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laptop
besides a Mac laptop is there any laptops out there that will do good editing and rendering. Quad core and ssd drive?
Any recommendations?
Grace and Peace to you!
Richard -
8 Replies
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There’s nothing magical about Macs — they’re just bog standard PCs these days. If you have a particular Mac in mind, you can find a dozen PC laptops with the same specs for half the price. Really. I actually did this, in reverse, a little over a year ago. My daughter was going off to college, for broadcasting, and needed a video-worthy PC (go with the fastest i7 you can afford and you’re on the right track, at least 8GB DDR3 DRAM). I found a really nice one from Asus — cast aluminum body, i7 gen 3 processor, Blu-ray drive, HDD (for video, you need lots of storage, on a single drive SSD, I didn’t find it practical.. that before I had a 960GB SSD for my desktop), for about $1100.
But the school really recommended a Mac, since they were doing most of their video editing with Final Cut Pro 7, as well as other Mac tools. So I tried to find the same specs in a Mac. I couldn’t… and the closest I could get, which included a 700GB SSD, ran well over $3K. I wound up finding a refurbished Mac, directly from Apple, with a full warranty, for $1850, plus another $100 to add Windows under Bootcamp. So, close to twice as expensive. This was only a Gen2 i7, no Blu-ray drive, just DVD-R, fewer ports (it does have Firewire… she’s been using a 3-chip Panasonic tapeless camcorder for five years, so, not much value there), but it’s certainly a well-made laptop. Just over a year later, the HDD started failing, but it was just as easy to swap out as a regular PC HDD.
I couldn’t imagine editing on a laptop again, it’s just too slow and too restrictive. I gave up my laptop some years ago — my wife was happy to have one that’s totally over-spec for anything she’ll ever do (used to have 1.2TB worth of HDD, but one drive started failing, and I swapped that for a 256GB SSD… still overkill for anything she’s doing with it).
The i7 quad core in my daughter’s Mac Pro was just dandy for basic editing in Vegas. MacOS is mysteriously bad at handling video… I was kind of shocked. She had a somewhat older Mac Pro on loan during High School (she was in a “communications academy” within the local school), and it was totally incapable of handling basic AVCHD files. I had taken to reformatting them to Apple’s “I-Frame” format (quarter-HD resolution, I-Frame only AVC… apparently that’s a preferred format for editing on Macs). Even the i7 Mac Pro seemed like a totally different computer messing with video in MacOS over Windows. I have no idea what was wrong, but again, ok for basic editing, if you can live with one tiny screen.
Far as brands, I’ve had mixed results with HP. The laptop I gave to my wife is now a 7-year-old HP, and it’s never had a problem. My son, on the other hand, went through three HPs and a Lenovo as a teenager. At my old job, over the course of ten years, other folks bought Dells, and I don’t believe a single one of those didn’t have at least one trip back to the factory. I still have a very old Fujitsu laptop that got knocked 30 feet across a floor by a robot and kept on working, but I figure I got lucky on that one.
-Dave
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You wouldn’t want a Mac to run Vegas, since it’s impossible unless you dual boot it with Windows, and there’s no reason for that, or spending the money for a Mac, or using its awkward operating system.
I got an HP that works surprisingly well with Vegas. It was $1000, I think refurbished.
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[Richard Milner] “besides a Mac laptop is there any laptops out there that will do good editing and rendering. Quad core and ssd drive?”
I would look at gaming laptop like those from Alienware. They usually have plenty of CPU/GPU power, memory, and fast hard drives. (Actually, I would buy a Mac and I did!)
[Angelo Mike] “You wouldn’t want a Mac to run Vegas, since it’s impossible unless you dual boot it with Windows,”
Not true. I do it all the time without dual boot. Here is a screen shot of Vegas Pro 10.0 running on my MacBook Pro fully integrated into the desktop using VMware Fusion (there is even an icon for Vegas Pro in the dock):
[Angelo Mike] “and there’s no reason for that, or spending the money for a Mac, or using its awkward operating system.”
Unless of course you wanted an operating system that actually performs preemptive multitasking and can’t get locked up by a user application or slow down every year until it’s practically unusable and you need to re-install Windows… then you might want to use a “real” OS based on Unix that runs as fast 3 years later as it did the first day you got it! (i.e., then you might want a Mac) 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “I would look at gaming laptop like those from Alienware”
Not sure Alienware has been the same since Dell took ’em over. But in general, yeah, most anything that makes for a good high-end gaming experience is good for a video machine too. You’re probably still going to be “stuck” with a lower performance mobile processor… an i7, definitely, but only two RAM lanes. But you’ll be able to get a decent GPU, enough memory, and at least a decent screen, though tiny (I have two 2560×1440 and one 1920×1200 monitors on my desktop).
And while I know John likes Macs, you’ll be able to far more performance in a gaming laptop than available in any Mac laptop; lots more performance for the same, a little more performance for less cash.
