Apple Updates iMacs with Haswell Processors and NVIDIA 7 Series GPU’s

Apple has once again updated it’s iMacs, now with Haswell Processors, PCI SSD cards and NVIDIA 7 series GPU’s!. Now that the MacPro is going fully AMD only, people wanting CUDA will have iMacs as their main option, as you can go up to a GTX 780M with 4GB of GDDR5 Memory. Would rather have a non-mobile version of the processor, but these should still rock for CUDA.

If only APPLE would relent and release a MacPro that is actually expandable, and doesn’t use just thunderbolt for expansion, but that is unlikely to happen. Thinking a hackintosh looks more and more likely in my Future!

Oliver Peters on how FCP 7 makes a great companion to FCP X

Oliver Peters has an interesting article on how he uses Final Cut pro 7 as a companion to Final Cut Pro X to make up for it’s missing features.

Personally I see it as indictment of FCP X. As a program is pretty broken if you have to use an older EOL version of itself to support many high end features, especially when said program could not work on the next OS X Mavericks!

Over 150 New Features being added to Adobe Creative Cloud Video

Yes, just 4 months after their last upgrade, Adobe is good to it’s word and is turning around much faster upgrades with creative cloud, and in October are upgrading Premiere Pro, After Effects, Speed Grade, Prelude, Media Encoder, Story and are adding the iOS app Prelude Live Logger. Awesome! You can check out the upgrades at Adobe.

Steve Forde at the Adobe After Effects Blog has a post on the new After Effects Features.

The Adobe Premiere Pro Work area Blog has more on Premiere Pro, Media Encoder (which now has GPU enabled rendering!) and Prelude and Prelude Live Logger.

The Adobe Moving Colors blog has more on the SpeedGrade Upgrade which includes direct link (an improvement over Dynamic Linking which you can see more about here) and GPU acceleration.

Thank you Adobe, looking forward to it! And here’s to hoping that Adobe permanently keeps up this rapid pace of development, except it will certainly keep us editors on our toes, as I have just scratched the surface of CC by now! Ha!

Decompose broken with Imported Media in Media Composer?!?!?

Now this is just showing how long it has been since I have worked in offline resolutions in AVID Media composer, but I didn’t realize that basically Decompose doesn’t work with imported clips. It leaves the clips their whole length, not subclipping anything to consolidate space. So if you were to re-import you are taking entire clips.

I tried Consolidating the media to make smaller clips and then Decomposing, but AVID only imports black clips this way. 
So with all imported Media, you have to import the whole clips and at 1 to 1 that can take a very large amount of hard drive space and time! This is insanity!
This makes the argument to use AMA if you can, but AMA is not working on either Media Composer 5.0.3 box I have access to right now with this copied P2 media. And if it wasn’t working at some point I don’t see how they initially managed to get the Media as DNxHD 36!
So frustrated right now!

My biggest worry of building a Hackintosh

I have not been quiet about my disdain for the new MacPro. Having Thunderbolt instead of PCI is not a solution.

A single PCI slot at 1x is 8 Gbps, while Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps, and Thunderbolt 2 is 20 Gbps. So Thunderbolt 2 is slower than 3x PCI (24 Gbps vs 20 Gbps). Every MacPro since 2009 has had 2 x 4x PCI slots which are 32 Gbps and 2 x 16x which 128 Gbps (or so much faster than even the next gen 50 Gbps Thunderbolt). So Thunderbolt will never be fast enough for a 16x Graphics card!
And my bigger worry is that without PCI expansion why will anyone write drivers for PCI cards for Macs now that there will be no Macs with PCI cards!
I have been thinking my next Mac will be a custom built PC, as NVIDIA and CUDA are important to me and my work, but I want a Mac! So I was hoping to build a Hackintosh, a custom built PC hacked to run Mac software. You can make a Hackintosh more powerful than the new MacPro (not cheaply as Decent 6x Xeons run around $1400 each, so almost $3000 for 2) and have huge amounts of expansion, but without future PCI drivers it won’t last! Maybe drivers will still work, as they will need to write Thunderbolt drivers which should still go through the PCI bus, but who knows. And why will NVIDIA keep writing universal graphics drivers like they have been doing?
So does that mean a PC is in my future? Maybe. Maybe a Mac laptop and a PC for editing and graphics work? That seems expensive! Of course so does giving up a Mac with all the software I have bought over the years.
Honest I just don’t know! No solution seems cheap, or to really fulfill my needs like a new MacPro with expansion like the current MacPro would have been.
If I had unlimited funds I would probably just move to PC and get a Wacom Tablet to replace my iPad. And replace all my software, and maybe a Retina MacPro laptop, or maybe a Razer gaming laptop. I just don’t know!