"I mean, jeez. They just left the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, what's the big deal?"
100% of the computer graphics at these events came from PCs and Macs with their default video output. Some even came from the HDMI output on a Raspberry Pi.
I worked a lot with the production companies behind these shows and it seemed to be SOP to use a regular Macbook with Powerpoint to drive the displays.
Maybe at the super bowl, or the opening of the olympics, or at some major pop stars tour where everything is time coded and planned and is the same production every night, sure.
But at festivals? Clubs? Whatever NYE party you go to this year? No.
That being said, I just don't believe you. A 7-figure budget with semi trucks full of equipment that couldn't afford (or didn't think to afford) a video display device is unbelievable if you want to suggest that a small dot makes this unusable.
All of those things can be controlled though, unlike this new dot. I've had my personal laptop hooked up to one of these huge screens with a live audience of 20,000. Yes, you better be careful to close out your messaging and Gmail and everything else. But also, since it's running as an extended display and the program is running in full-screen mode, the OS generally will not show the things you mentioned anyway, in my experience.
An orange dot would not have been tolerated in this environment. "Unusable" may not be the right word, but the people who set up these kinds of things are very particular about how things look, and so is the client who is paying millions of dollars.
In the cases I've been involved with, the computers generating the displays came from the clients, though the production company also used Macs with Powerpoint for creating lower-thirds for IMAG. The client-provided computers were running a custom software application designed for displaying data on a secondary screen. I'm not even sure if Decklink can even do that as the software just expects to output to a secondary display (it does not know anything about Decklink).
Here is a picture of one such event: https://media.beam.usnews.com/7e/1e/aecd818e4128ab6759358307...
If the computers came from the clients, then the clients didn't care whether something might pop-up on accident. There's literally no way for someone on the production side to prevent that with a computer that they don't know the ins-and-outs of so it cannot be an issue so that's not the type of situation that I'm talking about.
I'm only talking about the people who are saying that this dot makes a Macbook "unusable" for the purpose of display. That's 100% not true and anyone that needs that level of precision, as a professional, uses dedicated I/O hardware to keep exactly that from happening.
I don't know what else to say. I work with people who put on live shows for 20,000+, they use PCs and Macs to drive the display WITHOUT Decklink or similar, and they would be upset if there was a persistent orange dot on the screen. If you want to split hairs about whether or not that makes the new macOS "unusable" in these situations, then fine, but in the environment I'm familiar with it would not be tolerated. They would replace the Mac device with a PC which doesn't have this issue because they would deem it unusable, even though it can technically still display images on a screen.
And despite your repeated comments on this article, it IS possible to configure a PC to not show any notifications for use in a live show, between a combination of changing OS settings, closing unneeded programs, and using the fullscreen APIs of the OS. This is something that can be done ahead of time and tested. I've written software that shows fullscreen on secondary displays on large projectors for presentation-like purposes and I have never had an OS notification pop up over the fullscreen software on a secondary display, even on other people's machines where they didn't take care to shut down programs and turn off notifications. Other commenters here seem to have similar experiences.
notifications = low probability
orange dot = 100%
The risk of an embarrassing notification got traded for the certainty of the orange dot.
For what its worth, from someone who doesn't work in this space, there's something really confusing to me:
This thread is about professionals who:
1. Are displaying visuals at venues with million dollar A/V hardware budgets.
2. For which an orange dot (or anything other than pixel-perfect outputs) is a complete showstopper.
3. Who can't afford a $100 dongle mentioned upthread to output pixel-perfect graphics from their Macs.
I'm with you right up until point #3, but I'm really struggling with the last bit. $100 doesn't even sound like "prosumer" money to me. If $100 is really a show stopper for your million dollar business, you need to charge more.
Furthermore, while I'm not an expert on these $100 dongles, my understanding is that they do not present as just another monitor (since that would defeat the purpose). Thus, you cannot just show anything on their outputs that you could otherwise show on a monitor, right? My understanding is the application has to be written specifically to output to the Decklink (but I may very well be wrong on this) - if that's the case then the $100 dongle does not fix every situation here since a lot of things that get presented may not support it.
Apparently not because the OS has always been able to do this. They're just not happy because the OS has now chosen something that they disagree with. Ignorance of the limitations is not the same as being "happy with the way it was" even if ignorance is bliss.
>written specifically to output to the Decklink
With the DeckLink specifically, yes. That's a choice made by Blackmagic, though. There are other I/O devices that let you output any window's content (like OBS does with its virtual cameras).
Sure, but this is a classic case of shifting the externalities of your industry onto the rest of the rest of the public. People who operate coal power plants were happy with generating tons and tons of smoke (but they do see the value of less smoke for the communities around the power plant).
You're asking everyone else to accept being a little less secure so that it can be easier for you to make money.
> if that's the case then the $100 dongle does not fix every situation here since a lot of things that get presented may not support it.
The most annoying part of this entire thread is how the goal posts keep shifting. The use-case that the $100 doesn't fix is one that has all of these constraints:
1. Must use audio input on the same computer that is generating the visuals (so you get an orange dot)
2. Is generating the visuals from software (that can't be modified) that can only draw to plain old monitors
3. Is doing all the above in a professional environment with XX,000 people in attendance, where not looking professional (having an orange dot) is a show-stopper.
