Is this the deathnell for the new Apple MacPro

Arstechnica is reporting that Acer one of the leaders in Thunderbolt is dropping it for at least the next year. The entire new MacPro is dependent on Thunderbolt to act as it’s expansion, since it has no user addable PCI slots. So you must use expensive Thunderbolt expansion to add accessories to your new Cylinder MacPro. The thing is that so far Thunderbolt support is pretty underwelming. There are some good raid enclosures, but almost nothing for just hard drive housings for your old drives, and everything else is very expensive. In fact there are very few PC motherboards with Thunderbolt, and none with support for Dual Xeons, so it is very very niche!

Everyone is betting on USB 3, which is almost as fast (and plans on getting even faster, and has backwards compatibility), which every PC has, and yes the MacPro has a few ports, but not enough.

And Thunderbolt is not really a PCI replacement. It is fast, but not nearly as fast as PCI, so you can’t say put an external NVIDIA video card for CUDA support. It would just be too slow.

And without PC support it will always be a very Niche product.

Makes me think if I want to stay with Mac I will have to do a Hackintosh, which are notoriously unstable, but could at least run windows easily, and have everything I want internally instead of in a spiderweb of external expensive thunderbolt peripherals!

I don’t want to have to move fully to windows, but even now I am running bootcamp. And Windows 8 boots faster on my Mac than Mac OS X, and I can build a PC with almost all the expansion I want within a single case with a single power cord. I mean I already have such a serious snake of power cable is am surprised it doesn’t trip the fuse more often!

OS X Issues, Quicktime died but I fixed it, but Finder is still slow

Been having some serious OS X issues of late.

First quicklook died in my finder. Couldn’t see any quicktime movies, and I realized also could not open then in Quicktime, quicktime was basically dead. I tried booting as Root and the issue persisted so I realized it was not my user file, and was something with my system. The problem also persisted in Safe Mode, so it had to be a system issue.

Since my last major issue was a major system fault, I currently have a spare 2 GB hard drive, so I installed OS X on it and moved my user over to it using migration assistant to see if the problem persisted. Twice when I did it the computer froze. It was on, but all USB devices were unpowered, and pulling them and plugging them back in didn’t help, and the monitor was black. So I re-installed OS X a second time, and then started it before migrating my old user, and turned off sleep and it migrated fine. And that system worked fine, quicktime was good and everything was there. Since everything had moved over OK, and I now had a backup (beyond my Time Machine), I decided to try re-installing OS X over the old one using my new 10.8.4 recovery partition, and after that OS X booted fine (well a few things are weird, like Sugar Sync, X-marks and it seems Java is now gone for CrashPlan).

After the install my computer boot much faster. I have a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 for my graphics card, so it doesn’t show the mac startup screens until it goes gray and the desktop appears, and it was taking a good minute to boot, but now it boots in under 30 seconds, so that is great. And Quicktime now works fine, as does quicklook. No idea what happened to cause it, it just happened.

And I have already run Diskwarrior and TechTool as well as ClamXav, so I have no issues with drives or viruses. No idea what tanked my quicktime.

The one issue I have been having that persists is a slow finder. For the last 6 months or so my finder has been very slow and gets the beachball of slowness all the time. I mean all the time, and I have not been able to fix the issue, no matter what I do.

I have been trying to clean out my user to see if that is it, and have been using CleanMyMac 2, and manually cleaning as well. Nothing has helped the finder issue so far.

I even found this Apple Support forum thread, where they tell you to try this terminal command to see what is installed as finder extension. “kextstat -kl | awk ‘ !/apple/ { print $6 } ‘”

For results I get:

com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboard
com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboardUSB
 
For my Microsoft Ergo Keyboard
 
jp.plentycom.driver.SteerMouse
 
For my Trackball
 
com.razer.common.razerhid
 
For my Razer gaming keyboard
 
com.sonnettech.driver.SonnetSATA
 
for my Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P PCIe via which I run my SATA drives for editing
 
com.SafeNet.driver.Sentinel
 
How I run Lightwave 3D
 
com.makemkv.kext.daspi
 
For makemkv
 
com.AmbrosiaSW.AudioSupport
 
I am removing this WireTap Studio KEXT to see if that helps
 
com.nvidia.CUDA
 
For my Geforce GTX 670
 
If anyone has any ideas on how to speed my finder back up without having to re-install everything on a clean OS X install I would greatly appreciate any help!

