays most video on the internet seems like it's HD frame size. And so in four case coming to YouTube, you know, so that's, that's a reality and 4k is already committed by Netflix for 2015. I mean, it is going to be a part of our consumer landscape inevitably. So that two year cycle prior that's when the professionals really got to put their toe into the water, I think. Yeah. And, and again, remember to listeners that whenever you see this phrase ultra HD bandied about, that's just a kind of more consumery way of saying four K, right? So ultra HD 4k, it's all really the same thing. Many of the cameras that are coming onto the market now, or four K cameras, reds had one that are larger than 4k frame sizes for awhile, black magic Scott I'm coming out. Speaker 0 06:37 You know, there's quite a lot happening in this space and the technology is just going to inevitably get cheaper and cheaper. So yeah, this is why we recommend build some headroom into your machine. You're not exactly sure what kind of load you might be throwing at it a year from now two years from now. And you know, most of our clients is you can attest tomorrow. They tend to hold on to their production workstations. I'd say the average is somewhere between a three and a six year cycle. Right. And if you really are, you know, thinking, well, gosh, what kind of projects might I be working on in four or five years? You know, well, we're talking now. I mean, literally about like 2018, 2019, it kind of sounds like the far, most of the year 2020. I know. Right. And so it sounds like it's way far off, but I know as I age, man, you blink and like a few years go by. Speaker 0 07:28 My kid's already a year old. I mean, like I know it's, it's crazy. You know, I thought now would be a good time just to go over my short list in my head of nicknames that I have for the Mac pro, just so he could get them out of the way we go. We figured out what we're calling it officially. I love our two D tube. That's my favorite art two D tube. I mean, folks probably remember that Apple had the cube. And I think I mentioned this in a previous episode that one of our clients said, well, if they had the cube, this is like the tube. And it is basically a little black tube. And it's a little guys. I mean, it's like one eighth, the volume of these big silver Mac pro and power Mac G five boxes that I guess have been kind of the norm for Mac pro enclosures for what, like 11 years now or something there's gotta be like some Le like landfill in New Mexico, that's just filled with the chassies of macros. Speaker 0 08:16 We haven't, we have a tower of empty cases in a tower off towers. I know we talk about like, should we turn these into like fish tanks nobody ever does? Yeah. There are a million, there are a million Mac pro coffee tables have never been made. Right? So let's, let's talk about the specs and what the options are and how people should evaluate the specifications based on the type of applications that they're using, the type of projects that they're working on again now, and maybe down the road and there's four and we'll list these out and have a little dialogue about each of them. But the other thing that I wanted to just put out there is, you know, up until today, we only knew what the entry level versions really cost Apple had given, thrown. Some MSRP is out there of basically a 3000 bucks and 4,000 bucks. Speaker 0 09:01 And we knew that those were like kind of two of the lower end models. If you absolutely max out one of these new Mac pros, it is a around 9,000 bucks. So, but that's totally maxed out and frankly, quite possibly overkill for the vast majority of users. So there's, but also really commensurate with what the last go round was. Anyway, you, you went full bore on an old Mac pro you'd be up there too. So it's true. It's true. It's probably from a pricing perspective on par with what we would expect to see for the product, but, you know, unless you're doing some really, really intensive work, but it'd be hard to make a case. I mean, we'd love to say a nine K Mac pro, but you probably, you could get away with doing something a little less. So there's four variables when we configure a, uh, configure a Mac pro, right? Speaker 0 09:49 And these are, these are basically the four modifiable specifications that when we do a custom build and most of our customers are always doing a custom build of a machine because Apple only gives one or two models as kind of the base models and everything beyond that becomes what we call a build to order. So there's basically four variables. We'll hit them one at a time, but the four are CPU, GPU, storage and Ram, that's it. That's what lives inside of this little black tube CPU, your processor, GPU, your graphics cards. And in the case of these new Mac pros, it's two graphics cards and each and every one of them storage, of course, which is a new type of storage technology. We'll talk a little bit about that and ran the random access, memory, your memory, and we'll hit all of these. So let's start with the CPU. Speaker 0 10:37 It's a little different than what we've had for a few years. Sure. And probably if you're looking at the, um, the first thing you'll notice, if you look at those processors and how many cores they are, is that there's an interesting correlation with the speed of the processor and the number of course. Absolutely. And this has always been the case, right? So, you know, the first thing about these new Mac pros, Mac pros and even the <inaudible> for many years were dual processor machines. They had two physical CPU sitting on the motherboard, and then for years now those CPS themselves have had multiple cores, but then you have to have these central processing units and these new macros are different. They only have a single CPU. There is no option for dual CPS. And the way that it now works is even a single CPU configuration can be a 12 core CPU on one chip. Speaker 0 11:30 So it's no longer two, six cores. It's one chip that has 12 cores. And of course the other thing, because for years now, again, these, these Intel processors have a function called hyper-threading. When you like go into activity, monitor in Mac iOS 10, and you look at all of the cores and their activity across them. Each of the cores actually behaves as if they are two cores per core. And this is what we might call a logical core because of this hyperthreading feature. It can kind of treat a core as if it's two cores and do twice as many instructions per cycle. So the four core options are a four core chip, a six core chip, an eight core chip and a 12 core chip. And these are the first times I think we've ever had a single chips with eight and 12 cores on a single chip, but you're absolutely right, as you were saying, you know, and this is kind of the trade off when a company like Intel is building Silicon processors is that as the core count goes up, the clock speed of the chip goes down overall. Speaker 0 12:37 And so the, the four core, the six core, the eight core and the 12 core, well, interestingly from a gigahertz rating, it actually goes the fastest one per core is the four core machine. And then it builds up to what is technically the slowest one per core, which is the 12 core machine. So here's the dynamic, right? How this plays out for users I'm am an end user. And I don't understand, I want 3.9 gigahertz because that's my fast computer. Well, yeah. You know, it's funny, right? And we, we always look at like the battle of the specs and right. Like the biggest number always wins. But this is an interesting dynamic because if you want the biggest number in terms of speed per core, you're actually doing the lower core chip. And if you want the highest core count, the speed of the chip is going to be lower. Speaker 0 13:29 So it's like, gosh, which big number do I want? And, you know, the reality is for most people, I think you're going to want to be somewhere in the middle big, you're going to want to balance between the clock speed of the chip and the core count. And I think that means for most of our users, they're going to be looking at the two mid range price options, which are the six core and