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

We tend to think that editors are the only market for Mac Pro. But science, engineering and educational users are a big part of the Mac Pro world. I suspect that Apple might want the prestige of these users, and keep making the Pro just for them as a loss leader, if that were the case.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
http://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

If the people want something bad enough, someone will supply it. I think the market for Mac Pros are still there for a few more years, but with improvements in the speed and HD space of the Imac and mac mini, who knows? Don't count the mac pro out yet.

Editor, Sound Designer, Stop-Motion Animator, Lighting, and Pack Mule

Hi Rafael:

I agree that they cannot be replaced this moment. But the signs are there that they will be replaced soon. A pro friend of mine who does pretty high end work just bought a new 27" i7 iMac instead of a Mac Pro. Most of his work is on the web and he felt that the extra capabilities of the Mac Pro were going to be a waste of money. Right now, fast and powerful is needed to make professional video/film but that need is eroding, just as the pro market is eroding.

You said that iMovie on the iPhone shouldn't matter to a pro, but I disagree. Pros should definitely be aware of this trend because it signals more clients doing more things by themselves. I have seen three posts over at the LAFCPUG website this week of producers doing "legitimate" shows that they shot themselves on a Flip or a $500.00 consumer camera. Shows and pilots that are actually being pitched to networks. They hired a real editor to try to assemble the mess that they shot but the entire crew that would have gained a few days of work on the shoot to do it professionally? They were never called. Producers will always try to do things as cheaply as possible, which is why you have 22 year old interns as editors in a lot of places. What would you rather do, edit commercials and shows or get coffee for the boss? ;-)

As pros, our fallback position since the digital revolution began about 10 years ago has always been, "yes, you can get a camera and shoot it, edit it yourself but it will look like a home movie." That's the problem now, for an ever growing cadre of clients, that is good enough.

Don't know if you are in the U.S., but here in California, the Canadian board of tourism is running a commercial campaign that plays constantly. The commercials are home videos, shot by tourists of fun experiences in Canada. A glacier falling into the ocean, a seal hopping up on a person's kayak, etc. No VO, no graphics, no music. Just a home video clip and a visit Canada title card. Ten years ago, these commercials would have been a joke. Today, they are business as usual. What is ironic is that they probably bought the rights to these home video clips for next to nothing, added a title card and legalized the clips and run them. The air buy is millions of dollars, they run these things a lot here. Sad to say, but the future is pointing toward not needing fast and powerful computers and fast and powerful is a relative thing. A lot of people say that the processor in the iPad is fast and powerful and for a consumer product, it is.

Many, many clients now are just "doing it themselves" and quality be damned. The immense popularity of YouTube and Vimeo mean that people don't need to see RED 4k footage on a 107" plasma for it to be acceptable to them anymore.

I am convinced that towers like the Mac Pro will eventually fade away. And it may be sooner than later, although who knows exactly when.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

That's the thing Mark, I am normally extremely optimistic. I love what I do, I love producing, shooting and editing. But I make about a third of my living writing, interviewing and prognosticating about where the industry is headed. And based upon factual data, trends, speaking with industry leaders, it is headed in the direction that I am putting forth.

I don't think the post industry will die tomorrow. But it is constricting in a way over the past two years that show us where it is headed and at what rate it is shrinking. There will definitely be high quality work done, but the audience that thinks that they are capable of producing high quality work will continue to grow exponentially while the actual positions and amount of work available will continue to shrink.

It is not that if you are over 21, you cannot work, but as a producer, it makes sense that employers will find employees over about 30 to not be as appealing as kids, 18-25. Most kids have more free time available, do not have spouses and kids (you know the marriage rate has gone below 50% for the first time in our country's history, a couple of years ago), that means that they are available to work more hours at a lower rate than someone who is over 30, has a spouse, kids, a mortgage, etc. And most importantly, kids have grown up on media so they can learn software and grasp concepts more quickly. A partner I used to share an office with is an AE guru. He told that it took him two years of his life, working AE 15-18 hours a day, to really learn AE at a high end pro level. I know younger motion graphics artists today who can really learn almost any app (AE, Maya, Nuke, etc.) in a matter of months, not years. People under 30 have grown up in a different world and learned to speak the language much earlier than we did.

