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Great writeup and detail. However: > Even if it weighed 10 kilos and cost $10k I would still buy it. > (To show you exactly what I mean in terms of personal n
by nodesocket 10y ago
Great writeup and detail. However:
> Even if it weighed 10 kilos and cost $10k I would still buy it.
> (To show you exactly what I mean in terms of personal needs, I recently rendered a music video in HD using a neural net called Style app. Due to the 16GB RAM limitation it took several days and wrote 20.44 Terabytes to my drive in swap space (yes, over 20,000 gigabytes). This would have been an order of magnitude faster on a system with 32GB of RAM).
If your rendering video and can afford a $10k computer, then you should be using a Mac Pro. You can get a 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache and 64GB of memory for around 8.5k.
- lolive 10y agoWhy not rent a supercomputer on the cloud just for the time of such an experiment? I rent a 16 core/128GB machine at a cloud provider. I use it for heavy database treatments. And my laptop merely became a tmux terminal ever since.
- nodesocket 10y agoI don't know of a cloud provider that rents OS X machines do you? OS X is needed for Final Cut Pro, etc. If you're using Adobe Premier then you could use Microsoft Azure or another cloud provider that supports Windows.
- hairyhenderson 10y agoI doubt video editing would go very smoothly over an RDP connection to a Windows VM in the cloud ;)
- brazzledazzle 10y agoYou might be surprised. It wouldn't be ideal but you can do some amazing stuff these days with low enough latency to the data center.
- disordinary 10y agoI'd imagine the latency of running a video editor in the cloud would be a pain, also transferring hundreds of gigabytes of raw video information into the cloud isn't insignificant.
- elastic_church 10y agotransfer hundreds of gigabytes of raw video, or mail the hard drive to the data center. use proxy videos in your project, transfer the split instructions and composites, and let the server do the rendering no latency at all
- jlgaddis 10y ago> ... mail the hard drive to the data center. > no latency at all Um...
- elastic_church 10y agoI mean, after they get to the data center lol. just a few days mailing while you are busy editing the local files
- disordinary 10y agoYeah, but if you're using proxies your fine on a macbook pro. It's only the final render that needs the original files.
- tdkl 10y agoYou should probably apply for work in the Apple PR team for "Pro"fessionals.
- elastic_church 10y agobut I never said you needed a mac to do that, so why?
- Laforet 10y agoDepends on how the workload is split and such. Using AWS for video encoding is actually quite viable as long as Amazon don't charge for incoming bandwidth and dirt cheap spot instances could be found at the right time of the day.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoCloud render farms have been a thing in CGI for nearly a decade now. It can - sometimes - be cheaper to buy time than to buy hardware. But there are a lot of disadvantages. The process only really works for final renders. All the creative work needs to be fast and local, but thumbnail renders don't always give you enough detail to make good decisions. It doesn't work for audio, because audio isn't great with low-quality previews and often needs hands-on changes. It doesn't work for many kinds of ML - not unless the render machine has the latest graphics cards. It doesn't work for renders with huge asset libraries spread around a LAN. And so on. Basically there is a list of use cases, but it's not even half of all possible use cases. Meanwhile dual-Xeon servers have really started to kick ass. These are workstation grade machines with high four and low five figure prices. You can have up to 48 independent cores on a dual-CPU board, which is excellent for video rendering. Or you can get a blade rack. Depending the project, they can be better value than an off-prem cloud account. (Sometimes). Apple has turned its back on this space. I don't entirely understand why. Xserve had real potential, but they decided to go dumbed-down consumer instead.
- colejohnson66 10y agoIs more CPU cores really better? I thought a bunch of graphics cards would be better. Isn't that the whole point of Nvidia'a Quadro line?
- nodesocket 10y agoIn terms of Xserve, I think it made sense to drop it. If you're buying a server, nearly all applications make more sense using Linux and commodity hardware. The exception are desktop based (GUI) applications which Mac Pro targets. There really is no viable market for a Mac Server.
- hogrammer 10y agoPremiere. With an 'e'.
- chx 10y agoxcloud.me? macincloud?
- comex 10y agohttps://www.macstadium.com/mac-pro/ https://www.macstadium.com/mac-pro/ Not cheap, but...
- lolive 10y agoThat reminds me of the trend of switching from a laptop to a tablet. cf: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/six-weeks-working-android/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/six-weeks-working-android/ http://yieldthought.com/post/31857050698/ipad-linode-1-year-later http://yieldthought.com/post/31857050698/ipad-linode-1-year-... I know some of these people switched back to a laptop. And I wonder why they did.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoHow much does it cost you for a typical run?
- lolive 10y agoIt suited my needs so well that I switched to a monthly rental. 100E/month. Then it suited my needs so well that I switched to a yearly rental. 1000E/year. (taxes included)
- Dylan16807 10y agoThat's within the weight limit, but for a post focused so much on battery life it's a bit odd to suggest something with 0 minutes.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]