the eight core chip. Again, those are going to act like a 12 core and a 16 core. Um, but that's how it's kind of been with these chips all along for years now, they've acted like they have twice as many cores as they really mean. The 12 core really acts like a 24 core. I know if you open, if you open up activity monitor and you do the little view that shows you every core that's working, it's not 12 bars. Speaker 0 14:09 If you have a 12 core chip, it's 24 little bars that it shows. And then when you're running your applications, you can see those little lines bounce up and down and it'll show you what the activity is across all of these, you know, not necessarily literal cores, but these logical cores. So let's relate this to the software that people use so they can make a choice. Right? When we talk about cores, you know, think about parallel processing, the computer's ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, right? And in the world of computing and in programming, we refer to these tiny little tasks that are running in the background as threads. That's what they're called. That's, what's being kind of processed. You use your computer for various tasks. You have all of these little threads going on. And so the, the language we use to describe applications and programs that are very capable of taking advantage of multiple processor core simultaneously is they're multithreaded in that one program that you're running say after effects can actually spawn multiple simultaneous parallel processing activities across all of your real and kind of logical cores. Speaker 0 15:23 And it really will take advantage of the more cores you have. The more it can be processing in parallel. And even if you run applications that don't have a whole lot of multithreaded newness going on, and that they really maybe only take advantage of one or a couple of cores at once, while, keep in mind, you still have multiple things going on on the computer. You've got the operating system that might have many threads going on all at once. You might have several programs running easily all at once. Uh, for you Adobe users, it's going to be very common to have both premiere and after effects running simultaneous Photoshop open to, I mean like, you know, I mean, yeah, all of our creative users, they typically have like, you know, a good range of pretty hardcore creative applications open all at once. And so, you know, different apps may to a greater or lesser degree be more or less multithreaded. Speaker 0 16:14 But when you have multiple apps open simultaneously, you're inherently going to get a benefit. The more cores you have, but there is this flip side in that the clock speed of the cores, each core is higher. If you have a lower overall core count. And what that basically means is, you know, if you think of the clock cycle of a CPU is just how many little bits of work it can do per second or per minute or whatever range of time you're talking about. Even though you have a lower core count with that four or six core versus the aide or the 12 core, it's able to cram more work in because the chip is operating at a faster clock speed. So again, it's like you have to balance, you know, almost a six, a half a dozen, the other, if, if it depends on, you know, the workflow. Speaker 0 17:03 And the reality is if you look at the clock speed differences between the four different chips that are an option, and you look at the core differences that are, you know, the options, um, again ranging from four cores to 12 cores in a single chip, you do have to balance this. If you use applications that are very good at taking advantage of multiple processor, cores, you know, typical media transcoding programs are very good at that. You know, after effects is typically quite good at taking advantage of multiple cores. In fact, most modern software is, and the reality is most people's workloads will typically be improved these days more by having more cores available to them. Do I think that the 12 core given that it's priced at this quite a premium price level? I mean, I think it's about, it's at least 1500 bucks more than the next one down, which is the eight core machine. Speaker 0 18:00 Do I think that's absolutely necessary for everyone? I don't know. And that's always been an advisement historically is watch out for that first fully populated, fully full max Mac pro. If I were to make this purchase myself, if I were to just say, and this is something I'm actually considering, because I've very much like one for my own work. If I were to do that, I probably would land on an eight core with five 12. Well, we'll get into the other spots. I would land on an eight core because that would, for me personally, that would be the, the difference, the nexus between the kind of speed I wanted and ultimately the overall price. Right. Yeah. And the other thing to remember too, is that, you know, Intel is the largest CPU fabricator on the planet, and these are Intel chips, but for Intel to be able to create slabs of Silicon, that these CPS are built on and have them and pump out a chip where all 12 cores are functioning fully properly, it is so much more difficult and expensive for them to do that versus one that has eight good cores or six good cores or four good cores that they have to charge a super premium typically for that highest end option. Speaker 0 19:16 And I mean, for a lot of years now, I've typically recommended to clients get the second one down when it comes to CPS. Because I mean, if you need all the power you can get and money is no object and go for it, if that's you, you're my favorite customer, call us please. But now, but, uh, we like the rest of you too. It's okay. But, um, you know, okay, go for the 12 core, but again, the, the, the cost benefit analysis that you should be running is, you know, is it worth that much more of a premium, or if I bump it down to the eight core, given that the eight core is actually a bit faster, the eight core is a three gigahertz versus the 2.7, which is the 12 gigahertz. I'm sorry, the 12 core is 2.7. So it's like, eh, that's an awful lot of money to get, you know, for extra real cores. Speaker 0 20:05 And I think most people will be pretty well served with the eight core. And frankly, even the six core is a very powerful machine and its clock speed is, is higher still than even the eight core. So, you know, I'd say you got to the core of the issue here. I see what you did there. And also it's important to look at like, you know, the iMac specs, um, and if you stand them up alongside your you're still blowing them out of the water. Yeah. And the other thing to remember too, is that these are the latest, latest, latest generation Intel Xeon chips. They are the high end workstation and server class chips that are overall, frankly, more reliable than the CPU class that's in an iMac or the other Apple products. I mean, those are good chips, too. Don't me wrong, but Xeljanz are specifically built to behave good. Speaker 0 20:52 Underload they, they go in a lot of servers we sell and you know, that's a, that's a server class chip at the end of the day. And again, high end creative workstations tend to use the ons. And one of the differences is let's say you're there in that project. And it's this massive long, you know, after effects project with, I dunno, you know, dozens of layers of graphics and transitions and whatnot, right? And you there, and you, you gotta do a render and that renders going to take like four hours, six hours. Well, for that whole time where you're doing that final render, this machine is working hard. It's getting warm and computer parts typically don't behave quite as nicely when they heat up a bit and Xeljanz are really built to stay reliable and, and get the render done. For instance, if that's the task that you're throwing at it, or if you're doing a long video ingest and you're transcoding something to a different format from some ingester doing, you know, the Xeons typically will hold up much better than a consumer class chip just because they're designed to work under load being used very heavily. Speaker 0 21:57 So yes, we've gotten to the