Ageism has never been more rampant in our industry and based upon the parameters that the market is demanding, older, more experienced workers (sometimes known as Pros) are not as appealing in general. They want to work fewer hours and make more per hour. Not saying this applies to everything but it is a general trend.

Back more on topic, I agree with you. I only use Macs because I have lost years of my life in stress as a result of running my business on PCs. Macs are just simpler, easier and more reliable but they still have plenty of issues and problems too. My last MBP was lemon, Apple just had to replace it with this i5 15" MBP I am typing on. That used to never happen, I have owned 15 Macs since switching from PCs in the 90s. It isn't important which tools we use, who knows what we will be editing on?

I own a G5 tower, loaded up with an upgraded graphics card, Aja Kona 3, RAID card, etc. But I haven't replaced it with a Mac Pro because I don't have the need lately. More and more projects I edit are strictly for the web, so why spend $5,000.00 to just stay current?

I don't think the industry is crashing and burning, but there are trends that pros at all levels should be aware of, that most of them aren't. I already went through the digital revolution when the VX1000 hit the market. At the time, the hot tip was owning a BVW-D600 Betacam, an AVID MC for off-line and a linear on-line bay with lots of expensive Beta SP or DBeta decks, a Grass switcher and an Abekas DVE. So many people were caught with their pants down when DV and FCP 1.0 came in. I foresee a lot of people today who will be in a similar position with the expensive tools that they have invested in and that they are ignoring where the industry is going. Cheaper tools, and a hungrier, leaner, much cheaper labor force.

Cheers,

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

I totally agree with you that they are effective, but I know for a fact (I read Boards Mag) that what motivated the agency was that the concept was ultra cheap, not that it was that brilliant. Luckily for them, it turned out to be effective or they wouldn't run them so much. But ad people, corporations, networks, the main factor driving media today is doing it cheaper and cheaper, which eventually means doing it yourself and not hiring pros for the most part.

I am writing a couple of 3D articles for some magazines and websites and for all of the mania surrounding Avatar and dual RED beam splitter rigs, the hottest thing in 3D right now is the Panasonic AG-3DA1. It follows my mantra, "faster, cheaper, smaller, lighter, simpler" but mainly cheaper. What does a dual beam splitter RED 3D rig cost? $150k, $200k when all of the toys are in place? What does the AG-3DA1 cost? $21k.

Computers will go the same way, smaller, cheaper, faster, lighter and simpler.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

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

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

Absolutely on the nose Walter, you totally get what I am speaking of, you just expressed it much more eloquently.

When you have AVID, the undisputed originator of pro non-linear editing, showing editing over the web at NAB, that is a sea change. I don't think that computational power will ever go down, that would contradict every paradigm that has been set since the computer was invented. But what I do see happening, the thought I was trying to get across was that the methods and tools that we use to access this power are evolving on a massive scale.

"I might be arguing for the faster horse-drawn buggies at the dawn of the automobile."

This is such a brilliant summation of the idea I was trying to communicate. It obviously offends people when a new way of doing things becomes the norm, people fundamentally are creatures of habit and don't like change. That is why editing over the web, technologies I have recently written articles about like Sohonet, Aspera and various new and powerful remote workflow AVID tools are changing how we will work in ways that we can't even imagine yet.

The main point being that in the near future, what if instead of buying huge hunks of plastic and aluminum from Apple, we buy computational bandwidth from Apple, Amazon, Google and who else possibly? The interface becomes something much more iPad-like in size, weight and portability or even Android/iPhone like in some cases. Yes, we now have iMovie on the new iPhone, I postulate that this is just the beginning. It took a long time for people to get over the idea that they don't have to own hunks of plastic like cassettes, CDs and DVDs for their entertainment media, it will take a while for pros to learn that they don't need to own rooms full of expensive Mac Pros too, that is what people are conditioned to think. This all goes back to the death of the PC age articles that have been circulating. PC, as in big, expensive, heavy and immobile tower. Amazing directors like Chris Cunningham have been doing a huge portion of their serious work on laptops for years, this is just the next logical step.

Another area I have researched and interviewed geniuses like John Underkoffler



and written articles about as well is the extremely outdated way that we interface with our computers and devices. The touch technology that is so popular in mobile computing is a great start but there are other methods and technologies evolving that will make working with media much more intuitive and simple. When you think about it, the monitor, mouse and keyboard are ancient in computing terms and relatively inefficient.

