Mac vs. PC: Digital Video Editing Comparison 414
mnemonic writes "DigitalVideoEditing.com has posted its third Mac vs. PC comparison, dealing with performance in After Effects and Photoshop, graphics applications one might expect the Mac to be significantly faster in. It should be noted that the author, Charlie White, is a long-time PC supporter and disliker of Macs, though, as he shows, this preference is for as legitimate reasons as the ones devoted Mac users cite to disparage PC's. Ace's Hardware has another comparison that goes further in depth into the specifics of the G4, P4 and Athlon processors. As when comparing any two pieces of hardware, it's important to think not only of the relationship between performance and specification, but performance and price."
Biased or not... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Biased or not... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yep... (Score:5, Informative)
The bigger issue is that in the remaining 10 months before 970 systems come out Apple will be falling further and further behind in the markets they want to reconquer: video and graphics.
Re:Yep... (Score:3, Informative)
Motorola is about to loose *all* of their apple contract. Motorola cpu's are going to be twice the price/performance than a 970, and they can't top 1.3g if they tried.
Re:Yep... (Score:3, Informative)
If you mean the AMD Hammer, you may be right. I don't know the time schedule on that chip nor its SPECMARKS off the top of my head. Whether the Hammer and 970 are roughly equal in performance is an other issue entirely.
About dual systems... (Score:2, Informative)
You do the math. Go to the 3rd page if you are impatient.
Re:About dual systems... (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, not very useful.
Re:Yep... (Score:5, Informative)
You're right, the 970 will help a lot. What's really amazing is that the 1.2 Ghz G4s are competitive at all. Altivec is so kick-ass for things like Photoshop that it allows Macs to be in the running with machines almost three times their clock speed.
Because of the superiority of Altivec, I'm not really worried about the 970 lagging behind Intel or AMD chips. Sure, SpecINT and SpecFP scores may be a little behind, but OS X + Final Cut Pro + Altivec should rock anything else on the block.
Also, remember that the 970 draws a rather low current in comparison to similar performing x86 chips. That means that Apple should be able to make laptops that can mop the floor with any x86-based portable, since they won't have to make huge performance concessions for battery life. Having desktop editing power in a 5 pound laptop is a very compelling proposition in the video market.
I'm not really worried about Apple's position. Even if they don't have the "fastest" machine on the market, they still seem primed to dominate the NLE segment. Final Cut Pro is such an attractive product (at a sweet price) that it seems masochistic to purchase anything else.
Re:Biased or not... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you tell me i'm wrong, take a stroll through any of the big (or small) production and post-production shops in the world, and marvel at the fact that, with the exception of secretarial workstations, every machine in the office is some sort of macintosh, or else a highly specialized box like an SGI running Inferno [discreet.com] or Fire [discreet.com]. The Macintosh platform, and the software written for it, is a far better choice than ANY PC-based setup as far as dealing with video.
Even prosumer and amateur customers will find better support from the Apple end of things. Final Cut Pro and iMovie work far better than any PC equivalent. If you are a speed junkie, sure, get a PC, and then you can brag about how your benchmarks are higher than your mac-using friends. But don't be at all surprised when your actual output and workflow suffers because you aren't using the best tools for the job.
Re:Biased or not... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's really not an indication of definitive superiority of the Mac over PC. It means that the big production houses got a good deal on a ton of the machines, as opposed to worrying about the benchmarks. I've worked in 1 TV studio, visisted another, and talked with a few places that do animation and digital video. PC is their primary hardware, by far.
The truth of the matter is that when you get a Mac, you don't really get more than what you'd get with a PC. Firewire (and I can personally attest to this) works great on a PC with Windows 2000 installed. And yes, I do DV work. I don't have stability or maintenance issues. I have more software. I have more plugin support for apps such as After Effects or Lightwave. And I have access to nearly all the hardware that's out there.
Studios that use these machines have similar feelings, but they need to be well supported. They can't afford to hire a team of sysadmins to keep a 100 computer network working. Any big studios are going to have to heavily consider who their vendor is, even if it means a cut in per-machine performance. If Apple comes up and says "it can do what you need it to do, we can fit within your budget, and we'll make sure to keep you running because you're a valued customer" , that is a more valuable proposition than "we're 1.5 times as fast as Mac."
Re:Biased or not... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Biased or not... (Score:2)
That was true a few years ago. Recently, it's not so true anymore. As a matter of fact, companies like Foundation Imaging have been able to save quite a bit of money by not buying that expensive hardware, yet they still turn around kick ass digital effects.
It used to be that if you bought a $10,000 machine, you got a hell of a lot more than if you bought a $2,000 running inferior software. That gap has narrowed considerably in recent years. PC software has gotten cheaper and more powerful (Maya dropped from $7,500 to $2,500, Lightwave dropped from $2,500 to $1,500, etc...). Network rendering licenses are dirt cheap. With that $10k, you can buy a number of headless PCs.
You'll notice that SGI's not exactly a big screaming deal anymore, despite the surge in digitally produced movies.
Re:Biased or not... (Score:3, Interesting)
Even assuming that most shops do use mostly Macs, this proves nothing regarding the current superiority of one platform over another. With all their employees already trained on Macs, most established studios choose to stick with the platform, incrementally upgrading and hand-me-down-ing their Macs rather than pitching the entire installed base (both hardware and software) and starting over from scratch in order to gain a slight technical performance increase. No, where you have to look to see what is currently the best is in the new start-up studio. When you look there, You see a lot of PCs.
Re:Biased or not... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Biased or not... (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been the case for about 5 years or so that you could do the same work on a PC for significantly less money (in hardware costs) than with a Mac.
That said, mosst folks are diehard platform fanatics (regardless of the I-Switch campaign), especially Mac users (boy, religious fanatics could take some lessons) and tend to stick with what they know best.
I must say that the market has been leaning toward Apple as of late, but really becuase of Final Cut Pro. Though I myself am a PC guy, I have to hand it to Apple, not for clever ad campaigns, but becuase they designed an excellent NLE (non linear editing). There is nothing under $1000 on a PC that can do the same (sorry Premiere users). We've found a number of high end users that had a few $10000+ Avid licenses moving to a single Avid and replacing others with FCP work stations. Avid has responded with DV Xpress, which is just over $1300 or so.
I guess my point is that for most users, the platform doesn't matter as much in terms of raw speed, but in terms of the software tools available for it. Aplle has the upper hand right now.
:P
Re:Biased or not... (Score:5, Informative)
If one was interested in a sub $1k NLE, I would endorse the product Vegas Video 3.0 [sonicfoundry.com] from Sonic Foundry [sonicfoundry.com] as being an excellent tool for pc users at an incredible price considering its feature set. It is the only reason I have to boot Windows, but it is also my favorite reason for powering any computer I own: it is that much fun.
The product can be purchased for $300-$400 dollars, and if you are a student, there is a handsomely discounted academic version available. I strongly recommend anyone who hasn't tried it to download the demo and see how good it is, and I am not [beatmode.com] alone [computervideo.net] in [apcmag.com] my [funkyfresh.com] opinion [camuser.co.uk].
You're right (Score:5, Insightful)
Charlie really doesn't seem to go into depth about why MacOS, a platform that has been at least 6 month behind in processing speed for 4 years, is still so damn popular in the multimedia industry. Not only does MacOS provide users with a more superior windowing scheme and better usability, there is a lot of system software (midi manager, color sync, quartz) and Apple developed multimedia software (FinalCut, Shake, etc) that simply makes MacOS much more desirable.
Honestly, who cares if filters render a third faster on my Athlons, who cares is my machine only has a bajillion MHz and not a bajillion and 2. Having the fastest PC on the block really isn't that important. Hell most print shops, music studios, etc -still- have 3 or 4 year old Mac workstations. Are they slow? of course they are. Nevertheless, they are still extremely functional.
It's rare that I ever find old Windows PCs in multimedia production environments.
Re:Yes, it *DOES* matter with video (Score:5, Informative)
On windows, color management sits somewhere in between the operating system and the video card's drivers. It's difficult to get good color management on windows, but it's not exactly rocket sience either. On apple hardware, it basically comes with the OS out of the box. As far as color control goes on desktop video software, IMO final cut does an excellent job for an all-in-one solution, and that's definately another bonus for the mac. I think that probably having both platforms around to do your work is the best way to go.