core of it ha yack, yack, so we can make an Apple joke there. I mean, we got to the Apple core. There you go. So moving on to the next part here. So we got, we got the course, we got, we got the processor speed. That was a lot of the hubbub, but there's a different class of processor in these than we're used to as well, but it's not a central processing unit. It's a graphical processing unit, the GPU, the GPU. And this is, this is a whole kind of new world. It's a new buzzword. I mean, last year and the year before you might remember the conversation when it had to do a lot with aftereffects workflows, the, the, the word there's, your was Kuda core Kuda, Kuda Kuda. Right. So, yeah, let's break this down a little bit. Speaker 0 22:39 Right. So GPU is the graphics card that's built into the computer. We're not talking about the video card, like an Aja or a black magic card. We're talking the graphics card, you know, for many years people were like, well, yeah, that's just what I plugged my monitor into so I can have video and the computer stuff on my screen. Right. And what's changed a lot over the last few years is the ability for creative software, as you were saying, to use the graphics processing units, in addition to the CPU to do renders real time, preview of effects, all the stuff that our creative applications are using, many CPU just dedicated for it. You know, it's actually kind of a mega CPU because the funny thing is, is that graphics processors have in general greatly outpaced CPU in terms of the, the improvement that they see generation after generation after generation. Speaker 0 23:34 And so this is the first time I can ever remember. And considering the first Apple computers I used were in kindergarten, I feel pretty good saying this. This is the first time Apple out of the box included what is considered a true workstation class graphics card in their shipping Mac pro or high-end pro machine. And definitely the funny thing that they decided to pull is they were like, well, heck if we're throwing in a serious graphics card, let's just throw in two of them for what the hell, what the hell, right? I mean, it's like, you know, it's really funny because for many years, Apple has been kind of criticized as having fairly poor GPU options in their configurations. There's never been a huge number of aftermarket graphics cards that you could add to them. There's always been a handful, but Apple, I guess, struck like the deal of the century with AMD. Speaker 0 24:26 You may remember that AMD used to be the company that made graphics cards called ATI until AMD bought ATI. But these are now AMD fire pro graphics processors, and the fire pros are there pro workstation class card. And I think it's because they wanted to both be able to draw lots of complicated stuff to the screen and rely on the graphics processor, kind of under the hood to do a lot of the heavy mathematical calculation and lifting that our programs demand of us these days, that they're like, well, let's put to win because we've created this system. Um, the, the main system that Apple and iOS 10 use is called grand central dispatch. And we can utilize available CPU processor, cores, and a V available GPU cores to do all manner of interesting, you know, calculation. So that could be a render. It could be doing real time previews of, of graphical effects or transitions or whatnot. Speaker 0 25:25 And so there's two of them in every config, but there's three options. And again, when all three of them come as a pair. So the three AMD pairs of GPS that you can get in the Mac pros are what are called the D three hundreds, the D five hundreds and the D seven hundreds there, they're all in the fire pro family. And this would be an instance where actually more is better. You're going to, the more Ram you get in your GPU, the better. So there's two things that define these GPS as being different than one another, most of our listeners are probably familiar with V Ram, right? Video Ram. This is memory that is on the graphics processor itself. It's not your general Ram, it's the, it's the Ram specific for your graphics card. And the D 300 has, I want to say, yeah, it's two Jews per chip. Speaker 0 26:16 So that's four total. And then the D 500 has three. And the D 700 has six gigs of Ram per GPU, which is unheard of, I think the most V Ram that's probably ever been available on a Mac graphics card that I'm familiar with. Maybe there were some aftermarket and videos that had four or five, maybe somewhere up there, but this is a lot of VRM if you do the D seven hundreds. And the other interesting thing is if you get the, these, this class of processor, just, you know, as a PCI card for like a home brew PC, they are like three times the cost of what Apple is, is, is charging as build to order options, even for those higher end GPU options that the 500 and the 700. So there's two factors I was mentioning, right? You've got the V Ram and it is an important factor. Speaker 0 27:05 This is huge if you're doing very graphics, heavy stuff. And it's really, really big when you get into the realm of 3d, both modeling and animation, I would also say, you know, this is definitely the place where, uh, in the realm of color correction, you can't go wrong, especially absolutely. You are, you know, and the first interesting thing about color correction is they, a lot of times they are, they see the fringes of a newer codecs a lot before the rest of the industry does. Um, cause the first thing, if somebody does a larger than 4k project, when they're done with it, they need somebody to, to, um, full res color correct data. So, yeah, and that's a very intensive task. It is, it is frame by frame, you know, you know what it takes, right? So, uh, you know, it's an interesting dynamic I had mentioned before Kuda course, right? Speaker 0 27:50 I had that question today, right. Folks who have a previous IMAX or, uh, rather Mac pros and they God, a Kuta core enabled card and they're using some flavor of Adobe. You know, what about that was Adobe involved? I mean, are we going to see the level of integration with Kuda core enabled GPU acceleration that we would in now? What do they call an open cl? Yeah, correct. So here's the deal, right? Nvidia created a language for programmers to take advantage that allows them to what we call really right to the metal of the card. What that's kind of a way of saying is take advantage of the graphics processor at a very low programming level where they can muscle as much power out of the graphics processor as possible. And Adobe is a good example because they've had this thing called the mercury GPU playback engine. Speaker 0 28:42 And it is there to specifically use the graphics processor for a lot of the types of tasks that you might use in Photoshop premiere pro and after effects. Right? And so the thing about Kuda this instruction set is that it's Nvidia specific Nvidia being the other main graphics card company other than AMD and Apple has gone with AMD here. And Kuda is not a thing that exists with AMD cards. What Apple has been pushing for years is kind of an alternative to Kuda similar in nature called open cl. And it's actually the word open is true. It's a little bit more of an open standard because different graphics card manufacturers can adopt it. I mean, even Nvidia can adopted if they want to on their cards, invidious chosen to really push Kuda more than anything. But Apple is really trying to encourage developers, write your apps using these open cl instruction sets. Speaker 0 29:39 And you're going to be able to muscle a huge amount of power off of these AMD cards, even though they aren't technically Kuda enabled. And so some apps today, we'll talk a little bit about the final cut update that happened today. After we talk about the Mac pros, but the, the latest final cut update that came out today is a good example. It's specifically written to take as much advantage out of that processing power in these GPS as possible, but not every app is as optimized to use open cl some frankly aren't optimized at all to use open cl today. Sure. And there are partnerships like Adobe, you know, they got a