What is Apple Doing?

So, I’m reletively speaking kinda new to the whole “computer thing” that being said, I bought my first computer in November of 1989. I bought myself a little Mac SE and proceded to totally crash it in less then 7 days… I didn’t realize what this thing called the “System Folder” was and I thought I could trash it… bad idea.

I had friends that had owned Apple ][’s and Commodedor 64’s and stuff but I thought the whole computer thing was sorta dumb… I even WORKED on a TV show all about the computer industry, whatever.

Today I make basically 100% of my income thru the computers I either own or “purchase” (I advise all the purchases at SL\CE Editorial in West Oakland where I work). In the last couple of decades, i’ve watched the industry VERY closely. 

Back when Steve returned to Apple he complained that they had 15 products and proposed a GREATLY simplified product matrix. Consumer portable, Consumer desktop, Professional Portable, Porfessional desktop. It all fit very nicely into a 2x2 grid. He also claimed that, by dropping down to only 4 products, they could release NEW products on a 9 month cycle.

The question of this article is simple… will there be another pro desktop machine. If you go over to MacRumors, they have a tab called “Buyers Guide” right at the top of the page, I HIGHLY recommend looking at this page before you buy a new machine.

My mom recenly wanted to replace her iMac and I showed her that a purchase at this time would be silly because the iMac will PROBABLY be updated very soon. Well, that is if you look at the numbers.

At the time of this writing, Friday February 24, 2012, it has been 577 days since the Mac Pro has been updated. Now, thats a long time to be sure but the real information comes when you look at the number of days between PREVIOUS updates.

The interval between updates, if you go back to August 2006 is, 292, 240, 279, 420 (starting to slip), 511 (oops), and now its 577 days. That does not bode well for the pro user.

So why do you need a big ol’ Mac Pro?

SLOTS
Well in the “Little House on the Prairie” era of computing we used to talk about the number of expansion slots in the pro machines. the old 9600 used to have 6 expansion slots. When Apple moved to the Blue and White G3 (the one in the product matrix above) the pro’s cried fowl because the G3 only had 3 slots. The Mac Pro brought back a 4th slot but the fact of the matter is. There is so much built INTO a MacPro that I don’t think many people used all the slots.

Of course, there is always the “lunitic fringe” of pro users who need EVERYTHING and more but they are very few.

RAM
Some of us need lots or RAM, the current iMac can only accept 16 Giggle Bytes of RAM and yes there are those of use who would like to have MORE than that. The current, (577 day old Mac Pro) can accept 64 GB of RAM, uh… thats more then 16

PROCESSORS
Processsors are another desire of the lunitic fringe but suffice it to say, “More = Better” in most instances. The Mac Pros give you the option for up to 12 Cores and the iMac only has 4 Cores… Bummer. So if you are a monster power user, you want a Pro Machine.

I/O
The last thing that people buy Pros for is the various input and output possibilities. These are carried out by the use of cards plugged into those slots so this is sort of related to the SLOT issue. The difference being that now adays, most Macs have Thunderbolt and with Thunderbolt you have options.

So the question becomes, “Is Apple turning their back on Pros?”  Well that answer is an undeniable YES. There is a lot of evidence to prove this going back just a few years. They killed the XRAIDs, they bumped off the X-Serve machines. They bought and then subsequently killed off Shake, a professional level compositing tool after promissing to not “End of Life” it.

And of course the recent disaster of the DEATH of their professional video editing package Final Cut Pro, (I’m still not gonna call FCP X “Final Cut PRO X”… I just say “Final Cut X”.

And what of the rumors of the new MacBook Pro being “styled after the MacBook Air? Yea, the machine that is so think you can’t put a firewire port on it. “but hey… there is a Thundertube jack”… yea, ok.

So is there gonna be a new Pro Desktop machine? My guess is, NO.

I think we have seen the end of the Pro Market for Apple. And what does that mean for me? All I can say right now is… “I dunno”.

But for now, I’m waiting to purchase new hardware. But the iMac and the MacPro are over due for an upgrade, the MacPro is WAY MORE overdue. If we see a new iMac before we see a new MacPro, I’ll buy a couple of those, but if you are listening Apple… I’m waiting to buy SOMETHING… just lemme know what you got planned will ya?

I LOVE Chipotle.

Even before I took my mom a lunch from Chipoltle, she had bought a couple shares of CMG. After that first and to date ONLY meal from the resturant, she bought several more shares.

It looks like this was shot with a Canon 5DMK2.

Everyone needs a good photo.

Help Portrait 2011 (PersonalShots) from Jesse Lavender on Vimeo.

I recently announced that I would hire someone this year to do a graphics or animation piece for a project based on submission to me. I announced it on Digital Convergence, the podcast I co-host with Carl Olson. One of the people that responded sent me a link to their website and this was one of the videos I found there. 

This is AMAZING… and so simple. People really need a good family portrait and what a wonderful gift to your community to be able to offer this.

Thank you Jesse Lavender for sharing.

FCPX might work.

Recently I got involvedin a very interesting project. Because of all of the legal issues and “politics” behind it all, I can’t give you a lot of details behind it, although before I was asked to hold off on discussing it I did give more details on the “Digital Convergence” podcast I am co-host with Carl Olson, so you can go hear more about it there. However, the pure tech of it, I can talk about all I want.

We had sent a small skeletal crew to LA to shoot a music video for a band based down there. The song is AMAZING!!!, Great vibe, cool band, tons of energy, and, in the spirit of American Bandstand, “Its got a great beat, easy to dance to”… (OK, I’m dating myself). 

