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Friday Apple Quickies
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs' $78 million Apple income tops Fortune magazine's list of CEOs whose companies lagged behind the S&P 500 performance last year. The number 'reflects the value of five million restricted shares Jobs got this year in exchange for 27.5 million underwater options.'"
markomarko writes "Well, despite Charlie White making all us Mac users eat crow over his comparison of render times between a dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac and a Dell 3.06 GHz P4, it seems that that Dave Nagel has given us a reason to take another look at the Mac. His article shows how After Effects render speeds can be doubled with the Mac, by using both CPUs."
$31.7 salary
74.7% behind
Watching Linux grab up your market share?
priceless.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
brain no worky right dead tired sleep now.
night.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
this whole after effects comparision is a joke. Mac users use Final Cut (pro or express) or Shake. You can not compare these apps with AE in terms of computation time, as they are algoritmically different.
Give it a rest.
Go compare
iMovie3 on the other hand, sux so hard it would put Miss Lewinsky to shame. Goddamit Apple, how could you release such a POS ????? It's not even worthy of an alpha label !!!!!!
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
His article shows how After Effects render speeds can be doubled with the Mac, by using both CPUs.
And yet, it still lags dramatically behind a single Intel CPU.
... on my Quad Processor Xeon? Can I do this trick to improve my performance, or is it just for mAcs?
By releasing a product which uses 1/2 of the Mac's power, they've crippled it. It would be similar to capping that 3ghz pentium to 1.5ghz, in which cause the Mac would (Guess what) slaughter the PC.
Yea, Adobe's a real good Mac software maker.
I, for one, am getting quite sick of the PC vs. Mac benchmarks wars. If I'm out driving in my Vette, and some asswipe in his fartcan Civic wants to race me, do I give him the time of day? Hell no, it's just sad. Please let these stop, the Mac is good for plenty of things, but speed just isn't one of them.
Reading the "Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again" article was an exercise in frustration, particularly when the other link states how to nearly double rendering performance. The writing in the article just generally pissed me off.
Anyway, perhaps it's time to send a nicely worded e-mail to Mr. Charlie White. A real benchmark may be impressive, considering a 3.06Ghz Dell system was only 2 times faster than the 1.25Ghz G4 in the best case - a Mhz/Mhz comparison should put it closer to 2.4 times faster.
By doing a little analysis of their data, we get the following table:
Test Name (Mac Time in Seconds/Dell Time in Seconds) = Time Ratio
1. After Effects: Simple Animation (14/7) = 2.0
2. After Effects: Video Composite (85/54) = 1.57
3. After Effects: Data Project (227/125) = 1.82
4. After Effects: Gambler (43/29) = 1.48
5. After Effects: Source Shapes (426/254) = 1.68
6. After Effects: Virtual Set (495/264) = 1.88
1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation (7.1/4.5) = 1.58
2. Photoshop: Filter Effects (62/35.1) = 1.77
3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments (4.5/3.4) = 1.32
Average Time Ratio: 1.68
That means that On Average The Mac, running at 1.25Ghz only took 1.68 times longer to do the same task.
The "How to Double your After Effects Performance" article averages almost exactly a 2x speed increase, taking on average 49.2% of the time on the "long tests". Taking this into account, we can look at the two longest tests, factor in the speed increase, and look at the "final" performance:
5. After Effects: Source Shapes (209.65/254) = 0.83
6. After Effects: Virtual Set (243.61/264) = 0.92
If we go through the same calculation for _all_ of the calculations, we get the Mac BEATING the Dell, taking only 83% of the time that the Dell took. If we take the Photoshop calculations out of the average, it is still at only 86% of the time the Dell took.
Note that these are all calculated values, and as such may vary significantly from actual values, also that I used the improvement on the "long" test for everything, and did not use the improvement on the short test at all - I imagine that the two systems would end up nearly even in a real test.
Apparently all of my tables were lame when I had them formatted, thanks lameness filter!
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Oh, for the ability to just mod this entire story "-1 Troll." Pudge pratically trolls himself in this one! "Macs suck. No wait, they don't."
I am the hub of Jack's digital lifestyle.
"iMovie3 on the other hand, sux so hard it would put Miss Lewinsky to shame."
That being said, iMovie 3 is free and better than any other free editor I have ever seen.