leg up on this. Well, we'll see that integration fairly quickly. Yeah. Adobe Adobe has had Mac pros and testing listeners. Remember that we had a Dave home Leon and he talked about Adobe having access to the Mac pro for a while and making sure that they were optimizing their software around it, but the norm is not. Speaker 0 30:33 So, you know, it's a little mixed, I mean, some apps will inherently take advantage of the, the overall power of these processors. And the fact that they've the higher end ones have gobs V Ram. Some apps will just leverage that and behave well when they optimize around open cl specifically, maybe more than they are today, or for some folks, some, one of our clients mentioned blender today and blender is optimized for Kuda, blender being kind of an open source community, 3d rendering and modeling and animation package. And it supports Kuda, but I don't believe it supports open cl yet. Well, my feeling is Apple is such a big player in making workstation machines will happen that that almost every developer is going to tweak their apps over the next three, six, nine months and make sure they're leveraging the open cl libraries. So their apps are as optimized for these pair of GPS and these new Mac pros as possible. Speaker 0 31:29 And what we've seen with things like the new final cut, which some people we know saw kind of in beta this new version, but what's possible when a developer takes the time to really write to these open cl libraries, we're seeing the type of stuff, a phrase I heard about someone when I know who may have seen a Mac pro a little while ago, running a possibly early version of final cut that the version that came out today is that the amount of real time just lifting that the machine can do now basically surpasses anything they'd ever seen before. And so it's really impressive when you think about the fact that most folks right now are probably still white knuckling, a Mac pro from 2007, you know? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And the reality is we haven't seen a significant Mac pro upgrade in four or five years now. Speaker 0 32:20 I mean, even the last major upgrade, which was really a major upgrade, it was a quiet, Hey, you know, that was nothing. It was nothing. So the last real one was like, what, 2009, 2010. Prior to me beginning my employ here at Chesapeake systems. So, I mean, again, we're a little, this is like the olden days when Apple would release a new machine and it was actually, it actually meant something dammit, but so we're a little excited and a little warm. I'm very excited. I'm very excited. So, but, but in a nutshell, the GPS, given their price point, given that Apple is not going insane, they must have leveraged an insane deal with AMD to get these chips in these machines, that these prices go as high as you can guys definitely take at least the middle of the road D 500 option. Oh, I wasn't talking about, so these, these, the, the, the open cl instructions, one of the things GPS, GPS also have cores, GPU cores work very differently than CPU cores. Speaker 0 33:13 And one of the things that sets that off is that the number of cores and graphics processors is literally measured in many hundreds, if not thousands of cores, they're much more specific. They involve shaders. And it's a, it's a much more specific type of basically math and processing that they're capable of than a CPU. But in addition to getting more V Ram, you get more GPU cores. If you go up to the D 500 and then even more, if you go to the D 700, so give me do it. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just do the high end GPU by a Nikon D 702. Yeah. Those are nice. They are up. So, so those are the two real, what I would say, X-Factor scenarios in the new Mac pro everything else is we're kind of more familiar with, you know, a Ram, there is something different about the way in which the storage is presented, but you know, let's talk about that now. Speaker 0 34:02 So yeah. We'll start with storage. So it's, it's, it's, I'm reading it and I'm saying PCIE, that's very interesting. I've never seen that as part of the descriptor of storage. Well, and the other thing that's going to confuse people is they look at a phrase PCIE slot and they say, wait, I didn't think these Mac pros had slots because PCI II or PCI express is the type of PCI expansion card technology that we've used for many years when you slap a, a graphics video card or another graphics card, or a capture card, whatever into those slots that used to be on the Mac pro, but don't, don't be confused. The Mac pros do not have expansion slots. PCI is operating here essentially under the hood as the type of bus technology that the now completely flash storage based storage unit is connected to internally under the hood. Speaker 0 34:53 I got a question for you about that. Then I got an answer for you. Okay, well, so, um, you know, that's a standard protocol that, uh, would be used over thunderbolts as well. This PCIE typically we're breaking, you know, there are instances where we can break that technology out into a chassis and all that other stuff. Are we seeing similar speeds? Well, so the reason the reason Apple went to PCI express under the hood is, is twofold. One you're right. To link it to Thunderbolt in that thunder bolt is essentially PCIE shrunk down to a tiny little port and it, but it really is speaking the PCI express protocol. So the PCI express bus has to exist under the hood, but now by actually putting the flash storage, this is your storage device, not Ram, but it's still flash based, but by making it a PCI express, flash storage device used to be Satta, uh, and that it would use a, like the sat up bus, which was slower than PCI express under the hood. Speaker 0 35:55 But this is not a sat, a flash drive. This is a true bunch of flash storage directly on the PCI express bus inside of the machine train of, of that's terrible analogy. Never a bullet trains are nice. Yeah. It has nothing to kind of tap it into support the bullet train reference in that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. That's great. I, I wrote the shin consent. That's what the Japanese show, the bullet train over in Nihon. But, um, man, that was cool. I, I wish the SLO was, I wish the seller, what took 14 minutes to get to New York and stuff? I like the SLO. I go on it when I can. I'm kind of a train nerd. I think that we should have like this like 400 mile an hour Maglev train between Boston and Washington, but totally. And, and we'll outfit it with a bunch of Mac pros. Speaker 0 36:45 You know, Joe, Biden's a big train guy and I just, I, Oh, he used to ride the SLO and Amtrak between a Wilmington, Delaware and D C when he was a Senator. So, Oh, I thought you meant, like, I just imagined him like playing with trains on a table. Well, it is again, Christmas is coming up and he may bust out the old Aho scale model train set. I wouldn't be surprised. Are you visiting this year or are you just passing, passing through? Yeah. So anyway, so the bullet train, so it's basically just a straight shot. PCI express is fast. Yes. Straight shot. You're, you're mainlining that storage right into the Motherload. I accept that analogy as well. So here, so think about it this way, the pipe between the single onboard drive, which is this flash storage device and all of the other subsystems, the CPS, the GPS, the Ram, everything is way bigger than it used to be. Speaker 0 37:38 And the benchmarks that people are seeing for this built in flash storage is basically over a gigabyte per second of transfer rates. And that is about three times as fast as previous generation flash storage devices. So if you're one of these people who, you know, started using like a Mac book, air, or retina MacBook pro, or even one of these IMAX with a flash startup drive, and you're like, Oh my God, I'm never going back to using a hard drive for my boot drive. Cause this is just completely amazing. And my computer starts in like five seconds and, Oh my God, this is the best. This is like three to four times. This is three to four times as fast. Another thing is, and here's where it gets into the