OS X 10.9 Mavericks boost for post production

14 June, 2013
Alex, film making, final cut pro
6 Comments

Once post production work has to be done by more than one person at a time, the speed of the network becomes an important consideration. This is because it is much more efficient if editors, motion graphics artists and colour graders can get access to the same video source files and most up-to-date edits. This is done with shared storage connected to computers by a fast network.

Also for many years people have connected multiple computers together to perform complex tasks. In post production more and more computing is being done using advanced GPUs. Multiple computers combined to perform complex tasks together are known as render farms. The faster the connections between the computers, the better.

Current Mac Pros can have PCIe network cards installed, and those cards can be used with Thunderbolt-equipped Macs using an expansion chassis. However other Macs don’t have fast network connections built in and can’t use PCIe cards.

According to FAQ-MAC a feature of Apple’s forthcoming Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks might allow many more Macs be used in simple render farms: IP over Thunderbolt.

They showed a dialog box (which they may have mocked up) that shows Mavericks asking whether a newly attached Thunderbolt cable should be used as a network connection:

captura-pantalla-2013-06-12-s-125806_39540_640

Detected a new network interface:
   Thunderbolt Bridge
Check that it is configured correctly, and then click Apply to activate.

Internet Protocol over Thunderbolt means that you can connect Macs via Thunderbolt cables and use the Thunderbolt cable as a network connection. Thunderbolt 1 connections have a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 10 Gb/s – which is similar to the speed of 10 gigabit Ethernet, which is a popular post production networking standard.

I assume IP over Thunderbolt is less efficient than a dedicated Fibre Channel PCI Express card, but at least Thunderbolt is available on a wide range of Macs.

With a little distributed rendering, my 27” iMac connected to a pair of Thunderbolt equipped Macs will get through QuickTime encodes much more quickly

Also if I need to share 4K proxies with others, Thunderbolt over IP is good news.

Sample 4K footage captured from satellite

13 June, 2013
film making, media
1 Comment

Given that 3D is dying, the next great hope for film and TV seems to be UHD TV, Ultra High Definition TV.

Canal+ Spain dubbed today ‘4K Day’

Here is their 4K promotional video that I think was broadcast by satellite today and uploaded to YouTube.

If you have software that can download YouTube videos, you can get this footage if you want to practice your 4K post workflow.

For example if you use Safari and if you have the ClickToPlugin Safari Extension, you should be able to select 4K MP4 from the invisible top-left pop-up menu and then download the 1.5GB file to your computer.

Here is an example of how much detail there is in a 4K frame that was encoded using the UHD-1 flavour of H.264 – 3840 x 2160 at 25fps. The 1.5GB MP4 file had an average data rate of 22mb/s.

Click it to see the pixels at 1:1.

4K-video-captured-from-satellite

4K is big news for production designers and makeup artists!

4K-video-captured-from-satellite-2

Click to see at 3840 by 2160.

2013 Mac Pro expansion: A professional solution?

12 June, 2013
Apple, Ideas
28 Comments

The main complaint many people have about the forthcoming Mac Pro is the lack of internal expandability. Post-production professionals have Mac Pros with PCIe cards for important functions, internal storage and disc burners. They’ve invested a lot of money in workflows that require this hardware.

I’ve come up with a product idea that might satisfy many people with this complaint: A PCI Express card that can be installed in an older Mac Pro that uses one or two Thunderbolt 2 cables to connect to a 2013 Mac Pro. This would turn the old Mac Pro into an expansion chassis for the new Mac Pro.

This solution would provide access to the other PCI Express cards in the old Mac plus internal storage and disc burners (by connecting internal cables to the card if access via the PCI bus is a problem).

Such a card is easier to engineer than a whole expansion chassis. The old Mac Pro provides everything needed but the interface.

You could even attach more than one old Mac Pro to a 2013 Mac Pro using this method…

A valid idea for Kickstarter? The pro][pro card for your new Mac Pro… and your old Mac Pro too.

pro2pro-promo

MacPro GPUs vs AMD FirePro S10000

11 June, 2013
Apple
7 Comments

Here’s how a powerful AMD graphics card compares with what Apple has announced about the AMD FirePro GPUs in the forthcoming Mac Pro.

