Apple's new SOC Codec Speculations

As the title says, this thread is about the speculation of video codec support on Apple’s upcoming new ARM SOC for their Macs.

All I can see with that ProRes acceleration is that DNxHD and DNxHR will run stupidly slow on the ARM Macs, reinforcing spread of a proprietary codec for TV and Film production. This is very bad.

DNxH* is a SMPTE standard that FFmpeg devs can access and reproduce properly. ProRes had to be poorly reverse engineered, and most broadcasters deny FFmpeg reverse engineered ProRes encodes due to lack of quality. This is what a proprietary codec does, and FFmpeg is in use practically everywhere.

Dark times are ahead if you’re not already locked into Apple’s walled garden. We desperately need an open source wavelet codec that’s efficient for acquisition and intermediate work in post production, This is where the Alliance for Open Media has the most weight.

Newer versions of the Atomos Ninja could scrap DNxHD and DNxHR altogether if Apple has their way and cripple performance of that codec to unusable levels on ARM Macs.

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Why would they run slow?

I’m not going to refute you as I am uneducated in this area, it might be worth going into further detail in a different thread along with an explanation for a layman in such topic of interests like me.

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No acceleration. The Video Production accelerator is only ProRes and ProRes RAW. Like how the Mac Pro Afterburner is ProRes and ProRes RAW only.

Basically it’s like if your GPU can’t hardware decode VP9. Same principal, but with ProRes. ARM doesn’t have enough unaccelerated software decode power for DNxHD.

Oh so they’d run “normal” and prores would be accelerated?

Does afterburner not accelerate red raw and other things as well? This is not my wheelhouse so I’m genuinely asking.

Red Rocket accelerates R3D RAW. It’s another dedicated card. Afterburner is only ProRes and ProRes RAW.

Can you put a red rocket in a Mac Pro?

Yes, it’s a standard PCI-E card.

I know physically, but it’s functional in macOS (in premiere I’m assuming)

Resolve, VFX software, and many other post production things written in x86 can take advantage of the Red Rocket.

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Well, if they’re developing the apple way ™ they can just click “build for arm” and they’re good.

Still, it’s downtime that Apple’s forcing on the pro software development community.

Just when they reach somewhat stable, a new architecture appears.

It’s PowerPC to x86 all over again.

If they got Adobe to rewrite their entire library again, I imagine Davinci will as well. In any case, I expect Mac Pro to be the last to go ARM. They just redesigned it. It’s going to be 5+ years before that happens again.

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I don’t see how that’s true at all.

You don’t have to buy an ARM mac until you’re confident it’s all ready.

Or, if you don’t like it, you can always move to PC.

And most importantly, they’re still selling Intel Macs for the foreseeable future.

They mentioned at 2 more years of Intel mac hardware, and I think they said Software support to 2027, IIRC

It’s not like they’re doing a forced software update to remove support for DNXHR

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I don’t expect any difference to be honest. You have the turbo card now for Pro Res on mac pro. Everything else is using metal, like they already do.

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Do the ARM chips have additional prores acceleration or are they just generally more efficient at it?

Remember planned obsolescence though? Some people stuck to Lion and Mountain Lion for as long as possible to keep FCP7 working. There will be many more people holding on dearly to their x86 MacBook Pros, but Apple already made them hard to repair.

ONLY ProRes acceleration according to the design of the CPU. Not other codecs.