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Mac vs. PC: Digital Video Editing Comparison
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."
Haven't I seen this before?
Regardless of the author's bias, I have found this to be true. My dad has a small editing video business with many partners. One of them just got the new PC workstation box and it smoked the Macs in pretty much anything. Macs still might be easier to use and less prone to headaching, but if raw speed is what you need (and that is often what you need when deadlines are looming), then the PC wins.
A slower tool of higher quality can still get the job done faster.
Of course, "of higher quality" is rather subjective.
Aren't Mac PC's btw? :)
Apple's first advantage is OS X. It's UNIX, which means that it blows Windows out of the water, performance-wise. Plus, it has the amazing Aqua interface, which makes things easy to use, and Mac hardware was built for video editing, with Firewire ports on every machine sold as well as tight integration with OS X.
People doing video editing on x86 will have to use Windows. 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. 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.
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.
--sdem
That's not fair at all! Comparing a dual processor mac to a mere single processor PC. Of course the PC still creamed the Mac, but come on, it's a Mac! I'd like to see a little fairness here and compare two dual systems and see how the mac stands up (ie. falls down).
Is this an architectural problem or is it the level of software engineering? When I first saw a Mac (the very first one, mind you), I got put off by its "programmer unfriendly environment". Given that, my resources got diverted to more interesting platforms. I wonder how common is that and what it means to the level of software engineering today.
Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again
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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.
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Wait a minute -- Apple advertising LIE??
NO WAY
But Steve told me that Macs are TWICE AS FAST!
Hopefully, we'll finally see some sanity come to the Mac fans who still think G4s are so much faster than P4 at the same clock rate. Yes, they are faster, but only by about 20% on the average when you look at a large cross-section of benchmarks.
Maybe even that Slashdot guy who used to have in his sig that Macs are 4 times faster than PCs at the same clock rate will get a clue (but I doubt it).
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Can I jump on the "nothing new here" bandwagon? It has been known for a while that PCs are getting faster than Macs, in almost every way. Macs are very very good, and I am actually a switcher. But the PCs in the last year or so have been advancing faster in processing speed than Macs. Who knows who is to blame, but I put the blame on Motorola. But if the "rumors" are true, if Apple releases the Power4 based 970 IBM chips in a Mac, it will be QUITE fast. Then we can start the comparison's again. But for now, just keep enjoying Mac OS X.
The Mac lunies will somehow twist the facts around to once again convince themselves that somehow they are superior.
As the article is /.'d, I haven't been able to read it yet, but how can you compare a G4 and a P4? Even if it was the fasted G4 and slowest P4, there is still a great speed difference (1.0ghz compared to 1.4ghz?). I just wish I could hit the site so I could read the article to see which the writer thought did better.
I wrote a polite note to the author, and pointed out some flaws in his "benchmarks." He chose to benchmark using Adobe AfterEffects, but that app does not use both processors on the Mac, and is not Altivec optimized, but AE is optimized for Intel. 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. He used codecs that are also optimized poorly on the Mac, and compared the different Mac and PC codecs and declared them equal in speed. This completely biased the benchmarks toward PCs. I suggested he do the benches with a program that is equally optimized for both platforms, like Cleaner 6 or Shake.
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.
The only performance that counts is yours, not the machines.
I really don't give a s**t about 30 percent faster, 50 percent faster, or whatever.
I care that I have to lose a half a day trying to figure out why my CD-RW no longer records. And then give up and just buy another CD-RW, losing a few more hours.
Or that my settings suddenly change for no reason.
Or that my computer sends pornography to everyone on my email list without me knowing about it.
Or that my system freezes once a week.
That's the difference between a Mac & PC.
In the world of editing, for me PC's have the upper hand. One reason is AVID, the leader in pro editing, for instance. Even though I run the Matrox DigiSuite, I can read and write their files directly from an NTFS drive. In the pro world all oads lead to AVID and always will (interestingly, their sister company, DigiDesign, is THE pro audio application and it heavily favors the Mac). But when it comes down to it, my problem with the Mac is one that many Apple fans have a problem with too: total power. I mean, when you need to render that long composite you can get more horsepower on PC now, with the 3Mhz P4 ou specing the dual G4 1.25Mhz. In this biz speed is life. Just a thought.
is this a way of getting all the trolls in one story?
It would be nice to have a "real" comparison of the two architectures. I'm talking about leveling the playing field by using the same video card/drives/etc since Macs share these things now with pcs. At those price levels (high end to high end), someone wouldn't think twice about spending another $100 for a faster video card or hd.
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".
If you're going to post some goofball disclaimer like "long-time PC supporter and disliker of Macs," why not at least be consistent and include "would-be towelboy of Steve Jobs" on all the pro-Mac reviews?
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.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
well, what software is crap? premiere? avid dv xpress? vegas video? they are all crap huh? no, they are not. and osx is based on unix, it is not unix. it does not blow windows "out of the water" performance wise. and it still has lots of problems. now that they are actually releasing programs that work in 10 and 10.2, that is. i use macs all the time, and they have just as many problems as any pc i have ever used. most problems are user caused. there are a host of other compositing and editing tools for windows that are definitely not crap.
anyways, if you make crappy movies with a cheap editor you'll make crappy movies with the best editor. there is a thing called talent that doesn't come included on a mac even though most people seem to think so.
The PowerPC albatross is crippleware for Apple's future. Maybe they will move to AMD's Hammer, maybe not. But we'd all be better off if Apple shrank the size of their business by getting out of hardware and focusing on software. I'd rather buy OSX for my beige box than waste it on Apple's overpriced nonsense. Apple can acheive much higher margins with software alone than they can with the current realities of the commodity PC market.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Pretty soon they ought to be doing comparisons involving Linux too, not just Mac and Windows. Kino is beginning to seriously kick ass. It's now adequate for all my home video purposes (transferring camcorder video, editing and titling, making SVCDs).
of course macs are slower than pc's. they're comparing a 1GHz with 3GHz
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
FREE native linux video editing: cinelerra
scalable, too.
By now, it's well known that the PC is a lot faster than the Mac when it comes to just about anything - PCs overtook Macs around the time of the P3 800.
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.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Not only did they use benchmarks intentionally optimized for dual processors on the Intel platform but not on the Mac, they even lied about the price for the Mac. First they list it as over $3900, then admit it to be about $3600.
But the fact of the matter is I just ordered this EXACT machine for $3300 from Apple.com (cheaper through Clubmac, etc).
Warning to the Zealots manipulated by Steve and Marketing department lie factory. Morpheus is now asking you to make a choice, the red pill or the blue pill.
