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Comment by keithwarren | Hacker News Reader

You ever tried to edit 4K video? Real time editing is very important to post-production studios and when you are adding effects, rendering etc in a time sensitive environment - and you are a Final Cut person - then this is a great tool.

This is not for your average dev or photo person, this is legitimately a 'Pro' machine aimed at very small a subset of Apple customers who actually mean quite a bit to the company. It is a quality perception game, when Hollywood is using your stuff you gain a certain mystique.

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But then, wouldn't you want a beefier machine? 64Gb of RAM seems a bit on the low side for such tasks.

I would also think having multiple disks would be a pretty important feature (so you can stripe them for speed...) A single SSD? Really?

For video editing, proc and gpu are actually the important parts once you hit a certain point with ram and disk. Think about it, 4K videos in raw form are about 15gb per minute so you need a threshold of swapping and loading with ram and disk that allows you to move data in and out fast enough so the editing can be done in ram but you experience no lag as the user.

With disk in PCIe and a good controller you are getting around 1gb per second disk action so you have more than enough headroom.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for your explanation :)

I'd imagine the intent with storage is to use the Thunderbolt ports to connect to a storage device (probably one with hardware RAID) that takes up far more physical space than is available inside the Mac Pro chassis itself and has far larger capacity / redundancy that they couldn't fit into the form factor reasonably.

A Surface tablet with integrated GPU manipulating raw 6K video from a RED Dragon in real-time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A7Y5KCI1wc

I like my Surface but what they are showing and doing in that video is not truly editing. Showing raw or changing colors is not exactly the bar you need to get over.

If you're doing 4K check out Dell, they actually have a monitor for it.

I actually dont, but I leased office space in a post-prod studio for a long time and am still friends with the owner. There is a demand for raw horsepower on a level many people dont understand.

I do understand :-)

My preferred architecture for serious users at the moment is to have the horsepower in a datacentre, monster boxes with 96 cores and 2T RAM, connected to SAN via Infiniband/Fibre Channel, and on the user's desktop, a thin client, connected to it via gigE. Schlepping the data back from the DC to the office, crunching it on a normal desktop box and sending it back again is a wild goose chase.

Without being too verbose, have you configured your admittedly over-provisioned desktop as a thin client and actually tried the post-prod workflow this way?

I'm just saying that it's being looked at, and current hardware is definitely _not_ up to the task.

This is not for video editing but for number crunching. I am saying that I am familiar with apps and users that have an insatiable demand for memory...

Do you have any links handy for researching how to set up or rent/buy from a vendor such a solution?

There's little magical about it - it's just very expensive. Multi-gigabit MAN links for example! And Infiniband is not cheap either. You can use something like FreeNX for your thin client solution. Storage would be something like 3Par or HDS. The servers and desktops themselves are actually not the major cost in a setup like this.

Honestly, if 4k video editing is the goal, why the hell is it capped at 64GB of memory. Being able to store more than like a minute of the 4k film in memory would seem useful.

According to http://web.forret.com/tools/video_fps.asp?width=4520&height=... ... which is the "Camera: Red One 2540/60p" preset.

We haven't seen benchmarks yet but I bet the PCIe SSD can stream more than 64GB of video off the disk in 60 seconds.

Can't you use a render farm instead?

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