The New Cheese Grater... Finally!

  • It's obviously not intended to compete with $12000 models based on the price alone.

    True, according to Apple it's competing with a $43,000 Sony reference monitor.

    Check at 1:34:35 of the Apple Keynote video. This is marketing BS on the highest level.

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    An actual direct competitor (price-wise) would have been the upcoming Atomos Neon 31 for example. The Atomos is 4K "only" but it offers SDI input, it even has a built-in studio quality recorder, can be gen-locked to studio reference, is a touchscreen and so on and so on ... and it comes with a stand.


    Of course, Apple won't mention all these things. It's the viewers' / customers' business to do the reality check.

    I repeat it again, it's not a good idea to just blindly trust what especially this company states.


    I'm out now as well and hope you (and others) learned something :)

  • I'm out now as well and hope you (and others) learned something :)

    Thanks, Martin! I’m just “the sound guy” in my workplace, so the techie graphics stuff does go a bit over my head sometimes. Didn’t know that about the TB pipeline and ProRes! All our machines run Blackmagic cards and interfaces, now I know why! Cheers

  • thenoodle over at GearSlutz posted this:


    Paramount and Universal will gobble up several dozen fully tricked out models. I was talking with several guys over at Universal yesterday who will buy for themselves as well as naming dozens of entities right here in town who'll also buy loaded systems.


    That's just a few sets of guys in one town, so no doubt this thing will meet whatever projections cupertino is aiming for.


    So it appears that the high-end graphics guys are gonna jump on board and buy the uber-expensive fully-loaded system who's price stunned us, which leaves we lowly audio geeks... waiting and wondering...

  • Nicky, it doesn't surprise me at all if Paramount and Universal buy a few of these machines. Even if it's just for testing, they do have the budget and it's part of their business to try new gear to stay on top of the game. But ...

    I can assure you that none of these companies will color grade (and color proof) any of their productions on the upcoming Mac Pro monitor. And I can also guarantee you that they will not turn their existing infrastructure upside down for the new Mac Pro. It's hard to grasp for people not involved in this business how complex and HUGE the infrastructure of big production houses actually is. Of course there's certain aspects of the upcoming Mac Pro that are "better than before", no doubt. But you need to keep in mind that at the same time, some features that sound amazingly great to "normal" people aren't all that amazing for high-end post pro facilities.


    One simple example: While two 10Gb ethernet ports aren't commonly found on "affordable" computers yet and sound nice to regular people, the big houses will not be blown away cause 100Gb+ is the way to go. Just think of the bandwidth required for multiple 8K raw footage streams over network storage.


    Again, it's just one small example. I don't want to fill pages here. Try to translate this example to pretty much everything you can think off.


    Last but not least, let me show you a picture of one of the many edit / grading suites of Universal Studios. You'll see two pretty cheap computer monitors to the right for the software interface and three 12G-SDI reference monitors for the actual video output.

    Fun fact to demonstrate the scale of "difference" to freelancer's home workstations: Just the small waveform monitor (3U 9.5" beneath the middle monitor) costs 1.5 times the price of the entry level Mac Pro.



    I don't get tired of telling people to just judge technology within their own scope. It doesn't make sense to quote others without knowing what they're talking about. thenoodle obviously has no clue on his own, which made him quote other people he considers to be experts without the ability to put the information into perspective.

    An edit suite like the one shown in the picture doesn't look much otherworldly. A layman can think like "ok, this is a few screens and a few keyboards / controllers and a little bit of 19" rack gear. No big deal. The new Mac Pro will be the big, badass centerpiece of this room" ... while in reallity, this edit suite with all the behind the scenes infrastructure is worth a quarter million USD or way beyond. And they have many of these.


    In the audio business it's the same. Very hard for a home studio owner with no personal insight into big studio environments to know and understand what the "high-end" guys actually do and need. How would someone know what they need (and/or want) at Real World Studios without knowing their workflows, existing infrastructure, roadmaps.