But, im neither a videographer nor a mac owner, so I'm not terribly qualified to comment I guess...
Re:Biased or not... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can actually start an MPEG encode on my PC (800 Mhz), SSH to my mac(533 Mhz), SCP the file over there, encode it and SCP it back before windows is even 1/2 done.
PC's are faster, so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Macs because I feel more productive and creative, and tends to be less of a hassle. As a programmer, it has everything I need without the unnecessary junk. With MacOS X, I can get under the hood if I want to, or ignore it if I don't want to deal with it.
If you ask me, it's more like comparing the nutritional value of your favorite food. A salad might be better for you than a slice of pizza, but if you like pizza, you like pizza. If you like PCs, you like PCs. I like Macs, and I don't care if they're slower, more expensive, etc.
I think people who are hung up in this whole OS war thing need to grow up and realize that people have different preferences and opinions. Even when it comes to computers.
speed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, "of higher quality" is rather subjective.
Re:speed... (Score:3, Insightful)
True but I'm pretty sure the functionality of Mac Photoshop and PC Photoshop are the same or extremely close. So I don't know if it matters in this argument.
Now if you're comparing the fasting Microsoft Paint to the slower Adobe Photoshop, then definitely I'd want the slower tool
Re:speed... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, if PS was an island of use, that would be true. Problem is, most people need to import files, maintain databases of images, and generally make applications interact. On any given day, I have PS 7, DW MX, iPhoto, Freehand, Navigator, IE 5, and RDC (to test pages on the crappy PC at my desk, no monitor) open at the same time. It's just easier on a Mac. Qualities you can't put in a chart, and I'm sure if I were a usability expert, I could explain in a thesis, but they still matter.
This also neglects the fact that the article was about Video Editing. FCP wins in ease of use and cost for a NLE app. That's Mac only.
Re:speed... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are subtle differences in what you can control minor things that are available (such as a Pantone library was available one version earlier for Mac). Not enough to really stop you from getting the job done on a PC, but enough to kill your boss if they don't buy you a Mac sooner or later.
Re:speed... (Score:5, Insightful)
It has to be embarrassing for Apple to be systematically beaten by PCs in areas where, traditionally, they had the edge. I think they are right to try to push Macs more as home computers ("look, it's simple, it's pretty, it's fast enough") than as high-end DCC machines. At least until they manage to get better hardware.
If they're waiting for the new IBM chip, that could be a long time.
RMN
~~~
Re:speed... (Score:3, Funny)
It has to be embarrassing for Apple to be systematically beaten by PCs in areas where, traditionally, they had the edge.
That's why Apple is changing its marketing campaign. [crazyapplerumors.com]
And now for something completely different (Score:3, Insightful)
Please provide clear examples (facts), for everyone's education.
RMN
~~~
Re:speed... (Score:2, Interesting)
Final Cut Pro is an other story..
So.. if you "double" the Mac score.. you gets beatten now?
First article's text before it gets /.ed very long (Score:2)
Dell's $2964 3.06 GHz P4 Trounces Fastest Mac on the Market
by Charlie White
Page 1 of 4
Dell has just introduced a new workstation featuring the latest Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz processor with hyperthreading and faster PC1066 RDRAM. Accordingly, we decided it was time for another Mac vs. PC duel, created especially for digital video editors and compositors. So we got our hands on one of those new 3.06GHz Dell boxes and the fastest Mac on the market, fired up our trusty After Effects 5.5 and Photoshop 7.0 benchmarks on both of them, and man oh man, you won't believe what happened this time. It was just downright startling.
We published an extensive and somewhat favorable review of our Mac dual 1.25 GHz G4 box in a recent DMN report, so if you haven't seen that article yet and would like deep background on the Mac side of this duel, click here for the full scoop. That said, here's the lowdown on the PC entry in this Mac vs. PC Duel III.
A few months ago, we reviewed a Dell system that packed the fastest PC processor available at the time, the Pentium 4 2.53GHz. Since then, the chipsters at Intel have topped themselves twice, and this time, the newest chip runs at an unprecedented 3.06 GHz. The big story, though, is the new hyperthreading technology included inside the processor that promises to speed up the festivities even more. Coupled with faster RAM, the new $2,964 Dell Precision Workstation 350 was startlingly fast.
All the things that were great about the last Dell Precision Workstation reviewed here are still present in this newest iteration, and a lot of the features have been enhanced. For example, this unit is even quieter than the last one tested, while its neatly arranged components inside and its sleek, easy-open black case all look the same as before. The computer still uses RDRAM, the same Intel 850e chipset and 533MHz frontside bus as its predecessor. But there's more than meets the eye here, and it's these certain modifications, along with a faster processor with its remarkable new hyperthreading feature, that are the reason for this newfound speed.
So what is this hyperthreading, anyway? Without boring you to tears, I'll tell you that hyperthreading is a new technology from Intel that makes one processor act like two. It doesn't double the speed of a processor, but makes it able to do most operations faster, and is particularly effective if you're doing more than one thing at a time with your computer (multitasking). Hyperthreading comes in handy, for example, if you're watching a DVD and working with documents at the same time. You could drop frames without hyperthreading, but with it switched on, all is smooth. A neat trick is that applications don't even need any special programming to use this new feature, although you will have to be using either Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home to take advantage of the hyperthreading.
We'll talk more about hyperthreading later, but for now, let's get to the benchmarks. Put succinctly, this is the fastest workstation we've tested, too, by a long shot. Wow. We ran our After Effects and Photoshop benchmarks on this machine, nine in all, and saw a speed improvement that was far beyond what we anticipated. Mac users will be disappointed to see that this new Dell machine, while priced $629 less than the Mac Dual G4 1.25 GHz machine, was nearly twice as fast on most of the nine benchmarks we ran.
Page 2 of 4
If you're not familiar with parts 1 and 2 of our Mac vs. PC series, we use nine benchmarks consisting of Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop scripts, to get a real-world look at how the fastest machines on each platform compare with each other. In the After Effects tests, we use a variety of effects and source material, including video files, Illustrator files and bitmap graphics. Then we line them all up and render them, uncompressed, using the Best settings on each platform. For the Photoshop benchmarks, we use graphics that would typically be used by a video editor, so this will represent the real world of editing and compositing, not that of pre-press where graphics can often exceed a gigabyte. After all, it's not often a video editor working in standard definition will use a graphic that's bigger than 720x486. For the machines we used, we asked Apple and Dell to send us their fastest machines with one gig of RAM and the fastest graphics card available, without any other specific requests. Both companies responded quickly, with Apple sending its latest Power Mac Dual G4 1.25GHz machine, equipped with a gig of DDR RAM, a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 graphics card and a 120GB 7200 RPM IBM Deskstar ATA-100 disk, running Mac OS X 10.2.1, whose system retail price is $3,949.00 [Editor's note: this was the price of the machine when we received it a month ago. Since then, Apple has reduced the price by $100 and offered an additional $260 "promotional savings," for a total retail price of $3,589. We have modified the text within this article to reflect those changes]. Dell, for unknown reasons (maybe they were just showing off) sent another single-processor box, this time with a 3.06GHz Intel P4 processor with its new hyperthreading feature turned on. Also aboard that PC was gig of PC1066 RDRAM and a Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM ATA-100 disk with an 8MB cache running Windows XP Professional, with the whole package coming in at $2964.
Results in minutes: seconds, winner in boldface type Dell Precision Workstation 340
Intel P4 2.53GHz,
512 MB RDRAM
Alienware 2001DV
Intel P4 2.53GHz,
1GB RDRAM Apple Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz with 1GB DDR RAM
$3,589
Dell Precision Workstation 350
Intel P4 3.06 GHz,
1GB PC1066 RDRAM
$2964
1. After Effects: Simple Animation
2. After Effects: Video Composite 1:12 1:21 1:25
3. After Effects: Data Project 3:01 4:06 3:47 2:05
4. After Effects: Gambler
5. After Effects: Source Shapes 5:54 8:19 7:06 4:14
6. After Effects: Virtual Set 8:42 9:39 8:15 4:24
1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation
2. Photoshop: Filter Effects
3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments
By the way, looking at these test results, you might want to know why Intel didn't introduce this hyperthreading capability earlier. Unfortunately, there were legal reasons for the delay, where Intel was in a court battle with former workstation maker and current high-tech company Intergraph, where both companies claimed to have invented the technique. Intergraph prevailed in court, Intel settled, and now is allowed to use this innovation.