decision making process for our customers. You have three size options for the flash storage device and flashes inherently, not as big as traditional hard drives or even these hybrid fusion drives that Apple's been selling for a couple of years, because it's much more expensive. Speaker 0 38:37 And you have basically the option of a two 56 drive two 56 gigs, five 12, or a terabyte, and, you know, terabytes starting to get big. But that terabyte option adds many hundreds of dollars, definitely more expensive than a traditional state of drive. You know, I'm, uh, I'm still comparable. And, and, and the thing to think about is that there's really been a change in the paradigm in the way that people are working, right. It used to be, I need, you know, a four drive rate inside my macro for my scratch desk so that I can get everything going and I can do this. Right. And now that, that that's really been put on its head and, you know, most folks are doing work through external drives or through external Thunderbolt devices or in, uh, in lots of cases, we hope some sort of neck networked sand, but, uh, the thing about it that's, that's different is, you know, you use your boot drive to get your OSTP to start up your, your critical system files, uh, maybe a local render that that's certainly faster. Speaker 0 39:35 Um, but in any, any other instance, the idea is that you would, uh, either have a Pegasus two or something else that's going to serve as story. Whether it's a little external desktop raid drive, that's connected via Thunderbolt, or whether you're connected to a sand full on fiber channel San like Exxon, or StorNext using a fiber channel Thunderbolt adapter, or even a file server. And the Mac pros have a couple of gigabit ethernet ports. And so maybe you're connected to a file server over gigabit, or maybe you've got one of sonnets, 10 gig ethernet, Thunderbolt, adapters, you know, slung off the back of this. And you're attached to a file server over 10 gig ethernet that you don't have to think of extra usable space, very much being inside your, your pro workstation anymore. And feel like, you know, 256 is a good place. If you know, you're never going to do a render, but the middle of the ground, I'd say like a 500 gig drive is all you really need. Speaker 0 40:31 Cause you're not going to want to save everything you do to your no, in fact, you're, you really want to think of that startup drive as being operating system apps and the helper files associated with the operating system and apps. And as you just said, frankly, even if you've got the whole Adobe creative cloud suite on there, you've got <inaudible>, maybe you've got, you know, final cut pro 10 on there, few other things, you know, you may still be able to get away with a two 56 drive. I think most of our customers will be very well served with a five, 12, never a bad idea to buy yourself a little more headroom on your storage device. And, you know, we're not really that sure. At this point, if that PCI express flash storage, little daughter card, that's on one of the boards in the Mac pro I keep wanting to call it a tower, but it's really not a tower anymore. Speaker 0 41:25 It's a tube. But anyway, you know, we're not a hundred percent certain at all, really, if that's ever to be user replaceable and there's a good chance that it will be, but that'll be probably an aftermarket part that someone like OWC or whatever puts out that might just void your warranty or something, and maybe isn't as optimized anyway. So kind of assume that that flash storage is what you're going to have for the time being, you're not going to expand it the way to expand storage that's onboard is through Thunderbolt devices, Thunderbolt, raids, or connections to network storage, as you were saying. And so I wouldn't limit myself to the two 56 personally, I would do five 12. And if for some reason I've got workflows that just demand doing as much as possible, as fast as possible locally, maybe the terabyte, but it's still just hard for me to justify that because I think you're going to be better set up just to have a little external raid connected via Thunderbolt. You were mentioning the promise. Pegasus is Pega sigh, I guess the Pegasi pick us up, but anyway, promise has a Thunderbolt connected raid. We're just going to refer to it as the <inaudible>. Speaker 0 42:36 Um, but so speaking, uh, speaking to that, really, the only other thing we have here is Ram. And I'm actually a little surprised there has been a trend from Apple in the last two years or so. And it's mostly on the iMac and the MacBook pro side, but it's sort of integrated Ram it's soldered Ram. It's, you know, choose what you want from the get go, because, you know, that's what it is it's been hit or miss, right? The Mac book air really did not have user replaceable Ram ever did the new Mac book pro retinas don't have user replaceable Ram. The Mac minis kind of have, but it's a real pain on the original Mac minis. It was really hard to get in there. You needed to use a putty knife or as Apple called it, the Mac mini opening tool or whatever, you can actually buy that as an Apple service provider, you could buy the Mac mini opening tool device from Apple, and then you could end, it literally was a putty knife that came in this really slick little Apple bag with all the nice little logo on it. Speaker 0 43:32 And you're like, that's a fricking putty knife that they picked up at the hardware store for like a buck 59. What the hell? Apple, you know, we love you guys though. Especially our dear departed st. Steve. Oh, we're calling them st. Stephen. Now, why not? Yeah, sure. There was that cover of the economist where he was holding up the iPad and it was like the tablet and he had the aura and it was all that Christian. I did see that. Yeah. Motif thing. But so Ram in this case, we're talking about a little more flexibility. Quite frankly, you have four slots that you can get at. You can get at them. There's only four slots though, which is a little weird because with these dual CPU machines for the last bunch of years, you've either had six or eight Ram slots. And now you're down to four and people like, Oh my goodness, that's going to really constrain the amount of random access memory that I can have in my workstation place computer. But, well, that was the best Seth green I ever. Speaker 0 44:26 So, you know, I saw him at, uh, the store in New York, maybe six months ago, it's called toy Tokyo. It's got all, this is like one of these really geek out places. I swear to God, I was just walking by, I'm not into this stuff, but Nick was there with a map. He was circling centers. He wanted to go to all these like Japanese, like plastic vinyl, monster toys that these very they're made out of something called PVC, very extreme, strange, weird individuals that you never want to associate with, or by any of your advanced video technology from might happen to be into as collectors. But anyway, who were saying, I said, scream, isn't it. I'm like, you know what, I'm picturing robot chicken. And he sharply like is figuring out what he's going to do for the next episode of robot chicken with these weird like monster figures. Speaker 0 45:08 And I dunno, I thought that was cool. It is. And then, and then of course we're selling all the new stores to robot checking for the next season. I wish. But, um, you didn't talk to him though, right? We have talked to them, actually, we should have, we should say hello. Hi Seth, if by chance you're listening. So anyway, Ram, I don't know if that was even, even for us, that was a bit of a different diversion, wasn't it? So any Ram. Right. And, and, and again, people, sometimes even our dearest customers sometimes call their storage device, their memory, but really here in the biz, when you've reached a certain level of geekdom, you, you really are referring to the Ram chips as your memory, the random access memory in a, you know, quick frame of reference, they all play deaf punk. Speaker 0 45:56 Oh, rant. That's an album. I get it. Sorry, took me a second. And I'm kind of at Def punk fan. So I was like, what the heck anyway, be sure to play, um, get lucky