4. The venue and/or AV professionals have no facilities to crop / letterbox / pillarbox real-time video streams
If a customer hands you a mac with a PowerPoint deck, you break condition #1. If the use-case is an artist who wrote a custom sound->viz app, you break #2. If this is a church group or a VJ in an underground club, you break condition #3. I'm having trouble imagining situation where #3 and #4 are not mutually exclusive.
If a customer hands you a laptop at the event with custom audio->viz software that doesn't work with the dongle and this is a professional event with XX,000 attendees and you don't have a way to letterbox, I believe correct answer is "We're the AV team not tech support. Your equipment is creating the orange dot. We're just projecting what you provide".
In other words, I'll stipulate that the $100 doesn't cover literally all use-cases, but the cases it doesn't cover are the nichyest of niche cases and ones where the customer has unrealistic expectations.
If you're expecting Apple to turn off a feature that is useful (and wanted) by millions of users just to help a number of users who can be counted on one hand... well, those handful of users better be buying a lot of Mac Pros.
"In our particular case, this means that this orange dot appears on the stage output, which is totally unacceptable for anyone using macOS as a professional video tool that sends video output to a video projector."
Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square.
Seems unlikely that whatever's driving the billboards in time square needs to have the mic on...and that a tiny bit of postproduction is a burden on the people making said videos.
There have been many interactive billboards in Times Square. Some of them are at ground level. The article even mentions this use case: "Those applications don’t even need to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like"
> tiny bit of postproduction is a burden on the people making said videos.
What postproduction are you referring to? The dot is added to the video output by the Mac, not added to the video file. You can't edit it out.
Why would anyone want to suppress a warning to the user that they are being surveilled?
Crop a 20 pixel column? Surely we have hardware that can do that in real time today...
1) Who uses macOS to run a billboard?!?
2) As far as I can tell the orange dot displays in the menu bar? Does it show in the full screen app???
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/693969
Removing it in full screen ought to be the easy fix for Apple. By the time you've started the app and are done fiddlign with it while setting it up for production use, it should no longer be a surprise that it's using the mic.
Also, AFAIK apps don't use to autostart in full screen (might even be against design guidelines) so there should always be an opportunity to notice any spying in time.
It's absolutely not a stretch someone has a mac mini to run these.
That said, only a fool would upgrade to bleeding edge software in this usecase.
So while I can’t say if this is still the case or not, in 2012 many of the times sq billboards were being driven by macs.
> Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square.
I don't think I would notice or care?
Do you think none of the advertisers, or billboard owners, would notice or care?
Those are the clients paying the people that read this site to create and run their live visuals.
A 5 foot diameter orange dot on top of their ad is not what they signed off on. There is money at stake.
Whether you care or not isn't relevant.
Times Square is already blanketed in actual surveillance unrelated to live visuals on billboards.
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/timessquare/
https://worldcams.tv/united-states/new-york/times-square
https://www.mylivestreams.com/webcam/times-square-live-strea...
Potato, potato. If a billboard has a microphone attached, it's not unreasonable to put a visual tax on it. (Or the economic tax of using dedicated equipment. Nobody is running Times Square billboards off a Mac.)
Frankly, it doesn't matter if you would notice or care.
It is a special case where Macs connected to a projector are used to display live visual. The microphone is on, most likely so that the visuals can respond to sounds, and you get to show an ugly orange dot to your audience.
Macs are used a lot in the entertainment industry so it is not an insignificant problem.
The initial example of live shows (specifically the subset of which where the same device is being used for some kind of audio input and visual output) is so far the most convincing example because the orange dot is redundant there.
Would it bother you if Star Wars had an orange dot in the corner the whole time? People want to make professional videos and live streams, and not have a constant reminder that there's a Mac somewhere involved in the video... and this has hosed people's workflows.
My honest guess is that the author of the article is SUPER mad about this out of some principle-of-the-thing about how the design shouldn't do this, and they just ran with that in writing self-righteous nonsense about how this makes presentations impossible or something.
It's about as bad as having the cursor show up on the edge of a live presentation slide.
This is a news site for professional digital musicians and animators. The kind of people that are in charge of making the digital visuals behind a live performance like I described. This is not a "principle of the thing" argument, it's a "this update stops us from doing our job using Mac hardware" argument.
The hyperbole here is just so extreme.
You've never been near a show production, have you? I was involved with an amateur theater that had some projections during one of their plays. Even they were very peculiar about what was projected, where, and how.
One of the projections was a black-and white archive footage. Yes thank you, I'd love an orange dot there, it doesn't ruin it at all.
I mean, yeah, I don't want the dot there. It breaks the fourth-wall in a way. But there's something to that too. Society of the Spectacle and so on…
It's FUNNY to notice how a little orange dot is taken as such a profound threat. People could do well to reflect on the whole context a bit. Our dependency on tech and the way we depend on a few companies who force things on us, it's all serious, scary, and absurd. And this orange dot business is not the ultimate example of the problem, it's a silly one, that yes, I acknowledge is a huge problem for some people's jobs in practice.