Another important note: If you would like to replicate these After Effects tests for yourself, pick up the book After Effects 5.5 Magic that includes a CD containing these AE project files (and many more) along with all the media you'll need to exactly reproduce our results. Special thanks to After Effects 5.5 Magic's author Mark Christiansen and the book's editor, Nathan Moody, as well as New Riders Publishing for giving us permission to use materials from this outstanding book. Highly recommended.
So how did this Dell Precision Workstation 350 get to be so fast? There's even more whiz-bang newness under the hood, and all of it contributes to the speed bump we experienced with this new workstation. For instance, the memory consists of a gigabyte of PC1066 RDRAM instead of the PC800 RDRAM used before. Originally, Intel did not officially certify PC1066 memory on the 850e chipset until October 7th (2002), so Intel's good buddy Dell has followed suit and offered it with this latest workstation. That's good news, too, because now the memory's bandwidth matches the bandwidth of that 533MHz frontside bus -- 4.2 GB/sec. instead of the 3.2 GB/sec. it was limited to when using the PC800 memory. As a result, this unit has what's known as balanced architecture, where the increased bandwidth of the frontside bus can actually be used by the memory. If all this sounds like gobbledygook to you, let me just say this -- the thing is a lot faster because of these changes. And I'll tell you something else -- the Mac can't brag about balanced architecture, and that's why it's not able to take full advantage of its new DDR memory.
Further speeding up the Dell entry is new gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support. Also included in our test package is an ATI Fire GL E1 64MB graphics card, an entry-level 3D card that performs similarly to midrange graphics cards of just a few months ago (isn't technology wonderful?). Then there's our favorite disk drive at the moment, the Western Digital 120GB disk with an 8MB cache. It offers plenty of speed with a 40MB/sec. read and 42MB/sec. write speed according to our testing. Also along for the ride is a DVD-R/+RW drive. As icing on this tasty cake, content creators and gamers will like the quick 3D response of the new ATI graphics card while digital video editors will appreciate its dual monitor support. All these factors add up to the most advanced workstation we've tested.
Page 3 of 4
We also ran benchmarks on the system with hyperthreading turned off, to see what performance hit the system took without its new speed enhancer. On all the benchmarks, there was a reduction in speed without the hyperthreading which varied greatly depending on the operation (see table below).
Results in minutes: seconds, winner in boldface type Hyperthreading ON
Hyperthreading OFF
1. After Effects: Simple Animation
2. After Effects: Video Composite
3. After Effects: Data Project 2:05 2:32
4. After Effects: Gambler
5. After Effects: Source Shapes 4:14 4:59
6. After Effects: Virtual Set 4:24 5:49
1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation 4.5 4.8
2. Photoshop: Filter Effects 35.1 35.9
3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments 3.4 3.6
Digital Media Net talked with Dell Precision Workstation product manager David Methven about this latest box, and some of the decisions that went into its making. First, we wanted to know why Dell didn't go with DDR memory instead of the Rambus variety (RDRAM). "We expect some of our PC competitors to go with a newer, dual-channel DDR chipset, but we still feel that RDRAM, especially in a single-processor workstation, provides better overall performance," Methven said. He also thought the addition of the new PC 1066 memory will result in a significant performance boost, but echoed our findings that it depends on which application you're using, what file sizes you're working with and what else you're doing with your computer at the same time. "If you're doing very large files in Photoshop, you should see an appreciable benefit," Methven said. "You'll see roughly a 30% difference in raw numbers. As the file sizes in Photoshop increase, we pull further and further away from the dual G4 1.25," he added.
There's more than just raw speed boosts with hyperthreading as well. Methven explains that the benefit of the new technology is sometimes "qualitative and not as quantitative. So what we saw with that was you don't drop frames, but it may take a little bit longer for your background task to complete. So there's a tradeoff there." But Methven believes users will be quite happy with the extra "virtual chip" in their systems. "I think most people would prefer the more responsive capability that hyperthreading provides. So there's two primary areas of benefit, multitasking and then multithreading."
Dell engineers showed us how easy it is to toggle on and off the hyperthreading feature in the BIOS setup of the machine. But then that raises the question, if hyperthreading is so nice, why on earth would somebody want to turn it off? "If you're running Windows 2000, it's not recommended," Methven said. "You can turn it on, but generally, you'll get better performance if you're using XP. There is some overhead associated with multiprocessing, and there are some operations in some applications, the current version of Solidworks, for example, where we've see slight performance degradation. There are some Photoshop operations, at least in our internal testing, where we saw some slight degradation. On the whole, it's provided a benefit." Dell intends to show its users just how useful hyperthreading would be for their usage patterns, too. "One of the things that we're also doing in addition to providing the choice to turn it on or not, we have a workstation tool we're modifying that will show a recommendation for hyperthreading -- whether or not the customer should configure their machine with it turned on or not," added Methven.
Multiprocessor support is not the same thing as hyperthreading, but the two concepts are similar. Methven explains it this way: "Certainly you're going to get the best performance from two discrete processors. So we look at it as a good/better/best situation. One processor with hyperthreading is better than a single processor. Two discrete processors are better, and two discrete processors with hyperthreading are best."
Page 4 of 4
Finally, as mentioned earlier in this review, it was again impressive to experience the church-mouse quiet of this Dell workstation. Shedding some light on why Dell seems to be able to consistently offer computers that are quieter than any on the market, Dell's Methven said, "We have our own acoustic lab in-house. It's something we definitely focus on. Part of the drive for noise reduction is being driven out of the Nordic countries, in our relationship, our Optiplex corporate line of products. The Nordic countries are very sensitive to noise in the environment. As we've improved the product in those countries, we've decided to roll that technology worldwide. Yes, there is a slight cost premium for it, but we think it's very worthwhile, and it's something that our customers throughout the world can benefit from and appreciate."
We do appreciate that, and all the other remarkable features of this new Dell PC. It's the quickest single-processor PC we've ever seen at this writing, and for the price of $2964, it's hard to beat. This system is highly recommended for anyone who is tired of staring at that render thermometer when dealing with After Effects composites, or anything else that keeps users waiting around for a computer to catch up with the creative mind. It's especially quick if heavy multitasking is part of your daily routine. But whatever your application, this new Dell unit will make it so you can go home earlier if you want to, or just get more work done while you're on the job.
As for comparing the Dell workstation with the fastest Mac on the market, well, the two machines are apparently in different classes. Take a look at the test results, and you'll have to agree that, using these benchmarks, the Mac was slaughtered again, and this time by an even wider expanse than ever. We were surprised at the huge margin of the defeat of the Mac in these tests. Even though the Mac's dual G4 chips have been sped up to 1.25 GHz and offers faster DDR RAM, apparently this wasn't enough to keep up with the newest and fastest from Dell and Intel. The most amazing part of this is that this Dell PC cost $629 less than the Mac we tested.
Of course, Mac stalwarts will cling to the notion that Mac OS X is so much better and easier to use than Windows XP, but if you're spending all day inside After Effects, which operating system you're using makes little difference. What does make a huge difference is if you have to sit and wait for rendering any longer than necessary. And, according to our benchmarks here, if you have an After Effects composite that needs, say, two hours to render on the Mac, it'll take you about an hour and 10 minutes on this PC. So, in addition to the extra $629 you must pay for the Mac, it will cost you plenty of time as well, especially while using After Effects. Time is money. After looking at these startling benchmark results, we have to gaze over at our beautifully-designed Macs and ask, "Is it worth it?"
Charlie White has been writing about new media and digital video since it was the laughingstock of the television industry. A technology journalist and columnist for the past eight years, White is also an Emmy-winning producer, video editor, broadcast industry consultant and shot-calling television director with 28 years broadcast experience. Talk back -- Send Chazz a note at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com.
Nothing new here. (Score:2)
Re:Nothing new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Motorola's lack of delivery was for several reasons. The first were internal problems in the company. They really made numerous bad decisions and lost a lot of markets that they had owned. This led to financial issues which limited how much R&D they did. (Or so I am told) The other problem was that this was Apple's dark ages and a lot of people seriously questioned Apple's long term viability. Why apply resources into producing good chips that may never get used? Better markets were embedded systems and both IBM and Motorola seemed to push their chips in that direction.