Red Giant Plural Eyes 3.2.0 for OS X released

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Red Giant has released the 3.2.0 update for OS X.

  • Support for the just-released Avid Media Composer 7
  • Using MP3 files as external audio is now supported
  • Added an option to save the synced project to a specified location
  • Now properly supports audio tracks with more than two channels
  • Now properly handles ProRes PAL footage
  • Now supports Avid Media Composer 5.0 AAF files
  • Added support for imported media where audio gain was applied in Avid Media Composer
  • Spanned P2 MXF files will no longer show up as an “Unsupported Format”
  • Now preserves clip spacing when importing an AAF file
  • Fixed problem with media captured from iMovie, CineForm Studio, and Final Cut Express

You can download the update here.

Surgery and Diet Update

Haven’t given an update in a while, so I decided it was about time as quite a bit is going on.

I am working 12 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week, so up to 72 a week, and I am tired. Exhausted in fact. This job is really burning the candle at both ends. And before surgery I know I would either be sick, or getting sick, and I am not sick at all, which is a huge change. Before the surgery I know this much stress and this many hours would have made me really sick. I had asked my cardiologist about it, and he had said it had nothing to with my condition, but post surgery I am not getting sick as easily. I wonder if anyone else with hyper trophic has experienced this?

Of course things aren’t all good. I has been doing a 2.1 mile walk every day, then taking the subway to work, and getting over 10,000 steps every day. Unfortunately, I somehow managed to sprain my left foot quite badly. I don’t know how, and I do know it is at least not broken, but I am walking with a cane. I have some prescription anti-inflammatory, but I am almost out. The worst part is that I have not been doing my walk because of it, so have been getting only about 5-6000 steps a day which is affecting my diet.
I am still on the 8 Hour Diet, but the getting up at 3 in the morning thing makes it so hard to not eat till noon, and I haven’t made it every day, plus have eaten up till 9 some nights, but even before my foot, and eating well I have been staying about the same. Had gone from 258 to 236, but now am hovering above 240, going up a bit, but always back down, but not below 240. Hopefully when my foot heals I will be able to walk more, and when not working 5:30 AM to 5:30 PM, the weight will start coming off again.
Scar is about the same. Still a bit sore and am still using a pillow over it in the car, but I think that is likely because of the 3 bags i carry to work, that rub against it on the subway. I ave my backpack with my lunch and spare t-shirt and towel, an original xbox bag with 2 big full water jugs, and my briefcase/messenger bag with iPad and kindle. And I get a good 4500 steps walking from my car to the subway and from the subway to work and back every day, plus quite a few flights of stairs!
Looking forward to the job ending, and hopefully a couple of weeks off before getting a nice long term job! One can always hope!

Canon EOS 70D DSLR Announced

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PhotoRumors has the story on the newly released Canon EOS 70D. It is $1199 for the body, $1349 with an 18-55mm and $1549 for an 18-135MM. 20.2 Megapixels, with built in WIFI and the swing out lens of it’s predecessor. And Dual Pixel CMOS Auto Focus while you shoot video. And can shoot at 7 fps in still mode!

This sounds like an awesome replacement for the 60D! If only it had RAW Record built in! And lets hope Canon didn’t block MagicLantern’s access to the very cool new RAW features they have found!

PVC Posts 25 New Features of AVID Media Composer 7

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has posted 25 new features of AVID Media Composer 7.

Let’s hope the cached waveform redraw is great, as this has been a sore point with AVID forever!

Spanned Markers is a cool idea for sure.

Masks on output monitor is awesome, especially for center cut shows done in widescreen, which I often have to do!

Changing audio gain in timeline is a great addition.

AVID has released Media Composer 7

AVID has released Media Composer 7. And it is now $999.00 and the upgrade from 6.5 is $299 and the upgrade from Previous version is $399.

I would love to give it a run as I have 6.5, but can’t afford it right now. And honestly AVID never changes that much that most post houses that use it won’t be upgrading, so it isn’t as important to learn as say Premiere Pro that many people are now considering and most editors don’t have much experience with.