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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 desk

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.
- lambdasquirrel 4y ago
  That doesn't surprise me at all. Just the entry level p3.xlarge is $2k USD a month. You'll be able to build your own in short order if you're actually using it all the time.
- fredoliveira 4y ago
  Well... I read this earlier today: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/avatar-the-way-of-water-was-rendered-in-amazon-web-services/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/avatar-the-way-of...
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    "It usually uses its data centers to process multiple films at the same time. With Avatar: TWOW, even the entire data center was not enough." "Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours, or the combined power of 3,000 vCPUs in the cloud for an hour." "“we couldn’t architecturally expand our data center because that would require infrastructure that would go to the city council, and we all know what it’s like to go through local government," he said.""
geraldwhen 4y ago
Exactly how are you supposed to get 4PB of raw video to aws and back to color correct? Or edit? The cloud makes 0 sense for most of video production.
- rescbr 4y ago
  Shipping it! AWS Snowball all the way. I know that many production houses move those huge files in this way.
  - docandrew 4y ago
    “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes.”
- vannventures 4y ago
  We use Google Drive shared drives for this since, and a lot of people don't know about this, their Shared Drives have no file size limit. They only limit it to the amount of files, which is 400,000 per drive. This way, you can upload as much as you want and don't have to worry about the file limit. However, I think this is only available on the Google Workspace accounts. We have the lowest tier and we can still use it. Hope this helps!
pjmlp 4y ago
This is the official stack for movie industry as standard, https://vfxplatform.com/ https://vfxplatform.com/
ihatepython 4y ago
> Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors? Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important than color.
- anikom15 4y ago
  The black and white Mac monitors and software were carefully tuned to match the output of black and white offset printers, so yeah, they really cared about color before they even had color.
- kalleboo 4y ago
  It took a while for Apple to add color support, but when they did they were early out with proper color management in the whole chain from scanner to display to printer (ColorSync). IIRC when Adobe needed this on Windows for PhotoShop they had to re-implement it themselves (rather than relying on Windows) According to this MacOS got OS-level color management in 1993, and Windows wouldn't get it for another 4 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Operating_system_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Operating_sys...
  - scarface74 4y ago
    A while? The first Mac came out in 1984. The Mac II came out in 1987.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    And funny enough to this day color management on Windows is a terrible mess. Kind of incredible, feels like low hanging fruit for wooing creative users, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re dominant and can maintain that dominance through sheer inertia.
- prewett 4y ago
  Given that color monitors were 16 colors at the time of the first Mac, color calibration wasn't going to be of much help. Most people were using green and black monitors, anyway, except for the labs with the amber VT320. The memory requirements for color were just too large to be affordable. According to Wikipedia, the Macintosh II [1] came out in 1987, System 4.0, with 256 colors--for the equivalent of $17,000. I doubt color calibration is much use with 256 colors (although apparently the Mac II support 16.7 million colors but you could only use 256 of them), but I can't find anything on when color calibration was supported. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II
amelius 4y ago
And despite all this, they still didn't manufacture their own display panels.
scarface74 4y ago
There was only a very slim window of time that the PPC was faster than x86 in real life besides synthetic benchmarks and even then they were hobbled by slower busses, slower graphic cards (if they had any at all) and an operating system that wasn’t fully native.
- thenthenthen 4y ago
  I couldnt stand how slow my macs were compared to my win pcs. Still Photoshop boots faster on my 10 yr old Mac than my blazing fast Win desktop.
ben7799 4y ago
Early Macs didn't use Power chips.. that came quite a bit later. They went through Motorola 65XX -> 68XX -> 68XXX -> Power PC -> Intel. That portion before Power PC was a long time, 18 years.
- wtallis 4y ago
  The Apple I, Apple II and Lisa were not Macintosh computers. The first Macintosh used the 68k processor, and was only 10 years before PowerPC, not 18.
Maursault 4y ago
> It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the ban.