At the same time AMD was producing good chips for the x86 leading to heightened competition. Intel had to improve and improve quickly to keep its edge. This led to some fantastic improvements in terms of price/performance on the PC side even while the Mac side was languishing.
Now things are changing. AMD has more or less conceded the desktop to Intel. They'll still make excellent chips but there won't be the degree of competition that we've seen the past 4 years or so. At the same time Apple has bounced back with OSX and IBM will be delivering the 970 chip which they claim is competitive with top P4 chips. The problem is that the 970 is coming out second half of 2003. What will happend to Apple in the meantime? No one is quite sure.
If Apple can produce better software then they can probably hold on to become competitive with XP based systems again. (I think that in the portable computer market they already are competitive, largely because of the way the PowerPC works in terms of power and heat.)
Apple has been on a buying spree the past year of high end video systems. Presumably they'll be emphasizing OSX versions of that software. So they absolutely need the 970 sooner than later. Further the 970 can multi-process better than the Intel chips. (I can't speed for the AMD MP chips) If Apple can deliver 970 systems on time with a batch of well written high end graphics and video software, then they have a shot at reclaiming this market niche.
Uh... (Score:3, Insightful)
perhaps you should stop getting your news from slashdot headlines... the Desktop is AMDs bread and butter.
Intel and G4 (Score:2)
Re:Intel and G4 (Score:3, Funny)
Easy, P4's are NINE LETTERS BIGGER than G4's.
duh
Why would you "expect" the Mac to be faster? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why "one might expect that". SPEC benchmarks published by Heise [heise.de] comparing the G4 and the P3 suggest that the G4 performs similarly to the P3, MHz for MHz. While no benchmark is perfect, the SPEC benchmarks are probably the most complete and unbiased set of benchmarks around. Furthermore, both processors have SIMD instructions available, so both could take advantage of special low-level hacks in similar ways (for something like PhotoShop, it's only the integer SIMD instructions that likely matter). Those benchmarks also reflect my personal experience with the G4 vs. Intel processors when used for scientific computations.
Also, top performance aside, the most cost-effective way of getting compute cycles seems to be AMD processors, preferably not at top speed (for which you pay a premium) but a little slower, and preferably running on a headless node, closely followed by P4-based machines. You pay a premium for PPC or other RISC machines given their performance. Sorry, it's economy of scale. I'd much prefer a non-Pentium instruction sets to win, too.
I wrote to the author about biased benchmarks. (Score:4, Informative)
In response to my polite letter, I got a obscenity-laced reply. I decided he was a lunatic, with an axe to grind. I always admonish people not to believe benchmarks from people of companies with such obvious biases. Slashdot readers wouldn't believe Microsoft benchmarks done by companies with a bias towards MS, so why would anyone believe this idiot? It all comes down to the eternal problem in the PC world, consultants like PCs because it guarantees them an income for life, from all the support calls. And this guy's a PeeCee consultant.
Re:I wrote to the author about biased benchmarks. (Score:2)
Any chance of posting said reply somewhere? It's always fun to see lunatics squirm under the burden of proof of their lunacy
why don't you post your letter and his reply... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wrote to the author about biased benchmarks. (Score:5, Informative)
Where on the site did you see which codecs were used? I don't have Christiansen's book, though I imagine that as he's ex-ILM (and probably ex-Rebel Unit if he's an AE user as well, but I'm not 100% on that so don't quote me) that his tutorials probably work equally well on either platform. If I had to guess, I'd say that the output was to either the Animation, Sorensen, or maybe Cinepak codecs, all of which came from Apple. So if they're "not optimized," then that's no one's fault but Apple's. He could have skipped codecs altogether and rendered to uncompressed
So to sum up: there's little, if any bias in the tests used. As someone who's made his living using After Effects on both platforms for a number of years (though primarily on a rock-solid Gateway dual p3 w2k machine), I was very happy to see real-world benchmarks, rather than SPECINTFPUMARK2002 BS.
Re:I wrote to the author about biased benchmarks. (Score:3, Insightful)
He's not trying to do a thorough platform test, he's saying (IMHO) that if you do this all day long, here is what will do it fastest.
I believe his benchmarks, I have no problem that my brand new $3k G4 didn't win, and I noticed that there are pro-Mac and con-Mac articles on the site. I'm not about to drop my Mac for it, but if I were paying hundreds of people to use Premier and AE, and I needed new hardware, I would certainly be looking at those Dells.
Of course, for what I do, I found the Macs to be superior, or I wouldn't have bought them. They are the first Apple machines I have owned since an Apple IIe. I am delighted with them, and they serve well.
However, zealous platform issues aside, time is money, and corporate people who only use a small suite of apps (like 3DS or LightWave or Premier or Final Cut) should go with what will make them the most profit, the fastest. If I can produce a commercial in 30 days using a Mac, and in 30 days using a PC (since there's more involved than machine speed, you know), then I should go with what is cheapest. $600 across 30 machines is a LOT of money. Save $18k? If there are no other reasons to decide on a platform than that, I'll follow the money.
Of course, for me, I wanted the Macs. I only bought 2 however, not 30. (I also wanted a few apps that were apple only)
-WS
Re:I wrote to the author about biased benchmarks. (Score:2, Insightful)
stacked the deck by running the benches on dual processors, where a fair test would have benched a single-proc app on single-proc macs and PCs
How would removing a processor on the Mac board improve the results? The only reason you would want to run a signle-proc app is to defeat the "hyper-threaded" Intel processor. If you mean single process, it still wouldn't make a difference as the programs are almost certainly multi-threaded. However, if you meant a single-threaded app, this seems like a rediculous (and clearly biased) requirement to me as nearly all modern GUI programs are multi-threaded.
Even if AE was running with one processor on the Mac, it was also running on a one-processor PC, just an apparently (significantly) better processor. If Cleaner 6 or Shake were tested, I very much doubt that there would have been a significant difference in the results.
I have re-read your post and found that you may have meant single-processor when you wrote "single-proc". In that case, there is no such program. A program is either single-threaded or multi-threaded and has no control over whether it runs on one or more processors.
Re:I wrote to the author about biased benchmarks. (Score:2)
Ahh. A dual processor Mac should do no worse than a single processor Mac. I don't know why people refuse to believe that Macs are slower than PC given the evidence. PC processors are clocked over twice as fast, and you'd have a hard time arguing that a PPC processor gets twice the work done in it's clock cycles to make up for the slower clock rate.
Re:I wrote to the author about biased benchmarks. (Score:2)
Its a good thing so many things can be enhanced by SIMD. Now if only it did double precision floats
Re:I wrote to the author about biased benchmarks. (Score:2)
Reality check (Score:4, Interesting)
> not use both processors on the Mac,
So you're claiming it's unfair because somehow it uses both processors on the single-processor PC...?
> and is not Altivec optimized,
> but AE is optimized for Intel.
Is it? Then why was the dual Mac equally crushed by the Athlon, in the previous test? Let me remind you the Athlon does not support SSE2, so it has no Altivec equivalent.
> He further stacked the deck by running the benches
> on dual processors, where a fair test would
> have benched a single-proc app on single-proc macs
> and PCs.
So you're saying a single-processor Mac performs better than a dual-processor Mac? Now I'm definitely confused. He pitches a Mac with two processors against a PC with one processor and you say that's biased towards the PC...?
I agree that it wasn't fair. Personally I think he should have used a dual- or quad-Xeon, instead of a single-CPU "consumer" Pentium 4.
> He used codecs that are also optimized
> poorly on the Mac,
Could you please make it clear what codecs you're talking about?
> I suggested he do the benches with a program
> that is equally optimized for both platforms,
> like Cleaner 6 or Shake.
Cleaner is about the slowest, crappiest encoder ever created (this applies to both the PC and Mac version). Shake (as you well know) is no longer being sold for the PC. And neither of those programs is in the same market as After Effects. If you want an alternative in a close (though higher-end) segment, you have Discreet's Combustion 2.
Personally, I would have liked to see a comparison of 3D rendering, too. Since 3DS MAX doesn't run on Macs, they could use Lightwave, for example. BTW, you can see tons of Lightwave benchmarks here [blanos.com].
