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> Mac Pro systems are often used for cinema and video production, and such workloads are getting more demanding as resolutions and color depths increase. And su

by bmitc 4y ago

> Mac Pro systems are often used for cinema and video production, and such workloads are getting more demanding as resolutions and color depths increase. And such systems not only need performance, but the also versatility and flexibility of a desktop PC, as they need to install a variety of add-in-cards, accelerators, advanced storage devices, and so on. To add these boards, a new Mac Pro would need advanced I/O, which is somewhat of a departure from Apple's SoC ideology that entails a very high level of integration. I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?

dusted 4y ago
My impression is that when they look to buy, they get whatever is the best fit for them at that moment.. (maybe biased by various "gifts" and such to the right people) When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
ohgodplsno 4y ago
These industries typically give so few shits when it comes to money that replacing a fleet of 100 2020 Mac Pros with 100 2022 Threadripper based machines is seen as a minor inconvenience at best. Apple provides good hardware at the moment ? Use Apple hardware. Apple can't let us plug in our Quadro cards on our VFX guys machines ? Buy a new workstation somewhere else, who cares ?
vineyardmike 4y ago
I think as tech got more standardized, we're seeing industries move away from this (eg. new movies use AWS as a render-farm instead of just buying powerful desktops for the office). Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac". Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work). Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro. --- [1] https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-classified-weapon/ https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-c...
- timc3 4y ago
  Its more that the whole operating system was better for creative tasks, from font management to color management, as you touch upon, then the software started building on that. The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools. I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).
  - plufz 4y ago
    I don’t work at any big studio but as a long time designer I would say that creatives (generalizing here) care deeply about the aesthetics of everything around them. If I was going to build a studio to attract good creatives I would definitely pay for having aesthetic monitors (they would of course also need to function for the purpose).
    - bostik 4y ago
      The SGI Indigo ("Indy") workstations looked gorgeous back in their time. Our university had an entire computer class kitted out with them, and out-of-hours access was meted out ... sparingly. AFAIK the class was mostly used for computer graphics courses. For OpenGL stuff written in C, they were quite beasts. For everything else, it was still Irix. Of course, when the room was used in the evenings, it was mostly for bzflag LAN melees.
- aprdm 4y ago
  New movies don’t use aws. Don’t believe the marketing . None of the big vfx studios uses the cloud as their main render farm, mostly for bursts .. it’s crazy expensive
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    Yes you don’t need that many months of workloads to make a on premise cluster worth it. Surprisingly.
timc3 4y ago
It's not based on the whims of a company, it's usually based on what runs the software they need to run well, and what the operators like working with and how well it integrates with the rest of the production line. The higher up in the food chain you get with production the less these machines are used as general purpose computing boxes and the more they just run one task (be it color grading, compositing, editing, sound editing & foley). Yes, you can use Windows/Linux PCs, and they make more sense for a lot of 3D work and certain other tasks but at the end of the day Apple macOS and hardware just make sense and the cost is not a problem.
pavlov 4y ago
During the late PowerPC era (2000-2005), Apple was at risk of losing this industry entirely. Every new professional content creation application was being built primarily for the Windows NT platform which had already successfully killed off SGI workstations and their proprietary Unix software stack. Intel and AMD CPUs were consistently delivering both better performance and pricing, despite the brief glimmer of hope from IBM's PowerPC G5 CPU in 2003. What kept Apple alive in this market was 1) Pro Tools, 2) their own suite of applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic, 3) the 2006 Mac Pro that finally delivered everything users had hoped for — latest Intel CPUs, Windows compatibility, enough fast PCI slots for everyone. It was really the best of both worlds and became the x86 media desktop to beat. (In typical Apple fashion, the 2013 Mac Pro swung too far the other way towards Apple-specific integration and was an abysmal flop with massive heat problems and non-upgradeable GPUs stuck in the past.)
- leoh 4y ago
  How did NT beat SGI? Cheaper hardware?
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Cheaper hardware, faster CPUs, open OS platform. In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation Despite the GPU, it wasn't competitive with cheaper, more standard x86 hardware.
  - pipo234 4y ago
    I think "NT", here, should more accurately read "the Wintel platform". NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers (as well as some RISC systems) and intel retaking some of the high end previously lost to Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC, etc. So yes: price, primarily.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      > NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other project at Microsoft.
Mikeb85 4y ago
> I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations? Do they? Last I heard, most of the industry uses Linux render farms...
- bmitc 4y ago
  I guess I don’t really know and was kind of going off of the article. I sort of thought the industries heavily used Macs, but it does make sense that some use much more industrial setups.
- berkut 4y ago
  Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both workstations and render farm nodes. Some studios like Pixar allow a bit more flexibility to some artists in certain roles (generally those that don't work in the pipeline that much - i.e. concept artists) to use other software / OSs, but otherwise it's mostly Linux. Smaller studios use Windows/Mac a bit more (boutiques use Macs the most), but the removal of the Xserve and the lack of competitiveness in the MacPro for several years have shifted some away from Mac.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    > Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both workstations How do they deal with HDR content? As far as I know it's not supported yet and the colour management is lacking, which seems like a big problem for today's content.
    - Mikeb85 4y ago
      > As far as I know it's not supported yet Linux can support it, just not every display server/application (yet)...
    - berkut 4y ago
      ICC support works fairly well, and anyway, each DCC (Katana, Nuke, Houdini, RV, etc) has custom (normally via OCIO) colour profile support itself, so even if the OS' support isn't perfect, it doesn't really matter (as long as the graphics drivers can push the correct result out).
amelius 4y ago
I think it is simply not true and big production houses all use Linux. Or at least any software that also runs on Linux.
KaiserPro 4y ago
For movies (not sound) most macs are/were used for video editing or matte painting. Something that either needed final cut (and the rather good final cut studio) or photoshop. But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry) and blackmagic fucking with the entire software stack by making resolve and fusion free(ish) There are some niche bits like cinesync that allows remote viewing of footage securely and colour accurately that might still need a mac. Apart from laptops, apple have lost the VFX market pretty well.
- SSLy 4y ago
  And for indie filmmakers, Adobe's AE is still the VFX king.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  It amazes me how Apple completely screwed over Final Cut Pro. They went from ostensibly 60% market share in video editing to low double digits, maybe?
  - windowsrookie 4y ago
    They did make a huge mistake with Final Cut Pro X. Professionals continued to use Final Cut Pro 7 until just a few years ago. That said, everyone I hear who uses Final Cut Pro today seems to prefer it over any other editor. You can flawlessly edit multiple 4k color corrected video streams on an $800 fanless MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, and get 10+ hours of battery life while doing it. Nobody else can touch that.
    - geerlingguy 4y ago
      Yeah, FCPX had massive growing pains but after a few years, it has matured to be eons better for a modern editing workflow than FCP7. It's sad they had to take so long to get there, a number of people switched to Premiere during that time, but there are still a huge number of individuals and studios who edit on FCPX today.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dagmx 4y ago
It depends which part of the industry and which departments you’re talking about. Animation and visual effects for large studios are all Linux based usually. Smaller studios vary between Mac and windows. Edit houses tend to be primarily Mac based. There’s very little that competes with macOS and Apple hardware though. Take color accuracy and EDR. Linux and windows aren’t great for extended dynamic range while working, and especially if you’re using a laptop for mobile reviewing, very few laptops support the accurate display space most macs ship with. Macs also provide a lot more software compatibility than Linux for things like the Adobe suite of products. Combine that with out of the box support for many codecs, accelerated ProRes workflows and the ubiquity of airplay+airdrop, macs are very favoured for creative use cases.
suction 4y ago

