Macs vs. PC for video editing, which is better?

Nightowl · Post by **Nightowl** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 5:57 am

jonmartensen wrote:I personally don't care that "pros" use macs, that is not the kind of argument that persuades me to think macs are better for video editing.

I don't know about 3d rendering in a networked setup. I think PC's do rather well nowdays.

You're absolutely right - it is a shitty argument. I know I've used it, and I'll probably continue to use it (only if I have valid information to back it up), but it's still a shitty argument.

And PCs do currently dominate 3D rendering in a network setup, save a few very high profile systems that should not even be considered Mac or PC - then again, most good graphics houses contain both PCs and Macs, so who knows - perhaps we should all just use both systems for what they are - creative tools, etc.

And here I write this on my PC while my Mac renders out some video frames... yeah for cross-platform! Be one with the computer! Computers are our friends!

-N

Mask of Destiny · Post by **Mask of Destiny** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 3:22 pm

Actually until recently both Mac and PCs were used by only a small portion of the editing community. Most video editing was done on custom workstations Avid workstations and other such ilk. For a while the Amiga held a chunk of the market with Video Toaster, but it's been dead for over 10 years so I would imagine it doesn't hold any apreciable portion of the market.

It wasn't until the release of FCP that desktop computers were really considered a respectable editing platform again. In response to this Adobe tried to address the complaints about Premiere 5 with Premiere 6. Never having used v.5 I can't say how successful they were. I can't personally make a good comparison of FCP with Adobe's offerings, but from the reviews I've seen FCP has an easier to use interface. I would also imagine that's not nearly as buggy as Premiere.

As far as raw awesome power is concerned the PC clearly wins the day. The main problem with current Macs is they simply can't match the memory bandwidth of PCs. The fastest Macs still only have a 133MHz FSB and both processors in the dual systems use the same bus so the only thing that can take advantage of the extra memory bandwidth the DDR provides are things like the Hard disk controller which can do DMA.

As far as internal clock speed is concerned, looks can be decieving. Back in the days of the P3, a G4 Mac could get the same performance in Photoshop as a P3 PC running at twice the clockspeed. The reason being that Photoshop is highly optimised for Altivec and Altivec is much more advanced than SSE.

RDRAM actually does have better performance than DDR RAM, but the extra bandwidth is useless on Athlon based systems and generally speaking the extra performance isn't worth the extra cost on P4 systems. For a detailed comparison of the two RAM technologies I suggest you go over to arstechnica.com and look at the article they have there.

Nightowl · Post by **Nightowl** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 5:20 pm

Just so you know, Avid systems were and still are based on Mac systems - you can use PC now too, but the high end cards require Macs. You see, Avid is a card based system - Avid doesn't make computers. They have hard drives and capture cards and base units and all these little pieces that go together in a gigantic $60k build it yourself editing beast. But they're dying. Aurora has stolen more business from Avid over the past few years than you can imagine. Anyway, "raw awesome power" doesn't make a damned bit of difference in the editing world. I have a PC with a 2.1 Ghz Athlon and my Mac processes video twice as fast unless it's something like MPEG compression. Then the PC dominates. It's all relative - specs don't mean jack shit in the real world. They certainly don't affect me.

-N

Mask of Destiny · Post by **Mask of Destiny** » Wed Feb 26, 2003 10:54 pm

But a dual 1ghz Aurora based Mac NLE with a scsi RAID array will rip the SHIT out of a 2.1 ghz Athlon with an ATA RAID array.

Not exactly a fair comparison. If I understand correctly a lot of the rendering gets unloaded onto the Aurora card and generally speaking SCSI RAID tends to get a lot better performance than IDE/ATA RAID. Of course things in the computer world are rarely ever fair. I'm guessing that Aurora card you're using is probably not available for the PC giving the Mac a rather large advantage for professional editing platforms.