Please decide which one this is.
Final Cut Pro doesn't seem to run very well on that Athlon. ;-)
:-P
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.
-Brett
The real bias here, as usual, is editorial. A fearsome amount of people are ignorant of the inherent advantages of the MacOS- speed isn't one of them these days, but that's not a problem in my line of work.
:)
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.
The author took a single step out of video editing and benchmarked it. But what about the work flow... AFAIK most video editor would buy the new Titanium: edit in final cut pro, burn with dvd studio pro, give to the client. With a digital camera, you can a mobile studio, and possibly shot a commercial within some hours (even on batteries)!
Yeah pc have more raw speed, but is it the most effective working environment?
If that's all the Apple web site is stating about its smaller pipeline, than it is leaving out a somewhat important detail. It might be misleading if you read that as saying that the G4 is (20/7) 180% more efficient than the P4.
However, if two systems were built at equal clock rates and one of the systems has a smaller pipeline, branching with an incorrect branch prediction (a common thing in code) has to empty the pipeline (not necessarily completely, though), losing potentially 19 cycles in the P4. The G4 has the advantage of only losing at most 6 stages.
I'm not sure how they implemented each of these chips, and can't find the documents at the moment -- If I knew which stage causes branches on both the G4 and P4, and given an average number of cycles per branch, one could give an estimate to the efficiency of the processors.
The advantage to a larger pipeline, obviously, is that the clock speed (MHz) can be increased because each stage takes less time than it's larger pipelined equivalent.
I would really like to see someone write an article comparing the video editing abilites that come with a Windows machine comparted to those of a Mac.
I currently use WinXP pro on a dual P3 850 with a firewire card to do some very light-weight video editing. Basically, I convince one of my friends to film my hockey games, and then I review the film to see how I can improve. I also make clips for my team's web site to make it more interesting. I have no need for special effects or filters or anything of that sort: I just want to dump my video to my hard drive.
I've found Windows Movie Maker the easiest tool to get this done. There are only two things I could ask for:
1) Sound during the preview (which is solved by opening the LCD display on the camera, but still... if i can preview the video, why not the sound?)
2) More file formats. Currently, I can record only to uncompressed AVI, or a variety of WMV formats. Certainly this is WMM's weakest link. I guess this is just part of MS's embrace-extend-extinguish philosophy.
So what about a Mac? Out-of-the box, how would it do for a light-weight video capture/editing platform?
I think this is the real argument that must be addressed. Anyone can show that either platform is better than the other by carefully selecting the applications to run, so why not comare the basic abilities of the OSs? I suppose the real issue is that there is no standardized windows platform to compare a Mac against.
Anyways, the thoughts of you light-weight video editing Mac users (esp. those with the new PowerBooks) would interest me greatly.
"Dying tickles!" -- Ralph Wiggum
Read the replies by people who actually USE video editing and the trolls who say PCs are way faster (and therefore better) than Macs and judge by yourself.
As for the original article, it's pure FUD.
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.
oh right they probably released Shake for it. no, didnt do that.
so how do you edit dv on a pc again?
I want 2D games back.
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.
I am sure we would all appreciate it.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
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.
--sdem
A good comparison is not about hardware performance. When editing a piece, the rendering is about 5% of the process. Final Cut Pro blows Priemere out of the water. Things may render faster, but you can render all night when your're done.
Video editing is not like applying a Photoshop filter. A G4 500Mhz is more than fast enough to edit a feature length film.
Read up, it's not about MegaHertz it's about productivity.
I am a multiplatform user and I usually tout the Apple as the best solution over all. It certainly is for music, graphic manipulation (colour matching is so much better and easier on my little iBook than it is even on my iiyama monitor) and iPhoto's genious for managing thousands and thousands of photos.
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.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
My brother in law is an Intel employee and a recent mac switcher. What made him switch?
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
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.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
This was a (poorly executed) benchmark of graphics and effects software, not editing. Really, processor speed has little effect on editing efficiency. I know plenty of people editing features on old Media Composers running on 9500's and such. They don't care so much about processing speed -- you don't do much rendering when you're editing medium or long-form projects. What you care about is the quality of the software.
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.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Cool beans! Welcome to the party, dudes! I've been waiting to see this Slashdot article for the past 3 years!
This is redeculous
A good majority of comparisons between mac and pcs use software that is available for both platforms.
The fact is, most software that is used to compare PC and Macs where designed for one and then ported to he other.
Mac and PC architectures are very different, and porting from one to the other is very difficult.
If a software company does design to release their software for both platforms, they have a tendancy to spend more time and workpower on the PC version because they are statistically more likely to MAKE MORE MONEY. Software companies, by construction, are cowards when it comes to making the BEST software, and tend to focus on what will have the highest profit margins.
Even more common is when a piece of software is designed for PC first. Sometimes, if the software is successful commercially, they might port it to mac in order to make a little extra profit. Oftentimes, they depend on the success on the pc platform to sell the software on mac, not preformance.
And considering a majority of software is designed on pc's first, well, that explains your "cross section of benchmarks"
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
I'm as big a Mac zealot as the next, and I will readily agree that you can get faster PCs for the same price as a Mac (or less). But quite frankly, I couldn't give a rats ass how fast it is in brute performance.
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.
---
Open Source Shirts
Apparently you're an idiot. CNN did a report and proved over 94% of Windows users are homosexual. No lie.
The reason I like my Mac a lot more is software. The iApps it comes with are pretty good for most uses, much better than anything the PC ships with and even a lot of things you can buy.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does PC video editing software that this site tested take advantage of Altivec on the mac or not? From my programming experience, the 10 minutes it takes to vectorize the critical section of your algorithm can really speed up your code to the point where it's noticeably faster than running it on an x86 machine.
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.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Debian Doggy!
First the argument of Mac Vs. PC seems to base itself around Windows Vs. Mac OS-9/X and not really PC vs. Mac. but rather than choose sides (since I use both all day long) I'll leave everyone with a quote by a good friend of mine:
"Arguing about whether windows is better than OS-X is like running in the Special Olympics - Whether you win or lose YOUR STILL RETARDED!"
Ave Molech Setting
I'm a film student at the moment, and at this point I've used most of the options out there-- my school's friendly like that. For what it's worth, here's some opinions.
;)
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
So, how do you like your Windows box, colon caulker?
The benchmarks are biased?
I don't get it.
For most of us, the speed is not as important as final product. I would like to see a comparison of the trueness of colorsync technologies on PC and Mac. I think that would be more important to me than processor speed.