by bmitc 4y ago

dusted 4y ago

My impression is that when they look to buy, they get whatever is the best fit for them at that moment.. (maybe biased by various "gifts" and such to the right people) When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..

ohgodplsno 4y ago

These industries typically give so few shits when it comes to money that replacing a fleet of 100 2020 Mac Pros with 100 2022 Threadripper based machines is seen as a minor inconvenience at best. Apple provides good hardware at the moment ? Use Apple hardware. Apple can't let us plug in our Quadro cards on our VFX guys machines ? Buy a new workstation somewhere else, who cares ?

vineyardmike 4y ago

I think as tech got more standardized, we're seeing industries move away from this (eg. new movies use AWS as a render-farm instead of just buying powerful desktops for the office). Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac". Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work). Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro. --- [1] https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-classified-weapon/ https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-c...

timc3 4y ago
Its more that the whole operating system was better for creative tasks, from font management to color management, as you touch upon, then the software started building on that. The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools. I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).
- plufz 4y ago
  I don’t work at any big studio but as a long time designer I would say that creatives (generalizing here) care deeply about the aesthetics of everything around them. If I was going to build a studio to attract good creatives I would definitely pay for having aesthetic monitors (they would of course also need to function for the purpose).
  - bostik 4y ago
    The SGI Indigo ("Indy") workstations looked gorgeous back in their time. Our university had an entire computer class kitted out with them, and out-of-hours access was meted out ... sparingly. AFAIK the class was mostly used for computer graphics courses. For OpenGL stuff written in C, they were quite beasts. For everything else, it was still Irix. Of course, when the room was used in the evenings, it was mostly for bzflag LAN melees.
aprdm 4y ago
New movies don’t use aws. Don’t believe the marketing . None of the big vfx studios uses the cloud as their main render farm, mostly for bursts .. it’s crazy expensive
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Yes you don’t need that many months of workloads to make a on premise cluster worth it. Surprisingly.

timc3 4y ago

It's not based on the whims of a company, it's usually based on what runs the software they need to run well, and what the operators like working with and how well it integrates with the rest of the production line. The higher up in the food chain you get with production the less these machines are used as general purpose computing boxes and the more they just run one task (be it color grading, compositing, editing, sound editing & foley). Yes, you can use Windows/Linux PCs, and they make more sense for a lot of 3D work and certain other tasks but at the end of the day Apple macOS and hardware just make sense and the cost is not a problem.

