For the videographer U2 Stefan Desmedt, organizing spectacular the show U2 in the framework of the world tour of the Irish band, the Mac computers were not powerful enough for the job. For this reason, it switched on the PC in a special configuration.
Band U2’s world tour Innocence + Experience using the video in the form of a tunnel mounted above the stage along it. The walls of this corridor is semi-transparent led screens, the height of 7 meters and length is 29. They are mounted from the 240 panels V-Thru company Saco Technologies.
Acoustic guitar soloist music group, Bono gets into the tunnel and seems to become part of the video, interacting with the image. The rest of the time on the screens played video archive and graphics group, specially prepared for the tour. From time to time, the operator transmits the screen image from the cameras, the concert live.
As told Desmedt, all files of the video for the concert are stored on a hardened flash array, EMC VNXe3200, and record each concert are stored on the EMC Data Domain system — about the terabytes a night. The survey is carried out on two dozen odd cameras; estimated total volume of material for the tour will be of the order of 50 TB.
Management the show is performed by using a software system company, d3 Technologies Windows specific configuration. Desmidt stated that “on a Mac can’t do that — he’s not powerful enough”. AMD added that “Apple is far behind in this respect, which is why he “needs something on steroids”.
The most powerful at the moment Apple computers – workstations Mac Pro is equipped with a 12-core server processor Intel Xeon processor with a clock frequency of 2.7 GHz and 30 MB of cache memory. As the storage is used 1TB Quad-channel flash memory with a frequency of 1866 MHz with correction of errors and two graphics cards AMD FirePro D700 with 6 GB of memory, which is up to 2.5 times faster than previous generation models.
In Russia the cost of a Mac Pro in the maximum configuration is almost 700 000.
