Reuben Evans at OWC’s Tech Talk Blog on what Top Pros want from Apple as a Platform

OWC’s Tech Talk blog has an article with Top Video Pros Weight In On Where Apple Should Take Its Platform. 

It is a good article, if a little too FCP X focused overall. I made my huge post on the problems that I have with extensive use of FCP X, and I wish Apple would deal with them before adding too much else, though collaborative editing might help with some of my complaints quite a bit, but there are still so many to go into.

I totally agree that Apple needs to knock it out of the park with a GPU, but not just for Cinema4D, but also for Premiere Pro (as well as DaVinci). And yea the CPU needs to really stomp ass with After Effects for sure.

An updated XDR display should happen quickly, and the new version should also be the basis for a new iMac Pro.

And yes the Afterburner card needs to be able to decode different codecs as well, not just ProRES, and that should also be either added to the iMac, or make a breakout box with BlackMagic and include the tech in that along with an HDMI out and in.

I really do wish I could afford a MacPro, though with the M1, it calls it into question. Be really weird if Apple ends up with the MacPro as the only Intel Mac, and a medium machine like the article calls for as M1.

My faith in Apple mostly restored with the new Mac Pro!

So Apple officially showed off the new MacPro at the WWDC, and it is pretty F***ING AWESOME!!!!

First off it looks like a Cheese-grater, which was literally to please the fans of the old Cheese-grater!

And it has handles, and you can even get wheels. And the metal case comes off so you can access it from all sides.

It has 8, 12, 16, 24 or 28 core Xeon processors, getting 300 kw of power so they never get throttled, with a special air cooled system.

It has 12 RAM slots capable of 1.5 Terrabytes of RAM (I can’t wait to laugh at the price of that from Apple).

And it has 8  PCI SLOTS! Well, 7 really, but DAMN! 4 double wide slots for graphics cards (both with an additional new PCI connector for the MPX modules) with 1 x16 and 2 x8 gen 3 for video cards. And the top slot is a half wife slot for Apple’s I/O card (which means it can be upgraded or changed out).

And the MPX Modules are special PCI graphics cards in containers. There is a half heigh one fro the AMD Radeon Pro 580x which comes standard. And then full size modules that fill 2 double wide PCI slots, for either the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II with 32 GB of Memory, or the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo which is 2 cards in one with super fast connection between the cards (and you can install 2 of these! Wow that will cost a ton). And these all have extra thunderbolt ports (as there are 2 on top and 2 on the I/O card). And these can get 300 wats of power

The system has an unbelievable 1.4 kilowatts of power supply!

And my favorite addition, the Afterburner ProRES and ProRES RAW Accelerator PCI Card which can play 3 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or 12 streams of 4K ProRes Raw without touching the CPU or GPU! WOW! They said you can do realitime color correction and effects on DaVinci in 8K in realtime! My question is will it be supported via thunderbolt 3 for the iMacPro maybe along with a video card like the BlackMagic kit they support? And it would be even better if it also supported BlackMagic RAW!

And up to a 4GB SSD.

And there is also a rack mounted version!

WOW! This is a powerhouse, and the 6K monitor would make an amazing, though expensive addition!

My only complaints are AMD only, no NVIDIA. And sure NVIDIA wouldn’t let them do these MPX modules with Thunderbolt, nor support those new fangled PCI slots that allow them, but 4 NVIDIA cards in here would be screaming! And the 4GB SSD. I know people don’t like spinning platters anymore, but man I have so much stuff on drives now, 4GB which will be insanely expensive is just not enough storage! Hell I could only afford 2GB in my iMac Pro! I was hoping for some sort of built in raid when you could put in your own hard drives, but that was alas just a ridiculous dream.

Is the apple Afterburner ProRes Video Accelerator card for MacPro going to be available via expansion chassis for iMacPro?

OK so I just got an iMac Pro as my MacPro 4,1 finally fried. And I needed a machine, and just didn’t want to move to windows, so I went iMac Pro.

And I figured I could always add an external video card via thunderbolt if I need to make the system faster, but that new MacPro gave me an idea.

After all it has a PCI card that speeds up ProRES video rendering. Sure it might not be as fast via Thunderbolt 3, but an expansion chasis with a second video card and that ProRES card would be F•••ing AMAZING!!

Come on Apple! Think about it!

Premiere Pro Ingest is broken, Media Encoder keeps freezing and breaking the process

So I am running Premiere Pro CC 2018 12.1.1 and Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018 12.1.1.12 on a macOS Sierra 10.12.6 with a MacPro 5,1 dual 6 core 3.06 GHZ with 32 GB of RAM and and a GTX 97- 4096 MB mac flashed. I am running the latest CUDA 387.178 with NVIDIA Web Driver 378.06.25f03 and am using CUDA renderer. I am using UHD 29.97 footage from a Canon C300 in MXF format and converting it to ProRES on Ingest from Media Browser.

I am importing the footage from within Media Browser in premiere and it sends the footage to Media Encoder to convert it. The problem I am having is that Media Encoder keeps freezing and giving me the app “not responding” message. And if you force quit media encoder all the encodes are gone, and I have to delete the footage I imported and re-import all the footage into premiere to get the ingest going again. This is super frustrating. At least if I bring clips into media encoder myself and I have to force quit it, when I come back all the encodes are still in Media Encoder (sure some may have all compressed but that is an easy fix, just delete the encodes that already happened), it seems that Ingest can’t deal with any component breaking down, and it keeps breaking down for me.