on the outro. Yeah. Just don't let anyone, who's like a copyright infringement person from the MPA or whatever. Listen to this episode, filter their IP address. If we get a cease and desist, it's going to be from Seth green. And I know, so anyway, your storage device is your longterm memory. It's what stores all the data. Your Ram is what is, is holding all of the data that you're kind of dealing with at a given moment, all of the data that's being processed, the data associated with the operating system and the applications that are running there. And then, and yet the fact of the matter is, you know, we used to not be able to take very much advantage of lots of Ram because everything was 32 bits. Speaker 0 46:46 And one of the aspect of 32 bit computing was that individual threads actually could really only use two gigs of Ram at once. And so like final cut, seven could maybe use like, you know, a couple of gigs. Well, nowadays all of our apps are 64 bit. And one of the advantages of that is that they can literally use as much Ram as you can possibly throw at them basically. And so Ram is one of those areas where more AKA bigger is better in basically every circumstance. You know, you mentioned something about final cut seven, and this is a good time to sort of remind folks, are you still using final cut seven? Are you on an old Mac pro, do you know where your children are? It's 10 o'clock. We should probably figure that out. But the truth of the matter is we're in Hamden dude. Speaker 0 47:30 There's like four year olds running around at 1:00 AM. Like, you won't know when the zombie apocalypse comes here because you can't tell whether or not it's just a kid running into the street or not. But, um, jeez, I live here too, by the way, folks, just so Rick Merrill literally lives around the corner from the office. So when dash is like four years old, I'm going to keep an eye on EIA. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm not gonna be that guy, but so final cut seven, right? We don't even know a final cut. Seven is going to perform well on these machines. Something to really think about, right. You know, maybe you're holding on for awhile, but you know, Nixon, something that they really just sorta like cuts the core, you know, from an editor perspective, you're, if you're still using final cut seven, then you are only utilizing two gigs of Ram, no matter how much you got in that, uh, in that Mac pro you didn't forget like the hard sell. Speaker 0 48:15 You are going to see one hell of a difference. You're going to see one hell of a difference. If you go from a 32 bit final cut seven application on let's say a 2007 or 2008 Mac pro to a new Mac pro with either premier pro or creative cloud, premier pro or final cut 10 it's cut like butter. Speaking of final content. I think there's probably a great place to segue. Well, let me say just one more quick thing about the ramp. All right. Not a great place to segue, then you will. We're almost there. We there's only four Ram slots. The good news is Ram chips go up to as of today, 16 gigs of Ram per chip. So you can actually, as of today, 64 Maxim Mac, that is 16 times four formerly very good. I can do math. Very good. They taught me when they hired me here, we had to, we had to get Meryl to stop closing deals at negative profit margins, but it took a little remedial arithmetic. Speaker 0 49:16 It's already feast days. And some of our customers really benefited from that. But anyway, um, because the Ram chips available today are up to 16 gigs. Each, you know, you can fill all four slots with 16 gig chips, get a total of 64 and have gobs and gobs of Ram in your system. And all of your apps in the operating system will use it. Now Apple's pricing for the 16 gig option and the 32 gig option 32 gig, obviously using eight, uh, four eight gig chips, not bad pricing. There are third party Ram manufacturers with very high quality Ram that we do sometimes do business with that have little better pricing may have apps than Apple on, especially that, that 64 gig version. So, you know, I'd say it's difficult for me to imagine myself ever selling one of my clients, a Mac pro with any less than 32 gigs and 32 will be a lot. Speaker 0 50:12 Uh, you're you're in good shape with 32. Sure. But if you can go for 64 and let's say you're a hardcore after effects user, and you're doing a lot of like, I guess the Ram renders and all of that stuff, and just thinks that eat mad Ram go for the 64. It's not a bad option. 32 is probably, which is the really the mid option. You know, it's funny Apple makes a 12 gig configuration available and that's basically using three, four gig chips, but unless I'm mistaken, that's not going to actually utilize the Ram as effectively as possible because the Ram won't be running in quad channel mode, unless you actually have all four slots filled. So don't think about a configuration and get 12 gigs of Ram. Just, just fill all four slots, whether it's four gig chips, eight gig chips or 16 gig chips fill all four, try to shoot for 32 is your baseline. Speaker 0 51:08 If you can do it, do the 64, you will be happy. And the other thing to point out is we don't know this yet. This is kind of a theory, but it could be that when 32 chips roll out, there's a chance that these Mac pros will support them. And if that happens and you fill your machine with what are probably going to be quite expensive, 32 gig chips, you can do a four to four of them. These machines may end up supporting 128 gigs of Ram. So it remains to be seen. The reality is that it has any idea how much reality television you can cut with that. Oh yeah, no, it's probably an overkill thing for most folks, but just throwing it out there, that it might be interesting to keep an eye on that and see if they end up supporting those larger chips when they become available. Speaker 0 51:52 But the reality is 32 is going to serve, right? Almost all of our clients and 64 is just, you know, you won't feel Ram starved ever, basically. And those are the four things, right. We went over, there is something else I want to mention. And actually, I didn't even think about it today until we sat down and started putting together some of the first proposals for folks who have been patiently waiting for like, are you going to mention the keyboard and mouse? I was, and I was also gonna mention the monitor too. You know, this is, this is something to think about, right? So there are no in your bill to order configurations a, um, you know, it's not part of the system to get a keyboard and a mouse. Yeah. So basically Apple is a Mac mini sitting here. Apple's kind of doing what they've done with the mini for awhile, where, you know, if you want to keyboard and mouse, either stick with the ones you got, or we can put separate ones on there. Speaker 0 52:40 And whether you do Apple ones or third party ones, just bear in mind when you open up that cool slick Mac pro box, which do you think it's going to be a tube shaped box? How cool would that be? I think it might be because if you look at the new iMac boxes they've been shipping for the last year, they did away with like the external, like printing and they, they splendid, uh, they made them slender. So know it's a really funny question is a tube shaped box, still a box when it's not inherently boxy because it's a tube, but then you think of a hatbox and hat boxes tend to be kind of rounded tubular. And there are a box cause it's called a hatbox. So just a weird, uh, if it's, if it's a tubular box, I'm going to keep thinking I'm using the wrong word for it. Speaker 0 53:23 When I describe it, when you play some tubular, when he says tubular box set, anyway, there's not gonna be a keyboard or a mouse or a magic track pad or anything in there. You got to think about that. And then of course the video I'll put, you got some options here. It does have an HTMI on it, which is, yeah, I know one HTMI. So it's almost like the new MacBook pros with retina or whatnot that have had an HTMI port for a little while and it's, and then six Thunderbolt thunderbolts. There's like a, I forgot, I think three or four USB 3.0 ports. There's a couple