Larry Jordan on why FCP X is ready for Proffesional Use

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Larry Jordan has an article on my Final Cut Pro X is ready and in fact being used for Professional work.

Now I did try and use FCP X right from the start with lessons, and I don’t think it is a professional program at all. Yes it might be faster to teach to someone with no previous editing knowledge as Larry says, but that is because it forces you to edit in a very specific way, and for me not a way that I find faster or better at all. And yes I am biased by all the horridness of Apple’s launch of FCP X and killing of the Final Cut Pro 7 suite, and that may bias me, but I also think that Larry making his living doing Final Cut Pro lessons may bias him.

And I hate how no one ever talks about the things that Final Cut Pro 7 is not setup to do, like working in a multi-user environment on an X-Serve or Edit Share. He does mention it is not that good at going to Pro Tools, which is a deal breaker, but also the inability to organize tracks makes for a mess of a timeline when I often use 15-20 tracks on a commercial, all for different elements or graphics to keep it organized, and to have that all haphazardly put randomly into the timeline is insane and a mess, and not at all professional!

Now I do love the ability to mark clips by keywords and make it all easily searchable, but that could have easily been ported into a Final Cut Pro 8 and made it a really powerful 64 bit editing system instead of a mixture of 64 bit tech with iMovie conventions.

Even with all the additions I still see Final Cut Pro X as a mess and not-professional. It has too much wrong with it, and has so many weird bugs (see previous posts on Red Giant software and FCP X), and I just don’t see the magnetic timeline as being professional in a commercial environment or any graphics heavy environment where timeline organization is more important that clip organization, which I am perfectly capable of organizing myself.

StudioDaily on Dells over MacPros

StudioDaily has an article on editors picking Dell Computers over MacPro’s for editing, which may in fact be true (though the article is written by someone working for Dell), as the MacPro has basically stagnated for years now, but I also hate how they never bother upgrading a MacPro with more modern technology for speed tests. Like putting in a PC NVIDIA Geforce 675 GTX with 4GB of RAM. That will make a huge difference in speed, especially with CUDA compliant software like Premiere Pro or Black Magic’s DaVinci Resolve! It may not be a TESLA, but it also doesn’t come with the price, which could set you back well over $6000 for a QUADRO and a TESLA, vs under $500 for a GTX 675 which works with the Mac’s current power supply and can really upgrade your existing MacPro.

Now of course their is still the question of what Apple’s next MacPro will be like and if it will be a worthy and powerful successor to the current MacPro, but we won’t know till it comes out, hopefully at this years WWDC.

FCP.co on new MacPro’s

FCP.Co has 2 articles from 3D designer Peter Zigich on possible, though pretty out there designs for a new MacPro which Tim Cook has promised we will get this year (hopefully at WWDC).

The first is on a modular tower, and the second a smaller design using low powered AMD chips (wouldn’t that require a new OS and apps?).

Interesting ideas, though I doubt either will happen. I am hoping for something really powerful, and better would be the ability to use PC videos cards without Mac supplies firmware as long as you have drivers, and releasing the 2 GB of video ram limit, NVIDIA TESLA support would be great too, as well as many hard drives as you can stuff in there!

Problems with Amazon Cloud Player

So I am having problems with Amazon Cloud Player. I had wanted iTunes Match, but am way over the 25,000 song limit (the Big Finish Doctor who stories I listen to add so many tracks), but also wanted streaming.

Now there are a couple of problems with it for me, the first and foremost being it’s inability to do anything but try and match songs ripped in Apple’s Lossless format, as that is most of my library that I have ripped from CD (and the reason I have an 120GB iPod Classic so I can carry a lot of music, though not even close to all) and it doesn’t seem to match all that well. The addition of Auto Rip has been a big help with this as I have gotten most of my music since 1998 from Amazon, so I hope they keep ripping and keep filling in albums.

Also the music uploader crashes ALLOT! Now maybe that has to do with my library size, but if it is going to crash that much it needs to be smarter, as it has now duplicated all of my playlists 9 times, and I have a hell of a lot of playlists! And I can barely manage my playlists via the web interface. I can maybe delete one playlist before either it stalls out (allot in Chrome, though I have tried it in Safari and Mozilla as well both on my Mac at home running 10.8.1 and on my work computer running 10.6.8) or gives an error message about not being able to do that now.

And while the yellow buttons usually mean you can use the keyboard in the Amazon Cloud Player Interface, it doesn’t work for this OK, which I get constantly.
And if it isn’t that, with Chrome i get constant timeouts when using Cloud Player. the page freezes all the time, especially when I am trying to manage my playlists.

At least I could do most of the deleting with the keyboard if I could get it to work in the web interface, but it stalls out or gives me this message all the time. I can delete the tracks via the iOS interface, but it slow and a pain using the slide. I need a batch edit or delete feature, or a duplicate finder. Heck I would even like a way to reset the playlists and re-upload them from iTunes.

