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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."
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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
Apple's first advantage is OS X. It's UNIX, which means that it blows Windows out of the water, performance-wise.
But as shown by the tests, this does not translate into faster video rendering performance.
Plus, it has the amazing Aqua interface, which makes things easy to use,
Arguable at best. Adobe does not ship two differently designed interfaces for its different applications, a good one for Mac and a bad one for PC. Aqua just makes the buttons and windows pretty, if the application is built for it.
and Mac hardware was built for video editing, with Firewire ports on every machine sold as well as tight integration with OS X.
Firewire cards for PC's are available for PC's that don't have Firewire ports. Firewire has many other applications other than video editing, making it poor support for the statement "Mac hardware was built for video editing".
People doing video editing on x86 will have to use Windows. And the ones that are available for Windows are crap. Meanwhile, I have been using Final Cut Pro on Macs for more than a year, and I have to say that it is quite clear why it is the professional industry standard editing software for digital video. It's simply the most powerful, versatile, and easy to use video editing suite I've ever seen.
Ever heard of Combustion, Flame, Retimer etc.? Some of these are Academy Award winning apps available for PC (and some for Mac, though you'll have to deal with slow performance there).
I pity the people stuck with PCs to do their video editing. I've tried it on my Pentium III before, and it is slow as all hell.
Excellent judgement; casual usage of a PC with a 3 year old processor compared to a year's worth of usage on a recent Mac.
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).
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 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.
Apple's first advantage is OS X. It's UNIX, which means that it blows Windows out of the water, performance-wise.
No, it doesn't. Not the fact that it's UNIX, that is.
I've seen Linux--as UNIX is OS X, probably more--crawl on things that Windows _on the same machine_ has no problem with.
Sure, KDE could be to blame. Being on a higher partition could be to blame--but if UNIX automatically "blew windows out of the water", I should either not notice the difference or actually see a LINUX-slanted improvement.
'course, OS X _is_ faster than Windows, or at least it seems that way. An UNIX is more stable, and probably IS faster in a few specific or low-overhead (GUI et al) apps (note: I just haven't had the chance to see this firsthand, so I won't claim to know that it is.), but being UNIX doesn't automatically grant you a speed boost over Windows or anything else.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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!
"Apple's first advantage is OS X. It's UNIX, which means that it blows Windows out of the water, performance-wise."
If that's true, then why are PC benchmarks using Windows blowing away Mac Benchmarks using OS X. The point is a high-end PC running Windows is faster and cheaper than a the fastest Mac running OS X.
Vote for Pedro
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
Apple's first advantage is OS X. It's UNIX, which means that it blows Windows out of the water, performance-wise.
I agree with that comment, for the most part. But not in this application.
Plus, it has the amazing Aqua interface, which makes things easy to use
Amazing Aqua Interface? I have been using Macs at home for a number of years, but to say the interface is amazing, and makes things easy to use is completely subjectional. There are plenty of people who prefer Windows flexible and fully customizable interface.
Mac hardware was built for video editing, with Firewire ports on every machine sold as well as tight integration with OS X.
Right, and there's no such thing as FireWire on a PC. Nor tightly integrated software that can harness the technology. You can buy a PC from Dell, Alienware, etc these days that has all these things built in.
There simply isn't any kind of video editing software available for Linux that is even remotely affordable. And the ones that are available for Windows are crap.
It's true that Linux has very limited options for professional video editing. Blender and the Gimp are a couple of the best, and their use of file formats and limited features make them impossible to use for doing any real work. However, many businesses use M$ Windoze anyway for other things because of its compatibility and widespread usage (whether thats a good or bad thing).
So taking that into consideration, a business that does video editing, but not as their only (or primary) service would have to buy a Windoze box AND a Mac in order to stay on top of all aspects of their work. Affordability is always an issue for amatuers and home users, but for businesses, the difference in cost between Final Cut Pro ($1000) and say, Ulead Media Studio ($500), AVID ($1500) or Adobe Premiere ($550) is not the driving factor behind the purchase. The software has to work in their format, on their current hardware if possible, and their employees must be familiar with the interface to avoid extensive training or re-hiring.
