Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

How is iPad going to handle RAW 8k video? Its highest storage is small, good only for a scratch disk at best or for very short movies.

View on HN

When it does support it, probably very well. iPads could support editing and playing back multiple simultaneous 4K video streams long before desktop Macs could due to the huge bandwidth between cpu, memory and gpu of A series chips. M chips dialed that up to 11.

As to your storage concerns USB-C iPads, apart from having up to 2TB of internal storage and up to 16 GB of memory, support external drives just as well as any laptop. The time when high end iPads had below low end desktop specs is long gone.

LumaFusion, aka the only way to edit professional video on iPad before this announcement, supports direct editing/ingestion and working directly on an external ssd. With USB-C and thunderbolt supported on the M1 ipads, the experience is basically, hook up your 4TB samsung external portal drive, and edit away. You don't need to copy the information onto the ipad itself. The export also goes to the external drive.

If BMD did not support this fuction for Resolve, they will have a hard time competing against LumaFusion.

However I think LumaFusion will be very carefully monitoring this market. It is theirs to lose.

LumaFusion is a fantastic app, but I do find it a bit fiddly to use sometimes - really precise edits are much harder than they should be. Looking forward to giving Resolve a go though.

Not many people are going to care. I know a lot more people with 4k and lower short videos from iPhones/GoPros/Drones you name it. Being able to edit personal videos on the fly would be very nice.

External drives just like people using macbooks

Does iPadOS support them well though?

Yes, you plug it in and it shows up in the Files app as another storage source along with iCloud and any third party service you have like OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive or you can store files locally in the iPad.

Surprisingly yes. It used to be a limitation that apps would have to import the file on to local storage, edit, export back to external. But now extra APIs have been added and video editors can edit on external storage.

The iPad has been sitting in this limbo state where they are way more powerful than most people expect but still not really worth it when you can get a MacBook for the same price and do more.

The workflow many post-production studios use for editing/grading is to keep files on a NAS with proxies (i.e., lower-quality transcodes of the video clips in the edit) on a local disk -- that's the workflow I use even with my desktop machine, and I bet it'll work well with this too.

Now that mobile devices are getting this powerful, we need them to start supporting larger storage again.

They are expandable now up to 40Gb/s per tech specs

The iPad has options up to 2TB SSD and supports USB4 external storage along with 10Gbit ethernet.

The tests I’ve seen say that (depending on how you implement it) an iPad Pro M1 only pulls 5Gbps (directly powering) to 7.7Gbps (powered) out of a 10GbE card.

Has there been some development in this area?

Not sure. But I'm sure 5Gbps is probably good enough for any work you'd be doing on an ipad.

I'd generally agree, with the caveat that running a video editing workflow off of a NAS/SAN would want all the speed it can get, which is 10GbE at this time on MacOS/iPad OS (AQC107 chip).

So for copying files over it's bit slower, but for working with stuff it could be a pretty big issue. I really don't know; I haven't tried it as my iPad Pro is an earlier non-TB model.

If you have a camera that shoots RAW 8k video, I'd wager you aren't using an iPad to edit on.

OK, iPad Pro has something like 4k-5k video camera, which produces a lot of RAW data anyway (assuming software can access RAW feed with some lossless compression applied), so the problem is still there unless you want to prepare videos with ugly artifacts from compression.

iPad Pros can have 2TB onboard and hook up to external storage just fine. There isn’t much difference between that and the average laptop.

That said 90% of users are probably going to be working with compressed 4k video because they don’t notice the difference and it saves time.

Does the 2TB model have any additional bells and whistles? The difference to the base model is 1300€, which is almost as much as just buying an "average laptop".

The apple website does not mention anything, but that cannot be right. ?

https://www.apple.com/de/shop/buy-ipad/ipad-pro/12,9%22-disp...

Yes, but you might be using an iPad to take your rushes and throw together a quick assemble right there on set, "there that's how it'll look", and even import the timeline into your proper project.

I don't think it is the tool for the job

I don't think it is the tool for that job, but for footage acquired on the iPad it will do just fine thank you very much. The iPads are being used for shooting way more frequently than I'd have given credit, until I realize that if an iPad was available back when I was unable to afford other equipment, I'd have used the hell out of it too. We shot the shit out of VHS=>SVHS=>Hi8=>Digi8=>DV/MiniDV as if it were film. Now, there's image stabilization, light as a feather, prices are a fraction of prior so for the price of one thing you can get like 3 or 4, and then consider them crash cams, etc. Then when you get done shooting, there's 0 time wasted on transfering to your editor as your friggin camera is the editor and the color corrector. I mean, why the hell would you not do this if you're a broke ass college film student. hell, even elementary school kids could be doing this. it's mind boggling what kids have at their finger tips now.

I was talking about the specific thing I responded to. 8k RAW video on a device without the storage for it. But I'm sure there are proxies possible.

You can likely find some out of touch people to proselytize to somewhere else on this thread.

And i was agreeing with you. The proselytizing as you call it was me being able to expand past the nonsense proposed and offered up a more compelling workflow. Sorry to offend thy sensitivities on expanding upon a conversation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com