Q: No DVD drive in new iMac ???

justamacguy wrote:

 

Yes I am suggesting that they should have a BluRay option. We can get it on our Windows machines. Why not Apple.

That's not much of an argument. You can get * VGA * on Windows machines

When you are out on the road producing a $10K wedding on site hardware matters.

Well that line will certainly appeal to the masses.

I've suddenly got this image in my head now of thousands of mobile production studios re-tooling their entire kit with Windows boxes so they don't have to plug a DvD writer in for the 60 seconds it takes to write the Bride & Groom's souvenir of the special day

indigopete wrote:

 

justamacguy wrote:

 

Yes I am suggesting that they should have a BluRay option. We can get it on our Windows machines. Why not Apple.

 

That's not much of an argument. You can get * VGA * on Windows machines

 

 

When you are out on the road producing a $10K wedding on site hardware matters.

 

Well that line will certainly appeal to the masses.

 

I've suddenly got this image in my head now of thousands of mobile production studios re-tooling their entire kit with Windows boxes so they don't have to plug a DvD writer in for the 60 seconds it takes to write the Bride & Groom's souvenir of the special day

And the people show up with their iPhones... Shot the wedding... edited it and it's up on YouTube before the wedding over. What's even funnier is it's a 100 camera shot for the price of 0¢... priceless!!! (Your lucky if you can afford a two camera shot.)

(All of my professional cameramen friends won't shoot a wedding (not enough money in it). If they do (nagging from wife), they whip out their iPhone's to shot the wedding  .)

You only have to license BluRay for playback of copywrited video, courtesy of the MPEG group. Not for your own production and storage.

Your obviously don't understand quality over crap. As I stated before 4.5 mbps data rate for web video, 36 mbps data rate for BluRay. That is 8 times the data in the image on that little 99¢ BluRay disc. It's about quality. And BluRay is the most universaly used format for that right now, and most venues have a player. Sometimes we deliver on USB stick if they have TV's that accept it. Obviously most here don't have a business mind, only an Apple fan attitude. That is why you aren't doing $10 gigs, or probably not even $1K gigs. And you will never get past that with your mind set.

As for having the hardware contained, it is alot easier to carry a self contained unit that to carry pieces. You have to worry about getting all the parts there and having all the cables and making sure you have enough power outlets at the venu (carry a power strip). Everything in one tool box is the best. It's a crappy mechanic that only carries one wrench in his.

I send anywhere between 20-30mbps x264 videos for web pages. If I have to send to YouTube, at least I send them the ProRes HQ video with uncompressed audio. That gives I give them somthing with quality to work with compared to the h.264 crap they get.

Who said I wasn't doing $10K videos... that a drop in the bucket. $10 wedding videos is a joke... nobody pays that much for a wedding video. And it not common if they do.

Let's just throw some numbers around. Since we don't know what the internet speed is of your client we would have to assume that they have an average speed connection. For the US that is about 6.7 mbps. And, in the case of a wedding, I'm going to say you are doing a video loop that is about 20 minutes long. At 1080p 30 and 20 mbps that is roughly a 15 gig file. We are going to download it off of YouTube using their adaptive streaming for playback. Since the client has an average 6.7 mbps connection… know wait, I'm going to give them a faster one just so I can calculate it easier… a 10 mbps connection. You are going to have to show up 3 hours and 35 minutes prior to your event to get the whole video downloaded to the displaying computer. I'm just going to walk in and drop a disc in the player, hit loop and enjoy the reception dinner. Of course if there is any glitch, like oh, a power bump, your computer freezes, little Bobby pulls the plug out of the wall, you will be restarting your 3 and a half hour download all over again. I just plug the player back in and hit play. When you are at someone's once-in-lifetime event you better be ready for the unthinkable, because it will happen. Been there, done that.

Course you could use a streaming server, but then, no matter how high of bit rate you compiled in your only going to get 5 mbps. So what the heck.

Like most event videographers, our best advertising comes from word-of-mouth. Screw up and your business goes in the crapper for a while. We don't take those chances... even $2K weddings are important to us.

I think you have your MBs and Mbs mixed up. 6.7 mbps is less than dial-up speed.  Any one with less than 1MB download speed is living in the stone age. I have 4 MBs download speed. A steaming sever isn't going to help, it won't make the download speed on your side any faster.

I better know my customers download speed.

I'm not going to sacrifice quality because of the customers download speed.  I rather give them a 320x280 video that is good in quality than to give the 1080p that zuckz. My name is on the product! If they don't like that, I don't need them as a customer!

I send my finished videos out to have Blu-ray disc made. They have the latest in both hardware and software to make the disc. (I don't make money spending the time to authoring a discs.) I add to the cost of the Blu-ray disc and adding 10-20% on top of that and pass that onto the customer. FWIW, when I send a disc out for a Blu-ray disc I can start another project or finish the ones I'm working on. I'm not tried up making the disc (with special title and want-not).

(Word of mouth can kill you in any business.)

(Right now I have a  3 minute 3-D Blender file outputting to PNG images. The reason for the PNG files... if something happen... I need to stop it ... power outage... program crashes... or the computer says it's tried. I can resume were the last PNG image was made. You can't do that exporting to a video file, you lose it. It going to take about 12 hours to finish a 3 minute 1080p project and I'm on a very fast computer.