Thanks for your really sharp observations and thinking, you totally get it. This has been a fascinating exchange of ideas in this thread.

Sometimes it is the people on the set who cause an entirely different way of changing the entire workflow after them (RED 4k, for instance). And sometimes it is the people in the edit bays who radically change the way production is done (portable editing on set/location, the ability to motion track in software simply and effectively, freeing up the camera from the tripod and motion control rig when shooting green/blue screen).

I think that what we are evolving to and what is coming down the pike will change how we all work in ways that we can barely conceive of today. I really like the idea of total democratization of the tools, both hardware and software, even though it has caused many of us to make far less money than we used to. There is a lot of work today being shot on DSLRs and small inexpensive camera by people who previously would have not had a chance to ever visually communicate their stories and ideas before. Gear used to be so expensive, huge, heavy and complex. It is encouraging to see the tools truly evolve and become modern.

Cheers,

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

Oh Illya,

It's a conversation, not a pissing match. Yes, yes, you are right, Entertainment Weekly is a not a credible source for a college dissertation but it is a credible source for the mindset of consumers, that was my point. You have to admit, CGI/VFX is all starting to look like so much visual white noise. It doesn't look realistic in most cases, it looks like video game reality which is about as stylized as Anime/Manga. Lots of talent in the field of creating it but it rarely looks organic and based in reality, it is a very stylized hyper reality that appeals to a young audience who has been raised in an age where that is all they have ever seen.

To some, predominantly the artists who create it, it might look cool, but to a huge audience of viewers, it looks about as real as moving Photoshop. I can't help but to think that VFX today is beginning to look like the effects in 1902's Georges Melies "Trip to the Moon" must have looked to audiences just a decade later. Seen that, done that, when will something new looking ever come out? Even Avatar looked like moving Photoshop. Yeah, it was cool 3D moving Photoshop, but nobody thinks that those blue smurfs or their environment looked even remotely real. My hope is that someone like a Cameron or a Spielberg will get a wild hair and make a big, expensive feature with nothing but practical and in-camera effects, just to see if they can still do it. Nothing today looks as organic and fantastic as the effects in Blade Runner or the first Star Wars. Slicker, unrealistically larger and flashier with the sheen of Adobe, Maya and handwritten code all over it doesn't work for a lot of the audience anymore. They've been stuck with that for decades now.

HDTV sales? When were we talking about HDTV sales? If you went to college and ever took a statistics class, or if you have ever worked in retail or marketing, you know that 99.8% of statistics are meaningless, just like the one I used in this sentence. Statistics can be easily interpreted in a myriad of ways by any parties interested in using them to their own ends.

I should clarify, I used to make my living creating bonus material for DVDs/Blu-ray but just like traditional network TV viewership, DVDs/Blu-ray are basically a dead/dying issue. Along with the massive demographic migration of the most coveted male 18-34 audience to the web, much of the other viewership has gone to the web. It's not that people aren't watching television anymore, they are, but for an ever growing number of couch potatoes, it is on their computer. Yes, of course we still watch TV, but not as much as we used to and the audience numbers are shrinking, not rising.

As far as the first statement, what I meant by that was that software progress is somewhat negating the need for more computing horsepower to accomplish more and more tasks that used to take large amounts of computing horsepower. I can do particle effects, advanced lighting and shading effects now with ease, even with iMovie plug-ins on a Macbook, things that just a few years ago took the fastest computers available. And I did concede that yes, as more computing power becomes available, software developers and electronics manufacturers fill that processing void with things like 3D and 3D animation which, yes, do require a lot more processing power. But as Walter and I discussed, perhaps it will make more sense to purchase/lease/borrow that computing power from huge entities that hold huge server farms rather than buying hardware that is outdated as soon as we take delivery of it on an ongoing basis.

If we are all aware of the fact that computing is migrating to the cloud and not owning giant and ever more advanced Mac Pro and other PC brand workstations, then why did many of the posts in this thread disagree with this assertation when I posted it? Have you edited over the web? Used Sohonet, Aspera software or any of the latest AVID remote workflow gear? This is the direction of our business, it is there for anyone to see, just go to NAB, read the magazines and websites.