It seems that the ingest only works if everything is working correctly, and it has not been working right, so as soon as you force media encoder to quit the Ingest is finished.

Honestly there should be a way to restart the conversions from within Premiere (not just creating proxys, but an actual ingest conversion). And it would be great if the ingest survived crashes, by leaving all the convertions within media encoder even after a crash so you could continue it later if something fails.

I know I can just do the conversion straight in Media Encoder (which I am doing now, but still getting not responding, but at least I can force quit and the conversions are still there and I can just delete the completed ones), but I was hoping to do the Ingest Process, but it does not seem to be working at all well for me.

And yes I know that Premiere can play back the MXF footage, but I have much better playback of the 4K footage once it is converted to ProRES.

I also posted this on the adobe forums, but don’t expect to get an answer that will fix the issue other than doing what I am doing and doing the conversions in Media Encoder directly. I just can’t believe how broken the ingest feature is that it can’t handle errors within Creative Cloud. It just expects that it will work, and it is not doing that for me.

Apple has created a new video fromat, Apple ProRes RAW

Apple has created a new video format, Apple ProRES RAW and you can check out the White Paper here. They claim it will render 6.3 times faster than red .r3d format. It will be smaller file size than Apple Pro Res 4444. It will soon work with the DJI Xenmuse X7. And the Atomos Sumo 19 and the Shogun Inferno will support it, as well as the Panasonic EVA1 and the Varicam LT. It will allow for tweaking of the ISO and color balance in post.

I would be more impressed if they brought back ProRes Support for Windows, as without that it just can’t be a ubiquitous format.

Hopefully Adobe and AVID will support it soon.

it ships on April 9th with Final Cut Pro X 10.4.1.

Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 Supports Quicktime ProRes on Windows, death knell for Quicktime

BlackMagicDesign’s Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 has been released and it includes Quicktime ProRES decoding on Windows! You can check out all the new features here.

With Apple having ended Quicktime support for Windows, and now Adobe and DaVinci adding Quicktime Pro Res playback on Windows, that basically means that you can use all the old ProRes files you have, but it is time to move on. And it is unfortunate as ProRES HQ had really become a great intermediate format and ProRES 444 is an awesome alpha format.

And it looks like it is time to move to AVID’s DNxHD format, since like ProRES it is pretty much visually lossless at higher bitrates.

Adobe has licensed Apple ProRES playback for Wndows

Adobe today announced that they have licensed playback of Apple’s ProRES, so it will be natively supported within Adobe Creative Cloud, without having to use Apple’s Quicktime to do so (since it has been killed for Windows). Now it won’t be able to write out to ProRES (so Window users will need another format), but it will be able to be read, and should be out soon.

They are also adding export support of mov wrapped DNxHD and DNxHR as well as playback of AAC audio and PNG compressed frames, and the native reading and writing of the legacy Animation format.

At least this gives ProRES a lifeline, though it is really too bad that it won’t be able to write it as well, as ProRES is a great format, that looks to be in decline from now on.

I love that Adobe is doing this, but I still can’t wrap my head around Apple’s thoughts on this. Sure it saves them money in development, and in licensing fees, but to have a really pro format it needs to be cross platform!

Honestly with Apple’s history with Pro Products (constantly making them great then killing them), and with the MacPro not being customize-able or upgrade-able at all (and not having been upgraded since it release in 2013), it looks to me like Apple is moving completely out of the high end pro market, and I worry that any of their high end software may not survive either!

Apple has killed Quicktime for Windows, and this could be a big problem for ProRes!

So this is a scary thing, Apple has killed Quicktime for Windows, and it currently has major security flaws in it, so if your computer is attached to the internet you should uninstall it.

The problem is that there are many video formats that require Quicktime to run. This includes all forms of ProRes, which has even become a major camera format, as well as Animation (a major format for After Effects) and DNxHD/HR.

Now Adobe says they are working on it, but will likely have to license components to get these to work, so if it ever does it will take a while.

Overall while this seems like a very Apple thing to do, it makes me once again worry about Apple and it’s future in Video. The thing is even if you are not going to release your software for Windows, you want the video to be able to run for cross compatibility, like AVID always released versions of it’s drivers for people who didn’t own AVID. And ProRES is such a great format that it has become a defacto standard across a lot of the Post Production industry, but with this action ProRES will slowly be relegated to a sidestory, In the future cameras are going to be less likely to support it, and eventually it will be a FCP only format (that is if Apple even keeps developing FCP X in the future). Other than the short term why would Adobe support it, if it is literally only able to work on a Mac, that is less than half it’s market, so why bother.

This just shows me how out of touch Apple really is.

Sony adding a paid upgrade to ProRES and DNxHD for the F5 and F55

NonLinear Post has the news.

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.

EOSHD on H.264 Codec, ProRes 4444 Quality at 1% of File SIze

EOSHD has an article on the new h.265 Codec which is ProRes 4444 Quality at 1% of the File size. Of course i doesn’t talk about the computer power that is going to be needed. And that is going to need some power. Serious GPU power I am thinking.

Still you can try it right now with Cinemartin’s compressor, but it is not cheap! And the compressor is made for Windows 7, and I have no idea what will actually play it back right now, but the compressor also does ProRes. Would love to give it a try, but it is way too expensive to play with right now.