I think a more realistic benchmark would be to get two people of about the same skill level for both the Mac and PC, and see who can finish editing a complete movie and burn it to a DVD using FCP and DVD Studio Pro for the Mac and whatever their PC "equivalents" are. This will give people a better view of how fast a Mac and PC are. And no, I'm not biased toward either platform; I've got a PowerBook with OS X and I've just ordered the parts for a new Windows PC I'm building.
Funny you should mention "useability" and "Quicktime" in same sentence.
In Soviet Russia, PC means Personal Computer. It does not mean x86 Windows box.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If the results have anything to do with the Intel Pentium ads that are embedded in the web page.
straight men use macs
There is nothing under $1000 on a PC that can do the same
WRONG !!!! Go to www.sonicfoundry.com and get Vegas Video 3.0
Do you have a mac?
Actually the 970 and the AMD/Intel offerings are all due out around the same time. They are roughly equal in performance. I wouldn't be suprized if the high end workstations are released in august and the rest of the product line makes the switch in january 04. iBooks will be running 1.3g TiBooks 1.5-1.6g Desktops 1.3g-dual 2.0g (remember thats easily doubled to equate the the x86 speed ratings, probably even more than a simple double)
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.
I live in a giant bucket.
the trolls are submitting the stories. Is this slashdot's Troll Army?
"Find a topic and make me an army of trolls" says Wizard Tacoman
No, because he DID stack the deck in the PC's favor, the benchmarks are biased.
In order to be unbiased, he should have "stacked the deck" so that NONE of the plaforms was favored (as much as possible, and he did miss several easy points).
Get it?
It seems that whenever there's a new PowerPC chip it trumps whatever Intel has and whenever there's a new Intel chip, it trumps Apple's offerings. How is any of this newsworthy? When they start selling PPC970 based Macs, they'll probably run circles around whatever else is out there and then sooner or later Intel, AMD, or both will come out with chips that will run circles around them. If you want the fastest chips, buy the newest chips. Most of us have other concerns, though.
I saw this comparison of dual Apple G4 1.25Mhz, AMD MP 2200+, Intel P4 Xeon 2400Mhz and several single processor systems today.
You do the math. Go to the 3rd page if you are impatient.
Intergraph and Intel are fighting over EPIC which is the foundation for IA-64 aka IPF (Itanium Processor Family).
I guess you can chalk it up to the general anti-windows bias. Call Windows tools crap, and you can almost guarantee getting modded up.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
> benchmark using Adobe AfterEffects, but that app does
> 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.
> 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
~~~
On the topic of video editing (though not directly related to the article), is there any good/reasonable video editing software for Linux? Is there any good video editing software that is open source? Is there any video editing software which is inexpensive, for any platform?
I've tried several linux video editing packages (LinuxVideoStudio is the only name that comes to mind right now), and none of them seemed to be very good, in terms of usability.
I've heard very good things about VirtualDub, which is an open source (GPL) program for Windows, but it seems to only support a narrow range of video formats, and in particular did not support the format that my video was in.
What other packages are out there that are accessable to those who are not interested in forking over tons of money, but are still interested in doing some simple video editing?
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Apple sells hardware, not software. OSX is there to let you use that nice G4 system you bought.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Labeling people as anti-Mac, or PC supporter is the most stupid thing I have ever heard. Why the hell somone will try to be anti-Mac, put money into publishing his/her results? How come the guy will profit from being a PC supporter, yet it is unclear to me how the author of the post was able to determine that. Is it because the author doesn't like what he/she reads.
if the file you want to work on is locked down by Digital Restrictions Managment in Windows XP. Every time.
(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.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
haha, got you suckers.
Yes, Windows machines render faster then Macs. I work in multimedia and I've known this for quite some time. Good 'ol Charlie is wasting his time writing a 4 page essay in order to prove something that thousands of folks already know.
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.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
ColorSync! ColorSync! ColorSync!
It's not just about the processor, people.
Let's see Bill match this one!
You're using her as bait, Master!
to think about the code. If the code doesn't really make use of the G4 processor and it's capabilities (Altivec, bigendian, etc.), then the program will perform poorly. Photoshop is pretty well consistantly better on G4 (except under OS X it seems) than it's PC counterpart. Also, the P4 is optimized for Multimedia applications, the G4 is not.
just my humble opinion
-- DuckWing
This whole conversation is happening on the lower end of the market. Video editors don't reallly spend much time waiting for rendering anymore.
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.
My video compression blog
Amateur. That's the difference.
I just priced the Dell computer used in the comparison. The bottom line ship-to price of the computer was $3913.52---NOT THE $2900 that the article quoted. Of course I added the gigabit ethernet that he raved about, and I added the DVD burner that he needed and that comes standard with the Mac. And I let Dell compute my shipping and taxes. (Apple doesn't charge for shipping.)
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.
One thing not harped on nearly enough is how productive the UI of an application alone allows you to be. People dont shell out 30k+ and tens of hours of trianing for an Avid station for no reason. You need a UI that lets you realize your project with the maximum of flexibility, and doesnt get in your way. Editing video can be highly complex, and both FCP and Avid meet the UI + feature requirements to make them market leaders. I cant tell you how frustrating premire and other pc editing apps are to use. But you dont have to take my word for it.
... well, for OSX, this is definitly a basterd child as of late it seems. And i dont know if al the features overlap, but Shake blows AE away as far as i can tell... I think it woul also make a far better comparison. Actually, seeing shake being used is fun to watch, if not a bit daunting.
Secondly, After Effects
In the end, its the tools that let you be the most productive while maintaining a feature set to let you realize whatever you invision that win the day. And productivity is not just how fast you render. But go try FCP+Maya+Shake+photoshop+dvd studio pro on a nice 23'in lcd and see if you ever go back =P
PS: Does ANYONE know a good comsumer DVD authoring package on PC tht has a decent UI, costs less then 500, and has at LEAST the capabilities of iDVD2? There is a serius drought of good PC aps to do this for anyone but pros.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
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.
Please allow me to point out the obvious that this article is benchmarking a 3GHz CPU vs a 1.2GHz CPU. Is it just me or does this seem a little one sided? Now, of course you cannot buy a 3GHz G4, but what if you could? I think it really shows how superior the G4 processor is compared to the Intel/Athlon line of processors. If I was a Mac user, I would hold my head high.
I don't remember reading any car reviews where a 200HP engine was benchmarked against a 500HP engine. It just isn't done.
"With enough memory and hard drive space, anything in life is possible!"
