Comment by moefh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moefh | Hacker News Reader

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I have absolutely no experience with video editing, so I can't say if it's good or not, but the point the article is making is very clear:

    Put another way, if Stiller's team was building this for Amazon or Netflix, would that be a Mac Mini on Richman’s desk, or an HP or Lenovo box? Why even use a Mac in this editing process at all, when other companies offer access to better GPUs anyway?

    [...]

    Sure, there's an Apple logo in the top-left corner (two, actually), but it feels superfluous, knowing that the software isn’t directly on the machine and it [could] just as easily be running on a Windows or Linux box a thousand miles away. There are way more efficient ways to do this, and Apple doesn't offer them. Instead it relies on cloud providers like MacStadium, or localized IT teams, to work around their convoluted rules around VMs.

So the client is irrelevant (it's just a terminal), and a non-Apple server would be a better option. (Again, I have no idea if any of this is actually true.)

The point of the article, and the full quote, is "These editors aren't working on Macs, per se. They're working around them".

The point being ignored is that the editing software is also running on Macs [1]. The local and remote machines are both Macs. To the general public, and the purpose of their story, the fact that you could replace the local one with any dumb client is irrelevant [2].

[1] I don't know about the software they're using in particular (Avid?), but there is a chance the Macs are actually faster than what you can currently get from PCs regardless of GPU - nothing atm matches the bandwidth you can get from Apple Silicon, ProRes hardware encoders, power consumption, noise

[2] it's not even actually irrelevant as the overall experience of owning a Mac, outside of the remote desktop client, will be substantially different.

One more time, I'm not arguing for the article's point -- as I wrote, I have absolutely no experience with video editing, so I have no idea what are the demands regarding hardware/software.

I was simply clarifying "what's the point of the article". Your quote fragment ("These editors aren't working on Macs") makes it look like the article is saying something it's obviously not (as it's clear from the very next sentence).

To me, not sitting in front of a Mac, but using it via remote desktop, doesn’t change the fact the show is being edited on Macs. Which makes me not see the point in the article.

It’s like seeing a car ad where someone is being driven around by a chauffeur in a BMW, then arguing that “they are not actually driving it, it could be any car”.

> [...] doesn’t change the fact the show is being edited on Macs. Which makes me not see the point in the article.

I don't know what else to say, other than to show again this full quote: "These editors aren't working on Macs, per se. They're working around them". The point is not that they're not using Macs, he knows they are.

What you're doing is like seeing the scene[1] from the Watchmen movie where a character in prison says "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me", and then thinking "Wow, that character was totally wrong! Of course he was locked in there with them, he was in a prison!".

[1] warning: graphic violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0-EuoBjkKI

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