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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."
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.
FREE native linux video editing: cinelerra
scalable, too.
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).
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.
You must have a different definition of "crap" than most people. I've found VirtualDub and Avisynth to be pretty decent. Avisynth, in particular, offers some fairly nifty editing capabilities...one script I've written for it takes two AVIs and overlays them on a third AVI. (It's designed to mimic the appearance of a Win2K desktop running some video-telephony software I wrote...a conversation is captured with the software and converted to a pair of AVIs.) More frequently, I use it to cut the ads out of TV shows captured by my TiVo or my All-In-Wonder and to do inverse 3:2 pulldown. The script then gets loaded into TMPGEnc for compression to SVCD.
Unless you're willing to pay through the nose for a pair of the fastest Xeons, you don't want Intel processors for video editing/encoding. OTOH, the dual Athlon MP 2100+ I have at home hauls ass...over 30 fps for two-pass XviD encoding and somewhere around 6 fps for two-pass VBR MPEG-2 encoding with TMPGEnc at its highest-quality settings. The processors and motherboard were under $700 (it was an upgrade from a single 1.0-GHz Athlon) a few months ago; you could more than likely get something even faster for less money now.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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
I have spent only a little time using Final Cut Pro on a friend's Mac and though it was immediately and obviously a well-realized product, it was not enough time for me to full opinion. Most of my Mac-using friend who enjoy editing video rave about it, so it must really pass muster.
If one was interested in a sub $1k NLE, I would endorse the product Vegas Video 3.0 from Sonic Foundry as being an excellent tool for pc users at an incredible price considering its feature set. It is the only reason I have to boot Windows, but it is also my favorite reason for powering any computer I own: it is that much fun.
The product can be purchased for $300-$400 dollars, and if you are a student, there is a handsomely discounted academic version available. I strongly recommend anyone who hasn't tried it to download the demo and see how good it is, and I am not alone in my opinion.
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
Yeah, to be fair, they should have compared two machines in the same price range:
$4160 Apple PowerMac G4
2x 1.25 GHz G4 (166 MHz FSB)
2 GB DDR RAM (2 GB max)
120 GB Ultra ATA HD
Apple DVD-RW Superdrive
NVidia GeForce4 Ti 128 MB
AGP4X slot
(4) 64/33 PCI slots
Integrated Gb LAN
Integrated Firewire
OS X
$4128 BOXX Technologies 3DBOXX S5i
2x 2.4 GHz (P4) Xeon (533 MHz FSB) (2x 2.8 GHz available at higher cost)
2 GB DDR RAM (2 DIMMS free, 12 GB Max)
120 GB Ultra ATA HD
DVD+RW/-RW/-CDRW Combo Drive
NVidia GeForce4 Ti4600 128 MB
AGP8x Pro slot
(1) 64/133 PCI-X slot
(2) 64/100 PCI-X slots
(2) 32/33 PCI slots
Integrated Gb LAN
Integrated USB2
add-on Firewire
WinXP Pro
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
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.
PC are far from being the hardware choice for any video or animation studios. UNIX systems, namely SGI, and Macs generally have been the choice of studios with UNIX iron running in the render rooms. Smaller budget studios may be primarily PC based, but major studios don't really fret much about buying expensive UNIX hardware. Personally I have never been in any studio that was a Windows PC primary shop. I was a animation/film major and numerous studios before I decided I was getting burned out and came back to the boring but very cheap to live mid-west.
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.
If you spent any time learning about processors, you'd know that pure clock speed does not describe the speed of a processor. That is why a 1.8 gHz Athlon and a 2.4 gHz P4 are about the same speed. There is much more involved like the number or arithmetic units and the number of steps in the pipeline. These are some of the very rudimentary differences in processor design. Also, the PowerPC is a RISC based processor while the P4 and Athlon are CISC shell processors with RISC subsystems. Very different systems.
PowerPCs are still slower. so your initial "guess" is right.
The real reason that vidoe and graphics pros use Macs are because they prefer the interface (it's prettier) and the first good graphics apps were written for Mac while the PC was still in cmd-line and early windows phase.
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.
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
my two cents:
while not the most cost efficient hardware wise...
Macs are the only way to run Adobe & Macromedia applications sans Bill Gates evil empire.
all you Microsoft haters better wise up...outside of linux's domain, i.e. web servers, web surfing, ftp, and other network services...if your business relies on certain commercial applications, and you DON'T want to be Microsoft's bitch...
it's not going to be cheap.
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.
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.
Um, yeah you do need color management for video. Bigtime. You have to 1) Be able to accurately match balance and levels between different cameras (brands or even individual cameras), 2) get a grasp on gamut: NTSC has a shitty colorspace, and 3) be able to accurately tune and correct your color to warm up or cool down all kinds of shots. You can pick out amateur films and videos pretty quickly when you see the total lack of attention to color processing.
On windows, color management sits somewhere in between the operating system and the video card's drivers. It's difficult to get good color management on windows, but it's not exactly rocket sience either. On apple hardware, it basically comes with the OS out of the box. As far as color control goes on desktop video software, IMO final cut does an excellent job for an all-in-one solution, and that's definately another bonus for the mac. I think that probably having both platforms around to do your work is the best way to go.
But, im neither a videographer nor a mac owner, so I'm not terribly qualified to comment I guess...
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