With last year’s introduction of the Thunderbolt interface, the mobile editing workstation really came into its own. Some observers speculated that the super-high-speed jack, which makes incredibly powerful peripherals truly portable, was a signal of the impending demise of the decidedly non-portable Mac Pro tower.
And when it came to portable power in 2011, more editors and VFX artists than ever started eyeballing solid-state storage as a potential win for their mobile workstations. The drives remain quite expensive compared to spinning disks, but with hard-drive prices sky-high in the aftermath of major floods in Thailand, they didn’t seem quite so extravagant by year’s end.
Curious how the makers of increasingly mobile desktop software packages were seeing their user’s experience changing, we asked reps from the big three makers of nonlinear editing software — Adobe, Apple and Avid — about Thunderbolt, SSDs, and what other storage trends they expect to make the difference for their customers this year. Scroll down to read the responses.
