stoneinapond
Veteran
Option/Command and click is all you need to do to anchor the audio anywhere. It requires a little mental gymnastics at first, but it's a fantastic feature once understood.
"Apple pushes the reset button on the Mac Pro"
- Thread starter nutmegger
- Start date
Option/Command and click is all you need to do to anchor the audio anywhere. It requires a little mental gymnastics at first, but it's a fantastic feature once understood.
Thomas Smet
Veteran
Pros come in a lot of shapes and sizes and a lot of professionals are fine with an iMac. Please don't generalize that all pros hate the iMac.
People buy the iMac because they don't really have to worry about anything geeky. They plug in the power cord and go to town on whatever work they need to do without any cables/hardware getting in the way. I personally have an iMac and it is a great machine that gets projects done just fine. Sure maybe I could render a bit faster on a more "desktop" based system but at the end of the day I spend more time in meetings/phone calls then I do waiting a few extra minutes for a render to get done.
The iMac is a perfectly professional machine if it does exactly what people need. For some people it does exactly that. For some people the nMP did exactly that as well. So while Apple upset some pros they did not upset all of them. They only upset the same group of pros who can't seem to move on from the 1990's and learn how to use FCPX.
I have a 2012 i7 iMac and can edit 4k just as well as the 2016 iMac so what exactly am I missing by not being able to upgrade the parts in the machine? Performance wise the latest iMac is only 30% faster so I'm not really missing out on much. This isn't even just an Apple thing but the desktop computer industry in general. I can build a PC right now that isn't all that much faster than a PC I built five years ago. The days of popping in a CPU upgrade and getting double the performance are for the most part over. By the time we get hardware at any level of ROI on performance things like the chipset or socket change anyway. Same with RAM and storage. At some point any decent level of performance gain will require a new way of connecting which means you can only upgrade to a certain point anyway.
I'm not saying the iMac wouldn't benefit from some better options. It absolutely would and Apple needs to stop their obsession with thin when it comes to an iMac that sits on a desk against a wall. Thicken that beast up and put in a desktop class GPU and let us build iMacs with at least the 6 core CPUs. My point is not all pros care about that stuff. For every "pro" you find that is frustrated with the iMac and the closed hardware I can find a "pro" who has moved to the iMac and thinks it is the best computer they ever owned. A friend of mine does only 4k work and a ton of Motion Graphics work with After Effects and Motion and still uses a 2013 iMac and churns out a lot of different client projects a week. Nothing holds him back from being creative and he does a ton of rendering. He thought about getting a new machine but really not much would change for him. Might shave off a few minutes per project in render time and text on his iMac would be retina but beyond that his workflow and project load and profit margin would be exactly the same. So any level of CPU upgrade would be a placebo effect to him and only really useful to those obsessed with specs.
Even the 12 core nMP is only 2x faster at rendering with most benchmarked productivity applications. So any marginal CPU or GPU upgrade one would do on a modular Mac computer wouldn't really have a lot of benefit anymore. Again not Apples fault but how lazy and stagnant the computer industry in general has become. Blame Intel here not apple. Maybe now that AMD has risen from the dead with their Ryzen processors for such a low price Intel will feel the need to actually build better performance again.
stoneinapond
Veteran
Word.
My 2015 27" i7 5K iMac is a thing of beauty.
Would I like more power and upgradeability? Sure, but for the cost, these machines are awesome. And the display doesn't hurt either.
Batutta
Major Contributor
That just changes the place the audio attaches to, but it's still attached to something. Move the clip and the audio still goes with it. I have a pretty thorough understanding of how the program works. I just don't think it's a BETTER way to cut than a track based system. For me anyway. And I'm not the only one.
alaskacameradude
Veteran
Like I said, you can put the music in the primary storyline and then it does
not need to attach to anything. Other things then attach to it.....which was
what I thought you wanted. But I very well may have misread the situation
as you are calling this a 'workaround. Which seems to indicate that it doesn't do
what you want. Sorry it was just a thought, based on what it sounded like you wanted.
indiawilds
Veteran
Create compound clips out of bits and pieces of music and put it in one track and then you do whatever you want with your pictures. Clients have at the last moment asked me to do this or that with the picture, even after the picture lock and music scored and voice over done. There are lots of tutorials and one can learn FCPX fairly fast.
stoneinapond
Veteran
Fair enough.
