Re: Think the Mac is dead? I think not...

Hi Illya:

Ha, ha, that's a good one. I have served as a post supervisor on numerous shows, VFX Producer for a 100 episode animated series, supervising six animators and compositers for a year and half, I am a DP, have shot plenty of green screen and heavily composited shows. I know all about the computing power needed to accomplish visual effects.

Contrary to popular opinion, we are also overdue for a backlash from the audiences for the VFX abuse that people in our business have inflicted upon the audience. I even read a piece in Entertainment Weekly yesterday about how directors are just slinging cheesy looking VFX all over the place and how the audience is becoming jaded to it, much like listening to Auto-tuned vocals is becoming a joke for anyone with an ear. After a while, it is all so much moving Photoshop. It all looks synthetic and fake, other than the tastefully applied subtle VFX, But, I digress...

Yes, I know visual effects are overused even on bad sitcoms like The Office. You are missing the point here. You are thinking about today, while I am talking about tomorrow. Small, cheap and powerful will be what we all are working on and the footprint will be much more on a cloud or in portable computing. I know it is inconceivable to many that we won't all be using giant, heat spewing chunks of aluminum like Mac Pros, but I and many in the industry feel that we won't be in just a few short years, at least nearly as much as today.

If you have noticed, operations that used to take maximum horsepower like particle effects, advanced shading and texturing can now be done in prosumer editing and effects programs on relatively slow hardware at relatively quick render times. This will continue to develop at an ever increasing rate.

I agree, YouTube and Vimeo have increased immensely in quality over the past few years and more and more material is seen only on-line. But I am also of the opinion that resolution is overrated. I constantly see projects shot on the RED at 4k that are still horrible projects. I see many projects shot on low end cameras like the 7D, 5D MKII, HVX200 and the EX1 that are quite excellent, that are gathering fans and audiences and making the creators plenty of money. We have definitely reached the era of good enough. Most of the gear on the market even one or two notches above a Flip can produce quality that is good enough for the vast majority of most audiences. That is a monumental achievement from just a few years ago. Sure the Alexas, Vipers and REDs have their place, but those types of tools are not increasing in use, relative to the audience that is creating content, they are decreasing in relative use when considered against what is being produced and created with all of the tools available. Mac Pros are the same, more and more content is being posted on laptops and iMacs. Sure, there is the hardcore pro user base, but they are also decreasing in relative size as crafting media becomes cheaper and simpler. Is the Mac dead? Definitely not. But is the Mac Pro on life support? Sure does look that way from Apple's perspective.

Dan

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