AMD FirePro S10000 2013 Mac Pro GPUs
Stream Processors 2 x 1792 2 x 2048
Memory Bus Width 2 x 384 bit 2 x 384 bit
VRAM 2 x 3 GB 2 x 6 GB
Single Precision 5.91 TFLOPS 7 TFLOPS (OpenCL)
Launch Price $3,599 ????

Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro preview

11 June, 2013
Apple, film making
6 Comments

If you visit Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro page, you’ll see a sneak peek of the Mac Pro being released later this year.

One feature of the page are videos showing internal elements of the computer. In order to have a close look at how it’s put together, here are the videos as a single movie:

If you want to get the source video, visit its Vimeo page and click the Download button. This is is helpful if you’d like to step through the video frame by frame.

Room for improvement?

As regards how upgradeable the computer will be, it might be almost as easy as the old Mac Pro to modify. Apple have already stated that memory and flash storage will be user-configurable, however based on stepping through the Apple video, it seems as if the central chassis is put together with hex screws, and the three main boards are attached with a few screws:

mac-pro-2013-graphics-cards

The base board is then attached to the three card sockets:

Mac-Pro-base

Perhaps Apple will offer a configuration of the Mac Pro with only one GPU card, and publish the specs for third parties to supply CPUs.

Configuring Mac Pros with alternate GPU cards will have to be done by confident engineers, but probably won’t require a visit to an Apple Store.

According to a ‘friend of a friend’ report from the Worldwide Developer’s conference posted to the CGSociety forum:

OK – I have a friend the WWDC and he has asked a lot of questions to the right guy. The Graphics cards in this new macpro are swappable. But they are bespoke and a new form factor it seems. Ram / GPU and the Main drive is all updatable – it does seem that there is the possibility of installing 2 or more of these PCIe drives…

Future versions of the Mac Pro may have more space for GPU cards. With a slightly larger enclosure, there could be four instead of two:

3-cards,-5-cards

Professionals welcome

With the announcement of this computer, there’s no doubt that Apple is still interested in professional markets. Despite the relatively limited opportunities for making billions in profits, they must see value in serving those who want the fastest personal computers in their offices.

The most distinctive feature of the sneak peek is the fact that Apple felt under enough pressure to pre-annouce the computer at all. The Apple of 10 years would have created an Autumn 2013 event in Los Angeles featuring professionals from the film, TV and music industries extolling the virtues of Apple’s professional hardware and software solutions.

What else can we get them to do?

iTunes Radio and the future of all media feeds

9 June, 2013
Apple, Ideas, media
1 Comment

Apple’s new streaming service is called iTunes Radio. Not iMusic. What elements could be included that would justify such a name?

The current music streaming services offer very large music libraries to those that pay a subscription fee, or to accept listening to adverts. Although streaming services have features named ‘radio’, they don’t sound much like broadcast radio.

I think there is room for a streaming service that adds elements of radio: the shared experience, regular elements, a reliable schedule.

FutureRadio = Purchased music + Streamed music + Curated music + Shared experiences

Imagine a service that combines purchased music, music that fits well with purchased music and shared audio experiences.

Curated music in this case starts with algorithmically chosen music that works well with the music you want to listen to. iTunes has a ‘Genius’ command that creates playlists of tracks from your library that fit the genre or mood of a chosen track. Spotify has a ‘Radio’ feature that creates playlists based on an artist, genre or time period.

Curation doesn’t only have to come from software algorithms: it could come from the playlist of a favourite radio station or radio show. Radio station playlists change periodically, some every week, some every few months. Radio show playlists could be based on the music played over the previous years, year, month or week. The playlist could be the exact tracks played on a recent show.

There is also a place for non-music content on a radio service.

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Apple’s MacPro successor: Must ‘something really great’ be hardware?

7 June, 2013
Apple, Ideas
1 Comment

MacPro fans are waiting for Apple to announce an update to their favourite computer. Many hope that Monday’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote speech will end their long wait.

