100GB is enough for many DV editing projects, though, and the performance is adequate for that task. DV only requires 3.5MB/s. People assume SCSI disks and RAID configs are important for video editing but not really at those data rates. Video editing on a notebook works fine (especially with two spindles). Sure, faster would be better but I'd rather have the space.
Still image editing takes considerable disk space these days as well. It's easy to see how a photo pro could fill a 100GB drive on a single job. My last trip had two photo pros who took home a combined 70GB after two weeks of shooting.
You do when you edit video or still photos on them. I generated 40GB of still data on my last trip and have generated up to 110GB on previous trips. RAW files for the highest resolution cameras these days are huge and will continue to get bigger. It's not uncommon to fill up several gigs with of flash at a time.
Certainly I agree with you on the codecs. Adobe products on the PC sure don't feel fast like they should though. No matter how fast your system, Photoshop (and Premiere) always take 30 seconds to load. It sure doesn't seem like the core of Premiere is heavily optimized from usage, but if the mac was worse I would certainly understand the disappointment.
The OSX part is understandable considering the FCP situation at the time. The lack of Altivec optimizations I will take your word for but that's strictly a performance issue, not feature or ease-of-use issue. The question is in what way was Premiere neglected that it wasn't on the PC?
Premiere's DV support on the PC, BTW, comes from the MS DV codec, so Premiere arguably doesn't provide any MMX / SSE support there. Performance of this codec is terrible and I replace it. Doesn't the mac handle video codecs in a similar manner and isn't it the realm of Quicktime to address this? The Quicktime DV codec for the PC is easily the worst quality and performance DV codec on the platform. Perhaps that's true for the mac as well.
I don't think that daring move "cemented acceptance of USB" except on iMacs. USB still has mixed popularity today and it's technical merit has nothing to do with Apple's marketing decisions. Apple is a small market.
Colored plastics are what they are. Has nothing to do with USB.
The Pioneer drive is an example of how Apple doesn't always want 3rd part devices to work in their boxes. Peripheral manufacturers don't have as much control over whether their devices will in macs as they do PC's.
That's because "legacy-free" never made sense ecomonically for PC's. It was always a stupid idea and legacy-equipped PC's still are the overwhelming choice. Apple didn't invent legacy-free. They stole the iea from Intel. And it was a stupid idea at that.
The previous poster was somehow implying (by disagreeing with me) that realtime HD over firewire was somehow and impressive achievement because of the data rates. The mention of the potential raw bandwidth of HD was used to make that point regardless of the fact that it has nothing to do with firewire or with what FCP was doing. The poster further pointed out that the data rate on firewire was 100Mbps in objection to my claim but he completely ignored the existence of HDV at 19 and 25. I think if FCP ignored those formats it would idiotic and if they do support them, then I was correct.
I'm familiar with the HD10. It comes from the broadcast division of JVC, not the consumer side. What constitutes a "professional codec/format" is up for grabs but generally the criticism of the JVC's comes from snobs. There is certainly plenty of HDV development from major players and I'll remind you that DV itself once recieved the same kind of "not a professional format" criticism when it first came out. No one would ever accept lossy compression after all! The single CCD is also a red herring. Show another camera anywhere near its price range that can provide any way near its video quality. That's what matters.
As I said before, I don't think Apple's support for DVCPRO-HD means that they don't support HDV as well. More formats is always better and I don't think they need to do any more work to satisfy their current HDCAM custumers. DV has worked for a while now.
Of course, I never said that it did equate to VMS. Never much liked VMS as a user. They didn't call it the Vomit Making System for nothing you know.
The founders of the NT kernel group were experienced kernel people who desired to develop a modern replacement for VMS had they gotten a chance at DEC. Since they did not, they left for MS to do the work there.
The NT OS underpinnings are far more modern than idiot zealots here would give it credit for. MacOS was mature, too, so why'd they switch?
I'm a FreeBSD fan and run a couple machines myself but I don't have blinders on.
