Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
Note: this is not a flame.
As i read this article, the first thing that popped into my head was, "you gotta consider the software." Well, it seems someone beat me to the punch, but with much bias. He was correct in stating that Final Cut Pro (which I have been using for two years now) is a very powerful suite, indeed. But is it the most powerful? I would say "no!" but that is really my opinion. I find that a combination of Photoshop, Premiere, and After Affects (plus gimp on the occasion) makes a very potent suite. And i beleive that the price of all that software is equal to a single copy of FCP, but i would have to check. Truth be told, the integration is nothing compared to FCP's, but it works beautifully anyways.
If you, like myself, do a lot of video editing, then you probably at one time or another swore by your macs. However, the heyday of Mac Rule is over, and the PC can easily do every thing that the Mac can, and so much more. Not to mention that I can get a full fledged video editing pc for about $1,100, as opposed to the several thousand that a nice mac will cost you.
In essence, both the pc and the mac have their advantages
I've considered giving Linux a shot at video editing, but haven't found an MPEG-2 encoder yet (which would be needed for making SVCDs). I've tried getting TMPGEnc working under Wine, but have been less than successful. A quick check of the Kino website indicates some level of MPEG-2 support...any ideas as to how it compares to TMPGEnc for speed and quality?
Avisynth has also been useful for various NLE and filtering tasks...is something similar available for Linux?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
According to this benchmark, on the same website.. Adobe Products under MacOS X are not well designed for dual cpu machines. If you look at the scores, the dual CPU machines get almot the same rating that the single cpus..
;)
Final Cut Pro is an other story..
So.. if you "double" the Mac score.. you gets beatten now?
Menzoberranzan Networks
Windows XP responsive? You must be on crack - Microsoft managed to slow the GUI way down while adding no real features (that I've noticed anyway) to the GDI besides 'pretty shapes and colors' ...
... 2K feels much faster .. to me anyway. Of course, OS X under 10.2 with a good video card feels pretty responsive nowadays ...
Compared to OS X? Well, its easy to pick the slowest moving UI out there and compare to that. Take XP and compare it to 2K
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.
> 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
~~~
Basically your point is that your PCs were crashing and so you switched to Macs that were not crashing. Therefore Macs have lower TCO?
Over here, none of our Win 2k Pro and XP boxes have ever crashed. Jokes about BSODs just aren't funny anymore. We make sure we buy premium hardware and qualified systems. Even then, the total cost of one PC has always been less than the top Mac.
Yes, speed and cost are not always factors in productivity. But faced with deadlines, choosing between PC or Mac is a no brainer. FCP is great but XDV is still better and works well MC. Over the past three years, my experience in video editing has shown that PC's have a lower TCO than any other platform.
After playing with many Pro/Am video editing and DVD creation tools for Windows I have to say that most of them suck. They either just don't work or they do things so badly as to be unusable. It may be different in the actual professional level.
I have been giving getting a Mac for this kind of work a serious consideration.
And I was one of those guys who spouted off "Macs Suck!" for almost ten years. Then one day I grew up.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
"True but I'm pretty sure the functionality of Mac Photoshop and PC Photoshop are the same or extremely close. So I don't know if it matters in this argument."
Well, if PS was an island of use, that would be true. Problem is, most people need to import files, maintain databases of images, and generally make applications interact. On any given day, I have PS 7, DW MX, iPhoto, Freehand, Navigator, IE 5, and RDC (to test pages on the crappy PC at my desk, no monitor) open at the same time. It's just easier on a Mac. Qualities you can't put in a chart, and I'm sure if I were a usability expert, I could explain in a thesis, but they still matter.
This also neglects the fact that the article was about Video Editing. FCP wins in ease of use and cost for a NLE app. That's Mac only.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Photoshop on PC != Photoshop on the Mac
There are subtle differences in what you can control minor things that are available (such as a Pantone library was available one version earlier for Mac). Not enough to really stop you from getting the job done on a PC, but enough to kill your boss if they don't buy you a Mac sooner or later.