New Mac Pro's announced

8 Core
It was once only top-of-the-line processing power. Now it?s at the heart of the new Mac Pro.
[www.apple.com]

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Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

Oh and Xserves as well.

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Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

No changes to the overall design, but faster processors and caches. Lots more graphic card options, (dual 30-inch ACD support standard now), PCI Express 2.0, internal SAS (SCSI) drives with RAID card. No Blu-Ray though (yet).

JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

It is sounding like Paramount is going Blu-Ray so that about does it for HD-DVD. Who's left? Dreamworks?

This new Mac looks more about bad timing than anything else. Another month or so looks to see computers with Blu-Ray.

Michael Horton
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Quote

This new Mac looks more about bad timing than anything else. Another month or so looks to see computers with Blu-Ray.

They could just offer it as an option for the second optical drive slot, no? And who knows if a Blu-Ray Superdrive will be standard on all Macs soon or a rather pricey ($500) add-on for certain models...

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SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Like all things geek, its expensive when it first comes out then gets cheap a year later. Going to take a year for all this DVD crap to shake out anyway.

Michael Horton
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If you look at the application benchmarks at the Apple site and compare against the old flagship the new 3.2 GHz is about 10 (sometimes 20 percent) faster, so not such a big argument to convince somebody with an old 3 GHz to buy a new machine.
But if you have to invest into a new machine it's nice to have some updated hardware for a bit less money than a comparable model before.
In any case what to do with a BR burner if there is no authoring support, no system support etc.?
So it needs a bit more than just the hardware - even if it would be included.
Maybe they were so early with those desktop machines to have time enough to showcase some more important things in SF.

Regards
Andreas

Don't find it at all surprising they have decided to release the updates before macworld - it is afterall a consumer gathering and apple is increasingly devoting its 'screen time' to the ipod/ilife range.
Must admit im a little surprised to see no option of a blueray burner etc, but perhaps it makes sense that we don't see that until we get the next big DVDSP update (which is rather overdue)

As for the performance, these are bench marks using current software releases. it will take a while before the key programmes can take full advantage of the SSE4 instruction set in the new chips, but if/when they do i can imagine the speed improvements being dramatic - the instruction set is perfect for heavy encoding tasks etc and im sure these tests are by no means using the chips to full effect.

Its about time I updated my Dual G5 and this is perfect timing so I guess I'll be making an order once I know which Blackmagic Cards and multichannel eSATA cards work correctly.

Shame the BTO of a 3.2GHz + Nvidia 8800 is 3-5 weeks!



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Quote
Ben King
Shame the BTO of a 3.2GHz + Nvidia 8800 is 3-5 weeks!

That's the time they need to make Color work with the Nvidia ;-)

Andreas

Hey i have been waiting for the price drop and upgrade to the mac pro. After i spent 4k on a 1.8 dual i saw a 1500 dollar drop in the price of the machine with better hardware, that told me to be a little later on getting a new machine.

I still think that if i wait till say april that they will have the BR option.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Michael Horton Wrote:
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> Like all things geek, its expensive when it first
> comes out then gets cheap a year later. Going to
> take a year for all this DVD crap to shake out
> anyway.

For more than a year you've been able to get Sony, Pioneer and LG BLU-RAY burners for less than $250 in PC's.

Just because Apple buried their collective heads in the sand doesn't mean that the rest of the HD world wasn't busy "shaking it out."

Quote

That's the time they need to make Color work with the Nvidia ;-)

Don't joke I'm sure they'll be all kinds of issues I personally don't know why they don't off the ATI RadeonTM HD 3800 Series as an alternative to the 8800...

As for BlueRay, it would always be cheaper to source your own BR Drive and put it in afterwards and its so damn easy (and doesn't void warranty) to put drives in the modern Macs that its not even worth worrying about a BTO option at present.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

The problem isn't the drive its that DVDSP4 doesn't support it.

Apple will probably announce support for BR shortly and I realize that the majority here are still delivering SD but this really puts the FCP faithful at disadvantage in the HD market, Adobe is much farther down this path.

I don't understand why Apple sat on the fence as long as they did especially with Steve Jobs working with Disney who has been pushing BR since day one.

I would guess that some of the Apple uncertainty stems form Sony's decision to release BluRay players that didn't have a finalized OS or firmware. Supposedly the version in most players out there is v1.0 but v1.1 exists and v2.0 is supposed to be the final spec for what can be accomplished with Blu-Ray. I can see why Apple might be reluctant to develop or sell software that might be obsoleted by a firmware they have no control over.