> In response to my polite letter,
If your letter was anything like your post above, then, it wasn't "polite", it was "deranged".
> why would anyone believe this idiot?
Hm... tough one... I got it! Because it's true...? Because anyone can get the files he used and run his or her own benchmarks? Because Photoshop is the most important image editing program in the market (including the Mac market)?
I have something very important to say: My GeForce2 MX is the fastest graphics card in the world. People who benchamrk cards using Quake III or AutoCAD are biased because those programs are not properly optimized for my GeForce2 MX. If anyone tells you that ATI's AiW 9700 Pro or nVidia's GeForce4 Ti4600 are faster than (or in any way superior to) my GF2 MX, they are either idiots, or liars, or both.
Thats is what you sound like.
RMN
~~~
PC's preferred (Score:3, Interesting)
editors: (Score:4, Funny)
More indepth comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, the use of some more "real world" benchmarks, actually, not using benchmarks. Load up a 12MB image and do some manipulation, do some real 3d modeling, manipulate a real video file, etc. I'm sure that the pc would still win out, but at least we'd have a much better idea of what the two systems are capable of vs a couple of mentions of "the Mac".
double-standard (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, I've been following the DVE articles for a while, and my impression is that White is a long-time Mac fan who is looking at objective benchmarks and finding himself somewhat disenchanted.
Video editing on Linux (Score:2)
Re:Video editing on Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
I've considered giving Linux a shot at video editing, but haven't found an MPEG-2 encoder yet (which would be needed for making SVCDs). I've tried getting TMPGEnc working under Wine, but have been less than successful. A quick check of the Kino website indicates some level of MPEG-2 support...any ideas as to how it compares to TMPGEnc for speed and quality?
Avisynth has also been useful for various NLE and filtering tasks...is something similar available for Linux?
community (Score:3, Insightful)
the reason you use macs for video and graphics (at least here in manhattan) is that most of the pros use them for that.
if you need help with something, there are a bunch of people with similar mac setups you can call. If you use a PC you're on your own
Why do people even compare PCs and Macs? (Score:5, Insightful)
What people should be asking is not price/performance, but why customers will still fork out over $3000 for a Mac that is slower than a much cheaper PC. The answer is in the usability.
First, the Mac looks good - which is important - hell PCs look downright square when placed next to a Mac.
Next, it has a great GUI - what's key here is that it's a great FUNCTIONAL GUI, unlike even WinXP where though it might look good, things are still buried under layers of menus and dialog boxes.
Third, it has a consistent interface - the basic layout has never changed. Contrast that with Windows where the settings that matter generally tend to jump around.
Fourth, it's simple to use, basically because of all 3 reasons above.
Now this may seem like an Operating system comparison, but check this out : to most people, PC = Windows. So you compare two pieces of hardware, you're comparing the OS whatever and Windows whatever.
So to get back to the point, it's not about the speed. PCs have long been faster than Macs and if a new Mac comes out with a processor than changes that you can be sure you'll hear about it. Till then, I say old news.
Re:Why do people even compare PCs and Macs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical editing process involves clicking a couple of desktop icons once a day. One I'm in premiere, photoshop etc, its the same as a mac.
Re:Why do people even compare PCs and Macs? (Score:2)
Have you seen the new viao desktops? God damn they're pretty. I could use it as a center piece only my furniture isn't that nice.
Re:Why do people even compare PCs and Macs? (Score:2)
How about software? (Score:2)
The software that you do buy, I also find better on the Mac. Even Office X is better than MS Office under Windows.
And of course, all of the unix utlities are built in so I don't have to mess around installing anything else to get SSH working or use unix file utilities.
I agree with you on the other points, except that the Mac doesn't feel slower.
More Lies (Score:2, Informative)
But the fact of the matter is I just ordered this EXACT machine for $3300 from Apple.com (cheaper through Clubmac, etc).
This is why... (Score:2, Insightful)
OSX is the best thing Mac has going, and to be honest, a reasonably competent linux user can get what they want out of linux that OSX offers. Certain conventions in Mac world are nice (more strict adherence to self-contained application directories, no need for a 'registry' or cluttered bin and lib directories), there just isn't enough about OSX to get that excited about.
Time and time again, the more competitive ia32 world outpaces ppc development, so the hardware platform, while nice and efficient, lacks total power. Kinda like having to pay a whole lot more for a Geo Metro, great MPG, but you aren't getting anywhere too fast.... Except great MPG has direct economic impact, while great IPC doesn't really do anything if the clock speed is too slow....
Now one thing this efficiency does buy, is a really great laptop. I'm using an iBook (the only competitively priced Mac system there is, IMHO). The battery life, weight, and screen all kick all kinds of ass. I get a nice screen, lightweight laptop that has managed to last me 5 hours straight without a recharge (only once, but still usually more than 4 hours). Sure, it could be outperformed by a heavier, battery sucker pc laptop, but that doesn't matter so much in the laptop world. If the system isn't being moved and is plugged into AC power, everything I find in apple hardware that makes me like it becomes irrelevant...
For new users, there is some nice things, it isn't so in your face about things (plug in a hardware device, it just works without saying 'hey, I found something, let me help you set it up' , fewer 'special cases' to worry about (software installation is frequently just copying a folder), and a wider commercial support base than linux (Windows applications through wine is nice, but not perfect), but to me it sits on my lap and that is about the only place where I can justify the expense...
Why I switched (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did I go with the Mac? I knew the speed wasn't going to be as good. I'd have to reinvest in a lot of software and would have a huge learning curve.
But I went with a Mac because I have spent the last 6 years fighting with digital video on a PC. Started with a Miro Video DC30+, moved toa DV300 from Miro (now Pinnacle Systems). Then a Matrox RT2000.
Even with Windows XP, the problems were consistent and numerous. I found that my work was interupted by hardware concerns, which is not what I want.
Plus, Windows XP, and the entire architecture in general bite.
What drew me to the Mac were a few things:
1. Final Cut Pro - by far the best video editing software package I've ever used.
2. DVD Studio pro - Cost effective, very nicely laid out if a bit documentation-lacking DVD editor.
I've had the mac for a few months and am currently doing my first DVD. I'm doing a Dolby 5.1 soundtrack using Cubase SX, doing the compositions in After Effects and final layout and title sequencing in Final Cut pro. DVD layout in DVD Studio and then burning on that nice superdrive.
No problems what so ever.
For me, speed is not as much of an issue as usability, user friendliness and stability. Until I can do all my editing on a Linux machine, I'll stick to my G4.
Re:Why I switched (Score:2)
I Have Both and I Like The Mac Better (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure Adobe Premiere on my Sony Vaio (winMe) has more features and runs faster, but iMovie on my iMac lets me create a nicer movie quicker. there is nothing that I have seen that even comes close.
The kicker is I can teach an 10 year old kid to edit a movie with titles, transitions, sound efects and video effects in 15 mins with iMovie.
Every other video editing sofware takes a bit to learn, leaves files all over the place, and usually is dificult to get the 1394 link working correctly. Firewire on a Mac is done way better than a PC (Sony DVGate sucks)
Its the software that makes its better (Score:4, Interesting)
This is true. I have a friend with a viao as well, with whatever is bundled on it (movie shaker?). We have a compaq with a fire wire card and whatever was bundled with that (ulead).
Once we got the mac, we stopped using the other machines completely. and the edited videos come out much better. I'm not sure if its because with imovie its easier to use and you end up using more features, or if the pc programs didn't have the features or i couldn't find them in the strange interface. imovie gives some very polished results. And its fun!
Maybe the mac is slower/ more costly. But when the finished product looks better, The speed issue goes away.
For pros with the same tools on both platforms it may be a different story
PC's are faster than Macs? (Score:2)
I'm not going to go out on a limb and claim Macs blow PC's out of the water in terms of preformance, but AE's not very well optimized for OSX. The "gap" this guy is trying to prove is about as inane as Steve's "G4's are up to (X amount) times as fast" speeches.
The G4's are pretty decent machines. At the end of the day, they're a powerful tool to get the job done. Of course, no PC troll is going to admit that.
Besides, shake is better [universe42.com].
