Speculation on Mac Pro refresh

It's been more than a year since the current Mac Pros came out. Although the software to fully take advantage of them is still not here, a year is a long time and technology has moved on. As a 2009 refresh is very likely, here's some speculation on what the new machines are likely to be like.

First of all, a release to coincide with Snow Leopard is very likely, as the Mac Pros are the best-equipped machines in Apple's lineup to show off the new OS. Snow Leopard will be released (assuming no iPhone-related delays this time) in either Q1 or Q2 2009, discounting any hardware that is due to be released after this date.

CPU

I'm almost certain this will be a Xeon 5500 series "Gainestown". That will be Intel's most powerful CPU line until Beckton towards the end of the year.

Although the clock speeds are identical to the Harpertown range inside current machines, they offer significant performance boosts elsewhere. The biggest of these is an on-die memory controller (i.e. built into the CPU instead of on the motherboard). This reduces bottlenecking significantly and is something AMD's chips have had for several years. It will provide a major performance boost.

Another new technology is QuickPath Interconnect, which replaces the legacy Front-Side Bus (FSB). The FSB connects all system devices and memory to the CPU through a single interface. This is now split up, with the new memory controller handling memory and QuickPath Interconnect dealing with the other system components. You may have noticed that the caches on these CPUs are smaller than their predecessors - this is because the greater efficiency in the new architecture means data spends less time in cache memory.

There have been several optimizations to multithreading, including hyperthreading which allows two threads per core (great for Snow Leopard). Although Gainestown is limited to four cores per CPU (8 in total in a Mac Pro), Apple may market it as a 16-core machine because of the 8 extra logical cores. True 16-core machines will not be available until the end of the year when the Beckton series is released.

Memory

You're probably familiar with dual channel memory which doubles memory bandwidth. That's why you have to install Mac Pro memory modules in pairs.

The new architecture has triple channel memory! Mac Pro motherboards are expected to have three rows of four memory sockets, totaling a maximum of 96 GB (12 x 8 GB). You would be required to install chips in groups of three.

Hard Disk Options

2 TB internal hard disks are now available so it seems likely that Apple will offer these in their machines. This will allow up to 8 TB in total.

What about solid-state disks? I doubt they will be offered for the Mac Pro just yet. They're too small for media storage (unless you can afford to RAID them) and although they are a decent size for boot disks I don't think they are suitable for that purpose just yet.

I always put Western Digital Raptors (10,000 RPM) as boot disks inside my machines because they reduce boot times, load applications faster, and everything is generally more responsive as memory can be paged to and from disk a lot faster. So the fast read speeds of SSDs are welcome from me, but there are two problems. Writing is slow. The OS writes a lot of data to disk and you will notice a slowdown when multitasking or using a lot of memory at once.

The second problem is that each memory cell inside the drive has a lifetime of around 100,000 writes. You can easily exceed that in the lifetime of your computer, particularly if it is switched on constantly. Modern chips try to get around this by writing evenly to all areas of the disk in order to balance it out, but the usefulness of this will depend on the total size of the disk.

SSD technology looks very promising and these are problems that will be overcome as time goes on, but they are not ready for this kind of usage just yet in my opinion.

Graphics cards

I don't know what the stock graphics card will be but the following cards may be offered as options:

Radeon 4870 - This is a high-end card capable of accelerating H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding and decoding. ATI's drivers are traditionally much better optimized for Core Image than NVIDIA's so Final Cut Studio performance is likely to be good. Crossfire technology is available on the PC version of the card - it remains to be seen if this is something Apple will embrace. Another version, the 4870 X2 with dual GPUs, will not be available for the Mac.

It comes with DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. Apple may request a Mini DisplayPort connector instead (or in addition).

GeForce GTX 285 - This is a single-GPU card that is SLI-capable (NVIDIA's equivalent to Crossfire), should Apple choose to utilize that technology. This card does not offer DisplayPort by default so this is something likely to be requested by Apple for the Mac version.