I never claimed Premiere was a steal. That language was used by FCP promoters. Since you haven't used Premiere I don't think you're qualified to judge it compared to FCP. I've used it and Vegas as well so I'm familiar with it. I've seen demos of FCP and can't see what makes it so superior, but since I haven't used it I don't claim anything about it as others seem prone to. I doubt you've ever seen Premiere Pro or Vegas 4.
Two years ago Premiere was available and was cheaper then than FCP is now. If your argument is that FCP is cheaper now than it used to be, then that's quite an argument.
Avid has recently been giving away a version of their DV software. Do you really want to compare FCP's value to that?
Other packages offer educational discounts as well.
It will be hard to have this conversation with you since I doubt you'll agree that there's anything comparable to FCP. On the PC side, Vegas and Premiere would be considered competition and each is considerably less expensive on the street. Each does titling and comes with compression suites. Adobe bundles Premiere with audio software as you describe but Vegas doesn't AFAIK (they offer one). Adobe's bundle includes two other packages (AE and DVD authoring) so you aren't going to get very far with the comparision. I bought the Adobe bundle of 4 apps and paid considerably less than $999 without an educational discount.
Don't know who you're calling a troll but who's the one bragging about FCP being a steal at $999? At that price it's one of the more expensive packages. As far as special discounts, they may give it to you if you ask nicely but it doesn't alter the retail price. Adobe's best pricing is generally found in bundles with hardware. I paid under $500 for the Vegas bundle (long ago) and could easily buy the SF app for soundtrack creation if I had the interest. SF has been doing that a lot longer than Apple has.
There's two issues; firewire support and codecs. Not having a sample of the 100Mbps stream, I don't know what PC codecs may support it if any, but the MPEG_TS streams of HDV are supported by many MPEG codecs already. In the case of the JVC camera, a bundled app provides the firewire support and it works fine with PC's (no mac version). Not all editing applications have integrated tape loading facilities and I personally like it that way.
I can't say, then, that that camera isn't supportable by Vegas but I wouldn't automatically assume it wasn't as you have. I'm aware that FCP users were already editing HD using toolkits that people have put together. In any event, DVCPRO-HD may be HD quality but HDV is, by definition, HD quality as well. I hope you aren't suggesting that only FCP HD is capable of editing HD in "HD quality".
On the PC side, interested parties should look at what Cineform offers for Premiere. Realtime effects and transitions with multiple HD streams on relatively modest hardware. Don't know the new FCP compares to this, but AspectHD's been available for a while now.
Odd that you'd list FCP, Avid and Vegas. I think there are more players than that (including the volume leader).
I've successfully loaded, edited, and finished HDV work in Vegas 4 without any additional software. The experience could be better, but what's all the fuss? Cineform makes and inexpensive addon for it as well.
Hopefully version 5 will improve some of the areas of immaturity that Vegas currently suffers from. It's very nice in many ways and a little irritating in others. Multiple timelines in PPro is something I'm quite fond of.
I don't recall saying there was a 720p variant of DVCPRO-HD. In fact, I don't recall saying anything about DVCPRO-HD at all. I am familiar with DVCPRO however.
I hope you're not suggesting (or believing) that FCP's new support for HD is limited to DVCPRO-HD. How stupid and disappointing would that be!
I doubt you actually work with uncompressed HD digital or wou wouldn't be so flippant regarding realtime over firewire. Further, if you knew anything about current HDV you wouldn't insist that HD over firewire is 100Mbps. Just isn't so even if there's a version that is. What does the JVC HD10 do? How about the upcoming cameras from JVC and Sony? I'm sure Apple has no interest in those.
Uncompressed HD can be loaded into PC's using dedicated capture cards as well. Certainly not a mac thing.
Apparently neither of us respects the other's knowledge. Not from here.
Because Apple fancies itself as the computer for creative professionals and the industry standard is Photoshop, and application that runs identically on the PC and comes from a company who's officially stated that the mac is an inferior platform.
Apple would like a PS competitor of their own so they could say they have the world's greatest still image editing solution. Trouble is that there's no one to buy that offers it. Some suggest that they take gimp and do it up Safari-style. I think that's wishful thinking.
One could easily say the same thing for Apple regarding video editing. Prior to FCP, Apple had several editing packages available for mac, including the market volume leader (Premiere) and the package with the largest pro acceptance (Avid).