Oh, one other thing that really kills a macs performance is not so muh the cpu, or the os, but the current slow busses and ram used. This is why in certain areas, the macs performance has not gone where you would expect it. I sspect when the new motherbord revs with all the buzzwords like HyperTransport are released, much of the current performance bottlenecks will cease to be.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
You're wrong on that count. If we were to use an analogy to a hand tool I would think a hand plane would be a good example. In this analogy the progam is the blade which in this case can be set interchangeably (sp?) in various handles. In this case I would say the Wintel PC is a simple block of wood, rectangular and sharp but with a teflon base. The Macintosh is a ergonomicly shaped piece of plastic with rubber grips in all the right places. The PC plane is quicker with it's teflon bottom but teribly uncomfortable with it's sharp edges and occasional slivers from the wood. This means that it can't be usesd efficiently. The Mac on the other hand, with it's smooth comfortable shape can be used non-stop all day. However without the teflon that the PC has it can't smooth as much wood per minute as the PC. In any case it's your classic tortise and hare scenario.
We arn't talking about 1/3rd of a second compared to a half a second between when you click and when a menu pops up, we're talking about 2 hours compared to 1 hour and 10 minutes for rendering a video. When the vast majority of your time is sitting around waiting for a render, it really does matter what system your using.
Even for doing low quality previews its important.
Also, windows does have color managers (not that you need it for video really) and basic utilities.
And we arn't talking about being six months behind, its more like 18-24 months.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I just bought a video camera and picked up a firewire cable to hook it to my iBook. As I connected it I thought about the girl on the switch commercial talking about how her dad was spending Christmas day downloading drivers trying to get his video camera to work under windoze and how she just plugged it into her mac and was away to the races. So I'm thinking as I plug the cable into the camera and into the iBook, "this better just work". It did, i fired up iMovie and and could access the camera, downloaded a clip edited it and created a .mov file in less than 20 minutes. I'd switch, except i already did :).
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I've done professional (if one can call it that) video editing for corporate presentation CD's on Mac and on Windows using premier and after effects and I've done editing for DVD's using FCP on Macs.
While all of this is pretty low end stuff, I have a couple of friends in their own business still using AVID on 9500 Macs.
Why? Because it works. People who tell you that you must have the fastest setup are lying. It's a very similar to the idea that you need a 2.4GHz machine in the office to type fucking letters. People were typing very similar letters on 486 machines not so long ago and the work got done. Similarly, if you are a professional in ANY computing field you'll go usually with a system that works, irrespective of whether it's a Mac or a PC. If your system is stable it means that you can tell your client exactly when he can have his video. If your system is unstable (like that POS Miro DC30 on NT that was my first system) then you run the risk of having to pay contract penalties and losing customers who think you are unreliable. Not only this but the quality of one's work seldom depends on how modern the equipment is. If a good professional was getting praise for his work on a 9500Mac or 266NT machine, I very much doubt that he needs a 3GHz machine to suddenly become better. What he probably will appreciate though, is a machine/OS/Software combination that is very stable.
In my experience the Mac, especially with OSX and FCP gives me this stability. I haven't done this recently under XP but my experiences on NT were that the hardware and OS and software seldom worked smoothly without some show stopping problems.
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.
This
Not only is it priced right but it's got a MUCH better interface, better performance and comperable features.
First of all, the Mac OS doesn't have "processing speed". You're referring to the hardware found in Macs (specifically the Motorola processors). Secondly, assuming thus (unless you really meant something else that i don't quite grasp), your statement that the platform has been "at least 6 month behind in processing speed for 4 years" is still incorrect. You can't compare Motorola processors and Pentium-class processors strictly by numbers. A 1.25-GHz G4 != a 1.25-GHz Pentium 4. They are completely different architectures.
And, if i may throw in an anecdote here: i reformatted (i guess you could call it) my 333-MHz G3 iMac a few months ago, and reinstalled System 8.5 on it. After getting some of my junk installed on there, including Kaleidoscope, i went back to my 1.8-GHz P4 with Windows XP, and noticed that, hark!, the Mac seemed unexpectedly on-par, in terms of performance, with the PC! Can't explain it really, heh, except to say that the Mac was newly-reformatted, and the PC was running on a year-old copy of Windows with a fairly bogged-down hard drive. YMMV, of course, but i just thought i'd share a story with the other kids.
Pro Rendering is done with huge server farms running linux this or that. Who cares what the speed is on your machine, this is just the sort of silly Ohh this PC is Sooo much faster than this Mac thing that discredits the whole field. It is just like the peope who bitch that IBM mainframes are slow because their processors don't run at 3 Ghz.
I don't know anyone who has bought one of these speed demons. Every one who I know who has bought a new PC in the last 12 months has got one in the 1-2 ghz range, which is where the PPC Macs sit.
Has there been a survey on this?
I'd rather have the project on a linux on intel box, that gives you the best of everything. the stability of linux, btw, I'm NOT impressed by the stabitly of MAC OS. Honstly in my experiance Windows NT is better for stabilty and power.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
How much is not worrying about viruses worth? Not worrying about OS updates doing things you don't want them to do? Having to worry about DRM stuff being installed behind your back?
To me it's worth quite a bit.
All the more reason for Apple to pick up the Alpha torch and run with it... They can go from being continually behind PCs in terms of performance straight to outperforming them by leaps and bounds, while continuing to be energy efficient.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Nowadays, I use AE 5.5 (and sometimes Photoshop 7.0) every day on a titanium G4. Both programs run smoothly, and I can work for five hours straight without having to restart. I have done a 180 from those days five years ago and have become a Mac Hugger again. Yet, just like five years ago, I know that performance-wise, the latest PCs will be far more capable of handling heavy-duty video compositing/animation jobs than the latest Macs... but you know what, I don't care. I'd rather use a Mac because of the greater ease of use; speed be damned. Mac OS is just so much more streamlined and easier to work with, which is very important for artists who want to spend less time mucking with the OS and more time actually creating. For 3D animation, I'm definately sticking with PCs (though I haven't used Maya with OS-X yet...); but for 2D, compositing, and editing, Mac all the way.
Both articles had areas for reader feedback, but for some reason, old Charlie doesn't see fit to post any, and I know there were some, at least by myself.
You have a pretty broad definition of competetive.
You've got a G4 system that cost almost 20% more than a machine that smokes it by almost 100% in some tests. How is that competetive?
We all know how Intel prices their fastest chip well above the mainstream chip prices. In a few months, the Hyperthreading 3ghz will be the mainstream chip and cost a good deal less. This will only make the price/performance ratio on the Dual G4 system even more embarassing for Apple.
Oh yeah, just insult everyone and call them 'computer robots'. Why don't I just call all artist morons? or 'artsy fags'? It wouldn't make any statement i might make any more true.