Let's hope NVIDIA improve their Mac drivers to offer better Core Image performance.

Quadro FX 5800 - This card supports DisplayPort technologies as well as the brand-new OpenGL 3.0 specification (which the other cards do not). It's very fast but also very expensive. It is not necessarily guaranteed to make a significant difference to Pro App usage because, while it has a lot of raw power, it does not have some of the optimizations that the other cards have (e.g. H.264 hardware acceleration), and I don't know how well-optimized for Core Image they are. In addition, raw power is worthless if it is bottlenecked by other components in your system.

With the launch of Snow Leopard, Apple will be trying to sell us multiple graphics cards in our machines. I would personally wait until I have read reviews before deciding on purchasing multiple cards for Pro App usage. Also, I would have to wait until Final Cut Studio 3 came out anyway because multiple cards with FCS 2 cause problems.

Things you shouldn't hold your breath for

* eSATA - Apple has completely ignored this particular technology in the past - this time around will most likely be no different.
* FireWire S3200 / USB 3.0 - It's early days and I'm not aware of any devices currently supporting the new standards.

Conclusion

It's pure speculation but if my predictions come true, there will be a hell of a lot of new tech in the Mac Pros. Which is great because they'll be leaving a lot of legacy technologies behind - but on the other hand, new things carry a certain degree of risk.

The first-gen Mac Pros needed a couple of firmware updates to fix minor issues, and I have my own rule that says I refuse to use an operating system for professional work until at least 10.x.4. This rule will be particularly crucial for Snow Leopard which now has a 64-bit kernel, meaning every system component will need new drivers. This is fine for the hardware that ships with your machine but what about third-party capture cards, graphics tablets etc? I don't think it's going to be a huge problem but it's worth thinking about in advance.

Either way, 2009 looks pretty good for video professionals.

Twitter

After years of wondering what the fuss was about, I have finally signed up to Twitter.

What's Twitter? It's basically a mini blog where you post very short messages up to 140 characters. It's great for letting people know what you are doing, asking questions and getting feedback. The beauty of it is the 140 character limit - this ensures posts are quick and to the point. Perfect for the modern age!

It'd be nice to have a little post production community where people can help each other out or just get to know each other. From a business perspective, it's also a great way of getting feedback on our products in order to improve them.

So if you want to follow me on Twitter, my Twitter URL is:
http://twitter.com/digitalreb

FCS Remover 2.0.7 released

FCS Remover 2.0.7 has just been released. This is a minor release to fix a couple of bugs that still remained from the changes added in 2.0.5.



FCS Remover is completely free and is available here. See the Resources section of this site for more software.

QuickTime 7.6

As I'm sure you are already aware, QuickTime 7.6 was released yesterday. Unlike a lot of recent releases that were provided solely for compatibility with new iTunes versions, this one has a lot of things that can benefit pro users.

First, let's look at the change list:

Video:

* Improves single-pass H.264 encoding quality
* Increases the playback reliability of Motion JPEG media

Audio:

* Improves AAC encoding fidelity
* Audio tracks from MPEG video files now export consistently

Almost all of the main features improve exporting, and so it only benefits Pro App users and people who purchased QuickTime Pro. Furthermore, they all improve quality and performance in one way or another.

But Apple never details every single change made in detail. Discrete Cosine discovered that QT 7.6 can now demux MPEG-1 audio, meaning you can convert an MPEG-1 file to another format and the resulting file will have both video and audio.

Meanwhile, on ProLost, Stu Maschwitz discovered that QT 7.6 fixes clipping issues on footage imported from the Canon 5D MK II. However, as he notes, this could drastically change the look of an existing project if you update in the middle of it.

So in all, this looks like a pretty good update for Pro App users. However, the update has only been out for a day which doesn't leave much scope for discovering potential problems. If you look at the ProLost link above, some commenters are already complaining about slow playback performance with some codecs.