I don't think Apple bundling Blu-Ray in hard and software was going to be a deciding factor in that format war, so to avoid acrimony from their consumers, leaving high def DVD burning and authoring until the whole thing shakes out was probably a safe bet on Apple's part.

Considering that one of the major deciding factors for the big companies that switched to Blu-Ray was the format's relatively higher DRM security level and had very little to do with what kind of experience the enduser would have, I don't think anyone was putting ALL their money on one horse. Sony eventually had to manufacture VHS machines so they know what a bitter pill it is to swallow when you lose. If you hold off forever you're dead.

My understanding is that the authoring language of Blu-Ray is much less user friendly than
HD-DVD. Anyone have any experience with this? Or would it all be "behind the scenes" thing taken care of with GUI?

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

It's possible that the lack of BRay has just as much to do with internal Apple politics as much as the hardware issues. The iPhone sapped a lot of their development efforts away from Leopard then they had to turn around and scramble to finish Leopard, so it's possible that BRay support got shelved until they could get everything else out the door. It's not a matter of just updating DVDSPro; full BRay support probably involves a patch to Leopard, a new Quicktime, and patches/updates to Pro apps as well as the iLife apps. I'm sure the DVDSpro guys were itching to get started and the Leopard team wasn't returning their calls for a while

If anyone can corner an Apple rep at Macworld or the SuperFCPUG, see if you can get 'em to dish some dirt...

JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Quote
Ben
Don't joke I'm sure they'll be all kinds of issues I personally don't know why they don't off the ATI RadeonTM HD 3800 Series as an alternative to the 8800...

This was a serious joke. Or a joke just about the time. Color was/is programmed or optimized for ATI GPUs and there where several problems with Nvidia boards.
What I don't understand that they offer a 256 MB ATI as entry level instead of one with more memory.

Quote
Chuck
The problem isn't the drive its that DVDSP4 doesn't support it.

That's what I said earlier and confirm it here again.

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John
?full BRay support probably involves a patch to Leopard, a new Quicktime?

That's true as well. It will need those patches - so no prime time on the Mac yet.

So I personally wouldn't care about whether a BR drive is build in or available as BTO - as Ben said if you want one (and you probably don't need one yet)

Quote

its so damn easy (and doesn't void warranty) to put drives in the modern Macs

Andreas

John K Wrote:
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> It's not a matter of just updating
> DVDSPro; full BRay support probably involves a
> patch to Leopard, a new Quicktime, and
> patches/updates to Pro apps as well as the iLife
> apps.
>
> JK

Software patches as well as HDCP compliant hardware (drives, video cards, & monitors).


-A

As far as playing back Commercial BR Discs in Apple DVD Player...

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© MacBidouille 2001 - 2007. All rights reserved.
When releasing information collected from our sources yesterday about future Mac Pro, we were mentioning BD burning, but also playback. According to additional information, it seems that the latest feature will NOT be included for the time being, due to the current conflict between Apple and AACS LA.

To implement BD playback in OS X, Apple needs the key from the AACS LA which will of course not release it if it can not ensure that one would not to easily be able to crack it. This is mostly due to past month experience with the first BD playback application on PC which allowed hackers to relatively quickly got access to the key.

The AACS LA would currently require from Apple to implement a protection system, not on the software layer of "HF Player", but directly in the kernel of Mac OS X! For obvious reason Apple is not willing to accept such request for the time being, considering that such protection will only be used from time to time when users will play a BD media on their Mac

For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Quote

software patches as well as HDCP compliant hardware (drives, video cards, & monitors).

I don't believe that for a minute.

Updated software yes, but if Adobe Encore CS3 for the Mac can make BR Discs then why do you need HDCP compliant hardware just for DVDSP?

Personally I think its Apple dragging its heels or as Andrew said hedging its bets on Firmware updates that mean extra work...

Either way its poor show seeing as Adobe have their offering on the shelves already!



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

I have transfered uncompressed HD quictime projects to the PC and used AME and Encore to make HDDVD's with mixed results. I believe this has more to do with AME [Adobe Media Encoder]'s conversion from Quicktime to AVI.

I have had much better results converting the Quicktime files using the Cineform AVI which works well within Encore. Since Adobe's CS3 and Cineform now run on the Mac Pro maybe there's a work around.

It just seems to be a lot of work because Apple guessed wrong. How could they not see this train wreck coming???

I called Apple and they claim that you can write to Blue Laser. If using an MCE BluRay drive, is there issues in playing back the output?

Rob

Yes, a MAC using Adobe Encore can author and burn a Blu-Ray DVD, I'm not sure how you would accomplish this from FCS2.