-Brett
You're forgetting useability and Quicktime. (Score:5, Insightful)
I do professional video editing, compositing, and dvd mastering for a living. I use MacOS- having recently switched over from 9.1 to 10.2 on a G4/733. Painlessly, I might add. Video handles a hell of a lot smoother under X than it does under 9, hands down- I wouldn't go back. And I sure as hell wouldn't go to windows, for three main reasons- two of which directly pertain to this article.
The first big thing is maintenance: if my mac blows up, I can fix it. I've been running video production here for three years and have never once had to reinstall an OS or worry about a virus.
The second big thing is Useability, which relates to the third item indirectly. I could give a RATS ASS about how the P4 can spank the pants off of a G4- to me, that speed is completely negated by the atrocious Windows interface (which only seems to be getting worse). This argument does, essentially, boil down to Mac and Windows - Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop have not been ported to Linux.
Also as part of useability is applications- Media 100 DOES make PC boards, but Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro- the latter of which I depend on to do my job- are not available for the PC. And won't be. I'm sure there are DVD authoring packages for Windows, but the odds of them being useable- let alone on a par with DVDSP- are slim.
The third big thing is Quicktime. You can't fuck with it. It's system level, backwards compatible (to an extent), amazingly powerful once you plug in the license key, and exists outside of the applications- you can run any version of After Effects with any version of Quicktime. It also exists outside of the OS, though it's a big component of it. I suppose the equivalent might be the hooks and calls that developers for Windows can use to invoke various bits of IE.
Quicktime on the PC is generally considered to suck, and I can certainly see why- I love Quicktime, and the way it handles on the PC is one less reason to bother with the platform. Windows Media codecs are a pain in the ass to deal with, and very rarely cross platform. I could write a book about the issues with both platforms and the state of video software in general, but sufficed to say, there are more issues with doing video Right on Windows than there are doing video Right on Macintosh. Hell- if you have a DVCam, you can use any shipping Macintosh as a video editing station right out of the box.
Sure, you can technically do video work on a PC. I'd rather use a platform that's designed with such things in mind than one that added the functionality in order to appeal to marketshare.
Re:You're forgetting useability and Quicktime. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been giving getting a Mac for this kind of work a serious consideration.
And I was one of those guys who spouted off "Macs Suck!" for almost ten years. Then one day I grew up.
Re:hah (Score:2)
dv on a PC (Score:2)
oh right they probably released Shake [apple.com] for it. no, didnt do that.
so how do you edit dv on a pc again?
After Effects performance != quality editing (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, you simply cannot edit using After Effects. Forget it. Your workflow is so amazingly hindered within the program. I will admit that it is probably the industry standard (for low- to medium-end stations) to do titling, chyron, graphics, etc, but to do day-to-day editing work, it is next to useless.
That said, the choices for editing software in the Windows environment are horrifically bad compared to the choices for the Mac. Other than the high-end Avid system, the Windows platform has absolutely nothing. Adobe Premiere is an atrocity that passes for software; instability, terrible interface, doesn't play well with others. Vegas Video is marginally better.
The Mac, on the other hand, has all sorts of quality hardware and software solutions. Take the Media100i system, for example. They just recently have ported the editing system to OS X. I have found that the Media 100 is the best mid-end editing station out there. Broadcast video, hardware codecs, plays well with a Beta SP deck or your firewire deck, etc.
Additionally, Final Cut Pro is rapidly becoming the standard for low-end stations. The USC film school is switching to an almost all-DV program, and the unofficial word is that students should go out and get FCP if they want to edit. It doesn't offer the speed that a Media100 station offers, but for an all-software solution, it blows the doors off anything Adobe or Sonic Foundry has ever made.
If these guys are so concerned about a $3500 Dell PC outperforming a $5500 Mac, perhaps they shouldn't be in the video editing business. I would rather spend the extra $2k, then spend an additional ~$5k for a good Medea RAID system, ~$5k for a Media 100 system, and be able to create broadcast video for $15k. (Nb: that is an almost unheard-of low cost of entry to the broadcast arena) Alternatively, if I were on a student's budget, I'd go for the $2500 Mac, a $999 (or cheaper for students, correct?) copy of Final Cut, and be safe in the knowledge that I was using a high-quality, reliable package, rather than spending $2000 on a PC and struggling with Premiere.
More to it than hardware speed. (Score:4, Informative)
The creative process is nothing at all like hacking away at code. Believe me, I've done both. What you computer robots don't seem to understand is that we artists don't want or need to be interrupted by stupid things like taking half a day to get a CD burner running, or desperately trying to get our video card working properly with X-Windows. The Mac allows an uninterrupted, pleasurable working environment that is, above all, easy to use and intuitive, allowing me to execute my concepts more clearly without having some stupid interface get in my way.
It was never a pain when I was working with ink and paper, and it shouldn't have to be any harder when working in a digital medium. The End.
Yeah, it's true. (Score:3)
But I refuse to use my mac for movie editing. This has nothing to do with the speed of the processor...my 1 gig Tbird is about on par with my iBook for rendering times. It has everything to do with the speed of the interface.
I can't take the sluggishness of controls on OSX when video editing. I want instant control, instant jog and shuttle, precise scene sync, and I want it without having to type in timecodes. And even on the big sexy DP macs I just don't get it. Windows 2000, for all its faults, is very responsive and I love it for video editing.
Of course FCP's cool and nothing matches the simplicity of iMovie, but if you get a really nice software package (premiere and vegas video are jokes, windows xp's movie editor is like a bad pun) the sheer number of options for video on Windows make it awesome.
iDVD encoding vs other PC DVD software encoders (Score:2, Informative)
simple. DVD creation is simpler on the Mac and its faster.
We compared various P4 systems (1.4 , 2.53 , sorry no 3 gigs) and we compared an iMac G4/800, G4/867 and a dual G4 1 Gig.
The Dual 1 Gig was priced about the same as a similar Dell or Sony.
iDVD encoded our 10 minutes of DV footage in 9 minutes. This was nearly twice as fast as the P4/2.53.
I have noticed that most 3rd party Apple software doesnt fully utilize both the G4 processors. iDVD had both G4's working 80%-90% at all times.
-John
Experiance has taught ... (Score:5, Informative)
The other application is DV editing. We were using Adobe Premiere 6, but it was buggy to say the least. The editing people demanded that we get them Mac's and Final Cut Pro or else. So we bought them Macs switched to Final Cut Pro 3 and the editing guru's seem to be pretty content. Also the editing department, which also does contract work for clients outside the firm, increased their margins by 5% even after the purchase of new equipment. Accounting people were impressed.
Granted, we only use AE on rare occations, but Photoshop is used on an almost daily basis and most employees that griped at first because we replaced their PC's with MAC's have since quited down and some even like the new systems. Some say that its a bit slower than the PC's, but they have noticed that Photoshop doesn't crash as often and in some havn't had the program crash once. And we purchased mainly the entry level dual 866's with 512GB Ram each.
So PC's may buy you a few seconds in rendering, but might cost you a few hours in lost productivity.
Re:Experiance has taught ... (Score:2)
Re:Experiance has taught ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Over here, none of our Win 2k Pro and XP boxes have ever crashed. Jokes about BSODs just aren't funny anymore. We make sure we buy premium hardware and qualified systems. Even then, the total cost of one PC has always been less than the top Mac.
Yes, speed and cost are not always factors in productivity. But faced with deadlines, choosing between PC or Mac is a no brainer. FCP is great but XDV is still better and works well MC. Over the past three years, my experience in video editing has shown that PC's have a lower TCO than any other platform.
Wasn't Editing Comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
On the low end, there's nothing on the PC even remotely like Final Cut Pro, which is why the Mac pretty much owns the low end editing market. The high end is mostly still owned (though not as throughoughly as before) by Avid, which is cross-platform. Of course Final Cut is rapidly moving into the high end as well.
PC's can Edit Video? (Score:2, Funny)
Altivec? (Score:3, Informative)
It seems that Apple has put all their eggs in the Altivec basket, so it would be a big problem if major software vendors haven't taken advantage of it by now.
A Students' Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
You've basically got three choices in software when it comes to editing-- Premiere, Final Cut Pro, and Avid. Anybody that tells you that combining Photoshop and After Effects will suffice is apparently only interested in color correcting some darn pretty titles.
First off: Adobe Premiere [adobe.com]. I've used it on both PCs and Macs, and it's the suite to which most "prosumers" will probably have access. Guess what? It sucks. Plain and simple. Sorry.