The Golden Rules (TM) of Updating

As always, the Golden Rules (TM) apply:
1. Never update in the middle of a project.
2. Only update if this update fixes a problem you have been experiencing (i.e. don't install it if you don't use these codecs).
3. If you do decide to update, give it a couple of weeks for any significant issues to surface that would affect your workflow.
4. Make a clone or backup of your system drive before you install.

Here are the download links:
QuickTime 7.6 for Leopard
QuickTime 7.6 for Tiger

Important Update!
MacFixIt is reporting many problems with this update. It would seem Apple has made significant changes under the hood that are causing compatibility issues with everything from the Finder to third party codecs - even to video games. The MacFixIt page lists several workarounds.

My advice is to avoid this like the plague until Apple releases 7.6.1 or third party developers update their software to be compatible.

Getting to Know the Terminal Part 2: More File Operations

In the previous article, I showed you how to launch the Terminal and perform basic tasks like navigating through folders and dealing with files. Today I will build on this with more advanced file operations, working with directories, and wildcards.

Working with Directories

To create a new directory, navigate to the relevant parent directory using the cd command and type the following:

mkdir MyNewFolder

Remember: as discussed last time, if you want a file name with spaces, you must do either of the following:

mkdir "My New Folder"

or:

mkdir My\ New\ Folder

What if you need to create several new directories? Simple:

mkdir Dir1 Dir2 Dir3

A little-known feature of the mkdir command is that you can create multiple directories with just one command. Just separate them with spaces.

If you want to create a long chain of directories (e.g. Renders/Video/TIFF) you can use the -p parameter like so:

mkdir -p Renders/Video/TIFF

Press Enter and it's all done, instantly. Imagine how long it would have taken to do that within the Finder GUI! This is why the command-line is still used in the 21st Century even though we have pretty GUIs to look at.

To remove a directory, use the rmdir command:

rmdir Renders/Video/TIFF

The above command assumes that all directories are empty. If they are not, an error will be returned. To remove a directory and all its subfiles and folders, use the following command:

rm -dR Renders

(the d parameter tells it to include directories, R tells it to be recursive)

Wildcards

Last time I mentioned file operations such as cp for copying and mv for moving files. But what if you need to perform an operation on a large number of files at once?

Wildcards can be used to substitute characters. So if you want to copy, say, 100 files that are named Image.001.jpg to Image.100.jpg, you would use wildcards to substitute for the numbers. This will allow you to copy all of the files with one command instead of a hundred like so:

cp Image.*.jpg Renders

Question mark (?) substitutes a single character. So for instance, if you had files called render_v1.iff, render_v2.iff and render_v10.iff and you typed ls render_v?.iff, it would return only renders 1 and 2 because they are a single digit whereas render 10 is two digits.

Asterisk (*) substitutes a potentially infinite length of characters (including no characters at all). Use this if you don't know the precise length of the substitution. In the example above, if you type ls render_v*.iff, it will return all three files because it matches both the 1- and 2-digit numbers. You can also type, for example, *. jpg to return all JPEG images or *.* to return all files in the directory.

So, going back to the 100-frame image sequence previously mentioned, you would type ls Image.*.jpg to return a list of all of the images. That's all well and good, but what if you don't want to return all of the images - what if you only want a specific range?

Braces ([ ]) can be used to be more specific. In the above example, type ls Image.[20-30].jpg to restrict the results to frames 20-30. You can also restrict characters in the same way, such as [b-f] (remember that everything is case-sensitive).

If your numbers or letters don't fall into a sequential range, you can pick a set of non-sequential numbers or letters such as [brz] or [179] to match any of these characters. You can also combine them with ranges like so: ls Image.[1-10,12,14,20-40].jpg. This will return frames 1-10, skip frame 11, return 12, skip 13, return 14 and display frames 20-40.

And if you don't want specific characters to be returned, use the following syntax: [^bgv].

Combining the examples above: if you want to match a file starting with the letters a-c or x-z, with three miscellaneous characters in the middle, ending with a three-digit number at the end, you would type ls [a-cx-z]???[0-9][0-9][0-9].*. As you can see, it gets complicated pretty quickly.

