Electronista is reporting that the next generation Thunderbolt will reach 40 Gbps, though will have new connectors, and use up to half the power but still be able to charge 100 watts. It will support display port 1.2, PCI e 3, HDMI 2, and USB 3.
This would mean a much improved MacPro, though still not PCI e 3 x16 speed.
I have been considering building a hackintosh to replace my venerable 4,1 Mac Pro for some time. Either that or even moving to Windows, because the new MacPro does not seem like a viable replacement. It just isn’t expandable enough, and I can’t use NVIDIA graphics cards which are key to so many high end graphics programs. I don’t want to leave Mac, but I want NVIDIA and more expandability, and more internal storage.
Well one of the companies I work for picked up a Quo Computer to run as a Mac for editing with Final Cut Pro 7 (and we will be testing it on Premiere Pro on the job starting now). If you don’t know about Quo, they started as a Kickstarter Campaign to make a Hackintosh computer that can be legally sold as they don’t sell or install OS X for you, but the motherboard is built with many standard Mac components to make it the most compatible Hackintosh board out there. It is a Micro-ATX motherboard, so it is limited in PCI slots, but does have built in capabilities for Firewire 800, USB 3 and Thunderbolt. It is an older board design, so does not use the latest Haswell processors, but is still quite adequate for using Final Cut Pro 7.
There is a great article on the systems over at TechSpot, that is worth checking out.
This version includes an SSD for startup, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 for Graphics, and 3 internal Drive bays. It has USB 3 on the back as well as USB 2, Ethernet, 1 Thunberbolt and a Firewire 400 port. On the breakout in Front it has 2 USB 2, 2 audio ports, another Firewire 400 and an ESATA that is not hooked up. Unfortunately though it is on the motherboard there are no Firewire 800 ports (it really needs a custom breakout in front with USB 3 and Firewire 800) which can be a bottleneck when you have a ton of Firewire 800 drives laying around!
We tried a Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter, but didn’t realize it is not hot swappable, so it must be attached when the computer turns on to work, which is really inconvenient for external drives. No hot swap with Thunberbolt. Yuck!
Also the PCI Slots are a little spare because of the size of the board, it has 1 PCI2x16, 1 PCIx8 and a couple of PCIe x1 for USB 4 and Wifi cards, which are used up. So with a single graphics card, you get one slot, so you might want to consider a USB 3 or Thunderbolt video in and out card, though we are running an Intensity Pro, filling our single expansion slot.
Overall I have to say the machine is pretty kick ass. It seems rock solid going through a the edit and graphics on a 28:30 Direct Response Infomercial with no problems whatsoever. We had a little scare when out MacPro went down and we had to put an ATTO SAS card into the machine, and once installed it showed command line before boot, but it booted fine.
The only complaint, other then the lack of Firewire 800 ports, and an SATA slot that is not connected, is that the support from Quo is not the best. They don’t get back to you too quickly, which is really a shame. Honestly they could be really filling the niche left for expandable Macs. And if they made a full ATX Haswell board, they could really take over the high end Mac Market, especially as the machines are considerably less expensive than a new MacPro Trashcan!
Honestly this thing works so well I am much less worried about Hackintosh Machines, now if only we can guarantee that NVIDIA cards will still work even without a machine to install them into in Apple’s lineup of machines!
Chris Hocking at Late Nite Films has an awesome article, where he goes into not only the best things about AVID and Premiere Pro, but also his first attempt at using FCP X. And his is the first article that makes me interested in taking a look again at FCP X, though maybe once they fix audio issues.
And I still say that for graphics heavy projects, even longform (at least 28:30 Direct Response), I think Premiere Pro with a proper video card can easily outdo AVID, which is still archaic in how it deals with Alphas (and importing them) even if it is the king of media management. And those same projects would be a mess in FCP X without the ability to have tracks for organization.
I mean my current sequence has 18 tracks of video going all organized into different layers.
Larry Jordan did an extensive comparison of the latest Apple Compressor to Adobe Media Encoder.
He ran the tests twice, as at first he used default settings and didn’t check image quality, but his seconds test are more equivalent, and the results surprised me as I gave up on Compressor a long time ago.
Basically it looks like for Single Pass encoding Compressor is faster, but for Multi-Pass (though it defaults to single pass) or resized compressing Media Encoder is faster, and it looks better at lower file sizes, though Compressor has more ability to customize settings.