It will allow you to cut and paste and do your standard basic functions, but guess what: so does iMovie. It is the buggiest program that Adobe releases. It seems the only guaranteed feature of Premiere is that it will crash two minutes before it's done rendering, and corrupt your video files.
On some projects I've spent more time repeating steps due to crashes than it took to shoot the thing in the first place. Don't make the same mistake of using it.
Second: Avid [avid.com]. Probably out of most everybody's hands, because of cost, although it is the professional choice. Approximately 95% of television work and 80% of film features are edited on Avid, IIRC, but it's pricey to get the full hardware suite. They offer several levels of product-- Avid Xpress is the simplest, and will still run you $10,000. It's the only one I've used. It goes up to Avid Symphony, which is basically the same package, but with better hardware, more features, more possible video and audio tracks, etc.
My complaint with Avid is that it's not very user-friendly. Their dialogs tend to be tiny icons with no explanatory text. If you're going into the field, it's a system worth knowing, but the learning curve is high.
(Incidentally, Avid has just released a stand-alone software program to compete with Premiere and Final Cut, called Avid Xpress DV [avid.com]. Haven't used it, but it's apparently very similar to the rest of its family. So beware.)
And then there's Final Cut Pro [apple.com]. It's only available for the Mac. This is unfortunate, because IMHO, it's by far the best program out there. Easy to use, a wide array of features, moderate learning curve but decidely worth the hassle. Get yourself hooked up with a dual-1.25GHz G4 machine, and you can render scenes in less time than it takes to make a sandwich. This thing has color correction, titling, and just about anything else I've needed so far, within the framework of one program. No jumping around. Stable. Simply beautiful.
The final verdict? For the cost of the basic Avid, you could buy yourself two top-of-the-line Final Cut Mac workstations. Going from Premiere to FCP is a revelation, and I'd recommend it to anybody interested in the field. At home I'm a PC guy, and I've still got to say the Mac is the way to go.
Just be sure to buy yourself a two-button mouse, then you're all set.
PC?? (Score:2)
A Mac Plus beats a P4 HT 3.0 GHz... (Score:4, Insightful)
(this used to be "a Mac Plus is faster than (windows computer X) if the video card and the parallel port on the Windows machine are having an IRQ conflict")
However, now that it only took 10 years to get rid of IRQ and DMA conflicts, its nice to see that a new conflict - user vs. Microsoft - is the new conflict... which is much more powerful.... at least IRQ conflicts could eventually be worked out.
Privacy, lack of DRM, simple to manage server software and open standards are why i use Mac OS X... speed is like 5th down my give-a-shit list.
A picture is worth a thousand words... (Score:2)
Also important... (Score:2, Informative)
just my humble opinion
Pros don't render (Score:2)
DV-format editors, on both Mac and Windows, do real-time previews for everything on both platforms. Real-time is real-time. No big speed difference there. It's only when rendering the final output that a speed difference matters, which is a small part of the overall project.
On the high end, editing systems have real-time effects in hardware, so CPU speed doesn't matter. You'll still find old 68040 Avid machines every now and then that are still real-time.
AE guys certainly do care about rendering times, of course. The simplest thing to do is to do all of your creative work on the Mac, and then network render with a bunch of headless PC boxes. My main work suite has two Macs, two XP boxes, and a PowerBook. I edit, write, websurf on the Macs. The Windows boxes do video compression and play games. Everyone's happy.
Pricing of Dells (Score:5, Informative)
Now how many other things, did the author of the article need to complete his test that I did not add to get my bottom line price? Software, monitor, DVD drive etc., modem (Dell charges extra for a modem!) How did he get his data in the machine? Where did he export his data to? A DVD Burner? What versions of the software was he using? Was he running internet radio on iTunes in the backgound on the Mac while he was working (like everybody else does)? In fact was he even connected to a network with both machines or only one? Why is Dell Gigabit ethernet so great when it has been standard even on Mac laptops for a year?
I enjoyed reading how the Dell engineers walked him through the entire process on the phone, explaining how to turn the hyperthreading on and off and so forth.
GEE, Can I get the Dell Engineers to walk me through my Photoshop routines? Did their help come as a support package and did he add that to the price of the Dell? I couldn't find that option when I priced my Dell but I bet it adds a lot more to the price.
Come on. This is the most transparent shill set up by Dell.
I don't mind all this stuff about power computing, but lying about the price--by $1000 even--is really annoying.
Re:Consider the software too (Score:4, Insightful)
But as shown by the tests, this does not translate into faster video rendering performance.
Plus, it has the amazing Aqua interface, which makes things easy to use,
Arguable at best. Adobe does not ship two differently designed interfaces for its different applications, a good one for Mac and a bad one for PC. Aqua just makes the buttons and windows pretty, if the application is built for it.
and Mac hardware was built for video editing, with Firewire ports on every machine sold as well as tight integration with OS X.
Firewire cards for PC's are available for PC's that don't have Firewire ports. Firewire has many other applications other than video editing, making it poor support for the statement "Mac hardware was built for video editing".
People doing video editing on x86 will have to use Windows. And the ones that are available for Windows are crap. Meanwhile, I have been using Final Cut Pro on Macs for more than a year, and I have to say that it is quite clear why it is the professional industry standard editing software for digital video. It's simply the most powerful, versatile, and easy to use video editing suite I've ever seen.
Ever heard of Combustion, Flame, Retimer etc.? Some of these are Academy Award winning apps available for PC (and some for Mac, though you'll have to deal with slow performance there).
I pity the people stuck with PCs to do their video editing. I've tried it on my Pentium III before, and it is slow as all hell.
Excellent judgement; casual usage of a PC with a 3 year old processor compared to a year's worth of usage on a recent Mac.
au contraire... (Score:2, Informative)
FREE native linux video editing: cinelerra [heroinewarrior.com]
scalable, too.
Re:Consider the software too (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. Not the fact that it's UNIX, that is.
I've seen Linux--as UNIX is OS X, probably more--crawl on things that Windows _on the same machine_ has no problem with.
Sure, KDE could be to blame. Being on a higher partition could be to blame--but if UNIX automatically "blew windows out of the water", I should either not notice the difference or actually see a LINUX-slanted improvement.
'course, OS X _is_ faster than Windows, or at least it seems that way. An UNIX is more stable, and probably IS faster in a few specific or low-overhead (GUI et al) apps (note: I just haven't had the chance to see this firsthand, so I won't claim to know that it is.), but being UNIX doesn't automatically grant you a speed boost over Windows or anything else.
Re:Consider the software too (Score:2)
Did you check to make sure that hdparm is taking full advantage of your HD and that the kernel is using optimized instruction sets for your processor instead of generic 386 sets?
This is why I don't really like kde. I much prefer IceWM or GNUStep if I want a speed-demon. They may look more dated but they run much faster and use less resources. If you're looking for something "prettier" then go with GNOME. At least this is MY personal preference.
Well, as I said before this probably has more to do with your individual optimizations. Have Tom or I look at the machine. There are _STABLE_ tweaks that most systems don't do in order to insure vanilla hardware compatability. I've found that if hdparm isn't tweaked properly the hard disk access time, and therefore any apps that do any sort of I/O work, are slowed dramatically.
Re:Consider the software too (Score:3, Informative)
You must have a different definition of "crap" than most people. I've found VirtualDub [sourceforge.net] and Avisynth [avisynth.org] to be pretty decent. Avisynth, in particular, offers some fairly nifty editing capabilities...one script I've written for it takes two AVIs and overlays them on a third AVI. (It's designed to mimic the appearance of a Win2K desktop running some video-telephony software I wrote...a conversation is captured with the software and converted to a pair of AVIs.) More frequently, I use it to cut the ads out of TV shows captured by my TiVo or my All-In-Wonder and to do inverse 3:2 pulldown. The script then gets loaded into TMPGEnc for compression to SVCD.
Unless you're willing to pay through the nose for a pair of the fastest Xeons, you don't want Intel processors for video editing/encoding. OTOH, the dual Athlon MP 2100+ I have at home hauls ass...over 30 fps for two-pass XviD encoding and somewhere around 6 fps for two-pass VBR MPEG-2 encoding with TMPGEnc at its highest-quality settings. The processors and motherboard were under $700 (it was an upgrade from a single 1.0-GHz Athlon) a few months ago; you could more than likely get something even faster for less money now.