The REALLY big video companies (ie. Hollywood) are going to use hardware and software that costs hundreds of thousand of dollars, such as SGI machines using Discreet Inferno (as used on Lord of the Rings), so applications like Final Cut Pro, Premiere, etc. are not even options.
I pity the people stuck with PCs to do their video editing. I've tried it on my Pentium III before, and it is slow as all hell. Pity, too, but you really do get what you pay for.
Talk about opening yourself up to be flamed! Did you have your eyes open when you tried this? Since you are most likely a professional benchmarker, and made a fair test (ie. re-formatted, installed a nice clean version of Windows, purchased a professional video editing package, and ran extensive tests on all aspects of input, editing and output), I can't understand how you came up with the final verdict that it is... slow as all hell .
I realized coming into this thread that it would be bombarded by Mac fanboys futiley crying about how much PC's suck, but your post got modded up, so I figured it was worth proving a point.
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.
What the hell were you running? eMachines? Compaq?
Seriously, those problems on a PC are a myth, provided you get the right hardware/OS. If you scrap together a no-name brand pc with Windows 98, then you can expect things like that to happen. Put together a machine with reputable components and an OS like Windows 2000, and you ain't gonna have those problems. I can tell you that right now from experience. I rely on my machines (yes, machines plural) to do rendering, video editing, ect. I can't afford down-time like you described.
Honestly, if those problems existed, I would be a Mac user.
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.
Did you check to make sure that hdparm is taking full advantage of your HD and that the kernel is using optimized instruction sets for your processor instead of generic 386 sets?
This is why I don't really like kde. I much prefer IceWM or GNUStep if I want a speed-demon. They may look more dated but they run much faster and use less resources. If you're looking for something "prettier" then go with GNOME. At least this is MY personal preference.
Well, as I said before this probably has more to do with your individual optimizations. Have Tom or I look at the machine. There are _STABLE_ tweaks that most systems don't do in order to insure vanilla hardware compatability. I've found that if hdparm isn't tweaked properly the hard disk access time, and therefore any apps that do any sort of I/O work, are slowed dramatically.
----- I want my LART.
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
> Apple's first advantage is OS X. It's UNIX, which means
> that it blows Windows out of the water, performance-wise.
I see. And you are basing this theory on what advertising leaflet? Please define:
a) What does "UNIX" mean (this is not a trick question).
b) What kind of benchmark are you using to conclude that "performance-wise, OSX blows Windows out of the water".
> Plus, it has the amazing Aqua interface,
> which makes things easy to use
Aqua is not an interface; it has no influence on how easy programs are to use, only on the way they look. The interface of programs such as Photoshop, After Effects, Combustion, etc., is almost exactly the same on Mac and Windows.
> Mac hardware was built for video editing, with
> Firewire ports on every machine
Most PCs come with firewire ports, too (even laptops). When they don't, you can add them for about $50. As to the rest of the hardware, PCs use the same drives as Macs, the same memory as Macs, and they have faster CPUs (therefore they render the video effects faster, as this article shows). So how exactly are Macs "built for video"...? Is there a new model that comes with a tape drive, per chance?
> Final Cut Pro on Macs for more than a year, and I
> have to say that it is quite clear why it is the
> professional industry standard editing software for
> digital video.
I am a professional video editor and I never use FCP. I know several video editiors and several companies, and none of them uses it, either. I'm not saying it's not good, but it's definitely not "the standard".
> I pity the people stuck with PCs to do their video
> editing. I've tried it on my Pentium III before, and
> it is slow as all hell.
Maybe your Pentium III was not "built for video". Or maybe it was built by someone who didn't have a clue about building PCs.
Please, when you state your opinion, or your wishes, don't present them as facts.
Macs are excellent home computers, especially for people who are new to computers. Even Apple itself has pretty much given up pushing Macs as "faster" or "better" and is instead focusing on "prettier", "simpler". Why isn't this enough for Mac users? Why do you feel the need to keep shouting that Macs are faster and more powerful when very clearly they're not? It only makes you look like a bunch of fanatics.