of gigabit, ethernet ports. There's no real, you know, the funny thing is too, there's no real shortage of expansion on the new Mac pros. It's just external. And that, you know, may be a little bit of a sea change for people who are used to having most of those peripherals inside that big silver box. Speaker 0 54:11 Sure. I think it's kind of nice to have a lot of them external because it's so easy then to swap between machines and maybe you go out on a shoot and you want to bring your little video card, that's a Thunderbolt device or a little Thunderbolt raid, you know, it's pretty easy to just like pop it out and bring your laptop with you and plug it into that. And voila, you've got that stuff. And that it's almost like you really have one workstation in two modular pieces. Exactly, exactly. The idea of having a centralized workstation where I do this kind of work here, really, you know, if I got a Mac book pro retina in the field and I got a, you know, you know, or I'm a DIT in the field and I got to do a certain level of ingest, um, or, you know, I gotta do any of that stuff. Speaker 0 54:49 I might have all these things that normally I have hooked up to my desktop and from my bag, you know, get a couple battery chargers and go out for a full day production and do all that offload and not have to potentially invest in. And then a second set, a second set, which could drive my rates up in my daily rates, which could upset a producer who may or may not want to hire me as a result. And then I'm out of a job. Yeah. The other thing though, and I understand some people's complaint by Mac pros. You know, a lot of people are saying like, well, what about cable management? There's going to be all these cables sticking out to the back of my Mac pro those Thunderbolt connectors don't have any kind of locking mechanism. The USBs don't have any locking mechanism. And I'm going to just throw this out there. Speaker 0 55:28 That cable management is something that people may have to be a little more aware of what these, if they do start building a collection of external peripherals, I expect to see lots of really nifty third party sure. Things that's going to be some aftermarket spaghetti junction evaluating sort of put it together and make it nice and clean. You know, it always happens when, you know, it'll fit the footprint somehow of the machine. It'll it'll line up, it'll look nice aesthetically, and then you can just handle all your, your cables, but it is something to be aware of. And I think that's the trade off that, you know, there is no locking mechanism with thunderbolts, so you don't want to pull it on the fumble. You don't want to set these things up in a place where you're going to be tripping over the Thunderbolt cables constantly and yanking them out of the back of the Mac pro that's. Speaker 0 56:10 That's not good. But, um, yeah. So on the other thing I'll throw out to, you know, many of our clients who do use sands, you know, are used to having a fiber channel card inside the machine. And that was just something we specked out their Mac pros with. Well, now you're more than likely going to use an external Thunderbolt fiber channel adapter. Uh, we've typically sold the ones that promise makes sonnet also make some, um, but your, your interface to a high performance sand or even NAS environment is now going to be an external little box. So it is something to just be aware of. You know, it's ultimately it'll cost you the same. I think at the end of the day, it's just a matter of where it is in the chain. Now you were talking about monitors and because both the Thunderbolt ports and the HTMI port, the new flavor of HTMI that the Mac pro offers can support four K resolutions and you can have up to three, four K monitors connected across the Thunderbolt ports. Speaker 0 57:01 And HTMI port it's like, there is no as of today, new 4k Apple display there isn't. And, and just as an aside, you can have up to six 27 inch Thunderbolt displays. If you really feel like doing a video or something, you feel like spending the thousand dollars per, uh, inch screen. But you know, the good news is we hear a Chesapeake, offer them for a variety of manufacturers, screen products, and that would include 4k displays from folks. Like, I don't know the, I think there's a Dell one out there. There's a there's, you know, people are starting to roll them out. You're going to see them and they're not going to, you know, there's not going to necessarily be a compelling reason to go with an Apple flavor, four K resolution versus, you know, the Apple ones tend to be nice. It's not out yet. Speaker 0 57:47 They haven't announced any such thing. We are not rumormongering listeners who happened to work for Apple inc. But, um, you know, inevitably more and more 4k displays are going to start to hit the market. They might connect with display port mini display port HTMI just know that your new Mac pro will be fully ready for the four K display. And it'll also handle just to put it out there. There are consumer 4k monitors that are out now in best buy. You can buy them this holiday season, those potentially via HTMI. You can have that four K display. It'll be interesting to see if some folks decide to do that for, you know, kind of quality assurance monitoring, even though those aren't obviously cutter, you know, graded displays with perfect calibration, not by a long shot as maybe a client monitor a consumer 4k display for doing 4k projects, just plugged right into that HTMI port could work potentially quite well. Speaker 0 58:39 Something to think about. So, listen, we've gone over the ins and outs of the new Mac pro obviously folks, we do sell these things. We do expect there to be some lead time, but if you want to get a quote or whatnot, yeah. W w would sure like it, if you could, Chesapeake systems will sort you out, out, out, out, um, but something else happened today. We've alluded to it a few times. We kind of knew it was coming in tandem with the Mac pro, but today Apple released the sort of weirdly named final cut pro 10, 10.1. And that's the first 10 was an X of course, cause it's a Roman numeral, but it is a 10, it's not an X. And then the second one is the actual number of the app, 10.1, and folks who have transitioned over into final cut 10 land already have seen a bevy of updates over the last couple of years. Speaker 0 59:36 Some of them very significant. In fact, final cut 10 really almost getting back into from a sheer feature perspective were final cut seven was at, you know, a lot of people's initial complaints about final cut 10. The reality is Apple's put just about all of those capabilities back into the app. I'd say we're at about 80% now and almost 70%. I'd almost say more than that. No, no, no. I'd say almost more. I mean, for the types of workflows that we see today, you know, I could name probably counting on one hand clients of mine, that's still ingest base band video off of a live feed or a tape to their workstation directly. I mean, it's very uncommon. We're working with files these days. And so it's all files and you know, it's just the odd analog IO, these so final cut. Doesn't do the actual video ingest using like a Kona card. Speaker 0 00:23 It can monitor out, but it can't ingest. And you know what, Kona cards, black magic cards, they just come with those apps. So it's not really that hard to get video off of a tape and turn it into a file. So then final cut. 10 can use it. But most of the other features that, you know, there hadn't been a separate, like preview in canvas window before there were, you know, it didn't do video monitoring originally. There was a whole lot of features. Well, the reality is yesterday, most of them were baked back into the $299 application, which is cheaper than almost any plugin any of you probably have. So you might want to just consider having it. Cause it's a really good piece of software now, but today ten one came out. And while that sounds like a very minor update back in the day, that would have been more like the difference between final cut, six and final cut seven. Speaker 0 01:07 So this 10.1 is significant and the biggie is that