Re:Consider the software too (Score:2, Insightful)
If that's true, then why are PC benchmarks using Windows blowing away Mac Benchmarks using OS X. The point is a high-end PC running Windows is faster and cheaper than a the fastest Mac running OS X.
Re:Consider the software too (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple's first advantage is OS X. It's UNIX, which means that it blows Windows out of the water, performance-wise.
I agree with that comment, for the most part. But not in this application.
Plus, it has the amazing Aqua interface, which makes things easy to use
Amazing Aqua Interface? I have been using Macs at home for a number of years, but to say the interface is amazing, and makes things easy to use is completely subjectional. There are plenty of people who prefer Windows flexible and fully customizable interface.
Mac hardware was built for video editing, with Firewire ports on every machine sold as well as tight integration with OS X.
Right, and there's no such thing as FireWire on a PC. Nor tightly integrated software that can harness the technology. You can buy a PC from Dell, Alienware, etc these days that has all these things built in.
There simply isn't any kind of video editing software available for Linux that is even remotely affordable. And the ones that are available for Windows are crap.
It's true that Linux has very limited options for professional video editing. Blender and the Gimp are a couple of the best, and their use of file formats and limited features make them impossible to use for doing any real work. However, many businesses use M$ Windoze anyway for other things because of its compatibility and widespread usage (whether thats a good or bad thing).
So taking that into consideration, a business that does video editing, but not as their only (or primary) service would have to buy a Windoze box AND a Mac in order to stay on top of all aspects of their work. Affordability is always an issue for amatuers and home users, but for businesses, the difference in cost between Final Cut Pro ($1000) and say, Ulead Media Studio ($500), AVID ($1500) or Adobe Premiere ($550) is not the driving factor behind the purchase. The software has to work in their format, on their current hardware if possible, and their employees must be familiar with the interface to avoid extensive training or re-hiring.
The REALLY big video companies (ie. Hollywood) are going to use hardware and software that costs hundreds of thousand of dollars, such as SGI machines using Discreet Inferno (as used on Lord of the Rings), so applications like Final Cut Pro, Premiere, etc. are not even options.
I pity the people stuck with PCs to do their video editing. I've tried it on my Pentium III before, and it is slow as all hell. Pity, too, but you really do get what you pay for.
Talk about opening yourself up to be flamed! Did you have your eyes open when you tried this? Since you are most likely a professional benchmarker, and made a fair test (ie. re-formatted, installed a nice clean version of Windows, purchased a professional video editing package, and ran extensive tests on all aspects of input, editing and output), I can't understand how you came up with the final verdict that it is... slow as all hell .
I realized coming into this thread that it would be bombarded by Mac fanboys futiley crying about how much PC's suck, but your post got modded up, so I figured it was worth proving a point.
Re:Consider the software too (Score:3, Insightful)
> that it blows Windows out of the water, performance-wise.
I see. And you are basing this theory on what advertising leaflet? Please define:
a) What does "UNIX" mean (this is not a trick question).
b) What kind of benchmark are you using to conclude that "performance-wise, OSX blows Windows out of the water".
> Plus, it has the amazing Aqua interface,
> which makes things easy to use
Aqua is not an interface; it has no influence on how easy programs are to use, only on the way they look. The interface of programs such as Photoshop, After Effects, Combustion, etc., is almost exactly the same on Mac and Windows.
> Mac hardware was built for video editing, with
> Firewire ports on every machine
Most PCs come with firewire ports, too (even laptops). When they don't, you can add them for about $50. As to the rest of the hardware, PCs use the same drives as Macs, the same memory as Macs, and they have faster CPUs (therefore they render the video effects faster, as this article shows). So how exactly are Macs "built for video"...? Is there a new model that comes with a tape drive, per chance?
> Final Cut Pro on Macs for more than a year, and I
> have to say that it is quite clear why it is the
> professional industry standard editing software for
> digital video.
I am a professional video editor and I never use FCP. I know several video editiors and several companies, and none of them uses it, either. I'm not saying it's not good, but it's definitely not "the standard".
> I pity the people stuck with PCs to do their video
> editing. I've tried it on my Pentium III before, and
> it is slow as all hell.
Maybe your Pentium III was not "built for video". Or maybe it was built by someone who didn't have a clue about building PCs.
Please, when you state your opinion, or your wishes, don't present them as facts.
Macs are excellent home computers, especially for people who are new to computers. Even Apple itself has pretty much given up pushing Macs as "faster" or "better" and is instead focusing on "prettier", "simpler". Why isn't this enough for Mac users? Why do you feel the need to keep shouting that Macs are faster and more powerful when very clearly they're not? It only makes you look like a bunch of fanatics.
I have a GeForce2 MX graphics card. It has good image quality, it works fine in video editing / animation / 3D modelling software and it runs nearly all games at an acceptable speed. But it wouldn't cross my mind to say it's faster (or even "better", as subjective as that may be) than a Quadro 4 or an ATI AiW 9700 Pro. You see, for something to be good enough it doesn't have to be better than everything else.
RMN
~~~
Re:Consider the software too (Score:2)
Jaguar is like a dog in comparison. But for the most part it is bearable. Windows is faster on my 600mhz duron. Next OSX should hopefully leverage more speed.
Re:Consider the software too (Score:3, Interesting)
Compared to OS X? Well, its easy to pick the slowest moving UI out there and compare to that. Take XP and compare it to 2K
Re:that's not fair! (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, to be fair, they should have compared two machines in the same price range:
$4160 Apple PowerMac G4
2x 1.25 GHz G4 (166 MHz FSB)
2 GB DDR RAM (2 GB max)
120 GB Ultra ATA HD
Apple DVD-RW Superdrive
NVidia GeForce4 Ti 128 MB
AGP4X slot
(4) 64/33 PCI slots
Integrated Gb LAN
Integrated Firewire
OS X
$4128 BOXX Technologies 3DBOXX S5i
2x 2.4 GHz (P4) Xeon (533 MHz FSB) (2x 2.8 GHz available at higher cost)
2 GB DDR RAM (2 DIMMS free, 12 GB Max)
120 GB Ultra ATA HD
DVD+RW/-RW/-CDRW Combo Drive
NVidia GeForce4 Ti4600 128 MB
AGP8x Pro slot
(1) 64/133 PCI-X slot
(2) 64/100 PCI-X slots
(2) 32/33 PCI slots
Integrated Gb LAN
Integrated USB2
add-on Firewire
WinXP Pro
Re:Mac is still much much better (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell were you running? eMachines? Compaq?
Seriously, those problems on a PC are a myth, provided you get the right hardware/OS. If you scrap together a no-name brand pc with Windows 98, then you can expect things like that to happen. Put together a machine with reputable components and an OS like Windows 2000, and you ain't gonna have those problems. I can tell you that right now from experience. I rely on my machines (yes, machines plural) to do rendering, video editing, ect. I can't afford down-time like you described.
Honestly, if those problems existed, I would be a Mac user.
Re:Mac is still much much better (Score:2)
1) XP before SP1 was released would loose all network connectivity once a week as my router rolled the IPs over.
2) My soundcard, an SB Live, crapped out when I moved from 2k to XP (2k was giving me shit about the video card, an SiS which has since been replaced). Currently, my computer still does not play MIDI files, except ironicaly enough, through quicktime. I don't know why this is, and so far can't find a solution. Though I do know that when I try to do so (and thus turn on the MIDI support in the volume controls) all sound on my computer craps out. The fact that I had to use QT to play MIDIs and Other programs to edit them was a bitch and still is.
3) I have been hit with more viruses since plugging this PC into the internet that I have in my entire lifes usage of macs. In fact, I've recieved one mac virus so far and 8 PC ones. Granted I run stuff which is at risk for containing viruses, but I do that on both machines.
4) While I have never seen the settings on a PC or mac change for no reason (except when the internal battery gives out), I have seen the settings randomly change back to default or something else when I install a new program or update.
Granted these are rare problems in the PC world, but they are still much more common than on a mac. And even if they're uncommon, they're still a bitch to fix.
On a side note, putting together a PC with reputable components brings up the price point much closer to a mac.
Apple Sells Hardware. (Score:2)