HD For Indies

CORRECTION 6/30/04: Reader Brad Gallo wrote in to say:

"Mike, just a correction to your post regarding the new
monitors and 6800 card. In the keynote address, Job's
specifically indicated that each dvi connector was
actually a dual dvi port. so one 30" monitor per port
is standard with the 6800. As Jobs put it, " dual"
"dual DVI" 6800 card. So the 6800 card WILL run two
30" monitors for those who have the cash/budget."

So DISREGARD all the "need a second card for second monitor" stuff below.

-------end update-----

So here's a quick rundown on the new Apple LCD monitors announced today as expected:

20 inch model - 1680x1050 - big enough for 720p footage by a long shot. $1299

23 inch model - 1920x1200 - similar to a reskinned older 23", $1999. Great resolution to get pixel for pixel previews of 1080p or 1080i work.

30 inch model - 2560x1600 resolution, $3299. Requires special video card (see below).

All 3 of these monitors have dual USB 2.0 interaces and dual FireWire 400 interfaces. Awesome.

Sneaky deal: if you're planning on a 720p project, run don't walk and get the 17" model that supports 1280x1024 pixels for only $699. It's the older style, but hey! It works great...ADC connector as well.

Links:

Apple's page (with specs link) on the new monitors

QTVR of one of the new monitors (I think the 23", can't be sure)

Mike's Comments:

Sorry I've been offline so much, I'm having ISP troubles from the home studio. Plus, oh yeah, amazingly sweet/cute/nice/lovely 6 foot tall marathon running cutie new girlfriend. Researching online for new HD cards? Umm...no. Researching online to hike the Grand Canyon. But I digress.

: )

The new monitors - great, awesome, fantastic, gorgeous. Yes, I am breathing deep of the Apple smoke. The 20" is more than adequate for 720p work, (consider the older style 17" for a bargain 720p previewing solution with the HDLink).

Kinda as I suspected, these do NOT have HD inputs, be they analog or digital. Perhaps some future product. But these monitors are still of use for editors to work with timelines or to preview content using One2One or HDLink

The new 23": Perfect for 1080 res previewing with HDLink or One2One. And yes, you CAN drive this from a (recent) PowerBook. My dinky little 12" PowerBook (new 1.33 GHz model) will drive this 1920x1200 pixel monitor, in full 24 bit color, in ADDITION to the built in display. And of course, the new 20" is drivable from the PowerBooks as well.

The new 30": 2560x1600 pixel resolution. Wow. Which is enough for true 2K (2048x1536) film work. Will BlackMagic make a compatible HDLink for it? Good question. But $3299 - ouch, more $$$ than I thought. And in order to drive that, there is only one card to do it, the new $600 ($450 as an upgrade on a new dual 2.5) NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL Card, which requires BOTH of it's DVI interfaces to drive this one monitor. This is going to be a transitional technology - I'll bet in a year or two they'll have a single connector of some sort to drive it. NOT AVAILABLE UNTIL "August". And since it takes both monitor outputs to drive the one display, if you wanted a second display for bins, palettes, previews, etc., you'd have to use a slower PCI slot...which would leave only one slot available in the machine. So not even room for a SCSI card if you want to include an HD capture card. But then again, isn't 4 million pixels on one monitor enough for most folks? With my 24" CRT and a 15" LCD, I only use about 3.4 million pixels at best (usually just over 3 million at 1920x1200 and 1024x768).

So it'll be October I bet until dual 2.5 GHz G5s and the 30" are readily available at retail stores on the shelves I bet. If you are counting on a dual 2.5 & a 30" for a project, don't count on laying hands on it until mid October at the earliest to be sure. Apple has a history of announcing one ship date and the reality of mortal civilians being able to lay hands on it can be something else ENTIRELY.



Other tidbit from the Apple site:


"Special note on the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra: due to size of this advanced graphics card, the adjacent PCI or PCI-X slot will be blocked and cannot be used. This reduces the number of available PCI or PCI-X slots from three to two."

The card is so big it crowds at LEAST one slot, and might interefere with another (maybe, totally my conjecture).

So you'd be limited to a 4 SATA drive array with the presently availabe SATA cards.

If you had a 4 port PCI-X SATA card, you could do a 6 drive array.

So as great as the 30" monitor is, and as much as I'd like one (not ordering yet!), a dual 2.5 G5 with the NVIDIA card (to drive the 30" display) and the 30" display is $6748 before you add, um, ANYTHING else.

Other Apple goodies:


The next OS upgrade will be tiger and ship in "mid 2005" (September?). Some features:

-H.264 codec for next-gen HD DVDs - good that Apple is working on this.

-Safari browser - RSS support in a big/deep way. Good.

-Core Video- THIS IS HUGE: GPU will do a lot of video work on top of/besides the CPU. THIS IS HUGE for post production/editing processing. Especially since it will be OS level, not just application level. Expect Apple to have good support for Motion, FCP HD, and DVD Studio Pro somewhere between Tiger's ship date (middle-ish 2005) and early 2006 (either MacWorld San Francisco in January or NAB in April).

-mike