I've used windows, and its become a lot better over the years. win95 crashed a lot, and 2000 dosn't.
But the main thing is, 'hacking away all day at code' most certanly is a creative process. The only diffrence is, at the end of the day you actualy need to have something that works, not just looks pretty. And when I'm coding I don't want to have to deal with my computer fucking up, or installing libraries or the like.
From what I'm hearing here, some of the video editing software for the PC blows at the low end, compared to iMovie. But that's just at the low end, for people who pay more you can get the same software or better.
The fact that you know how to use one thing and don't know how to use another thing dosn't mean that the thing you know is more intuitive, it just means you already know it, you artsy poof.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No offense, but he answered all of yor points and all you do is just repeat "it's the standard. It's the standard."
Will AVID remain the professional choice forever? I don't know but I would bet against anything lasting "forever".
In the meantime, if anyone can work with FCP and then send the result of that work on to AVID at a fraction of the cost with arguably better usability... doesn't that mean it would be the best choice for almost anyone that wasn't stuck with AVID already? (I use the word "stuck" in sense that companies that have spent a lot of money on anything are very reluctant to use anything else, even if cheaper, as then they would look silly for buying the expensive thing in the first place).
Doesn't it mean anything to you that film school students across the land are all getting trained with FCP?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now things are changing. AMD has more or less conceded the desktop to Intel
perhaps you should stop getting your news from slashdot headlines... the Desktop is AMDs bread and butter.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I wrote the Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide. I have a section in there on SVCDs. So I know a thing or two about making SVCDs in Linux.
Here's a couple of Linux programs that can encode mpeg-2:
- mjpegtools
- transcode (see here for its SVCD documentation section)
As for quality, I have to admit, it's not on par with tmpgenc yet. If you are working with untelecined 24 fps film source then Linux can produce marginally acceptable SVCDs. However, 30 fps TV source NTSC will look really bad at SVCD bitrates unless it is one of the rare such streams that detelecines perfectly. For these you will have to bump up to DVD bitrates to get decent quality. See LG83 for how to author DVDs in Linux.Avisynth has also been useful for various NLE and filtering tasks...is something similar available for Linux?
Okay, here's the beauty of Linux. You don't need it. If you simply want to frameserve an AVI, a named pipe (man mkfifo) will do just fine. If you want to do fancy stuff like overlay two AVIs, check out the subtitler plugin in the transcode software I mentioned above, which can do overlays, fades, and scrolling of many types of objects including text, pictures, and video.
While we all are impresssed by Apple's excellent Final Cut Pro Version 3.0 video editing tools, the PC side has not been standing still.
Anyone who's tried Sonic Foundry's Vegas Video Version 3.0 has found out it can do pretty much everything Final Cut Pro can do, but Vegas Video is under half the price of Apple's program and today's PC hardware and OS software now have the power to do things that used to be the province of the Mac. Also, Windows XP Professional supports IEEE-1394 connections natively, so hooking up a camcorder that has IEEE-1394 connections is a snap.
A do-it-yourselfer could probably build up a very nice cutting-edge system that could easily compete against Apple's high-end Power Macintosh workstations in terms of video capture and editing for probably half the price of Apple's machine.
>Do you have a mac?
No, Im straight.
Tell me, then, what is the difference (besides the way the menus and title bars look) between Photoshop 7 on OS X and Photoshop 7 on Windows? Do the brushes behave differently? Do layers stack in a different order? Does the cursor go left when you move the pen (or the mouse) to the right? Do the pixels smell different?
Please provide clear examples (facts), for everyone's education.
RMN
~~~
After all that editing you often want to render to DVD format (basically MPEG-2). That will be the longest CPU intensive task of the process. Guess what, the Mac will destroy the PC hands down at that. The G4 in the test will do the compression at 2x whereas the 3GHz P4's barely do 0.5x.
Sum up all the time used with the PREFERRED apps on each machine and the Mac will be much faster even though the PC can beat it on many quick tasks.
This is similar to the Photoshop results where Apple shows the Mac beating the PC. The Mac loses on most of the tests, but almost all of those don't really take any time. The tests that you really have to wait for are where the Mac is faster. Apple reports their speed advantage as the percentage of the total time saved. PC fans report the results in number of tests one. In the real world Apple's benchmarks are generally more applicable.
I'm sure if I were a usability expert, I could explain
Try.
I really don't care what happened back in version 2.5. This is 2002, we are comparing current systems running current software. That means Photoshop 7 on Windows 2000 or XP and Photoshop 7 on OS X. What are the differences now?
I think it would be important and educational if you could provide some real, objective examples (ie, facts), and not just empty sentences like "it just feels different" or "it's just something you can't quite put into words".
RMN
~~~
Cost. That's the difference
The tool's only as good as the person using it. Your $1000+ software may feasiably allow better results, but based on that post, I'd wager you couldnt even load the program. Who can create a better desk, a hobo of the street with a $100,000 workshop, or a 15th century carpenter? Tools in the right hands can help a lot, but they are only tools. It doesnt matter if you use a fancy electric screwdriver or a penknife, as long as you get the job done. It's the final product that counts, and as much money as you throw at the problem, you arent going to be good.
Its people like you that give "Zealot" the bad name, and damage the rest of the mac community. Give well reasoned arguments, great. Post crap like that? Pah.
P.S. My point stands, just s/Premiere//.
I absolutely loved this message; it deserves a "+7, Witty" rating. Unfortunately, I'm afraid most Slashdot moderators won't quite get the irony (which I hope was deliberate, but either way, it made my day).
RMN
~~~
P.S. My point stands, just s/Premiere/<editing program of choice>/ even
So putting two CPUs on the Mac and just one on the PC is "stacking the deck" in favour of the PC...? This must be a deck made of anti-matter, because the more things you take away, the more stacked it gets.
P.S. - So now you post as anonymous coward, huh?
RMN
~~~
This kind of report hurts yet helps. I personally own a Mac and love it, but then I never do rendering. For development or average consumer purposes, the Mac is every bit as good as a Wintel box. But if you have the need for raw crunching, this is not your platform, and it pains me greatly to say this.
But, this may be just the push Apple needs. There are many advantages to releasing OS X on multiple platforms. First, there's the raw speed gain. Second, the price of the boxes drops for the consumer, and this may be the biggest single factor holding Apple back from total domination today. Third, using an Intel or AMD chip opens the door to running Wine and Windows software. Quite a potential gain!
