Apple's Dirty Little Secret

I was at the Apple store today checking out the new Retina 15" laptops, which were indeed awesome: screen much less glossy and they're very light.

But then I started playing with FCP X to see how it worked (they didn't have 10.0.5 yet) and decided to see what the media was that they're using on the Race Car demo project that was on the system. I noticed that the footage was set to use Original footage, so I decided to see what the originating codec was. Right clicking on the clips in the Event, it took me to the Originals folder where I opened one the clips in QuickTimeX. Checking the codecs, they were 1080/24p but in Apple Pro Res (Proxy).

This implies to me that Apple is goosing the supposed performance of their store machines by putting much smaller, easier to play media in as full-res, which is to me, somewhat misleading.

Am I being too hard on Apple?

It's a retail store, they're sales people, show me a sales person who's totally honest.

But yeah, that's very odd. As a trainer I have that project for doing demos and such. It does come with original and proxy, so go back and check in the preferences to see which it is set to use. If it's set to use proxies, that's what FCP X will point you to. If you change it to Original/Optimized for playback, then do a Reveal In Finder, it'll take you to the optimized ProRes files.

If in fact the ONLY copy of the media is proxy, that's simply BS.

Easier still, just look on the hard drive and dig into the Events folder and see what's there.

Wow what a dirty secret on a demo machine. :woohoo:

APTS L1 book is all proxy media as well. Most of the L2 book is as well. The color correction stuff is in ProRes, some in HQ.

How did it look? There's over 10G of proxy media, video and audio, in that project. There's a lot of stuff to play with. I guess they could have loaded just a few clips at high res and left it that.

Our local store is closed for renovations but opens back up on the 20th. I'm taking a USB drive in and copying 8 clips for a multiclip test. I wanna see how that retina MBP does with ProRes 422 for real.

The Event media had ProRes Proxy material in the Originals folder and nothing in an Optimized media folder and virtually nothing in a Proxy media folder. As I understand it, normal operation has FCPX create 960x540 proxies from Origninal footage (if requested). But since there's no "Original" footage that is ever 1080 Proxy, it appears that Apple is showing a demo of an unrealistic scenario. If they showed 1080 HQ material, then I'd see if the machine chugs a little harder on that. Of course if there's no chugging on HQ either, then they're just saving space for their demo....