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I work in Hollywood. The complaints are here too. But people are more concerned with upgrades and repairs. Loss of a machine for a few days/weeks for a repair i

I work in Hollywood. The complaints are here too. But people are more concerned with upgrades and repairs. Loss of a machine for a few days/weeks for a repair is far more costly than anything else. That said a lot of the industry is moving to the cloud anyway and doesn't require workstations. Some shops are entirely on Linux. Audio post/recording and editing are the last bastions of mac pro dominance, imo.

gigatexal 7y ago
Isn’t there something to be said about a local powerful workstation though or has offloading things to the cloud gotten that good?
- jsty 7y ago
  If you're looking at kitting out an entire department with these or buying the equivalent rendering firepower in the cloud, the cost of a couple of leased lines and cloud interconnects are probably going to be the least of your worries.
- holy_city 7y ago
  There is, but it's changing. Disclaimer, I'm on the audio side of things and my knowledge of video post is much more limited. Dedicated processors are bigger for us than cloud solutions. Audio post/recording shops use Protools HDX systems [1] which are rackmount units holding a handful of DSPs connected to the PC with proprietary PCIe cards. The industry is moving towards ASPs as a whole, through products like Waves Soundgrid [2] and Universal Audio's UAD [3]. Of these, PT HDX has an API for developing 3rd party code to run on their hardware (it's proprietary however) and the SOUL [4] project is aimed at these kinds of solutions. Dedicated audio processing units are about where GPUs were 25-30 years ago. Almost all proprietary, no shader languages, but CPU time is coming at a premium so we'll have to figure something out. [1] https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx [2] https://www.waves.com/soundgrid-systems https://www.waves.com/soundgrid-systems [3] https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html [4] https://github.com/soul-lang/SOUL https://github.com/soul-lang/SOUL Now that's not to say that having a fast machine isn't important, it certainly is since a large chunk of DSP is not running on dedicated hardware (and that hardware is freaking pricy). But in most situations your audio processing is dominated by single threaded performance, which is why some people are irritated by the iMac Pro advertised as a pro workstation when it will thermal throttle on you under moderate load, and this new Mac Pro that hopefully has better cooling and a better processor will be a huge relief for users and developers who want more CPU cycles for our code. With respect to cloud, some applications just simply can't use workstations. VFX stuff is mostly on distributed Linux systems these days because you can't put the power you need into a single box, or at least it's more effective to have people edit over 10Gbit connections through a terminal. The rest of the cloud stuff is more about workflow than power, at least in the stuff I've seen most cloud applications are about synchronizing projects in the highly parallelized production pipelines used in Hollywood studios. NAB is littered with cloud workflow solutions every year.
  - gigatexal 7y ago
    Fascinating. Thanks for your reply.
  - 9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
    Just wanted to say this is a super insightful reply! Thanks for taking the time to share.
rewgs 7y ago
I do music and audio in Hollywood, and yup, the Mac Pro will never die here. Which is funny, because this machine isn't exactly for us, either -- a Xeon is often less favorable than an i7 or i9 in our world.

gigatexal 7y ago

Isn’t there something to be said about a local powerful workstation though or has offloading things to the cloud gotten that good?

jsty 7y ago
If you're looking at kitting out an entire department with these or buying the equivalent rendering firepower in the cloud, the cost of a couple of leased lines and cloud interconnects are probably going to be the least of your worries.
holy_city 7y ago
There is, but it's changing. Disclaimer, I'm on the audio side of things and my knowledge of video post is much more limited. Dedicated processors are bigger for us than cloud solutions. Audio post/recording shops use Protools HDX systems [1] which are rackmount units holding a handful of DSPs connected to the PC with proprietary PCIe cards. The industry is moving towards ASPs as a whole, through products like Waves Soundgrid [2] and Universal Audio's UAD [3]. Of these, PT HDX has an API for developing 3rd party code to run on their hardware (it's proprietary however) and the SOUL [4] project is aimed at these kinds of solutions. Dedicated audio processing units are about where GPUs were 25-30 years ago. Almost all proprietary, no shader languages, but CPU time is coming at a premium so we'll have to figure something out. [1] https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx [2] https://www.waves.com/soundgrid-systems https://www.waves.com/soundgrid-systems [3] https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html [4] https://github.com/soul-lang/SOUL https://github.com/soul-lang/SOUL Now that's not to say that having a fast machine isn't important, it certainly is since a large chunk of DSP is not running on dedicated hardware (and that hardware is freaking pricy). But in most situations your audio processing is dominated by single threaded performance, which is why some people are irritated by the iMac Pro advertised as a pro workstation when it will thermal throttle on you under moderate load, and this new Mac Pro that hopefully has better cooling and a better processor will be a huge relief for users and developers who want more CPU cycles for our code. With respect to cloud, some applications just simply can't use workstations. VFX stuff is mostly on distributed Linux systems these days because you can't put the power you need into a single box, or at least it's more effective to have people edit over 10Gbit connections through a terminal. The rest of the cloud stuff is more about workflow than power, at least in the stuff I've seen most cloud applications are about synchronizing projects in the highly parallelized production pipelines used in Hollywood studios. NAB is littered with cloud workflow solutions every year.
- gigatexal 7y ago
  Fascinating. Thanks for your reply.
- 9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
  Just wanted to say this is a super insightful reply! Thanks for taking the time to share.

rewgs 7y ago

I do music and audio in Hollywood, and yup, the Mac Pro will never die here. Which is funny, because this machine isn't exactly for us, either -- a Xeon is often less favorable than an i7 or i9 in our world.