I tried e-mailing Amazon about that, and they said to contact them, so I did an online text chat. Now they are putting in a technical note, especially since I am having all the crashes in uploader, but basically it sounds like they can’t access your personal cloud player, so you have to deal with the playlists, so I have to go through my thousands of playlists times 9 and delete them myself!!!! And I pay for this service? YOUCH! Not like I added the multiple playlists, Amazon Uploader managed that little doozy for me. Now they say they will contact me via e-mail in 2-3 business days, so I will upload again.

UPDATE: Well so far Amazon has been less than helpful. I was trying to contact via e-mail, but first had to switch to chat, and then phone call, and then they tried to get me to call in again, but it was because they could not get the logs I sent them repeatedly. And these are simple text files being sent to an e-mail address they gave me. I eventually had to put them on DropBox to get them to be able to download them. And since they got the files I haven’t heard anything.

As for the horrible responsiveness of Amazon Cloud Player, I moved to Chrome beta to see if it would help, and it seems to let me delete 2 playlists before it crashes!

Honestly if they don’t fix this soon I am going to have to give up on Amazon Cloud Player and figure out another solution!

Review of NVIDIA Geforce GTX 680m Graphics Card

I have been interested in the new top of the line Graphics Card for the new 2012 iMac, which is an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 680mx, and was wondering how it faired against my Desktop GTX 670. Everyone has been claiming it makes the iMac the most powerful Mac Editing machine out there, but I doubted it, as I have not seen any speed test against equivalent graphics cards. The 680m is actually a 680 slowed down.

I found a EuroGamer review of the GTX 680m, which tells me what I wanted to know about a 680M, but not a 680MX, but I found a review of that at Notebook Check.

Here is some of what they have to say:

Compared to the GeForce GTX 680M, the GTX 680MX features 1536 instead of 1344 CUDA cores and higher memory clocks (720/2500MHz vs 720/1800 MHz)


the graphics performance of the GeForce GTX 680MX should be 15 – 25 percent above the GTX 680M and similar to the Desktop GTX 580.

And specs on the GTX 680mx from NVIDIA’s site.

CUDA Cores – 1536
Core Speed – 720 Mhz
Memory Speed – 2500 Mhz
Texture Fill Rate (Billions per second) – 92.2
Max RAM – 2GB



And as for the GTX 670 from NVIDIA’s site.

CUDA Cores – 1344
Core Speed – 915 Mhz
Memory Speed – 2500 Mhz
Texture Fill Rate (Billions per second) – 102.5
Max RAM – 4GB

So the iMac has more CUDA cores, but it’s speed is not as fast, and it’s memory speed is less than half the speed.

So basically the 680MX it is a really powerful mobile graphics chip, but not as powerful as it’s equivalent Desktop GPU the GTX 670, and is more in line to a last generation GTX 580.

And yes it is not the easiest thing in the world getting a new generation NVIDIA card running in your MacPro, but it is not that hard, but should put your speed above that of the top of the line iMac GPU, and have more processing power, making it still champion, even though it is such dated technology at this point. Have to love expandability though as an old machine can still hold a performance edge, which is something the iMac will never have.

Lets just hope Apple makes a really good new MacPro this year.

2012 iMac faster than Mac Pro with Radeon HD 5870 in DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro CS6

Bare Feats has run the tests, and the 2012 iMac 27″ 3.4GHz Core iMac with 32GB of RAM and the GeForce GTX 680MX GPU actually does beat the MacPro in Resolve and Premiere Pro, but that is a MacPro with the Radeon HD 5870 GPU. Not really a fair test unless you have an NVIDIA CUDA card in the MacPro. As the MacPro still beats the iMac in 2 out of 3 CPU tests.

I have a feeling my non Mobile NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 4096 MB would slaughter the iMac in anything CUDA aware, which would be Premiere Pro, After Effects or DaVinci Resolve.

Google has released Google Maps for iOS

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OK all, time to all take a collective breath, Google has released Google Maps for the iPhone and iPad. Download it and stop complaining about Apple Maps!

Yes I don’t like Maps too well either. Sure the 3D thing on new devices is cool, though useless. And I don’t see why older devices can’t do turn by turn. And I do hate the colors, and the traffic has been totally useless, but I just moved to alternatives. And have been really enjoying VUZE for traffic, but now Google Maps is back, so…

EDIT: ArsTechnica has a great article on it, including it’s shortcomings. The biggest that it doesn’t access your contacts from anywhere, not iOS or from Google itself, so you can’t just type someone’s name to get their address (THIS SERIOUSLY NEEDS TO BE FIXED).

And they tell you how to activate privacy, though it looks like it will then also turn off your helping with traffic.