Why would you do your own when you have the industry's greatest software on your machine already, indeed!
This was only coincidence. The development cycle for USB devices was much too long for the iMac to have possibly influenced any product development. It may be true that iMac owners were the first with serious interest in USB but that's not the same as saying that the iMac *made* USB.
Vendors were most definitely making USB devices before the iMac was introduced. In my job I saw and worked with plenty of them. Intel saw to it.
I might remind you that Apple has very small market share and I doubt many USB device vendors concern themselves with whether their products work with macs. That's Apple's job if they care to do it.
How do those Pioneer DVDR drives work with macs? You know the ones that you change the firmware id string and call them superdrives? The OEM version doesn't work so well, does it?
Perhaps Apple should be proud. I don't know, but how would you characterize Apple's performance through the economic downturn (your term) when comparing it to Dell's? Technical talent is very subjective as beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
The iMac didn't make USB. Apple simply timed it well and hyped it up. Legacy-free PC's were the very reason for USB's development by Intel and it had been in process for years. Just where do you think all those USB vendors got their USB silicon from anyway? Apple sure didn't provide any.
You are incorrect. HDV 720p is 19Mbps and the other formats are 25Mbps. Work with them all the time. The Panasonic format claims higher data rates but 100Mbps isn't really hard for modern PC's to handle either and doesn't challenge firewire at all.
I suppose you work with 1.5 gigabit digital video streams, then? I doubt it. When you say "in production" exactly what do you mean? If you mean FCP HD then you are mistaken in your "50-100 times higher than that" claim. If you mean traditional HD production, then it's meaningless because we're not talking Apple and we're not talking firewire.
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100GB is enough for many DV editing projects, though, and the performance is adequate for that task. DV only requires 3.5MB/s. People assume SCSI disks and RAID configs are important for video editing but not really at those data rates. Video editing on a notebook works fine (especially with two spindles). Sure, faster would be better but I'd rather have the space.
Still image editing takes considerable disk space these days as well. It's easy to see how a photo pro could fill a 100GB drive on a single job. My last trip had two photo pros who took home a combined 70GB after two weeks of shooting.
You do when you edit video or still photos on them. I generated 40GB of still data on my last trip and have generated up to 110GB on previous trips. RAW files for the highest resolution cameras these days are huge and will continue to get bigger. It's not uncommon to fill up several gigs with of flash at a time.
You might want to rethink calling something "gay as hell" as a term of derision then.
Certainly I agree with you on the codecs. Adobe products on the PC sure don't feel fast like they should though. No matter how fast your system, Photoshop (and Premiere) always take 30 seconds to load. It sure doesn't seem like the core of Premiere is heavily optimized from usage, but if the mac was worse I would certainly understand the disappointment.
"Outside of that there has been innovation. For example in Safari, the page load progress bar is an overlay on the address bar."
Wow, I thought you were going to give and example of innovation.
How about tabbed browsing?
The OSX part is understandable considering the FCP situation at the time. The lack of Altivec optimizations I will take your word for but that's strictly a performance issue, not feature or ease-of-use issue. The question is in what way was Premiere neglected that it wasn't on the PC?
Premiere's DV support on the PC, BTW, comes from the MS DV codec, so Premiere arguably doesn't provide any MMX / SSE support there. Performance of this codec is terrible and I replace it. Doesn't the mac handle video codecs in a similar manner and isn't it the realm of Quicktime to address this? The Quicktime DV codec for the PC is easily the worst quality and performance DV codec on the platform. Perhaps that's true for the mac as well.
I don't think that daring move "cemented acceptance of USB" except on iMacs. USB still has mixed popularity today and it's technical merit has nothing to do with Apple's marketing decisions. Apple is a small market.
Colored plastics are what they are. Has nothing to do with USB.
The Pioneer drive is an example of how Apple doesn't always want 3rd part devices to work in their boxes. Peripheral manufacturers don't have as much control over whether their devices will in macs as they do PC's.
That's because "legacy-free" never made sense ecomonically for PC's. It was always a stupid idea and legacy-equipped PC's still are the overwhelming choice. Apple didn't invent legacy-free. They stole the iea from Intel. And it was a stupid idea at that.
