NVIDIA announces Kepler based Quadro K5000 GPU for Mac Pro!!!! This is huge for CUDA users!

Arstechnica has the news on this HUGE announcement. The K5000 is the replacement for the QUADRO 5000 and runs at $2249. You check it out at NVIDIA as well.Built around NVIDIA's latest "Kepler" architecture, the double-wide card boasts 1536 processing cores shuffling pixels at up to 173GB/s along a 256-bit path to 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The card supports Shader Model 5.0, Open GL 3.2 on Mac OS X, and Open GL 4.3 and DirectX 11 when running Windows under BootCamp. And, it can support up to four monitors: two running at 2560x1600 over dual-link DVI ports, and two running up to 4096x2160 over DisplayPort 1.2. All that power also fits within an Energy Star-rated 122W power envelope.This has serious CUDA performance and should be awesome for Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve 9.Even more exciting for us not quite able to afford such a behometh card is that it signals some changes from Apple and Drivers. As you can actually run many Kepler cards now without much effort, since they included the drivers to deal with the NVIDIA powered MacBookPro and NVIDIA has started just writing a single driver for all cards in a series instead of different drivers. The thing is as of now you can only see 2GB of RAM on a card without doing some fiddling, which is an arbitrary addition made by Apple. The 4GB of RAM in this card looks like this will soon change for the better. And hopefully we get some Kepler GeForce cards running at full power on the mac soon. Like a GeForce GTX 680 (which matches the 1536 CUDA cores of the QUADRO) with slightly higher memory bandwidth.Any way you look at this it is good news for high end mac graphics as it looks like NVIDIA is back and here to stay.

iChat theater has issues, but is still a wonderful solution that Adobe and AVID need to implement

I know, I know iChat theater is old technology and has been out since Final Cut Pro 7 was was released, but it is still awesome tech. If you have a web camera or iSight you can share what you are viewing in Final Cut Pro 7 using iChat (or messages in Mountain Lion) and you can hear the person on either end and see Timecode as well. It has it's issues (audio often drops out and you have to restart the computer to get it back, and often it is hard to get the chat to actually start), but overall it works very well and allows for remote monitoring of an edit.Sure you can share your screen with Skype, but that shared the whole screen, timeline and all, and the video is small. iChat theater allows you to share just what is playing back from Final Cut Pro. It is awesome for editors who like to work at home, and producers who like to do the same. And it works very well overall.The problem is that Final Cut Pro 7 is EOL and will never be updated again, and is really showing it's age. Sure many companies have such an investment that they are still using it before the go with AVID (though I prefer Premiere Pro, if only it were more stable). And neither Premier Pro or Media Composer have anything like it.iChat theater and Final Cut Pro 7 is an elegant solution to a problem that is very relevant today (editors working remotely), and a new solution needs to be implemented in AVID and Premiere Pro.I wonder if it could be done via a plug in like BlackMagic or AJA, as if it was going out via video to Messages or Skype or a proprietary messaging program? The thing is it is such a great piece of software that the competitors need it (even if FCP X doesn't have it anymore either).Working from home means companies need less edit bays, editors get more sanity from not driving, and it is better for the environment not having to drive, so someone please come up with a solution and fast!

Walter Biscardi’s iMac Edit Suite

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Walter Biscardi has released a very cool article, on his new iMac editing suite. Very cool to see all that can be done with only an iMac. It is a very powerful machine, though I still want a new MacPro!

MacMatrix Updates SideEffects to work with Mountain Lion

MacMatrix has updated SideEffects which combines SIMBL and and ColorfulSidebar to return colored icons to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. The best part is having your custom drive icons back (as they really do help you hit them).The only thing that did not work for me was the finder restart added to your Users startup items, and I had to use my own I made with Automator, but I am back to color icons.Don't these look so much better, and I love my custom icons as well!I am still have some SIMBL crashes though, but have been in contact with the creator to see if we can clear them up, as I love my color finder icons!

ArsTechnica’s Extensive Review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

John Siracusa over at ArsTechnica has written another of her amazing OS X reviews, this of Mountain Lion. And it is a must read for anyone who is going to be using the new OS. It is 22 pages long, so expect to take some time with it, but it is worth it.

Apple releases Mountain Lion OS X 10.8 for Mac

So Apple has released Mountain Lion OS X 10.8 via the Mac App store for $19.99! Sure are undercutting Microsoft there, and with a year between released they can really add in the near and the short term.So far my favorite part if that Contacts has returned to a 3 pain view so you can see the groups and contacts at the same time as you could before lion. Still hate the B&W icons in the Finder Sidebar, and the stupidification of the OS (such as hiding the User/Library folder).Also had some issues, lost the icons in the sidebar and had to dump the sidebar preferences to fix them. The finder also ground to a halt after the upgrade, but I fixed it with Diskwarrior. And I have had some scrolling issues where I would scroll and it would instantly jump back to the top. And Launchbar had to wait for the OS to re-index with Spotlight before it worked (wow, I can barely function without Launchbar at this point). Had to change the settings to allow all apps to launch, so I could install apps from anywhere to get everything working though.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 is unofficially supported in MacPro

Tej's Tech Blog has a post on installed an NVIDIA GTX 570 PC card into a MacPro and it seems to work except for EFI (so it goes straight to desktop or login screen, you don't see the spinning ball at the start. Guess you can't do safe mode or boot to another drive then from startup, though not positive on that).You will have to do some Terminal tricks to get the Adobe suite to see it as compatible as the card is not listed for Mac, but it can be done.This is great news. Wonder if NVIDIA is going towards one driver for all their cards, or if it means that Apple is planning to include NVIDIA if and when it ever updates the MacPro?No matter what, more NVIDIA support for Macs is a good thing. And it is great that the new MacBook Pro and the MacBook Pro Retina are run by NVIDIA cards, as more CUDA support means more realtime with the Adobe Suite.