Most people in our business are pining away for the next update to the now outdated and getting slower 15 month old Mac Pros, that's why I fell in love with Walter's line, "I might be arguing for the faster horse-drawn buggies at the dawn of the automobile." Apple's business has radically changed and pro hardware and apps are becoming an ever dwindling part of Apple's business and are obviously not a priority or we would have new Mac Pros with the fastest processing available and we would be using FCP 10.0 instead of 7.0.

BTW, enlighten me, what exactly is BMDs USB 3.0 tech and what does it have to do with CPU or graphics processing power?

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

http://www.psfk.com/2010/06/youtube-introduces-a-cloud-based-video-editor.h...

Of course, this is consumer and fairly primitive, but based upon my interviews with the AVID marketing and technical teams, the development of pro level cloud-based remote editing is further along that you would think. I mean, they acquired an entire company just for their remote editing technology.

The beauty of it is that the actual editing is being done on a server at full res, it is proxy editing you are doing on your laptop halfway across the world, mitigating the need for much larger "pipes" than we have available right now. I think that for a while, it will be a proxy-based world, in a way, going back to the off-line/online model that we just kind of got away from a few years ago.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett] "At some point, most everything that takes big iron and lots of third party software to accomplish will be able to be done by anyone with a small, portable and cheap device. Moore's Law still applies and doing almost everything in software will just keep on evolving. Remember ICE cards for your Mac and AE plug-ins? Seems like ancient history but it was only, what, ten years ago?"

Pixar offers a counterexample.

The average render time for a frame of Toy Story (1995) was 2 hours, and tens years later, the average render time for a frame of Cars (2005) was 15 hours -- and the Cars renderfarm was 300x more powerful! (http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/12/pixar_quiz.html)

When Toy Story was re-rendered for 3D in 2009, the average render time per frame was essentially realtime -- 1/24th of a second. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125201712352284765.html)

I think that Moore's Law isn't just transistor count (or speed, or price) -- it seems our expectations of what we can do with our technology double every 18 months as well.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog - What I'm thinking when my workstation's thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

Here is that chart I was talking about http://www.edibleapple.com/how-important-is-the-iphone-to-apples-bottom-lin...

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

Hi Nicholas:

I am looking at the big picture here. And the trend is that sales of powerful, large desktops, both PCs and Macs, are plummeting over the past three years and will continue to plummet.

Not saying that they won't be killed off right away but eventually, buying a tower will become kind of "weird" and soon after that, the companies will roll some of the features into smaller, cheaper and lighter computers like the iMac. Apple is already doing that with the 27" i7 iMac, right? That is a serious processor for a consumer computer. We are already seeing that Apple is not serious about keeping up with the technology curve on the Mac Pros, 15 months is an eternity in computer time.

More and more users who used to buy towers are now buying iMacs and laptops. More and more post facilities are going under, I can't tell you how many I used to use here in LA that no longer exist. It used to be, "why go to a post house, when for $15k, I can have what the post house has here in my office or home?" Now it is evolving to, "why should I have a $15k editi bay in my office or home when I can do most of what is needed on a $2,000.00 iMac or laptop?" It is the next logical step.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

To be fair Walter, a quote from your article you linked to...

"While a welcome number, the 25.7% gain over the same quarter a year ago should be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s more a reflection on how bad the Q1’09 market performed than how good Q1’10 turned out."

I don't feel that market statistics are currently very relevant for the exact reason listed above. We are barely, sort of, kind of coming out from the worst economy since the Great Depression so same quarter sales and sales growth are not a realistic indicator of where the market is really headed. When you had the most horrible year in your recorded computer sales history, any growth from the dismal numbers last year will look impressive.

Yes, my viewpoint in probably very LA-centric because that is where I work and that is the main concentration of broadcast and filmed entertainment, but it is by no means always the sole reliable indicator of the industry's health overall.

Cheers,

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

I was a diehard PC guy since 1978. I poo poo the MAC all the time....
Once I started shooting P2 in 2006 and finally bought a Mac laptop
I have bought 2 more MAC's and hardly ever experience any crashes....
My old PC edit systems were expensive, custom built machines that are
now boat anchors. I cannot tell you how many BSOD's we suffered on a weekly
basis. Always swapping HD's and RAM and they just were never 100%.
I went though about 6 DELL POS's that were eventually kicked to the curb.
I have been more productive with the MAC's and have no compelling reasons
to ever look at a PC again.