Backburner on OS X

[Anonymous]

Why has backburner not been ported to OS X? It seems to me that OS X would be a perfect choice for a distributed rendering environment…

Is this another example of autodesk’s anti-Mac bias?

-zolo

[eltopo]

Autodesk has never believed in Macs. However the change of the tide might be full of surprises. Burn and Smoke and Flame should be ported to Mac OSX.
Smoke should work in key with FCP and start to be compatible with Quicktime (remember Pixlet).

As to Flame the G5 would be a match made in heaven or just imagine that for the same proce of an Inferno You could buy a 200 processors 2GHZ+, 1GHZ bus 64bit processor each with 2 128bit vector engines machine… one can only dream 🙄

[Anonymous]

eltopo wrote:

Autodesk has never believed in Macs. However the change of the tide might be full of surprises. Burn and Smoke and Flame should be ported to Mac OSX.
Smoke should work in key with FCP and start to be compatible with Quicktime (remember Pixlet).

As to Flame the G5 would be a match made in heaven or just imagine that for the same proce of an Inferno You could buy a 200 processors 2GHZ+, 1GHZ bus 64bit processor each with 2 128bit vector engines machine… one can only dream 🙄

I love the idea of flame on a G5, but there’s a serious stumbling block in the way: the G5 currently doesn’t support professional graphics cards. This drives me nuts, because the G5 would be a killer 3D machine if that final piece of the hardware puzzle were in place.

There’s also the matter of 3D application support. As of yet, there’s no Maya Unlimited for OS X, and there’s no 3ds Max (which I don’t care for, but many people use).

Who knows what the next year will bring… Apple has really made huge strides in the professional video and film markets, and I’d love to see them do equally well in visual effects. Yes, they have Shake, but combustion still isn’t up to snuff on the Mac compared to the Windoze version.

In any case, even if flame were to be ported to OS X, I wouldn’t expect the price to drop very much. Even though the hardware is cheaper, what you’re really paying for is the software and the support. You’d still need stone arrays too, since third-party filesystems aren’t supported anymore. Obviously something like Xserve RAID and XSAN would be great infrastructure, but unless discreet supported it, then it would be useless. On the plus side, OS X now supports SGI’s CXFS, which would give the G5 the benefit of a true 64-bit realtime filesystem.

If Apple were smart, they’d start working on a flame killer of their own. Something like flame running in realtime on a G5, for under $50K (or less) would be an immense success. It should be a true 3D compositing environment, bringing together some of the the editing features of Final Cut Pro, the compositing features of Shake and the best parts of combustion and FFI.

It should be an exciting year ahead!

-zolo

[Xavier]

Eltopo,

>>As to Flame the G5 would be a match made in heaven or just imagine that for the same proce of an Inferno You could buy a 200 processors 2GHZ+, 1GHZ bus 64bit processor each with 2 128bit vector engines machine… one can only dream

Only problem is, you would have 200 CPUs sitting in a warehouse and no good way to use them.

Don’t forget that you need software, storage, network switches, cooling, power and rack space to start using your 200 CPU Inferno killer.

Even if you think that Shake is “good enough”, you better have a darn fast RAID and network to keep those 200 render nodes well fed with media to composite!

For a 6 layer HD (1920×[email protected]) comp, with 200 nodes, you need to pump out 9.5 GB of data out of your storage and through the network *at every frame*. Doesn’t leave you much bandwith to play with for interactive work!

Clusters are cool, but for compositing, they definitely DO NOT scale very well beyond a certain point. Usually, “a few” nodes is just enough…

Anyways, I know you were only making a point that “Inferno is so darn expensive”… yeah yeah… I know…

I would like to see FFI on OS X too, but not for the same reasons as you, I guess!

Regards,

Xavier

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