The previous poster was somehow implying (by disagreeing with me) that realtime HD over firewire was somehow and impressive achievement because of the data rates. The mention of the potential raw bandwidth of HD was used to make that point regardless of the fact that it has nothing to do with firewire or with what FCP was doing. The poster further pointed out that the data rate on firewire was 100Mbps in objection to my claim but he completely ignored the existence of HDV at 19 and 25. I think if FCP ignored those formats it would idiotic and if they do support them, then I was correct.
I'm familiar with the HD10. It comes from the broadcast division of JVC, not the consumer side. What constitutes a "professional codec/format" is up for grabs but generally the criticism of the JVC's comes from snobs. There is certainly plenty of HDV development from major players and I'll remind you that DV itself once recieved the same kind of "not a professional format" criticism when it first came out. No one would ever accept lossy compression after all! The single CCD is also a red herring. Show another camera anywhere near its price range that can provide any way near its video quality. That's what matters.
As I said before, I don't think Apple's support for DVCPRO-HD means that they don't support HDV as well. More formats is always better and I don't think they need to do any more work to satisfy their current HDCAM custumers. DV has worked for a while now.
Of course, I never said that it did equate to VMS. Never much liked VMS as a user. They didn't call it the Vomit Making System for nothing you know.
The founders of the NT kernel group were experienced kernel people who desired to develop a modern replacement for VMS had they gotten a chance at DEC. Since they did not, they left for MS to do the work there.
The NT OS underpinnings are far more modern than idiot zealots here would give it credit for. MacOS was mature, too, so why'd they switch?
I'm a FreeBSD fan and run a couple machines myself but I don't have blinders on.
I never claimed Premiere was a steal. That language was used by FCP promoters. Since you haven't used Premiere I don't think you're qualified to judge it compared to FCP. I've used it and Vegas as well so I'm familiar with it. I've seen demos of FCP and can't see what makes it so superior, but since I haven't used it I don't claim anything about it as others seem prone to. I doubt you've ever seen Premiere Pro or Vegas 4.
Two years ago Premiere was available and was cheaper then than FCP is now. If your argument is that FCP is cheaper now than it used to be, then that's quite an argument.
Avid has recently been giving away a version of their DV software. Do you really want to compare FCP's value to that?
Other packages offer educational discounts as well.
It will be hard to have this conversation with you since I doubt you'll agree that there's anything comparable to FCP. On the PC side, Vegas and Premiere would be considered competition and each is considerably less expensive on the street. Each does titling and comes with compression suites. Adobe bundles Premiere with audio software as you describe but Vegas doesn't AFAIK (they offer one). Adobe's bundle includes two other packages (AE and DVD authoring) so you aren't going to get very far with the comparision. I bought the Adobe bundle of 4 apps and paid considerably less than $999 without an educational discount.
Don't know who you're calling a troll but who's the one bragging about FCP being a steal at $999? At that price it's one of the more expensive packages. As far as special discounts, they may give it to you if you ask nicely but it doesn't alter the retail price. Adobe's best pricing is generally found in bundles with hardware. I paid under $500 for the Vegas bundle (long ago) and could easily buy the SF app for soundtrack creation if I had the interest. SF has been doing that a lot longer than Apple has.
There's two issues; firewire support and codecs. Not having a sample of the 100Mbps stream, I don't know what PC codecs may support it if any, but the MPEG_TS streams of HDV are supported by many MPEG codecs already. In the case of the JVC camera, a bundled app provides the firewire support and it works fine with PC's (no mac version). Not all editing applications have integrated tape loading facilities and I personally like it that way.
I can't say, then, that that camera isn't supportable by Vegas but I wouldn't automatically assume it wasn't as you have. I'm aware that FCP users were already editing HD using toolkits that people have put together. In any event, DVCPRO-HD may be HD quality but HDV is, by definition, HD quality as well. I hope you aren't suggesting that only FCP HD is capable of editing HD in "HD quality".
