Andi

Not following you here...... 

Marianna

 

I believe Andi is comparing the length of time getting Native MC for Apple Silicon to the length of time it's taking to get a working Titler+

Hi, 

I am hoping to recommend an investment of 30 new M4-Pro Mac Mini workstations to the post production house I work for but I feel it is sensible to wait until an apple silicon native MC is available. Do you have any further updates as to when this may be released as we are looking to take on some upcoming tv dramas around December/Jan and we would need ample time for setup and testing. 

Thanks

Danny 

Hi gardenpigeon,

The team is currently working on this one and as of the moment there is no specific release date for it. Although, there are significant progress that has already been made on the works.

Once all the works and testings are done this will be release.

 

Thanks,

Ajay

Any news?

 

Ajay Yumul:

Hi,

About Native MC for Apple Silicon. As per checking, the team has made significant progress and it will be available this year

 

Thanks,

Ajay

 

Hi tough though through,

The team is continuously working on this if everything goes well this will be implemented on the upcoming release.

Thanks,

Ajay

This is probably a major re-write of decades of old code. Of course, not good to release a buggy version, but when finished, I think this version will be a major solid platform that will enable a lot of power for AVID. I still think AVID is the best editing software, but I wish it handled all types of files as smoothly like Resolve does. If the Apple Silicon version makes this a possibility, then it will be a real gem. It may take some time, but Apple silicon may become the desired processor of the future, as Intel stock has taken a hit in recent years, and is struggling to catch up with TSMC manufacturing. The $11B from the Chips Act will help, but there are some areas that have some serious losses in Intel. With those government grants, they may have a chance. I have to admit, 2024.10, works very well on a 2019 Intel MacPro. The native Apple silicon version will thrash that, I'm sure. But for now, I'm pretty impressed. I wish Apple would make up with NVIDIA, as NVIDIA graphics cards still outperform Apple Silicon in that area -- at a price. But M4, and higher chips may have some serious power. Even though graphics is built into Apple silicon, it would be nice to somehow co-exist with external graphics cards. Interesting times. Still awaiting an M5 .. like Star Trek's Ultimate Computer episode. Best, Ernie

Ajay: Do you know if the new native Mac version will be strictly for silicon Macs, or will it also be compatible with Intel Macs running the latest versions of MC? I ask because, contrary to Ernie’s experience, I have not found MC to run well on Macs of any stripe since MC2018.

I’ve edited happily on Macs since 1998, most recently with MC 2018 running smoothly for 5 years on a 2010 Mac Pro. I typically work with compressed, transcoded media. But eventually I needed to upgrade. After seeing all the trouble with silicon Macs and Blackmagic hardware, I opted for a 16-core Intel 2019 Mac Pro, with 192GB RAM, Radeon 6800X GPU, Avid DNxIO, and blazing fast RAID5 Areca enclosure. It’s an Avid supported system.

Immediately, I noticed beach ball hangs — not full freezes, but hangs that last 30-45 seconds, and then Avid recovers. This happens about 3-4 times every hour — pretty aggravating. I saw the beach balls with and without BM hardware enabled. Seemed like some kind of bottleneck, but I was not seeing any evidence of bottlenecks on Activity Monitor. I tried various operating systems and MC combinations. I tried Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma. I tried MC 2022, 2023, 2024, and all point releases. I tried three different Mac Pros, including a 24-core Mac Pro with 768GB RAM. I opened a support case and got good help from Clarence in Avid Support, who remoted in to my system and indeed witnessed several hangs, but nothing in the console or the MCFax reports gave any solid clues. We also tried many other things like disabling indexing, unmounting unnecessary volumes, tweaking all sorts of Project and User settings. On a whim I tried running MC2024 on a Mac Studio with Blackmagic hardware, and it was a disaster with loads of timeout errors and beachballs, as I suspected it would be based on the posts I had read.