This time last year an email purported to be from Tim Cook was posted to the MacRumors forums:

Thanks for your email. Our Pro customers like you are really important to us. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year.

Those few words have been pored over since then. Some pointed out that Tim’s email didn’t say that there would be a new MacPro ‘later next’ year, just that Pro customers would get ‘something really great.’

More recently Drew Baird posted the following to the reduser.net forums:

For what it’s worth – a couple of months ago I received a call from Douglas Brooks, Apples project manager for the new Mac Pro to address my concerns about the new machine. Obviously he didn’t tell me anything about the new MP, but asked me what I wanted to see. I told him expandability for extra graphics cards support, and memory expansion were at the top of my list amongst other things. His reply was simple:

“You are going to be really glad that you waited [to buy a new tower]. We are doing something really different here and I think you’re going to be very excited when you see what we’ve been up to. I can’t wait to show this off”.

That conversation gave me enough confidence to wait for the new machine. I’m looking forward to the announcement. Hopefully the wait will be worth it.

If this is true, the MacPro replacement is unlikely to look like the current model in any way.

More recent MacPro rumours suggest that the new hardware may have more GPU power, but will not have FireWire, optical drives or internal expansion. Some suggest that the new pro computer will be the hardware that Apple is manufacturing in the U.S. as high-end customers are less likely to complain about the extra costs of home manufacturing.

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Apple’s timeline animation patent: Final Cut Pro with a little more Motion

4 June, 2013
Apple, final cut pro x, Ideas
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Four years ago, Apple applied for a patent that is relevant to animating parameters of clips and other content in a timeline. They were awarded patent 8,458,593 today.

I’m not reproducing this to start a debate on whether this sort of thing should be patentable. This patent shows how future Apple applications might show timelines of animatable values, and how more than one value can be changed at a time as well as controlling the shape of the graph joining two keyframes.

09

You can see from this drawing of an imaginary application interface, this patent applies to a media editing application that users can use to set keyframe values for clip parameters such as scale and position with editable graphs.

The example application shown in the patent looks like a version of Final Cut Pro that uses some elements from Motion, but not so many that editors are turned off. The editing temperament is somewhat different from that of motion graphic designers.

However bear in mind that this patent represents Apple’s thinking back in May 2009, in the intervening years, they may have moved on from these ideas.

The rest of this post is made up of most of the text and images from the new Apple patent

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It’s time to make London SuperMeet plans

23 May, 2013
london
1 Comment

There are few events where post production professionals can escape their dark rooms full of technology. The calendar is pretty sparse: Winter: BVE in London, Spring: NAB in Las Vegas, Autumn: IBC in Amsterdam.

So it’s great news that this Summer sees the third London SuperMeet.

uk13_supermeet_300x250_banner

SuperMeets are exciting events for editors and other filmmakers who want to be inspired by, learn from and connect with other creative professionals.

Doors open at 4.30pm for the Digital Showcase, an exhibition featuring the newest TV and film making products and services.

The main show starts at 7pm and features a conversation and Q&A with Tom Rolf, A.C.E. editor of Taxi Driver, French Connection II, The Right Stuff, Jacob’s Ladder, WarGames, Sneakers and Heat.

The full agenda hasn’t been announced yet, but previous years have included the London premiere of Final Cut Pro X, 3D and Autodesk Smoke for Mac OS X, integrating Final Cut Pro with Adobe creative suite applications and speakers such as Philip Bloom, Martin Baker, Larry Jordan and Walter Murch.

Each SuperMeet ticket includes two raffle tickets

As well as the exhibition, networking and presentations, SuperMeets are known for their product raffles. Throughout the evening raffle tickets are chosen and winners are called to the stage to receive one of many prizes.

The value of the prizes at the last London SuperMeet amounted to over £25,000.

SuperMeet tickets cost £10 + 90p booking fee – until May 29.

Tickets bought at the door on the night cost £20.

Student tickets cost  £10 + 90p booking fee.

I hope to meet you there!