And you could be the only one and it would matter. No need to invoke the many to justify your needs. I'm just happy that NLE now really means non-linear. Provides so much more freedom (for me....:beer
.
indiawilds
Veteran
Is the XQD reader USB 2.0 or USB 3.0?
If it is USB 2.0, then you need to move to to XQD reader with USB 3.0 or thunderbolt connection.
Batutta
Major Contributor
Again, I know the program. I've used it on several projects already. The bottom line for me is that the new features of FCPX aren't of much benefit to me, and the workflow less efficient for my needs.
Thomas Smet
Veteran
Nothing wrong with that at all. We don't all have to use the same tools. How boring would that be? Not every tool is going to be awesome for each person and if you honestly gave it a serious go and it still isn't your thing that is perfectly acceptable. Same way I feel about the Affinity design apps. Great tools and some things are faster but it just isn't there for me.
I never understood the obsession people have with getting everybody else to use the same tools like some sort of get along gang. I honestly don't give a hoot what people use to get work done. What I care about is when people criticize a tool without even giving it a chance and just hate it for the sake of hating it. If somebody gets all giddy inside editing with iMovie on an iPad hey more power to them.
roxics
Veteran
I'm not trying to generalize that all pros hate the iMac or even that the iMac isn't powerful enough. I'm trying to generalize that most pros given the choice would probably go for a tower and monitor for the same price. But they don't have that choice with Apple. It's not offered, so they are stuck with getting an iMac if they want to spend less than $3K on a machine.
Plus I don't think it's that geeky to have to run a cable from the tower to an external display.
But you're right that computer hardware has stagnated a bit. I'm typing this on a 2008 macbook which is my daily internet browsing machine and it's fine for that.
The overall point of my message is that in the modern era, a desktop should be different than what you can get with a laptop and not just a non portable laptop with a really big screen. Doesn't matter if you never open it up. Just seems to me that given the mac makes up 20% of Apple sales and probably less for desktops, it would be easiest if Apple streamlined the machines they offered into only one tower with multiple configurations and user upgradeability for those that want it.
Batutta
Major Contributor
The day may change me when I have to move on from FCP7, but it may not be to FCPX. DaVinci Resolve is promising as an editor but doesn't seem mature yet. I'm still committed to Apple as a platform for many reasons. I have an iPhone and iPad and laptop and like the seamless way they interface. And in my twenty years of owning Macs I've yet to have a single virus. Hopefully the new Mac Pros are easy to upgrade and customize and affordable.
dmitrizigany
Veteran
That is true, but... I only buy gear when I can pay it in full immediately, so I like the idea of being able to buy a lower spec'd machine and upgrade ram, graphics, harddrives afterwards. Slowly, as I have the money, turning it into something close to what sells as the top of the line... That is basically the only reason I want an upgradable computer, to be able to buy it cheaper and then upgrade. If I could afford to buy the top of the line every 5-6 years that wouldn't have been necessary...
Batutta
Major Contributor
Same here, and why should I pay for the features I don't need? I'd much rather just buy a machine custom built to the specs I want. Apple should just ditch the one box fits all approach for the pro market. Instead of filling shelves with overpriced machines, only build the units you sell. They aren't impulse buys, and I think pro users would be willing to wait for delivery.
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Thomas Smet
Veteran
Oh I'm not disagreeing with that at all and I also have waited patiently for apple to make a decent Mac mini or other desktop system that could be upgraded. I was just stating that to some people the closed thing makes sense. I'm right there with you guys that I want to build my own hog. I used to do that many years ago. I helped build editing systems and work stations for production companies. One of the previous companies I worked at I built many of the main editing workstations to handle RED ONE material.
I'm really just defending the iMac for some pros. For others I 100% agree Apple should have an in between option.