When I upgraded to the 2019 Mac Pro and MC2024, I actually was in the middle of a very large documentary project with hundreds of hours of footage, which started on MC2018. I wondered if somehow the fact that the project was not native to the newer versions of MC was a factor. But after getting sick of beachballs, I decided to run this very same project with same MXF on a qualified Windows system. It ran beautifully for two days. ZERO beachballs.

This leads me to believe that something about newer MC running on the newer Mac platform is causing the problem. It’s hard to pin the blame entirely on Avid, with Mac putting out new OS releases so frequently. Compare Mac OS release schedule to Windows OS release schedule, and you can immediately guess which system will likely be more stable for Avid. Clarence himself admitted that most of his support cases these days are on Macs.

Anyway, I’m hoping that somehow the new native Mac versions of MC will be stable, and I’ll cough up the $$ for a silicon Mac if I have to. I prize stability over speed any day and would happily go back to MC2018 if I could. I’ve been in the Mac ecosystem for 25 years and am reluctant to switch, but if these beachballs don’t get sorted out, I might have to make the leap.

Thanks for any info Ajay, and praying to the Mac gods for stability.

I'm also really hoping for this to be solid. We will be upgrading next year and the Mac Studio is the perfect form factor for a portable but powerful machine. Hoping to buy 4 of the M4 Mac Studios when they are released next year. With all the remote working that's going on, it's super handy to be able to fit a whole machine in a pelicase easily and send it off to someone. The other option is a great big HP workstation which is so much more cumbersome so really don't want to go that route. 

Fingers crossed it's not a debacle. 

Andi

funckdren:

Ajay: Do you know if the new native Mac version will be strictly for silicon Macs, or will it also be compatible with Intel Macs running the latest versions of MC? I ask because, contrary to Ernie’s experience, I have not found MC to run well on Macs of any stripe since MC2018.

I’ve edited happily on Macs since 1998, most recently with MC 2018 running smoothly for 5 years on a 2010 Mac Pro. I typically work with compressed, transcoded media. But eventually I needed to upgrade. After seeing all the trouble with silicon Macs and Blackmagic hardware, I opted for a 16-core Intel 2019 Mac Pro, with 192GB RAM, Radeon 6800X GPU, Avid DNxIO, and blazing fast RAID5 Areca enclosure. It’s an Avid supported system.

Immediately, I noticed beach ball hangs — not full freezes, but hangs that last 30-45 seconds, and then Avid recovers. This happens about 3-4 times every hour — pretty aggravating. I saw the beach balls with and without BM hardware enabled. Seemed like some kind of bottleneck, but I was not seeing any evidence of bottlenecks on Activity Monitor. I tried various operating systems and MC combinations. I tried Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma. I tried MC 2022, 2023, 2024, and all point releases. I tried three different Mac Pros, including a 24-core Mac Pro with 768GB RAM. I opened a support case and got good help from Clarence in Avid Support, who remoted in to my system and indeed witnessed several hangs, but nothing in the console or the MCFax reports gave any solid clues. We also tried many other things like disabling indexing, unmounting unnecessary volumes, tweaking all sorts of Project and User settings. On a whim I tried running MC2024 on a Mac Studio with Blackmagic hardware, and it was a disaster with loads of timeout errors and beachballs, as I suspected it would be based on the posts I had read.

When I upgraded to the 2019 Mac Pro and MC2024, I actually was in the middle of a very large documentary project with hundreds of hours of footage, which started on MC2018. I wondered if somehow the fact that the project was not native to the newer versions of MC was a factor. But after getting sick of beachballs, I decided to run this very same project with same MXF on a qualified Windows system. It ran beautifully for two days. ZERO beachballs.

This leads me to believe that something about newer MC running on the newer Mac platform is causing the problem. It’s hard to pin the blame entirely on Avid, with Mac putting out new OS releases so frequently. Compare Mac OS release schedule to Windows OS release schedule, and you can immediately guess which system will likely be more stable for Avid. Clarence himself admitted that most of his support cases these days are on Macs.