I challenge the idea put forth by some that Apple needs its OS to be on oddball hardware to be successful. The fact is, Apple has switched over to industry-standard hardware in every other area -- USB, Firewire (granted this was introduced by Apple), PCI, IDE. Nothing need stop them from moving also to an industry-standard CPU. Apple boxes do not need to be Windows-compatible to gain the speed advantage of the Intel/AMD chips. And Apple can still guarantee perfect compatibility between the hardware and the OS simply because it can dictate the hardware and sell the boxes. You could try to put together an OS X compatible box today, too, but no one is doing so because Apple isn't releasing some of its technical information. There's no reason to think this would be different on Intel or AMD.
The Classic compatibility layer is out on Intel Macs, but I personally never use it; I actually won't use software that runs only in Classic mode and I have never had a compelling need to do so. Everything good is available for OS X and can be recompiled to Intel/AMD with minimal effort, once Apple puts the pieces in place.
I hope this scares the bejesus out of Steve Jobs, simply because Apple under his leadership has achieved so much and is capable of so much more. I want to see Apple take what I see as its rightful place in the OS market -- a share of 20-30 percent, the BMW of operating systems. OS X is well able to do this, unless it is weighed down by things like overpriced, slow hardware.
This is the most pointless argument ever. How can you honestly say that MAC's are better then PC's?
XP vs OS X. Windows Xp can run anything and everything for everyone. It's trully plug and play, even more so than OSX, cause OSX has only handfull of stuff that you can connect to it, wich obviusly work fine for it, but Windows support 10x the amount stuff and proportionaly does a better job. People love not to work for things, and in this respect both OSX and XP do equal jobs. XP is speedier due to better hardware (DDR RAM, faster bus, etc) and is designed to run everything. As for running apps, MAC users have the age old cheap line that PC's crash. Well, my friend, MAC's crash too, they have been and will continue to crash as long as their archaic hardware remains as their base. At least with PC's things have changed now, as XP is STABLE, running on way better HW.
I mean, cmon, the G4 is like a ferrari engine in a Volvo shell. It was great once, but can't keep up with Intel and AMD anymore, and MAC fanatics will never admit that, no matter how many benchmarks and real world test they see.
POWER is completely relative to PRICE. You take equally priced PC's and MAC's, running their latest OS and have the same or similar tasks take place and then you have a realistic comparison as to who is better. 9 out of 10 the pc will kill the mac.
This whole crusade agaist the ruling order is the most cliche and overdone thing in existance. The whole world runs Windows, and those who dont, feel like their rebeling against something honorable and worthy, calling MS of all things, EVIL. Sorry but, you people really need to think about where you stand in this world.
Oh, i almost forgot. I definetly know that this happens several times a day, all around the world. Some poor guy somewhere is half way through editing some crap on Final Cut Pro 3, waiting for the 11 filters he used to render on his $3000 MAC, while somewhere else, another guy finshed two hours ago his similar crappy project(with 12 filters) on Avid Xpress 3.5 running on a $1500 PC, then played some everquest or Unreal 2k3, then went on Internet Explorer and checked out some naked pics of the first guys sister.
On the other hand, AMD bowing out of the processor speed wars will only help Apple in the long run. Intel will slow the speed to which it releases new chips allowing the G4 (or it's replacement) to catch up.
Everything the author claimed in the system, plus a few extras, is available for $3102, including free shipping:
Dell Precision(TM) Workstation 350 Minitower: Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor, 3.06GHz, 512K / 533 Front Side Bus 35T30 [221-1587]
Memory: 1GB PC1066 RDRAM® (4 RIMMS(TM) ) 1GN4 [311-2190]
Keyboard: Entry Level Quietkey Keyboard, PS/2, (No Hot Keys) E [310-1609]
Monitor: No Monitor Option N [320-3316]
Graphics Card: ATI, FIRE GL(TM) E1, 64MB, 2 VGA or 1 VGA and 1 DVI, (dual monitor capab ATI64 [320-0561]
Hard Drive: 120GB ATA-100 IDE, 1 inch (7200 rpm) with DataBurst Cache(TM) 120I72 [340-6396]
Floppy Drive Options: 3.5 inch 1.44MB Floppy Drive 3 [340-7634]
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional, SP1 with Media using NTFS WXP1 [420-1931]
Mouse: MS IntelliMouse® Explorer, USB, Optical (4-button, w/scroll) O [310-0951]
Modem: V.92 PCI Data/Fax Controllerless Modem V92DF [313-1142]
CD-ROM, DVD and Read-Write Devices: 4X DVD+RW with Sonic DVDIt! SE -for professional authoring DVRWR4X [313-1513]
Speakers: harman/kardon 206 Speakers HK206 [313-1042]
Productivity Software: Dell Precision Workstation NOMSBE [461-2963]
Hardware Support Services: 3Yr Parts + Onsite Labor (Next Business Day) W3YOS [900-3140] [900-3142]
Installation Services: No Installation NOINSTL [900-9987]
Intel Hyper-Threading: Hyper-Threading feature preset to "ON." Can be disabled/enabled in BIOS. HYPER [461-8167]
I'm as big of a Apple fanatic as anyone but I see the writing on the wall. Even with Jobs back, Apple has not been able to break the 10% market share; in fact, Apple has been losing market share every year in practically all markets. Besides coming out with cool casings and great software, Apple needs faster processors and lower prices. Waiting for the 970 is going to be like waiting for Copeland. Why not just build a Mac with the Power4? Better yet, why doesn't Apple use Intel chips? Then, the speed issue would become non-existent and a lot of Intel Inside fans would be swayed in switching to the Mac. Intel would be giddy about this switch because they would be able to sell more chips.
You know, I'm a tremendous fan of the PPC architecture versus the x86. Constant length instructions are a godsend when hacking around in existing binaries. The number of registers is wonderful, and the instruction set doesn't have the massive amount of *crap*.
However, Apple has billed AltiVec as way, *way* more useful than it actually is. SIMD is simply not useful for the overwhelming majority of code, and it's a pain to use, requiring the developer to go out of his way.
Because of the superiority of Altivec, I'm not really worried about the 970 lagging behind Intel or AMD chips.
No. AltiVec is not a bad thing, but it simply is not a substitude for raw clock speed, either.
I think that your best point is the power usage. AMD chips currently draw something like 60 watts, Intel 70. I haven't looked at PPC chips for a bit, but I believe the 1Ghz chips draw around 20 watts (actually, quite an increase -- the PPC line used to be around 5 watts).