But imagine if you had to search through and move or copy those files manually. It would be time-consuming, tedious and prone to human error. The command line comes into its own when you want to perform operations on a large number of files at once.

Editors can get away with not knowing this (although it can be very useful for them to know) but it is required knowledge for anyone who wants to get into visual effects.

I had originally planned to cover permissions here but I'm going to move it to the next article because I went into a lot of detail and it's too large to add on the end of this one. I'd much rather delay it than miss out information.

So next time I will be covering file permissions, symbolic links and opening, viewing and saving text files.

FCS Remover 2.0.6 released

Yesterday we released FCS Remover 2.0.5. This is a minor update to our Final Cut Studio uninstaller.

Changes:

• Feature: Remembers last window positions.


• Feature: Remembers last selected options.


• Feature: Preferences dialog.


• Feature: Trash Preferences option.


• Improvement: Improved Qmaster exit method.


• Feature: Command-line arguments (see user manual).


• Feature: Keyboard shortcuts - Space to select items, Cmd+A to Select All, Cmd+Shift+A to Select None.

FCS Remover is completely free and is available here. Check out our other software here.

Update 1/14/09: 2.0.5 was re-released as 2.0.6 to fix some bugs.

Macworld 2009 Keynote

I've been busy today so apologies for the lateness of this post. I almost entitled it "Macworld 2009" before adding "Keynote" when I remembered that there is more to Macworld than just the keynote. And, of course, that's something IDG will be banking on next year when Apple will sadly be absent.

Phil spent a lot of time on iLife and iWork. I won't say much about them except that the Keynote Remote is an awesome idea.

Onto the 17" MacBook Pro. There's been a lot of disappointment with Apple's recent pro notebook releases, and Apple has luckily made some excellent decisions with this new one. It's glossy but you can thankfully change it for a matte screen for $50. It's considerably faster than the 15" one (up to 2.93 GHz, 6 MB cache, up to 8 GB RAM). It comes with a 320 GB 5,400 RPM hard disk that can be upgraded to either a 7,200 RPM disk or a 128 or 256 GB solid-state drive (I didn't realize they made SSDs so big nowadays - they're really advancing within the market). Like the 15", it comes with two Nvidia graphics chips and a large glass trackpad.

Like the 15", it's also Firewire 800-only. Luckily FW800 is backwards-compatible with FW400 so it's just a case of using an adapter, but that's one more thing to carry around with you. Not really a deal-breaker though.

There is some controversy over the battery. You see, it's fixed. I see that as a good thing for some and a deal-breaker for others. It will give you up to 8 hours of "wireless productivity" which is 3 hours more than the 15". It will also take much longer to deteriorate. For me, as someone who doesn't own spare batteries, I see that as a very useful thing.

However, if you regularly use your machine outdoors for more than 8 hours at a time, or are planning a trip to the Amazonian rainforest where it might be days before you see a power outlet, that could be a problem. So it's neither great nor terrible - it all depends on your needs. I can see third-party manufacturers filling this gap in the market though, much like the iPod "battery packs" that you can strap on.

The base model is still the same price - $2700. The 128 GB SSD adds $500 to the price and the 256 GB SSD adds $900. SSDs have now reached the point where their storage space is comparable with that of a regular laptop hard disk. Hopefully SSD manufacturers will now focus on lowering the price because they are still far too expensive.

It's going to be 3-4 weeks before they ship but Apple is accepting pre-orders today. If you select the matte screen it changes to 4-6 weeks.

The other announcements can be summed up quite quickly - fixed-price iTunes tracks are a thing of the past and Apple will now adopt price tiers of $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29. 8 million songs DRM-free today, the entire catalog DRM-free by the end of Q1. You can now purchase songs from the iPhone itself.

I was hoping Apple would go out with more of a bang considering it's their last Macworld but I guess their whole point was that they didn't need to save their big announcements for Macworld any more, as people would listen wherever and whenever it was. I wasn't expecting much to interest me as it's mainly geared towards their consumer line, but I was disappointed to see nothing of Snow Leopard.

