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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."
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.
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 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.
Where on the site did you see which codecs were used? I don't have Christiansen's book, though I imagine that as he's ex-ILM (and probably ex-Rebel Unit if he's an AE user as well, but I'm not 100% on that so don't quote me) that his tutorials probably work equally well on either platform. If I had to guess, I'd say that the output was to either the Animation, Sorensen, or maybe Cinepak codecs, all of which came from Apple. So if they're "not optimized," then that's no one's fault but Apple's. He could have skipped codecs altogether and rendered to uncompressed
So to sum up: there's little, if any bias in the tests used. As someone who's made his living using After Effects on both platforms for a number of years (though primarily on a rock-solid Gateway dual p3 w2k machine), I was very happy to see real-world benchmarks, rather than SPECINTFPUMARK2002 BS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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