CPU power just doesn't matter all that much any more for most people -- it really has outstripped the ability of software to usefully use it. That will, I'm sure, change, but at the moment, a 600Mhz x86 processor packs all the CPU power that anyone's going to need for most tasks. Use Linux, and it's even less. Power usage *is* an issue, as fans start producing more and more noise, and hard drives and CPUs have gotten hotter. The solution is not to try to swathe your computer in blankets of sound-insulating crap after adding scads of failure-prone fans -- it's to use components that draw less power and produce less waste heat. This is one thing that Apple has done right -- I cannot buy a reasonably-powered x86 processor that draws a sane amount of heat (sane being sub-30 watts). (Transmeta's stuff is nice for laptops, but their processors are actually a bit slow for new machines, desktop machines).
The other point I have is that reducing "average" heat production is a good thing, but not a substitute for peak heat production. My system *is* going to have to undergo peak heat production at some times -- the hard drive seeking, the CPU running at 100% -- and people need to look at the numbers for *that*, not "average heat".
May we never see th
I meant next gen AMD/Intel offerings, which is what the 970 is designed to compete with as far as I can tell.
I can almost guarntee you if the 970 was released at 1.8g today no one would even begin to argue the 3g hyperthreaded p4 is faster at anything except select integer artithmatic computations (which would proy be very close to tied). The chip is built to compete with the next gen of arch's not todays junk.
I live in a giant bucket.
Not only did they use benchmarks intentionally optimized for dual processors on the Intel platform but not on the Mac, they even lied about the price for the Mac.
Try to catch the falling clue. They used identical versions of software. They weren't benchmarking the software. They were determining which systems performed better for a given software loadout.
So, if you're using that specific suite of programs, of COURSE it behooves you to use the more powerful platform.
They didn't use something like FCP because:
"Mac gets X on FCP! Since the PC can't run FCP, it gets zero! Macs are faster! WOO!"
And similar idiocies.
First they list it as over $3900, then admit it to be about $3600.
Wow. He displays journalistic integrity! And gets castigated!
He happened to find the Mac at a LOWER price around the time of the article being published. So he edited the article to account for the lower price. WOW! What a bad person!
And the price of the model has dropped again SINCE the article was published. OH NO! Now I feel SO cheated that I put together a P3 system 4 years ago for about $1500, and can now get the exact same hardare TODAY for a whopping $300!
Hello? Light dawning in the swamp there?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's not about a PC being faster than a Mac.
It's about a PC being faster than a Mac in the given suite of apps tested with.
IE, if you're a shop that's running lots of running AE, Photoshop, etc, and power is what you need, you'd be an absoloute MORON to go out and spend half a grand more on a DP-Mac when a single-CPU P4 3.06Ghz machine will suck the doors off it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Why did Apple buy Shake? It has the fastest core renderer of any product out there... which has future applications for both Quicktime and FCP. Steve narcissistic but not stupid... he does own Pixar after all... which brings me to an ironic yang, most of that done in Pixar (excuse me: PIXAR)is, uh Linux. Perhaps this should change things... My info is subject matter straight from Linux Journal. (about Shake acquisition... don't turn me in ti Harvard English, thanks.)
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
The first big thing is maintenance: if my mac blows up, I can fix it.
So you're saying that if a PC blows up, that a knowledgeable PC user couldn't fix it? Maybe I should go back and tell all the machines I've worked on to stop working, simply because it violates your precept?
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
Funny, I find the Mac interface obtuse and annoying as hell. My productivity on Mac systems is less than HALF what it is on a Windows system.
Usability is a function of familiarity, not an innate value.
Also, this argument is complete bullshit for another reason. The interfaces here are Photoshop, AfterEffects, Premier, etc. They do NOT vary all that much between Mac and Windows versions. Some of the window buttons look a bit different, and the window border may look a bit different. Otherwise, functionally, they're nearly identical. This is the first point you missed.
Also as part of useability is applications- Media 100 DOES make PC boards, but Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro
Look back. See that thing behind you? That's the OTHER point you missed.
This article was not about Wintel is faster than Mac.
The article is saying If you're in a shop that runs these specific apps on a very regular, or full-time basis, then the PC is the better value.
So, bringing up FCP, or DVD-SP means DICK. Because the people looking at the article and making a purchase decision based on app/suite performance are NOT going to be using FCP or DVD-SP.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Editing on Windows - It sucks. At school we have Windows 2000 based computers with Adobe Premiere. Three hours or so you can run Premiere without problems, but then it get nasty and you have to boot the whole crap to get it working.
I haven't tried editing at home with my Mac (because I don't have a own video camera), but at least you don't have to boot it as often.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
to most people, PC = Windows
This is entirely true! One of the things standing in the way of GNU/Linux gaining mainstream acceptance is that PC means "a computer with an Intel processor that runs some version of Windows."
My Personal Computer runs Gentoo. I'm sure that other people's Personal Computers are Macs.
It may have been more appropriate to compare DV editing on Windows and Mac OS X.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Unfortunately the 970 will reportably be speed equivalent to the current top Intel chips but come out 6 - 10 months later. That would at least be an improvement over the current systems in which Apple is lagging by at least 16 months on the performance scale (and worsening each month).
Video editing on the Mac versus PC is no different than pretty much any other application. Final Cut Pro is a fine product, and OS X is maybe the best OS in existence. But I've yet to find a Final Cut user who can name anything significant he can do in Final Cut that can't be done in, say, Premiere or anything important the Max OS offers over a PC. Sure, there's the amorphous "experience" of using a Mac. But it costs more, and when I pay more, I want something substantial for my money. Apple is trying to sell me a ghost.
After pressing the "do render" button, I really don't care if the computer want's to render one oder two hours. Because this will be hopefully the last step, of editing a movie, I'll go asleep, doing my breakfast or anything other similar productive.
If rendering will as preponderate as in the movies by Pixar,... thinking about the speed of the processor will reduce the costs. Yes, this peoples are also switching: to Linux Renderfarms.
At one point, it was Linux vs. Windows. Viscious(sp?) fights between the 2. Both sides made fun of Macs.
"Everyone is used to Windows." "Linux is better but everyone is used to Windows, and everyone needs to use Office."
OS X comes out... and now the *nix people are kinda ok with OS X (not quite as good, but hey, it's pretty neat), but the Windows people are in total "Macs suck no matter what" mode. "Not only do they use slower CPUs, they also use inferior plasitics in their cases!" "And they smell funny, like wet emus!" No mention that the Macs still can do Office.
Now in this article we have people saying the only reason that graphics/publication people are "still" using Macs are because they are "used to them, and everyone is used to xxx (I don't know what the top pubishing packages are)." Ok, so it's ok that everyone uses Office, but in the pub industry using xxx is bad, somehow?
Are we seeing some hypocrosy here?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Are all moderators here from Apple's marketing department? How does this troll (Sakusha) keep getting modded as "insightful" or "informative" when he repeatedly trolls and lies (or at least is just plain stupid and completely uninformed)?