I have a GeForce2 MX graphics card. It has good image quality, it works fine in video editing / animation / 3D modelling software and it runs nearly all games at an acceptable speed. But it wouldn't cross my mind to say it's faster (or even "better", as subjective as that may be) than a Quadro 4 or an ATI AiW 9700 Pro. You see, for something to be good enough it doesn't have to be better than everything else.
RMN
~~~
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.
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.
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.
You obviously do not use an iBook. I am using a May2002 iBook with 16mb vram/radeon.
Jaguar is like a dog in comparison. But for the most part it is bearable. Windows is faster on my 600mhz duron. Next OSX should hopefully leverage more speed.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
> 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
~~~
Apple sells hardware, not software. OSX is there to let you use that nice G4 system you bought.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Not quite, I've seen some rather bad run ins with my PC.
1) XP before SP1 was released would loose all network connectivity once a week as my router rolled the IPs over.
2) My soundcard, an SB Live, crapped out when I moved from 2k to XP (2k was giving me shit about the video card, an SiS which has since been replaced). Currently, my computer still does not play MIDI files, except ironicaly enough, through quicktime. I don't know why this is, and so far can't find a solution. Though I do know that when I try to do so (and thus turn on the MIDI support in the volume controls) all sound on my computer craps out. The fact that I had to use QT to play MIDIs and Other programs to edit them was a bitch and still is.
3) I have been hit with more viruses since plugging this PC into the internet that I have in my entire lifes usage of macs. In fact, I've recieved one mac virus so far and 8 PC ones. Granted I run stuff which is at risk for containing viruses, but I do that on both machines.
4) While I have never seen the settings on a PC or mac change for no reason (except when the internal battery gives out), I have seen the settings randomly change back to default or something else when I install a new program or update.
Granted these are rare problems in the PC world, but they are still much more common than on a mac. And even if they're uncommon, they're still a bitch to fix.
On a side note, putting together a PC with reputable components brings up the price point much closer to a mac.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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.
Only the windows version.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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!"
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
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.
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
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'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
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
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.
Photoshop on the Mac looks, feels and behaves just like Photoshop on the PC. Mac bits are exactly the same as PC bits; they're not sharper or smoother or better polished. The OS and the hardware are just a means to an end. When you spend all day inside After Effects, or 3DS MAX, or whatever, the OS is irrelevant, and so is the CPU brand; you just want it to be as fast and as stable as possible (and you want a good monitor, good tablet, etc., but those are - or can be - the same in both cases).
:-/
One of my company's Athlon MP / Windows 2000 Pro workstations (which is used to run Photoshop and After Effects, amongst other programs), has been on for 584 hours as I write this. I would say that's stable enough. It's also ridiculously fast (faster than the 3 GHz Pentium 4 they tested in this article, and possibly cheaper, if it was bought today).
In the fable of the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise won because the hare overslept (remember?). If anyone has overslept (and thus lost its advantage) here, it's Apple. Fifteen years ago, they were miles ahead of the PC in every department. Ten years ago, they were more or less matched in hardware, but Apple still had the software edge (both in terms of OS and applications). Five years ago, the PC matched that. And now, it's hard to find anything Macs do objectively better (some people may say they look better, but that's a matter of taste, personally I hate the Aqua look nearly as much as I hate the Windows XP look).
I think Apple lost "it". They haven't come up with anything really new for ten years or so. They're just refining, making things look prettier, rounder, smoother, but deep down it's the same thing they had a decade ago (when they copied a lot of ideas from Xerox and IBM).
For the last 5 years, Microsoft, Apple (and Linux) have just been copying each other ad nauseum. If Longhorn does introduce a database / property-based file system, it will be the first truly new thing in a long time. And it's a bit depressing that it's coming from Microsoft.
RMN
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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.
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
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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
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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//.
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.
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
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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.
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
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).
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.