On the PC side, interested parties should look at what Cineform offers for Premiere. Realtime effects and transitions with multiple HD streams on relatively modest hardware. Don't know the new FCP compares to this, but AspectHD's been available for a while now.
Odd that you'd list FCP, Avid and Vegas. I think there are more players than that (including the volume leader).
I've successfully loaded, edited, and finished HDV work in Vegas 4 without any additional software. The experience could be better, but what's all the fuss? Cineform makes and inexpensive addon for it as well.
Hopefully version 5 will improve some of the areas of immaturity that Vegas currently suffers from. It's very nice in many ways and a little irritating in others. Multiple timelines in PPro is something I'm quite fond of.
I don't recall saying there was a 720p variant of DVCPRO-HD. In fact, I don't recall saying anything about DVCPRO-HD at all. I am familiar with DVCPRO however.
I hope you're not suggesting (or believing) that FCP's new support for HD is limited to DVCPRO-HD. How stupid and disappointing would that be!
I doubt you actually work with uncompressed HD digital or wou wouldn't be so flippant regarding realtime over firewire. Further, if you knew anything about current HDV you wouldn't insist that HD over firewire is 100Mbps. Just isn't so even if there's a version that is. What does the JVC HD10 do? How about the upcoming cameras from JVC and Sony? I'm sure Apple has no interest in those.
Uncompressed HD can be loaded into PC's using dedicated capture cards as well. Certainly not a mac thing.
Apparently neither of us respects the other's knowledge. Not from here.
That is correct, but there is also HDV support which is 19 and 25. Any of these rates are easily handled by PC's and macs both.
Because Apple fancies itself as the computer for creative professionals and the industry standard is Photoshop, and application that runs identically on the PC and comes from a company who's officially stated that the mac is an inferior platform.
Apple would like a PS competitor of their own so they could say they have the world's greatest still image editing solution. Trouble is that there's no one to buy that offers it. Some suggest that they take gimp and do it up Safari-style. I think that's wishful thinking.
One could easily say the same thing for Apple regarding video editing. Prior to FCP, Apple had several editing packages available for mac, including the market volume leader (Premiere) and the package with the largest pro acceptance (Avid).
Why would you do your own when you have the industry's greatest software on your machine already, indeed!
This was only coincidence. The development cycle for USB devices was much too long for the iMac to have possibly influenced any product development. It may be true that iMac owners were the first with serious interest in USB but that's not the same as saying that the iMac *made* USB.
Vendors were most definitely making USB devices before the iMac was introduced. In my job I saw and worked with plenty of them. Intel saw to it.
I might remind you that Apple has very small market share and I doubt many USB device vendors concern themselves with whether their products work with macs. That's Apple's job if they care to do it.
How do those Pioneer DVDR drives work with macs? You know the ones that you change the firmware id string and call them superdrives? The OEM version doesn't work so well, does it?
I'd hardly call FCP at $999 a steal compared to its competition.
and only the ignorant would refer to it as a game-playing OS.
NT was developed by a team put together by ex-DEC VMS people and is certainly much more modern than BSD. It amazes me where people get crap like this.
Perhaps Apple should be proud. I don't know, but how would you characterize Apple's performance through the economic downturn (your term) when comparing it to Dell's? Technical talent is very subjective as beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
The iMac didn't make USB. Apple simply timed it well and hyped it up. Legacy-free PC's were the very reason for USB's development by Intel and it had been in process for years. Just where do you think all those USB vendors got their USB silicon from anyway? Apple sure didn't provide any.
You are incorrect. HDV 720p is 19Mbps and the other formats are 25Mbps. Work with them all the time. The Panasonic format claims higher data rates but 100Mbps isn't really hard for modern PC's to handle either and doesn't challenge firewire at all.
I suppose you work with 1.5 gigabit digital video streams, then? I doubt it. When you say "in production" exactly what do you mean? If you mean FCP HD then you are mistaken in your "50-100 times higher than that" claim. If you mean traditional HD production, then it's meaningless because we're not talking Apple and we're not talking firewire.
Sorry, I do know what I'm talking about.
and such a critical thinker, too! Boy, everything Apple does is so topnotch! Can't imagine why that would be considered flamebait.