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.
lambdasquirrel 4y ago
That doesn't surprise me at all. Just the entry level p3.xlarge is $2k USD a month. You'll be able to build your own in short order if you're actually using it all the time.
fredoliveira 4y ago
Well... I read this earlier today: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/avatar-the-way-of-water-was-rendered-in-amazon-web-services/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/avatar-the-way-of...
- gamblor956 4y ago
  "It usually uses its data centers to process multiple films at the same time. With Avatar: TWOW, even the entire data center was not enough." "Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours, or the combined power of 3,000 vCPUs in the cloud for an hour." "“we couldn’t architecturally expand our data center because that would require infrastructure that would go to the city council, and we all know what it’s like to go through local government," he said.""

geraldwhen 4y ago

Exactly how are you supposed to get 4PB of raw video to aws and back to color correct? Or edit? The cloud makes 0 sense for most of video production.

rescbr 4y ago
Shipping it! AWS Snowball all the way. I know that many production houses move those huge files in this way.
- docandrew 4y ago
  “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes.”
vannventures 4y ago
We use Google Drive shared drives for this since, and a lot of people don't know about this, their Shared Drives have no file size limit. They only limit it to the amount of files, which is 400,000 per drive. This way, you can upload as much as you want and don't have to worry about the file limit. However, I think this is only available on the Google Workspace accounts. We have the lowest tier and we can still use it. Hope this helps!

pjmlp 4y ago

This is the official stack for movie industry as standard, https://vfxplatform.com/ https://vfxplatform.com/

ihatepython 4y ago

> Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors? Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important than color.

anikom15 4y ago
The black and white Mac monitors and software were carefully tuned to match the output of black and white offset printers, so yeah, they really cared about color before they even had color.
kalleboo 4y ago
It took a while for Apple to add color support, but when they did they were early out with proper color management in the whole chain from scanner to display to printer (ColorSync). IIRC when Adobe needed this on Windows for PhotoShop they had to re-implement it themselves (rather than relying on Windows) According to this MacOS got OS-level color management in 1993, and Windows wouldn't get it for another 4 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Operating_system_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Operating_sys...
- scarface74 4y ago
  A while? The first Mac came out in 1984. The Mac II came out in 1987.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  And funny enough to this day color management on Windows is a terrible mess. Kind of incredible, feels like low hanging fruit for wooing creative users, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re dominant and can maintain that dominance through sheer inertia.
prewett 4y ago
Given that color monitors were 16 colors at the time of the first Mac, color calibration wasn't going to be of much help. Most people were using green and black monitors, anyway, except for the labs with the amber VT320. The memory requirements for color were just too large to be affordable. According to Wikipedia, the Macintosh II [1] came out in 1987, System 4.0, with 256 colors--for the equivalent of $17,000. I doubt color calibration is much use with 256 colors (although apparently the Mac II support 16.7 million colors but you could only use 256 of them), but I can't find anything on when color calibration was supported. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II

amelius 4y ago

And despite all this, they still didn't manufacture their own display panels.

scarface74 4y ago

There was only a very slim window of time that the PPC was faster than x86 in real life besides synthetic benchmarks and even then they were hobbled by slower busses, slower graphic cards (if they had any at all) and an operating system that wasn’t fully native.

thenthenthen 4y ago
I couldnt stand how slow my macs were compared to my win pcs. Still Photoshop boots faster on my 10 yr old Mac than my blazing fast Win desktop.

ben7799 4y ago

Early Macs didn't use Power chips.. that came quite a bit later. They went through Motorola 65XX -> 68XX -> 68XXX -> Power PC -> Intel. That portion before Power PC was a long time, 18 years.

wtallis 4y ago
The Apple I, Apple II and Lisa were not Macintosh computers. The first Macintosh used the 68k processor, and was only 10 years before PowerPC, not 18.

Maursault 4y ago

> It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the ban.