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New movies don’t use aws. Don’t believe the marketing . None of the big vfx studios uses the cloud as their main render farm, mostly for bursts .. it’s crazy expensive

Yes you don’t need that many months of workloads to make a on premise cluster worth it. Surprisingly.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Just the entry level p3.xlarge is $2k USD a month. You'll be able to build your own in short order if you're actually using it all the time.

Well... I read this earlier today: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/avatar-the-way-of...

"It usually uses its data centers to process multiple films at the same time. With Avatar: TWOW, even the entire data center was not enough."

"Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours, or the combined power of 3,000 vCPUs in the cloud for an hour."

"“we couldn’t architecturally expand our data center because that would require infrastructure that would go to the city council, and we all know what it’s like to go through local government," he said.""

Its more that the whole operating system was better for creative tasks, from font management to color management, as you touch upon, then the software started building on that.

The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools.

I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).

I don’t work at any big studio but as a long time designer I would say that creatives (generalizing here) care deeply about the aesthetics of everything around them. If I was going to build a studio to attract good creatives I would definitely pay for having aesthetic monitors (they would of course also need to function for the purpose).

The SGI Indigo ("Indy") workstations looked gorgeous back in their time. Our university had an entire computer class kitted out with them, and out-of-hours access was meted out ... sparingly.

AFAIK the class was mostly used for computer graphics courses. For OpenGL stuff written in C, they were quite beasts. For everything else, it was still Irix.

Of course, when the room was used in the evenings, it was mostly for bzflag LAN melees.

Exactly how are you supposed to get 4PB of raw video to aws and back to color correct?

Or edit? The cloud makes 0 sense for most of video production.

Shipping it! AWS Snowball all the way. I know that many production houses move those huge files in this way.

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes.”

We use Google Drive shared drives for this since, and a lot of people don't know about this, their Shared Drives have no file size limit. They only limit it to the amount of files, which is 400,000 per drive. This way, you can upload as much as you want and don't have to worry about the file limit. However, I think this is only available on the Google Workspace accounts. We have the lowest tier and we can still use it. Hope this helps!

> Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors?

Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important than color.

It took a while for Apple to add color support, but when they did they were early out with proper color management in the whole chain from scanner to display to printer (ColorSync). IIRC when Adobe needed this on Windows for PhotoShop they had to re-implement it themselves (rather than relying on Windows)

According to this MacOS got OS-level color management in 1993, and Windows wouldn't get it for another 4 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Operating_sys...

A while? The first Mac came out in 1984. The Mac II came out in 1987.

And funny enough to this day color management on Windows is a terrible mess. Kind of incredible, feels like low hanging fruit for wooing creative users, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re dominant and can maintain that dominance through sheer inertia.

Given that color monitors were 16 colors at the time of the first Mac, color calibration wasn't going to be of much help. Most people were using green and black monitors, anyway, except for the labs with the amber VT320. The memory requirements for color were just too large to be affordable.

According to Wikipedia, the Macintosh II [1] came out in 1987, System 4.0, with 256 colors--for the equivalent of $17,000. I doubt color calibration is much use with 256 colors (although apparently the Mac II support 16.7 million colors but you could only use 256 of them), but I can't find anything on when color calibration was supported.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II

The black and white Mac monitors and software were carefully tuned to match the output of black and white offset printers, so yeah, they really cared about color before they even had color.

There was only a very slim window of time that the PPC was faster than x86 in real life besides synthetic benchmarks and even then they were hobbled by slower busses, slower graphic cards (if they had any at all) and an operating system that wasn’t fully native.

I couldnt stand how slow my macs were compared to my win pcs. Still Photoshop boots faster on my 10 yr old Mac than my blazing fast Win desktop.

This is the official stack for movie industry as standard,

https://vfxplatform.com/

> It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here)

The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the ban.

Early Macs didn't use Power chips.. that came quite a bit later.

They went through Motorola 65XX -> 68XX -> 68XXX -> Power PC -> Intel.

That portion before Power PC was a long time, 18 years.

The Apple I, Apple II and Lisa were not Macintosh computers. The first Macintosh used the 68k processor, and was only 10 years before PowerPC, not 18.

And despite all this, they still didn't manufacture their own display panels.