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Posted by Smarty on 04/13/07 14:22
New releases of FCP or an improved NLE would certainly cause me to
re-evaluate my opinion, and I am a sufficiently big Mac fanboy that I could
get sucked into buying yet another Mac and another NLE from Apple. The
forthcoming re-introduction of Premiere for the Mac is another temptation.
DVDStudio Pro is truly an excellent product, and Motion could be a real
winner if they added 3D and especially if they speed it up. I readily admit
that I did not give Motion a full try-out, but I am impatient with the
rendering performance. One of its' templates with bubbling water is nothing
short of spectacular to view, and it has excellent creative power. Also
LiveType, which both Spex and I did not mention before, does some very
unique titling effects.
A massive rewrite is a good thing for FCP IMHO. I run a little widget called
"Performance Monitor" which has a real-time bar graph of how the 4
processors are being loaded, and FCP / Compressor / Motion / etc. all show
the 4 cores being utilized almost equally with true load sharing apparently
taking place. It is my speculation that the urgency of porting FCP into a
Universal Binary, and thereby rewriting the whole shebang in whatever
codebase they used (Codewarrior, MacApp, Codeworks, C++, etc.) was the true
culprit in killing performance, since the original apps were optimized over
years for the PowerPC and its vector processing, and then needed to run
native in an Intel host when the new Macs were introduced. I suspect this
forced them to migrate very non-optimally, sacrificing run-time performance
to get it out sooner. Just a guess on my part as I certainly have no way of
knowing for sure, but there should be absolutely no reason why so much Intel
horsepower as a Quad Xeon with their fastest 3.0GHz processors and huge
caches and 1066 Mhz front side buses should run Vegas 7 like greased
lightning but run FCP like frozen molasses.
My understanding of the MacPro game plan is to offer blue laser burners to
be introduced with more HD authoring at the WWDC Developer Conference this
summer. (This comes from one of my kids who is directly connected with
Apple.) but no other hardware bumps near to intermediate term. I will wait
this one out.........
Vegas is just so fast, so competent, and so relatively cheap that I can only
conclude that FCP would need a huge re-work to regain my support and
willingness to buy into it yet another time.
Smarty
"Spex" <No.spam@ta.com> wrote in message
news:461f2a62$0$8741$ed2619ec@ptn-nntp-reader02.plus.net...
> Since we are top posting....
>
> FCP Studio is really looking its age compared to other offerings such as
> Adobe's suite of applications. But, you'd have to be living up your own
> ass if you weren't aware that Apple are making a big announcement at NAB
> just a few days away now. If you are interested in FCP wait until Apple
> have done one of "their look at us aren't we great" presentations at NAB
> then make a decision.
>
> It has been heavily rumoured that FCP has been given a drastic rewrite to
> make use of GPU and multi-core processors along with QT itself. The new 8
> core Mac Pro is showing little or no improvement in speed over the 4 core
> Mac Pro in FCP so if Apple want to keep selling its Mac Pros for editing
> they had better have got FCP multi threading like crazy.
>
> You might just get a free grading system thrown in too. Apple bought
> Final Touch so that might end up in the FCS box.
>
> Other applications in FCP Studio, IMO, are excellent. Motion and DVD
> STudio Pro are the two apps I bought FCS for. Motion is not an after
> effects and it is not meant to be. It is much more useful than Smarty
> indicates. I use it for pre-viz, DVD menus, 2d animation and IMO it is
> almost superb. It lacks some features that prevent me using it more e.g.
> a tracker.
>
> FCP - Showing its age.
> Motion - Good start but lacks some really useful features like a tracker
> and 3d! Still work in progress.
> Soundtrack - Looks nice but fails to deliver and feels like a beta
> release. Logic Pro is well worth the money though.
> DVD Studio Pro - IMO still second best to Scenarist.
>
> Luis,
>
> My advice would be to look at PremPro2 and its productions suite,
> certainly have a _serious_ look at Edius and its HD accelerator boards
> which are superb.
>
> Vegas has a very poor GUI. Ideal for educators...
>
> Wait 'til NAB before jumping.
>
> Smarty wrote:
>> Luis,
>>
>> I have the same opinion as nappy. Using the very latest version of FCP
>> Studio HD on the very latest / fastest Apple Desktop workstation (Xeon
>> Quad MacPro 3.0GHz) I have found the rendering and previewing of content
>> to take far longer than the PCs I use here which are much less expensive
>> and have much less expensive software. I am seriously considering dumping
>> the entire system in fact, although there are situations where this Apple
>> solution does make a lot of sense, namely, if you are in an already
>> established Apple environment, or if you do mostly multiple camera NLE.
>> The program called Motion is a lot like After Effects but to me is less
>> appealing. The Compressor software in Final Cut is terribly slow. Most
>> irritating to me is the Apple pre-occupation with their Quicktime formats
>> and the lack of support for mpeg2.
>>
>> I use the Vegas / DVD Architect suite, Premiere, and several other PC
>> tools which get the job done very efficiently, and I almost never turn
>> the MacPro on. I think a laptop running this suite would be even more
>> disappointing in terms of performance to say nothing of the screen space
>> limitations unless you also add a big monitor. Even if you did, Motion
>> and other Apple software uses the graphics processor card(s) for
>> rendering, and even the extra cost very high performance $450 card I
>> added to this MacPro is still marginal.....and I hate to imagine how a
>> laptop's graphics card would waste a lot of waiting time.
>>
>> I hate to get into this Apple versus PC discussion at all, because it
>> sparks a lot of discussion with a lot of heat and smoke, but very little
>> "light". I would only caution you before spending many thousands of
>> dollars as I did for FCP Suite HD and Apple hardware to get a lot of
>> opinions before taking the plunge.
>>
>> If this is Apple bashing, so be it...but I readily admit that I have
>> owned many Macs starting with the 512K machine over 20 years ago, have
>> owned Apple stock, etc......but I just do not think FCP and the hardware
>> to support it make the most sense for many if not most users.
>>
>> Smarty
>>
>>
>> "nappy" <spam@spam.com> wrote in message
>> news:atzTh.23$Yo2.2@newssvr19.news.prodigy.net...
>>> "Luis Ortega" <lortega@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
>>> news:eTyTh.499$633.495@newsfe4-gui.ntli.net...
>>>> I value the advice that I have been given here on many occasions. I
>>>> recently took a course on Final Cut Pro 5 and I was very impressed by
>>>> what I saw.
>>>> The studio version includes a music creation program and a special
>>>> effects program that some say is comparable to After Effects, plus a
>>>> dvd creation program and some sort of file format converter, which I
>>>> think is called Compressor..
>>>> My current software is Avid Xpress DV HD and Premiere Pro 2 on Windows.
>>>> FCP seems to have all of the features of Avid and Premiere Pro plus a
>>>> few more very interesting workflow features.
>>>> My question is what people who are really familiar with these programs
>>>> think about the idea of getting a macbook pro and FCP studio 5 as
>>>> opposed to continuing with the Windows series of programs that I
>>>> already own.
>>>> I didn't have enough time to really get into all of the programs of
>>>> FCP, and I am not that familiar with how stable Apples and FCP are.
>>> Don't be swayed by the hype PPro2 is vastly capable. As is the AVID
>>> offering. You would be wasting money. IMHO.
>>> Get After Effects.
>>> I never saw any realy use in the music portion of the Soundtrack Pro
>>> tool. Others have. But as a composer.. it was useless to me.
>>>
>>> YOU would be spending a great deal of money for hardware and software
>>> for minimal benefit.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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