BrianMurphy
Veteran
I have to chime in again, the Apple OS and its Apple specific software are what lead most of us to where we are. Certainly the roots of digital non linear are deep in Apple products going back to the original Avids. The issue is the cost of the Apple hardware and in the iMac no simple upgrade path. I have a late 2010 iMac, I have maxed added an SSD where there was none as an OS drive, a 4TB as its archive and swapped out the SuperDrive for another SSD. But I am stuck with the graphics card and processor. Now if they bring out a "pro version" of the iMac, that immediately tells me it is gonna be expensive and not likely to be upgrade friendly. If "Pro" means allowing access simply to graphics cards and storage then I am all for it. I love the Apple OS it's elegant and reliable and easy to manage. But their hardware is too damn pricey in today's market when you can build a quality computer for half the cost of the same hardware in an Apple product. So I will use my old macbook pro and continue to use my iMac but have built a streaming production kit based on a Dell i7 laptop running Win10 and will probably do the same for a desktop running Resolve. The best thing with Resolve is I can run it on any OS and that I think is a very smart move on BlackMagic's part. But if, as I have said Apple come out with a game changer which they very well could do.... save me a spot on the bandwagon.
I guess you are not working with 4K material then? I started film school in 2008, and right off the bat we started working with HD on those iMacs. So a machine from back then will still be good working with both HD material and for surfing the web.
But once you start editing 4K, or start reducing render times, you will see that computers still has about 10% increase each year. But im working on a self-built PC, so i have access to much stronger hardware than macs, and at a faster rate since i pay much less for each upgrade. The prices the OS crows pays for their machines scares me... I have used my Windows 10 self built machine without any flaws since 2015, and have even edited a large TV-doc on it without any hiccups at all, in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Good to hear that Apple admitted their trashcan mistake, and that things are going better for the OS crowd. Tom Lowe kinda showed us how to own 4K with GPU rendering back in 2012. Funny Apple didnt read the same forums...
the magnetic timeline is my most hated feature on FCPX.
.....what do yo mean by "only two tracks scares me"? you can put as many layers and your computer as you like considering that the computer is beefy enough to drive those layers. so is FCPX capable of 27 layers? YES. the few times i used it i didn't have 27 but i probably had at least 10.
david
Samuel H
Major Contributor
Interesting thread about Apple and "the pro market" (specifically: the 3D pro market):
https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/849256276295114753
https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/849256276295114753
filmguy123
Veteran
Oh, plenty of brilliant people and brilliant pros may use an iMac, just like plenty of brilliant cinematographers may employ consumer level cameras to obtain hyper professional looking results. A lot of that comes down to budget, availability, and need.
But iMac even by Apple's own admission doesn't meet Pro standards, because it lacks things that are traditionally considered pro. Just like an A6500 lacks SDI, genlock, etc. I think that's all people mean.
I will say as an experienced pro and a bit of a computer guy, while it may work for some, buying an iMac as my pro editing station would be extremely limiting, as much of a quality piece of hardware as it is.
Excited to see Apple wakeup to this. What I miss most about Apple is their focus on software which has really dissipated over the last 10 years or so... it's a shame to actually see them start falling behind software wise in almost every category (yes, even iOS -- looking at you stagnant iPad iOS) when they used to lead by a mile.
The double tragedy here is that this was because they were so focused on hardware, but even that era is passing. They sparked a hardware design revolution, and now that everyone has caught up and a sort of design plateau has been reached, their hardware design isn't that much better than their high end competition, either.
But iMac even by Apple's own admission doesn't meet Pro standards, because it lacks things that are traditionally considered pro. Just like an A6500 lacks SDI, genlock, etc. I think that's all people mean.
I will say as an experienced pro and a bit of a computer guy, while it may work for some, buying an iMac as my pro editing station would be extremely limiting, as much of a quality piece of hardware as it is.
Excited to see Apple wakeup to this. What I miss most about Apple is their focus on software which has really dissipated over the last 10 years or so... it's a shame to actually see them start falling behind software wise in almost every category (yes, even iOS -- looking at you stagnant iPad iOS) when they used to lead by a mile.
The double tragedy here is that this was because they were so focused on hardware, but even that era is passing. They sparked a hardware design revolution, and now that everyone has caught up and a sort of design plateau has been reached, their hardware design isn't that much better than their high end competition, either.
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