Update: You can now view the keynote video online.

Getting to know the Terminal Part 1: Basic File Operations

The Terminal is an application that drives fear into the heart of a lot of Mac users - an application they only dream of using in their worst possible nightmares.

It's really not that scary - in fact, it can actually be a very useful timesaving device. You can perform operations on a large number of files at once in a fraction of a second, saving a lot of time.

Although the GUI is prettier and more intuitive, constantly moving, clicking and dragging the mouse around the screen wastes time - not to mention that rendering the GUI takes away precious processing cycles from the operation you are trying to perform. And you don't even need to constantly type things either - you can write a shell script to perform a task and set it to run automatically.

If you are thinking of entering the visual effects industry, most employers will expect basic command-line knowledge and shell scripting abilities. While most VFX houses use some form of Linux, Mac OS X's Terminal is almost identical with the exception of a small number of proprietary commands.

So let's get started.

Setting up

First of all, open up the Terminal by navigating to /Applications/Utilities and double-clicking the Terminal application. I find it useful to ctrl-click the dock icon and select Keep in Dock so it is always there for convenience, but this is up to you.

A window like this will appear:

The title bar of my window says "Terminal - bash - 80x24".

bash refers to the shell I am using. There are various different shells available, each with minor differences. We will just concentrate on bash. Incidentally, if your title bar doesn't say "bash", type bash and press enter.

80x24 refers to the number of characters that can be displayed on screen at once - 80 horizontally and 24 vertically. If you resize the window these numbers will change. It doesn't matter if yours has a different value to mine.

Directory navigation

You will see something like this on screen:
Last login: Mon Jan 5 15:27:17 on ttys000
MacBook:~ Jon$

MacBook is the name of my machine, Jon is my username. The ~ indicates that the current directory is my user directory. To view the full path of the current directory, type:

pwd

This stands for Print Working Directory and on my machine outputs the path /Users/Jon. The working directory is the directory the shell will perform all commands in unless specifically told otherwise.

To change to a different working directory use the cd command like so:
cd Documents

The prompt changes to MacBook:Documents Jon$.

It's worth noting at this point that all commands are case-sensitive, so cd Documents is not the same as cd documents, and cd is not the same as CD.

There are some specific shortcuts you can use with the cd command that are summarized below.



It's worth mentioning here that shell commands are easily confused by spaces in a file path. If you must type a path with spaces, you must either:

a) Surround it in quotes
cd "~/Desktop/My Spaced Filename.doc"

or b) Use escape characters
Escape characters are characters placed before a potentially conflicting character (a space in this case) so that the shell knows to treat it as text and not as a command. The escape character for the Unix shell is \ (backslash).

cd ~/Desktop/My\ Spaced\ Filename.doc

Viewing directory contents

If you want to view the contents of a directory inside the Terminal window, use the ls command. ls is short for "list" (you'll notice that shell commands are generally quite short as they need to be typed often).

cd /
ls

Returns:


Notice that ls returns system files and folders that would normally be hidden by OS X, except for files and folders that have a dot at the front of their name such as .DS_Store. You can show these by typing ls -a (short for "all").

You can also specify a directory as a parameter such as ls /usr/bin and it will list the contents of this directory instead of the current one.

You can set several options when you call ls such as:



You can combine as many of these parameters as you like such as:
ls -l -R

Or more simply:
ls -lR

(note: some parameters automatically override others)

These are just a few parameters of many. For exhaustive details of the parameters available, type:

man ls

This is an important Unix concept that also translates to OS X. Man (manual) pages are documentation files easily accessible from the shell using the man command. They will tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the command such as its syntax, parameters, compatibility and return values (more on that in the upcoming scripting tutorial).

You can use man with any command such as man cd, man ls, man echo. With the man page open, press Space to go to the next page and press q to quit and return to the shell.

This gives you documentation instantly at your fingertips, even if the machine you are using doesn't have an internet connection.