The computer is hard at work!!! Yes!!!

justamacguy wrote:

As for having the hardware contained, it is alot easier to carry a self contained unit that to carry pieces.

Then what you need isn't an all-in-one computer -- it is a self-contained camera/NLE/burner solution with a giant battery good for the duration of the shoot, editing, & client media creation production cycle.

Obviously, this doesn't exist. Every pro worthy of the name carries multiple pieces of gear, whatever the job. If you are doing $10K wedding shoots on the road, I'm guessing you travel with a lot more production gear than just a computer & a video camera. You probably have multiple batteries & at least one charger, maybe a few wireless mics & a small audio mixer, an assortment of cables, & so on. If you are doing on-the-spot BR production, you might have a backup BR burner, or at least a separate BR player in case the venue doesn't have one or it isn't in good working order.

Like you said, you better be ready for the unthinkable, & that means bringing as many spares, backups, & alternate solutions as your production budget allows.

**** it I've just bought one of these as well thought it would have come as standard , can I use a external DVD drive with it then?

Westy220586 wrote:

 

**** it I've just bought one of these as well thought it would have come as standard , can I use a external DVD drive with it then?

Yes.

Westy220586 wrote:

**** it I've just bought one of these as well thought it would have come as standard , can I use a external DVD drive with it then?

Sure. You could get the Apple USB "SuperDrive" or a third party optical drive, like maybe one of these OWC Blu-Ray alternatives.

I just bought a new iMac too & I'm probably going to get this one to go with it. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this topic, I don't want another troublesome slot-loading optical drive so that tray-loader looks 'good enough' to me.

David M Brewer Denver, CO

indigopete wrote:

 

justamacguy wrote:

 

Yes I am suggesting that they should have a BluRay option. We can get it on our Windows machines. Why not Apple.

 

That's not much of an argument. You can get * VGA * on Windows machines

 

 

When you are out on the road producing a $10K wedding on site hardware matters.

 

Well that line will certainly appeal to the masses.

 

I've suddenly got this image in my head now of thousands of mobile production studios re-tooling their entire kit with Windows boxes so they don't have to plug a DvD writer in for the 60 seconds it takes to write the Bride & Groom's souvenir of the special day

And the people show up with their iPhones... Shot the wedding... edited it and it's up on YouTube before the wedding over. What's even funnier is it's a 100 camera shot for the price of 0¢... priceless!!! (Your lucky if you can afford a two camera shot.)

(All of my professional cameramen friends won't shoot a wedding (not enough money in it). If they do (nagging from wife), they whip out their iPhone's to shot the wedding  .)

Must have been "the" "most" boring wedding ever!!!!! With the ugliest broads that uncle Jack Daniels couldn't make pretty!!!!! Je!!!

R C-R Texas, USA

Westy220586 wrote:

**** it I've just bought one of these as well thought it would have come as standard , can I use a external DVD drive with it then?

Sure. You could get the Apple USB "SuperDrive" or a third party optical drive, like maybe one of these OWC Blu-Ray alternatives.

I just bought a new iMac too & I'm probably going to get this one to go with it. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this topic, I don't want another troublesome slot-loading optical drive so that tray-loader looks 'good enough' to me.

You know RC… I’m psyched …. Even knowing that there are other options for DVD in the back of my mind… I still goanna buy the apple DVD… You always look at the specs and say it’s the same, it’s the same type of keyboard or mouse or whatever and apple charges you extra but it gives you the best… I’ll burn up the crappy apple DVD and then burn up another crappy brand and decide which one is best… As for keyboards and mouse I never realized how good they where until they broke had to buy other brands, cause they weren't available, just to overspend and get back to apple…

Back to the original issue guys… iMacs have always been amazing, this new one is too!!! They are so amazing that over the years they replaced MacPro in the market. Before you couldn’t even think of buying something other than a tower for Photo/Video, and these past years it’s been obvious that iMac replaced Mac Pro’s, and everything in the market, since they haven’t made a major change to Mac Pro's since 2009/10 ( am I right??), making the iMac a pro-sumer product…

Now never in history of the iMac I’ve seen a decision such as this… To take away a part of the machine that is still functional to pro world, to take away a part of the machine that binds you to the pc world, or non techky people. And let’s not forget it’s a desktop computer not a portable device…

As a pro you can’t hand over USB flashdrives or you are broke in a second (at least me), whether it’s because you become expensive trying to charge the USB drive to clients or because you hand them over from your pocket. DVD it’s still the cheapest way… The upstreaming it’s ok but the cloud it’s kind of dicey still… I don’t intend to have a computer that saves time in rendering just to loose it in upstreaming….

pipogoro wrote:

 

Back to the original issue guys…

 

As a pro

From now the DVD player is died in the iMac. DVDs are low res... in this age where people want 1080p media. Nothing you can do will return the DVD player  to the iMac. As a pro you shouldn't rant about something that is easily fixed... BUY A DVD PLAYER! Pros don't bicker about the simples things. They are out to make money at all cost.

I haven't seen one pro person in this thread as of yet... just whiners.... (There are some in this thread who have asked about the DVD not being in the new iMacs. They get a answer, buy one. Their happy with the answer and go off to make videos, make money and enjoy life!!! These people are pro's at living life to it's fullest.)