As for the production, Peter Dippery, the producer,  wanted a pure performance piece… just 6 guys in, as Paul Koblik, the director put it, “A black hole where crazy shit happens”. We shot the piece in a blacked out rehearsal space with just a small arri light kit and a few kinoflow lights and one big backlight, and by “big” I mean something like a 2K… (Ok… a SMALL backlight). That was it. 

We had 2 5D Mark II’s and the piece was shot by Tom Spingola of San Francisco and Julian Lassuer of LA, Julian is best known for his work with Shane Hurlbut. We use Tom for a ton of stuff and Both guys are VERY talented. Paul, the director decided to just crank up the track and let it rip and had the band play along and sing, full voice, for 10 passes of the song. 2 cameras, 10 passes, 20 angles, for the most part, the full duration of the song.

Ok… How am I going to cut this?  No timecode, 20 angles… hmmm.

Well… I’ve never been a fan of the multi cam tool in FCP Classic, Multi cam in PPro can do 4 angles… and I just hate Avid, I don’t know what they offer. 

Just one day before the shoot, Apple released the 10.0.3 update to FCPX and one of the big features was a new 64 track multi cam tool. Really??? 64 tracks?

Its important to know that this music video is part of a larger project that will be cut in FCP classic. We use a whole bevy of freelance editors and they are happy working there so we have not put the hammer down to MAKE people change so we are staying put for now. That being said I had already taken the footage and converted it to ProRes.

At first I decided to just give it a go with 6 angles. So I randomly selected a few shots and experimented with making a Multi Cam clip in FCPX. After selecting a few angles you right click on one and select “Create New Multicam Clip” from the drop down. This is where FCPX gets really interesting. 

In FCP Classic, I think you were given the choice of syncing from the timecode, (out of luck there), the first frame of the clip, unlikely, or the last frame, thats an interesting way to do it. But in FCPX you get another choice… “Can you just see what you can do??” Or as Apple puts it, Sync with Audio. Basically FCPX has a pluralize function for multi cam built in.

So I tried it. I was still on a  FW800 drive and FCPX made the multi cam clip in about 20 seconds with 6 angles in it and then I dragged that clip into a blank timeline… er… PROJECT in FCPX-land. When you turn on the multi viewer it gets really cool. You get to choose between 2 up, 4 up, 9 up and 16 up views. You then hit play and lay your hand on the number keys of your keyboard and pretend you are sitting in the truck out back and start hitting the buttons as if it is the program bus.

Decidedly with 6 ProRes streams playing off a Lacie FW800 drive it didn’t play too well, BUT… and this is the most important thing… the audio played smooth and EVERY cut I made happened ON THE BEAT that I cut on. Meaning, when I was done cutting the 3 minute song, and played it back… the cuts were on the down beats that I cut on. That was awesome and more importantly… the 6 shots were in sync, PERFECTLY.

I then decided to move the project from the FW800 drive to one of our suites that has a Promise Pegasus 12GB Thunderbolt RAID in it. Here is where I got to test the re-linking features of FCPX. I copied over my project folder with my assets, (I had chosen to leave the clips in place and not copy them into the Events Folder in FCPX, I’m not gonna get into that here). The next time I open FCPX on the new machine it didn’t find the clips… although it DID FIND SOME of them, curious. I worked for several minutes to try to make everything re-link, it was NOT elegant and it did NOT work well but I was able to just drag a folder full of clips to the appropriate Keyword Bin in FCPX, one Folder/Bin at a time and then the clips did reappear in the app. 

On the Promise RAID I decided to just go for it, I created one multi cam clip with all 20 angles I had. When you have more then the 16 camera angles available in the multi cam viewer the app creates ‘pages of views’, so I had 16 angles on one page and 4 more on the second page. 

The Promise RAID despite its crazy data handling capabilities still couldn’t keep up with 20 streams of ProRes files but again it DID keep the audio smooth and the cuts did happen were I cut them. What I decided to do was to concentrate on the best 9 angles. 

Here is a trick, once you have your multi cam clip made, double click on it, You’ll get a new view on the lower half of your screen that will allow you to prioritize the clips. Drag the best 8 or 9 to the top of the page and then just use the 9 up view and cut that first. You can always go back and replace shots with the other angles… and the Promise RAID performed better with only a 9 up working.  Also learn “Command-Shift-7” you’ll be using this a LOT as you replace shots. The timeline won’t play back smooth unless you are in the viewer only mode, so play till you want to change a shot, then “Command-Shift-7” and turn on the multi viewer, select from the available shots, replace it, then “Command-Shift-7” to turn off the multi viewer and move on.

I worked for 2 LONG days on it, but not because I was staring at Render bars but because I was having so much fun I didn’t want to leave. Paul actually joined me for much of the edit and was pushing me out of my seat and wanted to ‘drive’. Almost immediately the technology just evaporated in front of us and we were completely immersed in the performance and what the band was doing and not the EDIT and what our fingers were doing. That, I may say is probably the most significant observation. IT WAS FUN!!

To make a long story short… the piece turned out great. The angles cut like butter. Peter brought us a great client, Paul did a great job directing, Tom and Julian captured some wonderful angles and it was a pleasure to cut.

When all the ‘politics’ and legal stuff get taken care of, I’ll be able to tell you more about the client and most importantly the band… I can’t wait to go see these guys live. Oh and, I’ll embed the video when I’m allowed. Later.

New math is hard.

Brilliant how you can do math 3 different ways WRONG, and still come out with the same answer.