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Can Sony Vegas Pro Run Sucessfully On A Mac???
I am at a crossroad. Looking at switching out all our PCs for Macs. Can Vegas run on a Mac? Pros? Cons? What do I need (software & hardware)? If you are running Vegas on a Mac, I want to talk with you.
Please contact me ASAP.
Happy new Year.
Ken Bennett
Video Adventures
Capturing Your Life’s Adventures! -
6 Replies
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Currently running Vegas on a MacBook Pro under BootCamp. All seems fine with the minor exception of a Focusrite Saffire Pro firewire audio interface that doesn’t play nice under BootCamp.
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I don’t use Macs, but I have helped Mac users add Windows to their systems.
The good news is that all Macs today (all x86 Macs) are bog-standard Intel PCs. The main difference is that they run Apple’s version of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), rather than the old PC BIOS or the Open Firmware HAL from the PowerPC days. You can run Windows on x86 Macs using BootCamp, which includes a boot manager, partitioning and formatting utility, and Windows drivers for standard Apple hardware. The actual boot functions are already built in (if you have a very old Mac, you may need a BIOS update) via classic BIOS emulation in EFI.
Once you partition a disc, install Windows (current BootCamp 4.0 only supports Windows 7, which is what you should be running for Vegas Pro 11 anyway), and boot, you’re on a PC in every meaningful way… just one made by Apple. Of course, if you play to run in Windows mode most of the time, you might question why you’re paying twice as much for slower hardware… but hey, some people like pretty casework.
It’s technically possible to run both at once, via a virtual machine environment such as VirtualBox or Parallels. This allows you to run a Virtual PC on your Mac desktop when you need Vegas, but you’re going to take some performance hits. Generally, things like GPU emulation are a bit weak, though Parallels claims to have support for 3D games, but I don’t know if it would support OpenCL acceleration.
some of the GPUs in current Macs will work fine , though none of the Macs ship with terribly powerful GPUs by today’s standards…. the Mac Pro is old, and the iMacs are really laptop PCs built for desktop use. The Radeon HD 5870 in the higher-end Mac Pro was a fast card in 2009, and it does support OpenCL, which is a useful thing to have for accelerated video editing and rendering in Vegas. The Radeon HD 6970M sounds better, but it’s the laptop/mobile version, so it’s actually delivering less than half the performance of a desktop Radeon HD 6970.
Of course, if OpenCL isn’t virtualized and you intended to run using a VM, this is probably not an issue. But you won’t be getting the most out of Vegas. I have used VMs quite extensively for work since the 1990s, and in general I have the host OS as the one that really needs performance (usually Windows, for video/multimedia/CAD) and the Virtual OS for things that are less critical (software development). I did once build a dual boot system that could run either native or in a VM, but it was a big pain and didn’t work well. In general, you need to treat each environment as a separate computer, even if you do master the art of mapping a physical disc partition to a virtual one for the VM (much easier under VMWare back then than VirtualBox today).
-Dave
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Great info Dave. So now my question is back to the simple “is there really any need to move to Mac to run Vegas?” To get the max performance out of Vegas, is it wise, then, to stay with a WIN 7 64bit machine?
My current editing PC (custom built) has an aging Supermicro MOBO. I have dual Xeon E5440 2.83Ghz CPUs, 16GB RAM, running WIN 7 64bit with 4 internal HDDs and 2 external 6TB RAID-5 boxes. Graphics card is a NVIDIA 470GTX. I need to retire my aging Video Toaster card (only using NewTek’s SpeedEDIT for Photo Montages) and add a BM card to I/O HD to studio monitor for Vegas playback and I/O analog stuff. The question was either update the current PC or jump to Mac. Sounds like I should stay with PC.
Suggestions, comments? Thanks.
Ken Bennett
Video Adventures
Capturing Your Life’s Adventures! -
I use Vegas Pro 11 on a Mac Pro running Windows7 64 bit. I have a 2TB internal drive dedicated to Windows and video. It runs very well.
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Mac hardware is pretty good. We also have a few Mac’s running Win7 x64 in dual-boot. It really bugs the Apple purists to see the Win7 splash & stuff! Hee hee…
Steve
Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T3400, MultiTB SATA, 8GB RAM Vegas 10e x64 DVDA 5.2(build 133) Sony HDR-CX550V
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Chris,
Thanks for your post. I too am using the Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, and I would like to run Sony Vegas Pro on my Mac through bootcamp.
Does the Focusrite work at all? Have you discovered any work-arounds.
Thanks in advance.
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