Re: After a year has perception of FCPX changed?

[Marcus Moore] " think it speaks to a larger, dare I say philosophical?, question of what a workstation is. You go back even 5 years and the processing advantage between a MacPro and an iMac was miles apart. Now you see demos of people working with 4K material on a MacBook Air via Thunderbolt."

I talk about this a lot when we discuss workstations here.

There's a distinction between computing power and throughput. You used to need a workstation to get both. Now, courtesy of Thunderbolt, you can pretty much get the throughput without the computing power.

Moore's law means that processing power per unit of price grows exponentially, but video requirements grow stepwise at a much lower rate. Computing power (capacity) has utterly outpaced our needs for video (demand). Straight editorial simply doesn't need workstation-class computing performance in 2012. Workstations have outgrown video editorial.

However, I think it's myopic to suggest this means Apple can reduce the relative computing power they offer on the desktop without affecting our industry. Thunderbolt is still a relatively narrow pipe when compared with server- or workstation-class PCIe, there are still applications with high RAM requirements, and there are still applications (especially compositing or 3D applications) that can soak up every cycle of processing power your machine can offer.

Expectations rise at the same rate as capabilities, so once we can deliver a better visual or a tighter turnaround, that becomes the new norm.

There is no such thing as enough processing power, and I think that if Apple only moves forward with throughput without corresponding advances in computing power on their desktop machines, they'll lose whatever portion of the high-end (read: high-expectation) markets adjacent to editorial that they have left.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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