I also should say that, in my limited working with it, I have not had any problems.
For those who are doing more than making home movies, Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express are reasonably priced.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
That After Effects speed up hack article sounds like a Windows installation manual. Shame on Adobe for not making this a one-click install (but then, it's probably in their interest not to show this hack, for marketing and tech support reasons).
I guess we Mac users are so desperate to make the best use of dual-processors that we have to resort to such hard-to-find tricks. We could also say the same about Altivec, but that's another flame war.
The last thing I wanted to achieve with my posting was another shouting match over the validity of Charlie White's benchmarks. If some more of you had bothered to read the second article, you would realize that this isn't a software "hack", it's a technique that employs adobe software included with the After Effects production bundle, and that it does, in real world terms, double render speeds on many After Effects tasks. Charlie and Dave were both good enough to reply to my inquiries about their tests, and the relationship between them. Seems Charlie is planning another test soon, using the "render farm" technique on both the Mac and the P4, but with the latest hardware. And yes, the technique provided by Dave did come after Charlie's article. Two things I'm disappointed with: One, that adobe didn't recognize that the benchmarks they published didn't make full use of both processors in the mac, when they have software that will do so. Charlie wasn't aware of this trick, and that's fine, but I would have expected Adobe to know more about their own software. Two, (yes I'm saying it again)the number of slashdotters that don't actually read the articles they comment on. To Charlie and Dave: I publicly apologize if my invitation to revisit the results has resulted in a mass of e-mail you don't need, or otherwise inconvenienced you. To Charlie in particular: I in no way meant to slander your test. I just wanted to show that the dual 1.25 is actually capable of much better performance with both processors being used to their full potential.
And mod me down to (-1 obviously impaired) for thinking a hardware comparison between Apples and P4's would be commented on sanely.
It's called "using the provided software". Unless you consider using expert features of a program a hack. It is not uncommon to use the network renderer in pro houses for heavy comps. I never thought of using two "render nodes" on the same machine tho, but it makes total sense. The big difference of AE for NT/2K/XP vs AE for Mac is that AE for windows is threaded and uses multiprocessoring (has been for years), while AE for Mac is not using both processors. It is pure sillyness and lazyness from Adobe (or strategic evil payback to FCP by trying to move people out of Macs), since ALL the professional Mac animation/compositing monkeys use dual proc machines. Mac Duallies are standard in the industry for over 3 years.. Anyway, Adobe needs to seriouly overhaul its rendering sub system (practically unchanged since they bought "Causa After Effects 2.0", way back). They should use a self replicating render deamon, like many more efficient compositing systems. Maybe do something fancy like rendez-vous rendering a la Shake 3. While not "top end" AE remains a bargain for the all the functionality it offers and remains the standard swiss knife for many effects/animation shops. As for the guy stating that Mac users prefer to use FCP and Shake, obviously he does not know what he is talking about. Totally different stuff. FCP is a (very nice) rather unexpensive, feature packed non linear editor with some compositing functions, but not a full fledged compositor like AE. Shake is a great compositor for the wealthy ($5k license on macs, while AE production is what, $500?) with many great features (color tools, keying, easy scripting all over the place, SPEED) and unparalleled control, a toy for rather expert compositors. It also inherits from its "linuxy geeky" past many annoying inconsistancies (undos are ***ed up, UI is on the garish/unreadable/confusing side, file acess looks linuxy...). it is also lacking some features (hello ? where is the mesh warping ? Crappy timeline also). It will turn out beautifully in version 4 once apple spends some time polishing it. Version 2.5 was just a quick port on the mac platform ("look Steve ! it does run on mac") but gave a feel of work in progress, performance wise and UI wise. Didnt try new vers 3 yet.
Speed is not the reason why some people use Macs. They use it because of the OS and bundled apps. Having a nice looking computer,complete with dual processors and altivec to speed things up is just a bonus.
For that matter, what are diluted shares (the ones mentioned in Apple's quarterly results)?
(sources: Apple press release; article in 2003-04-14 MWJ -- a free trial before Monday should get you this issue)
Fortune sent me a reply saying they're going to print this in the next issue.
The Charlie White benchmark is a very unprofessional piece of work. It reads more like an interview with the Dell product manager, and he might get paid by the Dell marketing department for that.