Here he goes on about how polite he is and what an animal the article's author is, but then fails to provide the evidence. In my book, this is called slander. Produce the evidence or shut up, troll.
Want another exmaple? Go here. He clearly states "you are making that up, there is no $4500 Mac". Dozens of posts after his point out that not only there are $4500 Macs, but there's actually a $4599 model being sold right on Apple's site. He gets modded as "informative" , the other posts are either ignored or modded own.
What is this? I mean, what's the point in reading Slashdot if the "information" here is fictional, and based on a small group of people's opinions and imagination, instead on on actual facts? It's just sad to see what this once great site has come to. Personally, I blame bin Laden (for not bombing these trolls).
You do? Then it's quite simple. Try it. Use the same files, on the same systems, and see if your results match is. No need to stress your brain wondering.
RMN
~~~
Look at el_dirtball's record (here). He registered just to post this message. And My guess is this is sakusha with a different username, posting just to "agree" with himself (just compare the timestamp of both posts).
And again, he doesn't present any sort of evidence to sustain his obviously false claims. He even says "we" to pretend he represents some institution or something. Maybe it's the dirtball association. Get a life man. Produce the exact benchmark setup and the exact benchmark results or stop trolling. It's assholes like you that give Mac users a bad name.
Can't you just use your video editing software to do that (ajust the hue/saturation/levels/etc). What I'm saying is that you don't need the same kind of precision you do with, for example, print because every display device is going to be diffrent anyway (diffrent TVs, uncorrected monitors, etc).
Ajusting the colors to 'warm them up' or whatever is obviously important, but its not something you need the OS for.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"straight men use macs"
Wow, that IS a backwards country!
No. AltiVec is not a bad thing, but it simply is not a substitude for raw clock speed, either.
Hey, I'll be the first to agree with you. Raw clock speed is usually king. However, Altivec can often be applied in applications like image, sound, and video manipulation. With things like MP3 manipulation or Photoshop, my G4 is competitive with chips more than four times the clock speed. Video editing is the market that's under discussion right now, and I think Altivec will apply often enough to give Apple a nice advantage.
It's true that SIMD isn't as magical as it's often talked up to be. It sure kicks ass at a lot of the creative stuff though, and that's all that matters in most of Apple's markets.
This
You're right, of course. Even with Altivec there's no way that even the latest G4s can compete with the monsters that AMD and Intel are putting out. When you pull out the benchmarks, Motorola's chips are lagging far behind. It would be foolish to claim otherwise, and Apple is currently grasping at straws with stacked benchmarks.
My claim is only that on Photoshop and a few other things my lowly G4 450 doesn't lag too far behind a 1.8 Ghz Celeron. That's a subjective opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. I haven't run benchmarks.
My original point was this, though: even if Altivec + Apple's Heavy Programming Investment in Altivec only nets them a 50% increase in speed on things like title renders, it will help make that chip very competitive vs. the P4/Athlon in the video editing market. My hunch is that the 970 based Macs will be right up there with the latest x86 based machines for performance. Of course, that's speculation based on conjecture based on fairy dust. The 970's best known trump card is still power consumption.
You've challenged my bullshit and kept me honest. I salute you, sir.
This
because the screen closer matches print. this is true for os9 for sure. I work for a lithographing company and we use macs for all editing work. we compared the 1 bit tif files on pc and mac to a proof, and the mac looks substantially closer with the same colour profile loaded. this is the main reason that macs are used in image production. (of course, you could always adjust the monitor on the pc endlessly to get it to work, but when you load a different colour profile, you'd have to do it again, so that's not an option). The second reason their used is software. We use RIP (Raster Image Processor) servers (win2k servers dedicated to process vector art into tiff files) and the only manager software avaiable for these is on mac. We also use software that keeps copies of low/high res raster images on a rip, and keeps the high res version on the server, but downloads the low res to the users workstation, so when editing the layout of images in illustrator or quark, they only see the lowres image, but when the tiff file is made, it uses the highres. This really speeds things up. Even with 2GB RAM, this makes an insane difference. Things like that just arne't availble on pcs. the final reason macs are used is superiour font control. ttf fonts are almost never used in litho jobs, but suitcase fonts are used. I don't even know if there's a suitcase manager for pc (i'm sure there is though), but the extensis suitcase manager on mac totally kicks ass... it makes font control easy, and actually possible... we tried a job on a pc, just to see if it was possible to switch for simple tasks, but the fonts would never load properly, and there were tons of issues, so we gave up. Macs are used instead of pcs for other reasons that their speed.
Reset button. Dialog boxes can be reset to their state before you started adjusting without having to hit cancel and re-open the dialog. That's just one thing. It is simple, yet necessary and missing on the Windows version. You don't actually use Photoshop on both platforms, do you? If you did, you'd know the differences. Most professionals that use both platforms will tell you the MacOS version has many additional features as well as fewer annoyances (like stupid grey borders).
MHz makes for only a two to four times throughput difference at best (I'm being generous to P4 in comparision to G4) and costs you more for power and cooling. Parallel processing can scale many orders of magnitude beyond that, and you don't have all your eggs in one basket when a motherboard dies.
Photoshop especially is highly tuned for the Altivec engine. In fact, Apple used to use Photoshop to promote the speed of its processors until the Intel processors started running Photoshop faster.
Is dump the PowerPC architecture and make the Mac standards a controlled subset of PC architecture. The reason their systems have inherent stability is that Apple has ultimate control over what constitutes a Macintosh computer. Microsoft has no control whatsoever. Lets face that the Intel/AMD solution is far superior to the RISC environment for computational tasks. They can build their own hardware and motherboards, perhaps a solution involving a SMP hybrid with a PowerPC slot for mac native binary compatibility, and an AMD Hammer socket for raw computational goodness. If they would build a machine that was superior at EVERYTHING, who could resist- being able to run a lightweight windows and MacOS on different processors would rock- especially if the two could hand off data with no lag. Just a concept at this point. IANAHEOD (I Am Not A Hardware Engineer Or Designer), but it seems an ASYMMETRICAL multiprocessor machine with a motherboard capable of determining the optimal processor for the given datatype would simply be a supercomputer. Why does MP have to be symmetrical? Why not have two vastly different processors, each one with its own strengths? You could have the Mac G4 chip handle GUI and the Hammer handle the backends!
Worth a try.
this guy _is_ crazy
posix: from the looks of Enlightenment he's on LSD
LSD is nothing compared to what this guy's on..
-- Seen on #Unix
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