Basic File Operations

Use the cp command to copy files like so:

cp [source file] [destination path]

Here's an example on my system:
cd ~/Desktop
cp UntitledDoc.txt ../Documents

This will set the working directory to my desktop. It will then copy UntitledDoc.txt to my Documents folder (remember that .. refers to the parent directory).

You can also create a duplicate of a file within a directory by changing the destination filename:
cp UntitledDoc.txt UntitledDocDupe.bak

To copy a folder and all its subfiles and subfolders, use cp -R. Type man cp to learn about the other parameters.

To move a file, use the mv command with the exact same syntax as the cp command.

To rename a file, you can either use the rename command (same basic syntax as cp) or use mv like so:
mv myfile.txt mynewfile.txt

To delete a file, use rm:
cd ~/Desktop
rm myfile.txt

Some useful rm parameters are listed below:



That's it for the first tutorial. In Part 2 I will be covering more file operations, working with directories, wildcards and permissions.

Macworld SF 2009 rumor roundup

As you are probably all aware of, tomorrow is the date of the Macworld San Francisco 2009 keynote by Phil Schiller instead of Steve Jobs.

MacRumors has done a great job of rounding up the rumors pertaining to this event. It's definitely worth checking out - even if a lot of them seem to be from the same source.

It's also important to remember that Macworld SF is a consumer-oriented show so if don't expect too much in the way of professional products and equipment.

(As a side note: I would always advise buying the later speed-bumped version of a product, not the original. If Apple does release a fixed-battery MacBook Pro, there's lots of potential for problems and issues with the first-generation.)

Why does my DVD audio level differ from the level in FCP?

Have you noticed a discrepancy between the audio in your Final Cut Pro timeline and the audio of the finished DVD when using Compressor's DVD presets?

That's because the Dolby Digital 2.0 audio preset in Compressor has several functions to improve unsuitable audio, but if you have already mixed your audio they might do more harm than good in some cases. Rather than just telling you which settings to use, I'm first going to explain what these functions are designed to do because there are a lot of misconceptions about them.

Compression alters your dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds in a soundtrack) by compressing the level of sounds to fit within a certain range. The loudest sound in a Dolby soundtrack can be 105dB. Considering the fact that prolonged exposure to 90 dB audio can result in hearing loss, most people do not play their audio at 105dB. When you set up a Dolby decoder with a reference tone, you are telling it the volume level it should play 105dB audio at. So if this is lower than 105dB (which is likely), you will lose some of the very quiet sounds on the soundtrack. The compression presets allow you to regain these sounds by sacrificing some dynamic range in the process.



It is set to Film Standard by default but if you have already performed a mix with a moderate dynamic range, further compression is not likely to be necessary and so it is worthwhile to switch this to None.



Dialog normalization is a feature on several Dolby decoders that ensures all content plays back at the same level. The listener sets their preferred playback level and the dialogue in every DVD and TV show plays back at the same level, meaning you don't need to keep reaching for the remote in order to adjust the volume. Contrary to popular belief, it only adjusts the overall volume level when the source changes (i.e. when you begin playing the DVD or when a new TV program begins) so dynamic range is preserved throughout the movie. It does not dynamically adjust the volume as the movie is playing.



The normalization value indicates the difference between the overall level of dialog and the maximum audio peak of 0 dBFS. The default is set to -27 dBFS, which is the established level for film soundtracks. It is also the level most decoders are set to by default. If you have your decoder set to -27 dBFS and then, for example, try to play a -25 dBFS movie, the decoder will lower the overall volume by 2 dBFS so that the general dialogue level remains the same. If you do want to switch it off when compressing your audio files (if you've already leveled your sound mix for example), set it to -31 dbFS.

So if you would like your audio to be exactly how it was in Final Cut Pro, set Dialog Normalization to -31 dBFS and set Compression in the Pre-Processing tab to None. However, these functions do serve useful purposes for the end user and it is worthwhile to bear their needs in mind.