it's highly, highly optimized to work with the multiple GPS in the brand new Mac pro 4k is where it's at. You know, these guys really, you know, if you look at it from a two year perspective, they really hit their, they really hit their stride. A lot of people said that Apple had sort of lost their head in, you know, FCPX but, um, it was it's clear. I think now looking at the two years that have passed since the product came out, uh, they had a clear vision and, and it took some time they didn't handle it very smoothly. You know, the interesting thing is one of their other pro apps logic, the audio application that they bought from iMagic sure, I think they learned from how they kind of mangled the final cut transition, because with logic there hadn't been a lot of updates for like a couple of years, but they didn't just stop selling the existing version. Speaker 0 02:01 And when they rev released the flight fully rewritten version of logic pro it had all of the capabilities that the previous version had. It didn't feel like they had just eviscerated it in the process. Kind of like a lot of people felt they did with final cut 10. So I think Apple learned and they never really intended to tick people off quite as badly as they did. And they learned from it cause they handled it very differently with logic. But now that ten one is out, you know, you almost can, can get rid of that. You know, I think it's almost like out of fashion to say that it's a, you know, like a fancy eye movie it's it's back to yeah, no, it's, it's a hardcore professional application and a lot of what we're hearing from again, folks who have used it heavily, both up til now, and folks who have given us hints about what it's behaving, like, especially on this new Mac pro hardware, is that from a sheer performance standpoint, it's probably the fastest nonlinear editor on the market right now. Speaker 0 03:01 That's even if you're dealing with native read code, which yes, it handles natively. So they, in fact, today they announced support for MTS files. If you're shooting the ABC HD codec, there's a long, long list of features that they brought out today. The big one, of course, just overall performance enhancements, lots of additional little features as far as like, Oh, I'll setting audio, fade points on audio tracks in the sequence of there's so many little things that really, I think get it back there to being what people needed to be. But another really interesting one, and this is going to demand a little bit of play to really understand the dynamic is there's now this additional level of organization called the library. And so, whereas before you had your project, which really was your sequence and you had your events, which are very analogous in many ways to an avid bin, which is a location and on a, on a folder somewhere, but also with a little bit of a database in there, you know, to store information about like your, your sub clips and things like that, your key word ranges or whatever they call sub clips these days. Speaker 0 04:03 Um, but now there's this thing that kind of can reference both multiple sequences, AKA projects and events allow you to turn events on and off. This was a big complaint. A lot of people had because they were like, gosh, I don't want a client. Who's looking over my shoulder to see every event that I've created for every other project and see who else I'm working with. That's none of their business. Sometimes it's a conflict of interest. And so it just seems like Apple's given a lot more flexibility to the users now to just manage all of the stuff that they're working on in terms of what sequences and that the clips themselves, the events folders we understand from some of the ma'am developers that we work with, the media asset management systems that this new version 10.1, a final cut is potentially a lot more intelligent and feature rich at interacting with other types of collaborative software platforms, like a media asset management system. Speaker 0 05:00 And so I'm very excited to learn over the coming days and weeks what this is going to mean both for individual users and more sophisticated work groups, because if some of this ends up making it a much more flexible editing tool, you know, between might be having a much more flexible, um, you San environment as a result. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you know, Funeka 10, wasn't always the nicest player in collaborative storage environments. It wasn't always the nicest player with media asset management systems. Now I have some hope that we're going to see additional levels of collaboration and just overall sophistication when it comes to that stuff. So check it out again. Final content is like two 99 folks. It's, it's cheaper than most like basic effects that you would get from like red giant or whatever. So the truth of the matter is, I mean, like I, I, and I think most editors, um, have a copy of it on their machine and maybe use it, uh, once in a blue moon, but it's the kind of tool set at 300 bucks where why the hell not? Speaker 0 05:55 I mean, you know, we can't even sell it to you. So we don't have a vested interest here, Apple totally. You know, you gotta get it through the app store or that out from our us resellers and basically decided to go sell you the hardware, which we're happy to do. And we're happy to sell you, you know, creative cloud and what else, what else you need here to round out that workstation so that you have every editing tool that you need on one brand spanking, new 12 core Mac pro you a boy that's right. Drop the mic. So, um, we've really hit it a lot today. We talked about the Mac pro orders are taken place. We can spec them out for you, offer additional feedback on how to configure these for your needs. Put the orders in. Then we'll are all gonna like sit patiently for like a month or two while we're waiting for these things to arrive. Speaker 0 06:40 And just every day we'll have dreams about black tubular Mac pros and you know, eventually they'll get here. The new final cut landed. You, you didn't, uh, you know, and then, and then everything's good. I'll tell you, this is like one of those old school, Apple days, like five, six years ago where there'll be like a new Mac pro or new laptop that dropped. And we'd all like to sit around in front of the computer and like memorize every spec. Of course this was, I was doing at like 3:00 AM last night when I couldn't sleep. So, you know, I that's, I, I guess it was a lot of pent up. I see, I see, I would just leave with this thought, which is that leading up to the release of this product? The number one question that I've received, and I think you probably have to is, is what about my thunder bolt workflow? Speaker 0 07:23 And that's probably the thing that's most nebulous still as a result of the fact that it's not having the workstations in our hand, that's something that we can help you with. We can figure out what's going on there, what you need in line to make your color correction, ingest external storage connection to the sand, monitoring, monitoring all those things that typically were once upon a time built into the Mac pro, but are now sort of modularized. We can help you. And we've got it because we've been doing it for IMAX and for laptops that have just had Thunderbolt for ages. And, you know, we basically know what the lay of the land is going to be for the Mac pro. So thanks for listening guys. I hope you're as excited as we are. It's a whole new era for us, professional Macintosh people, Mary Mack, promise to you, Mary macaronis to each and every one of us and, um, happy maca days. And, um, Matt Kwanzaa, uh, yeah, uh, Mackey new year pro Conecuh Mac pro Conecuh. Alright. As always, if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, uh, you just want to tell us how silly we are. Uh, you can email [email protected] that's workflow show at <inaudible> dot com. You can reach us out to Maryland. I, as far as the Chesapeake system side of [email protected], we look forward to hearing from you guys and stay tuned for next time. Take care. See ya.

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