Film Editors see Apple pulling away from the Workstation Mar
Posted: Sep 21st, '12, 16:41First, I live just 120 miles South of Tinsel Town ( Hollywood USA )
and being a video editing fan I do travel up there for various events.
Mostly Trade Shows and special events. My interest is in video capture
and editing. I exclusively use Linux notably first Mandrake/Mandriva,
and now Mageia. It's fun at times to rub shoulders with the
movers and shakers of that industry. I do not get involved with
the "Stars". Only those folks in back of the cameras.
I wanted to comment here on a tread I have been noticing in that
industry that may indirectly effect Mageia in a good way. It seems
that there is an increasing belief that Apple is removing itself
from the High End workstation market. Many most of the professional
movies today are edited on Apple workstations. As best as I can
get a feel of what is happening, or at least what the people in
Hollywood believe, Apple will continue to offer Workstations but
they will not have the horsepower that will be needed in the next
generation of movies. Mostly in what is called "4K" content.
So that leaves only Microsoft. Interestingly enough I befriended
an Engineer from Microsoft at a Movie Industry event just this week.
His sole purpose of being at the event was to find ways to get
Microsoft Windows a better foothold in the movie industry. That with
the increasing absence of Apple.
When I share with people in the movie industry that I edit exclusively
on the Linux platform the response has always been, and continues to
be, they wish there was a way to move their NLE's ( Non Linear Editors )
over to a Linux platform. The platforms of choice would be RedHat and
Ubuntu.
Already RedHat ( RHEL ) and Ubuntu have a foot print in the movie
industries. ILM uses RedHat in its rendering farm and the NFS network
protocol. Additional rendering farms use Ubuntu. Some of the more
popular NLE's mainly Avid, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro and
to some extent Sony Vegas Pro will run some of their versions
under Wine but that is not a popular choice. My conversations with
folks from these NLE's is that they are not as of yet keen on porting
over to Linux.
So my guess here is that RedHat will gain some traction in the
movie industry and we'll see some of that trickling down to Mageia.
One interesting side here is that some of the continuing irritants
in the Windows platform is all but non-existent in Linux. At least
that is my long years of experience. Because Linux has access to
many and widely varied codecs the ability to import/export and
edit video file formats this makes it very easy to use. Windows
because of the problems there many times editors must transpose
a video file from one format to another before they can edit.
Another part of this is, believe it or not, many of the Editors
working in this movie industry are using platforms that are
at least a generation old. Budgets are tight in the movie
industry too.
and being a video editing fan I do travel up there for various events.
Mostly Trade Shows and special events. My interest is in video capture
and editing. I exclusively use Linux notably first Mandrake/Mandriva,
and now Mageia. It's fun at times to rub shoulders with the
movers and shakers of that industry. I do not get involved with
the "Stars". Only those folks in back of the cameras.
I wanted to comment here on a tread I have been noticing in that
industry that may indirectly effect Mageia in a good way. It seems
that there is an increasing belief that Apple is removing itself
from the High End workstation market. Many most of the professional
movies today are edited on Apple workstations. As best as I can
get a feel of what is happening, or at least what the people in
Hollywood believe, Apple will continue to offer Workstations but
they will not have the horsepower that will be needed in the next
generation of movies. Mostly in what is called "4K" content.
So that leaves only Microsoft. Interestingly enough I befriended
an Engineer from Microsoft at a Movie Industry event just this week.
His sole purpose of being at the event was to find ways to get
Microsoft Windows a better foothold in the movie industry. That with
the increasing absence of Apple.
When I share with people in the movie industry that I edit exclusively
on the Linux platform the response has always been, and continues to
be, they wish there was a way to move their NLE's ( Non Linear Editors )
over to a Linux platform. The platforms of choice would be RedHat and
Ubuntu.
Already RedHat ( RHEL ) and Ubuntu have a foot print in the movie
industries. ILM uses RedHat in its rendering farm and the NFS network
protocol. Additional rendering farms use Ubuntu. Some of the more
popular NLE's mainly Avid, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro and
to some extent Sony Vegas Pro will run some of their versions
under Wine but that is not a popular choice. My conversations with
folks from these NLE's is that they are not as of yet keen on porting
over to Linux.
So my guess here is that RedHat will gain some traction in the
movie industry and we'll see some of that trickling down to Mageia.
One interesting side here is that some of the continuing irritants
in the Windows platform is all but non-existent in Linux. At least
that is my long years of experience. Because Linux has access to
many and widely varied codecs the ability to import/export and
edit video file formats this makes it very easy to use. Windows
because of the problems there many times editors must transpose
a video file from one format to another before they can edit.
Another part of this is, believe it or not, many of the Editors
working in this movie industry are using platforms that are
at least a generation old. Budgets are tight in the movie
industry too.
