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Posted by Spex on 04/13/07 16:03
Smarty wrote:
> 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.
The word on the street is the Sunday announcement is BIG. Take huge
pinch of salt! There is some speculation that Phenomenon might be
demoed. Take even bigger pinch of salt!
>
> 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.
>
Yep, overlooked that. Live type is a useful tool.
>
> 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.
Yep again, but I remember the days of Vegas being dog slow at rendering
and was one of the big criticisms of it at the time. It is not beyond
the wit of Apple to get FCP optimised like the other NLEs out there.
Thankfully I only use FCP to update my vfx/compositing reel so only use
it in limited circumstances. I have found it stable tho'.
>
> 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.........
>
It is very easy to predict what Apple is up to with hardware these days.
Just look at Intel road maps and look at what Dell, HP et al are
offering in their configurators...
We are going ahead with getting an 8 core Mac Pro asap as Lightwave
universal will be here shortly and it will make an excellent all-in-one
renderfarm.
> 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.
>
Huge re-works are not uncommon. Vegas itself has undergone a serious
amount reworking as has Premiere Pro which in its v2.0 guise is quite
excellent I hear from people using it (people shifting from Avid as a
lot of us have done). On Sunday we'll find out whether Apple have
dropped a bollock or not...
Another good reason for going Mac is Shake even though it is EOL it is
just sooo good. For the price of a good plugin you can have the mutt's
nuts in compositing software.
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