[Frank Gothmann] "No, external SAS is cheaper, faster and much more expandable. I posted about this earlier."
This has not really been my assessment when a good controller is factored in, particularly with Mac-compatable controllers.
[Frank Gothmann] "TB Expansion is PCIe 4x, so half the performance you get from a modern Raid, Fibre or 10Gig Controller."
Err... huh? You appear to be assuming that since PCIe cards that support those things are sometimes 8x, they actually require that bandwidth. But that's not actually the case. Thunderbolt's has two full-duplex 10 Gbps channels. That's a total external bandwidth of 2500 MB/s. And higher-end iMac models have two independent ports. This is significantly more bandwidth than is required by e.g. 10 GbE.
[Frank Gothmann] "AJA's forthcoming TB solution only handles 8-Channel audio which is useless to me. I need 12 so I need a Kona 3. "
You're essentially going down a list of edge cases here. Perhaps it's possible that Thunderbolt is useless
to you, but it's entirely suitable for the vast majority of pro video work. You're not really complaining about Apple abandoning the pro video niche here, but about Apple supposedly abandoning a niche
within that niche.
Blackmagic's UltraStudio Pro Thunderbolt interface does 16 channels of audio over HD-SDI, incidentally. There's no
Thunderbolt-related limitation in play here; your complaint seems to be with the production features AJA has chosen to include.
[Frank Gothmann] "I don't care what might be in 5 or 10 years. I need to run a business today."
We're talking about Apple's
future product decisions. Today, the Mac Pro is still on sale, and I'd be quite surprised if it didn't receive an update in Q1 2012.
[Frank Gothmann] "Try running 4k DPX files off your TB raid on a laptop for film restauration and let me know if one or two weeks difference in render time matter to you and your business."
Even most Hollywood feature films are not being finished at 4K. You are, again, not really talking about pro video editing here, but about a niche within a niche. 4K DPX is effectively the
only format that Promise's Thunderbolt RAID can't handle in real-time, and Thunderbolt itself actually
is fast enough for 4K DPX on paper.
--
Digital Workflow/Colorist,
Nice Dissolve.
You should follow me on Twitter
here. Or read our
blog.