pavlov 4y ago

During the late PowerPC era (2000-2005), Apple was at risk of losing this industry entirely. Every new professional content creation application was being built primarily for the Windows NT platform which had already successfully killed off SGI workstations and their proprietary Unix software stack. Intel and AMD CPUs were consistently delivering both better performance and pricing, despite the brief glimmer of hope from IBM's PowerPC G5 CPU in 2003. What kept Apple alive in this market was 1) Pro Tools, 2) their own suite of applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic, 3) the 2006 Mac Pro that finally delivered everything users had hoped for — latest Intel CPUs, Windows compatibility, enough fast PCI slots for everyone. It was really the best of both worlds and became the x86 media desktop to beat. (In typical Apple fashion, the 2013 Mac Pro swung too far the other way towards Apple-specific integration and was an abysmal flop with massive heat problems and non-upgradeable GPUs stuck in the past.)

leoh 4y ago
How did NT beat SGI? Cheaper hardware?
- pavlov 4y ago
  Cheaper hardware, faster CPUs, open OS platform. In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation Despite the GPU, it wasn't competitive with cheaper, more standard x86 hardware.
- pipo234 4y ago
  I think "NT", here, should more accurately read "the Wintel platform". NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers (as well as some RISC systems) and intel retaking some of the high end previously lost to Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC, etc. So yes: price, primarily.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other project at Microsoft.

Mikeb85 4y ago

> I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations? Do they? Last I heard, most of the industry uses Linux render farms...

bmitc 4y ago
I guess I don’t really know and was kind of going off of the article. I sort of thought the industries heavily used Macs, but it does make sense that some use much more industrial setups.
berkut 4y ago
Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both workstations and render farm nodes. Some studios like Pixar allow a bit more flexibility to some artists in certain roles (generally those that don't work in the pipeline that much - i.e. concept artists) to use other software / OSs, but otherwise it's mostly Linux. Smaller studios use Windows/Mac a bit more (boutiques use Macs the most), but the removal of the Xserve and the lack of competitiveness in the MacPro for several years have shifted some away from Mac.
- viraptor 4y ago
  > Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both workstations How do they deal with HDR content? As far as I know it's not supported yet and the colour management is lacking, which seems like a big problem for today's content.
  - Mikeb85 4y ago
    > As far as I know it's not supported yet Linux can support it, just not every display server/application (yet)...
  - berkut 4y ago
    ICC support works fairly well, and anyway, each DCC (Katana, Nuke, Houdini, RV, etc) has custom (normally via OCIO) colour profile support itself, so even if the OS' support isn't perfect, it doesn't really matter (as long as the graphics drivers can push the correct result out).

amelius 4y ago

I think it is simply not true and big production houses all use Linux. Or at least any software that also runs on Linux.

KaiserPro 4y ago

For movies (not sound) most macs are/were used for video editing or matte painting. Something that either needed final cut (and the rather good final cut studio) or photoshop. But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry) and blackmagic fucking with the entire software stack by making resolve and fusion free(ish) There are some niche bits like cinesync that allows remote viewing of footage securely and colour accurately that might still need a mac. Apart from laptops, apple have lost the VFX market pretty well.

SSLy 4y ago
And for indie filmmakers, Adobe's AE is still the VFX king.
dmitriid 4y ago
It amazes me how Apple completely screwed over Final Cut Pro. They went from ostensibly 60% market share in video editing to low double digits, maybe?
- windowsrookie 4y ago
  They did make a huge mistake with Final Cut Pro X. Professionals continued to use Final Cut Pro 7 until just a few years ago. That said, everyone I hear who uses Final Cut Pro today seems to prefer it over any other editor. You can flawlessly edit multiple 4k color corrected video streams on an $800 fanless MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, and get 10+ hours of battery life while doing it. Nobody else can touch that.
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    Yeah, FCPX had massive growing pains but after a few years, it has matured to be eons better for a modern editing workflow than FCP7. It's sad they had to take so long to get there, a number of people switched to Premiere during that time, but there are still a huge number of individuals and studios who edit on FCPX today.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dagmx 4y ago

It depends which part of the industry and which departments you’re talking about. Animation and visual effects for large studios are all Linux based usually. Smaller studios vary between Mac and windows. Edit houses tend to be primarily Mac based. There’s very little that competes with macOS and Apple hardware though. Take color accuracy and EDR. Linux and windows aren’t great for extended dynamic range while working, and especially if you’re using a laptop for mobile reviewing, very few laptops support the accurate display space most macs ship with. Macs also provide a lot more software compatibility than Linux for things like the Adobe suite of products. Combine that with out of the box support for many codecs, accelerated ProRes workflows and the ubiquity of airplay+airdrop, macs are very favoured for creative use cases.

suction 4y ago