Anyway, I’m hoping that somehow the new native Mac versions of MC will be stable, and I’ll cough up the $ for a silicon Mac if I have to. I prize stability over speed any day and would happily go back to MC2018 if I could. I’ve been in the Mac ecosystem for 25 years and am reluctant to switch, but if these beachballs don’t get sorted out, I might have to make the leap.

Thanks for any info Ajay, and praying to the Mac gods for stability.

Hi funckdren,

Let me check this and will update you once I got the scoop.

 

Thanks,

Ajay

Hey Funckdren..

Nice to see you online.  :).  Ajay asked that I respond.  Currently,  it is planned for Native and MC will include the first iteration of Media Composer Native support.

Not sure if you are aware but BMD did release a new driver last week which seems to help a lot with the MC/BMD stability.

We also released a 2023.3.xversion that fixed a few memory scribbler issue we had in MC which related to BMD so the combo seems to be good right now with 2024.x.   The driver is 14.3 and can be obtained on the BMD site. we are testing it across our i.o devices and once we do, it will be most likely posted to the download center.  

The native is in beta now and thre are several known issues they are orking through but I am not sure the uccess of that yet as they are still chugging along.  

Happy holidays and please let me know if you have any more questions on this and I can be more specific if needed.

Marianna

Hi, Marianna! Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. :)

Thanks for the update. I don't quite understand your first sentence. Will the native silicon version be a separate installer or will it just be folded into the next release supporting both Silicon and Intel Macs?

And thx for the heads up - I will try out the new BM driver. I'm currently using 14.1 and still getting beachballs, which may or may not be BM related.

Hello funckdren - I have been experiencing the beachballs recently as well. I am using a BMD card and updated to the newest version of BMD Desktop Video. But have been seeing the ball.

This occurred while editing a multicam sequence with a group clip that had a very large Blackmagic Design 4k file, with 3 other 4k cameras, all linked to the raw files. It was running fine without the BMD camera in the group. I had to make a proxy of the BMD file and then update the Group file with the new BMD, and it seems to work pretty well, not 100%.

However, I still get a few beachballs, and although one drive is a large thunderbolt G-RAID Shuttle with 8 drives (about 1300 MB/s), the other one I use for Avid MediaFiles is a very old G-Speed Q (about 200 MB/s). I think MC is waiting for files to be delivered pretty fast for 4 x 4k files, and the G-Speed Q is the hold up. Now this may be overkill, but I'm going to try a Sonnet M.2 PCIe card with NVME drives on it for Avid MediaFiles and footage files. Supposed to do around 13,000 MB/s on 2019 MacPro PCIe 3.0 (30,000 MB/s on the silicon MacPro PCIe 4).

This may all be moot as the Apple Silicon version may work fine with the Mac Mini M4! Sigh... I worked on a 2012 5,1 MacPro until this summer, so I guess I paid my debt to society.

I have to stick with the 2019 MacPro for a little while at least, just to get some value for the investment, and gives some time while the bugs get discovered and worked out with the silicon version.

But, I hear you, that beachball is no fun and you have to be patient otherwise you can crash the thing and lose your last bit of work. But plugins work a lot better with the 2019 MP.

best,

Ernie

Hey Ernie – I would be very interested to see if your NVME storage upgrade makes a difference. I'm afraid my guess is that it won't. I am editing all day long with DNxHR LB or SQ footage using an 8x8TB SSD Areca RAID, with average speeds topping 4500 MB/sec. I should NOT be experiencing beachballs due to slow drives.

I think there is some other root to my recurring beachball problem. Keep us posted!

Ernie – Could you also describe your beachballs? I'm wondering if they're like mine, where MC hangs for 30-45 seconds and then recovers. So a beachball temporary hang (albeit a long one) rather than a permanent hang, which required a forced quit and was much more common on earlier versions of MC.

Thanks for any intel (pun intended).