However, I would imagine that this card is also rather expensive and probably out of the budgets of many if not most of the editors here. I mean even a off-the-shelf PowerMac is going to set you back quite a bit more than a whitebox Athlon system and if you don't have a card for real-time effects rendering than raw power does make a difference even in real-world scenarios. This is evident in some of the Mac vs. PC benchmarks in Premiere that someone mentioned a while back.

So I suppose the question should really be qualified. Are we looking for the best platform for a professional who can afford to buy custom hardware or are we looking for the best platform for a hobbyist willing to spend some cash, but not a fortune.

Thanks for the info about the Avid systems. My information on those was more or less third hand.

Nightowl · Post by **Nightowl** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 3:32 am

Heh, you're right, it isn't a fair comparison! The reason I used those two particular types of systems is because those are the two particular systems I own. And you're right, the Aurora is Mac only. But as far as realtime professional video cards go, it's surprisingly inexpensive - $2k. Yes, for the rest of you out there, prices on professional equipment are relative - Mark of Destiny here knows this, I'm sure. But yes, again, the card is more than likely out of most people's budgets on the .org.

As for benchmarks, I've still yet to trust them - when someone is doing a benchmark test, most of the testing is typically biased - this goes for Mac and PC users. There's always something out there - be it specs, or benchmarks, or what have you - that will back up your argument. There are some After Effects filters that render a lot faster on my out of the box G3 than on my Athlon, and some on my Athlon that crunch faster than the Aurora based system. I don't like to base my decisions on benchmarks or specs or any of that - I base my decisions on how a system works for me.

Though, yes, I am a professional, so my other problem is that I can no longer differentiate the arguments and I get confused. It happens to us all at one time or another!

So in the end I guess the argument really boils down to which system are you more comfortable with.

Or if you plan to upgrade to a professional level system eventually - but considering that you'd probably go ahead and buy a whole new base system if you did that anyway and, well, the point is moot.

Or get both systems - that way, you get it all : )

-N

dj-ohki · Post by **dj-ohki** » Tue Mar 04, 2003 5:52 pm

im just picking nits here, but a few pages back, someone said that OSX was running the BSD kernel... its not. its using the BSD userland runtime, and is using a hacked up MACH kernel (which has been benched slower (not by much mind you, but still slower) then linux 2.4 running on the same hardware)

also, IIRC, there was a claim that linux was being used more in professional situations. there are 2 places where this is true. 1) in renderfarms, due to the price/performace factor. 2) and existing UNIX based installs migrating to linux/x86 systems due to price/performace factor, due the fact they can easily port their existing tools over to linux pretty painlessly.

i now return you to your regular thread.

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Tue Mar 04, 2003 7:12 pm

:... O necropost and your avatar doesn't work. But atleast it was informative ^_^.

dj-ohki · Post by **dj-ohki** » Tue Mar 04, 2003 7:23 pm

klinky wrote::... O necropost and your avatar doesn't work. But atleast it was informative ^_^.

ack, didnt notice the thread was dead that long, sorry ^^;

and the avatar should be working now.. was playing around with things in my profile trying to get it to randomly rotate (like i have it setup on forums.arsanime.com) but for some reason, this forum doesnt like trailing slashses on avatar pics and it borked.

jonmartensen · Post by **jonmartensen** » Tue Mar 04, 2003 7:29 pm

It also needs to be shrunk to 80x80.

And hey, you posted usefull/good information, so it's not all bad

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Tue Mar 04, 2003 7:31 pm

Actually i wasn't that bad a "necropost" if even that. Only a week or so. Not like... 6months, like a few have been.

Rotating avatar >_> <_<. I became quite famous for my random misato avatar.

I should set that back up. I just used a random perl script

renamed as a .png file. Only problem is I can't serve up PNG files on my home webserver w/o perl trying to execute it.

. But oh well. It's worth it ;p

BTW using Win2k w/ OmniHTTPd.

~Klinky