The article is certainly worth a read, especially for all those who do a lot of compression.
Now he is mostly using Photoshop and not video programs, but isn’t seeing too many speed increases, as most software can’t use many cores and or don’t have GPU acceleration for the new MacPros.
Sonnet has announced it’s xMac Pro Server, to add the new MacPro to a Rack. Of course that is not all as it also adds PCI expansion through Thunderbolt 2, room for optical drives and ports. It is $1499, but adds 3 PCIe Ports to the MacPro including a Red Rocket (through Thunderbolt 2, so no graphics cards) with a 300W power supply, places (with additional kits) to install optical drives and additional hard drives.
A very cool idea, if a bit expensive.
This is so exciting as Sony has always loved their proprietary formats, even proprietary media, and for them to be opening up their amazing cameras to ProRES and DNxHD even with a paid upgrade is huge. Especially with the F55 which has a Global Electronic Shutter, which gets rid of the rolling shutter problem of CMOS image sensors!
And it has beautiful image quality.
MacRumors has the news that iTunes 11.1.6 Beta has returned local iTunes Contact and Calendar sync to your iOS devices. I have railed about this because iCloud syncing is very very broken, especially without the ability to easily overwrite the iCloud information from your computer. Now if only they would add back Bookmark syncing so I could forget about the damn iCloud which seems to constantly screw up my bookmarks! Honestly I have now figured the only solution which seems to get clean bookmarks to my iOS devices. I use x-marks to sync my bookmarks, as I use Chrome as my primary browser with Mozilla as my secondary browser. Since I am not a PC (which has the great iCloud Sync extension for Windows) I have to get my bookmarks into Safari on my mac to be able to sync bookmarks to my iOS devices, so I use X-marks, but while my Safari seems to then have good clean bookmarks, it does not follow that my iCloud bookmarks are at all the same. Instead I seem to end up with many duplicate folders, but most of which are empty in random orders. In order to fix this, I have found that the aforementioned iCloud plug in for Safari only available on PC’s seems to actually overwrite the iCloud bookmarks, which I can’t seem to manage from my Mac. So I boot up Windows 8.1 in Parallels (can also be done in BootCamp) and launch Chrome for PC. Then I download clean bookmarks from Xmarks and wait for iCloud to sync, and that seems to clean up my bookmarks for a little while at least. Why Apple can’t add a control to iCloud to control overwrite, like they used to have for syncing, or like x-marks has I will never know. I mean if there weren’t issues they wouldn’t have brought back local syncing in any for. Lets hope they bring back local syncing of bookmarks soon, so I can forget about the broken iCloud bookmark syncing!!!
Red Giant has released a new set of GPU accelerated plug ins called Universe. Right now you can try out the Free plan which includes 32 free plug ins, and you will be able to get Premium plug ins, or create your own. They are also updating many of their old plug ins to work GPU enhanced in universe.
Supernova: Behind the Scenes of Red Giant Universe from Red Giant on Vimeo.
There is the free membership, a $10 a month Premium Plan or a $99 per year plan, or a $399 Lifetime plan that does not expire!
The Plugs include:
Universe Free Tools
Universe Blur (7 plugins)
Universe Distort (8 plugins)
Universe Generators (4 plugins)
Universe Glow (3 plugins)
Universe Transitions (9 plugins)
Universe Premium Tools
Universe Chromatic Glow
Universe Holomatrix
Universe Knoll Light Factory EZ
Universe Noise
Universe Premium Transitions
Universe Prism Displacement
Universe Retrograde
Universe Toonit
This sounds very cool, and I have already installed and am looking forward to trying them out. Not sure about the monthly pricing unless they do add as many effects as they say they will, but the Lifetime is probably the best deal here, especially seeing things like Knoll Light Factory being added with GPU support.
Also is an addition is called Red Giant Supernova, which allows you to program plug ins quickly using the Red Giant Universe Library. So it fairly easy to create your own plug ins.
Supernova: Behind the Scenes of Red Giant Universe from Red Giant on Vimeo.
Macnn is reporting that NVIDIA has updated it’s graphics card drivers, but you need CUDA 5.5.28 to work with them.
I tried installing them in my MacPro with a PC NVIDIA Geforce 670 and it wouldn’t restart, had to zap the PRAM, so be careful with these!