I've been around show production stuff, and I don't respect the way everyone takes themselves so damned seriously in that world. The dadaists were onto something.
Anything that doesn't have a workaround gets thrown away. And nope, it's bot a hyperbole. I've seen lamps discarded because they couldn't be made work just right, and stage props removed entirely because they looked out of place for that particular stage.
"Something is shitty, let's laugh about it and continue regardless" is what often separates people who don't care from people who do. Unfortunately, seeing all the shit we have to put up with daily, those people that do are in the minority.
The idea that you have to connect laughing with not fixing things is evidence of being in a triggered, reactive, threatened state.
Did I ever suggest that the problem shouldn't be fixed?
People who can laugh about something are people who aren't in a state of threat. And yes, those who don't care are less likely to be threatened. But we can also find ourselves in situations where we are willing to laugh and not be so defensive and self-righteous while we still care about things.
In our outrage-driven society, that's the real minority: people who CARE and are also willing to laugh and not be in a victim mentality. And to be clear, this isn't some fundamental feature like we simply are one way or the other. These are states we can shift between, and most people are shifting all the time.
So presumably you'd see a big orange dot in the right-most screen here: https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
Mic input is very useful for receiving timecode to keep production gear in sync.
But.... why? Why would a little orange dot offend anyone?
Monitor outputs are for monitors - if you want an application-specific video output you can get that and it won't be a desktop so it won't have this problem.
If you mirror your desktop then yeah... you get whatever desktop UI chrome is on your desktop.
You're not going to "gotcha!" people who have actually done this stuff.
That's just how this stuff works. Sure, you could use something like a DeckLink, but the vast majority of things like this just use a monitor output.
For the use cases like the one described in the article, that distinction matters. I'm not questioning the usefulness of the orange dot, but rather the people saying the workflow of using a second monitor as output as being invalid and wrong.
TRUE: the dot BEING THERE is useless (and undesireable and bad)
FALSE: the dot makes Macs useless for live visuals
Just because something is 100% bad design, bothersome, 100% negative, and should never have been allowed to happen, does NOT mean it destroys a product entirely.
When Mini Coopers were made with the stupidest turn signals ever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282) that doesn't make the car undrivable even though there's ABSOLUTELY no defense of the design.
Just because other people are feeling super aggravated about this completely stupid design decision by Apple doesn't mean it's valid to project that on me as if I'm fighting some battle.
I don't really care about this. I get it, people are upset about a totally indefensible, short-sighted design that impacts people's ability to use Macs to do presentations that will be accepted in professional contexts.
Yes, there's some sense to the hyperbole that says something is "useless" when reality is "this will not be accepted in my field of work". It's still hyperbole. Admitting that it's hyperbole doesn't mean accepting the bad design.
This is like when you crash a car. Insurance company considers it "totalled". But you can still drive it. The cost of fixing the car is more than the value of the car.
In this case, the negative effect of the orange dot outweighs all utility of the product for the use case. So it's useless in the sense that it's "worse than nothing" by some metric. It's useless in the same way that a shopping cart is useless for commuting to work. I mean, TECHNICALLY, you could commute to work in a shopping cart. But it would be worse than just not using it.
The orange dot doesn't total the presentation the way a totalled-car in a crash does, certainly not necessarily. It's NOT worse than nothing. It's not like a shopping cart for commuting to work.
The point of the replies here overall is that those things are hyperbole. It's NOT about nit-picking the language. It's "well, technically, the car will still drive in this case", it's saying that the orange dot DOES NOT ruin presentations that badly. You can ACTUALLY and PRACTICALLY present with the orange dot.
A better analogy: your nice car gets a rock through a window with a noticeable hole and huge cosmetic crack. You say "I can't drive this now! My car is useless! It's totalled!" And people are like "Dude, it's not totalled." And you say, "This is my professional car for business, I can't show up with a cracked window!" and People are like, "well, you could actually…"
It's not like the software has a bug that inverts all the colors, and people are saying "you could in fact do an inverted-color presentation, it's possible". It's JUST a little dot, and it's bad, but it's NOT as bad as the hyperbole.
I'll take you at your word that it's not that bad for you. I'll take someone else at their word that it is that bad for them. It probably depends a lot on the context.
The orange dot being unacceptable to some people and situations is never something I've doubted in the slightest.
Some people can't seem to grasp that it's perfectly consistent to say "you're being hyperbolic, but your objection is fully sound". It's as though after a crash that results in a shattered window, someone says "it's totalled!" and then if someone else says "it's NOT totalled" they take that to mean that a shattered window is no real problem.
The orange dot is totally stupid, unacceptable in many situations, the decision was atrocious, AND the language people have been using about it is hyperbolic.
I see that some people above suggested a solution with an extra hardware device but even though a lot of theses creatives are using macs, they aren't especially tech literate outside of their field and have to make do with venue that can use quirky hardware with sometimes very limited time to set up their gears.
This dot is a major pita for these users.