B>[John Rofrano] “[Angelo Mike] “You wouldn’t want a Mac to run Vegas, since it’s impossible unless you dual boot it with Windows,”
Not true. I do it all the time without dual boot. “I run Linux in Windows much the same way. Virtual PC environments are pretty sophisticated these days. You’ll take a hit on graphic-related things, but not much on the actual CPU-related stuff, other than of course doubling the basic resting workload on your system by running two operating systems at once.
Since AMD’s 64-bit x86 architecture, there has been CPU-level hardware support for virtual environments. So you’re not losing much performance virtualizing the CPU itself. Virualizing other things, you can drop performance some.
This is also just good tech to know about. When I was setting up my new PC, I had things about golden on the new PC. I had started it out with some old unimportant GPU, but needed to swap the Radeon HD6970 to the new PC, drop the bogus GPU into the old one, put the new one in the office and the old in the lab — still had things to transfer.
Well, after surgery, the new one started up just dandy. The old one never woke up from surgery. Not sure what died, but it hadn’t been healthy for awhile. But I had this old PC that I still wanted around… what to do?
Of course, I could mount my old HDD on the new PC. But what if I needed to actually run something on the old PC? So I did add the old HDD to the new PC, but rather than using it directly, I set up a virtual disc link for the HDD, start up VirtualBox (free virtual software), and launched, in essence, my old PC in a window on my new PC.
-Dave
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[John Rofrano] “Unless of course you wanted an operating system that actually performs preemptive multitasking and can’t get locked up by a user application or slow down every year until it’s practically unusable and you need to re-install Windows… then you might want to use a “real” OS based on Unix that runs as fast 3 years later as it did the first day you got it! (i.e., then you might want a Mac) ;-)”
Windows has done real preemptive multitasking for quite some time. The Windows NT kernel, at the time, was actually more advanced than any version of UNIX around. Some UNIX-like operating systems, like MacOS, have caught up, at least to some degree.
That given, the Windows UI does, in places, ruin that power. Much of the way Windows works was designed in the days of fake multitasking… then again, that’s also true of the Mac API. It’s just that, the way the Windows API is architected, this is kind of still exposed. You CAN write good multitasking/multithreaded software, but you have to watch out — there are things in the OS, still, that try to artificially serialize all that great parallel code through the Windows event queue.
At least event queues are per-application now. In the past, there was a single queue in the whole system… so a misbehaving program could lock out every other program. Today, you’d have to lock up a hardware resource for that to happen… also possible in pretty much every other OS.
Both systems had pretty primitive ideas about GUI events. In AmigaOS, your message port only ever saw message types you actually requested to see — the OS managed all of the others. One UI port per window, too, so nothing blocking anywhere.
Back to UNIX… MacOS is actually best described as “UNIX-like”, not UNIX. The kernel is CMU’s Mach 3.x kernel, with decades of Apple modifications (like getting decent multimedia performance… historically, UNIX didn’t even care about this sort of thing). But classic UNIX defines a “macro-kernel”… the kernel has pretty much everything including the kitchen sink in it, including all drivers of any kind. Mach defined a microkernel, which allowed both plug-in kernel-level drivers, kernel-level multitasking, user-mode drivers, etc… like the NT kernel. Neither is a pure microkernel, and to an extent less today than historically… video drivers used to be user-mode in early versions of NT, for example, but they were deemed too slow, and moved into the kernel.
UNIX also classically didn’t have multithreading. Multiprocessing, sure.. you could pretty easily create big fat processes, clone your current one, communicate via pipes or files between processes, but for much of what you want in a modern OS, that’s very clumsy and inefficient. Mach also had real threads from early on, as did NT. Linux got them more recently, and some versions still give you “user mode threads” rather than “kernel mode threads”… which is fancy geek talk for “cooperative multithreading in user programs”. Fake multithreading.
Pre-NT versions of Windows always slowed down for me over time, and since I was trying to do realtime stuff, music and all, this could need a re-install every six months. That never happens in modern Windows. Careless users can definitely get bogged down with hundreds of crap background programs sitting around polling for the one stupid thing they manage… one of the major innovations in today’s mobile OSs and appstores was central management of this kind of thing. But the OS itself doesn’t seem to rot, the way Win9x did.
Of course, Microsoft has recently ruined desktop Windows by grafting their tablet UI on it, as many folks have discovered in Windows 8. They really do seem intent on screwing up their desktop stuff. Apple has intentionally resisted most of that, instead trying to actually figure out what you can adapt specifically for the desktop from what they’ve learned about touch-screen systems. But that may have been driven by SJ. And given how small MacOS is becoming relative to iOS (about 12% of Apple’s business), I’d be nervous about where they take MacOS, too, in the next few years. The announcement of the new A7 SOC has all the chip geek blogs predicting, again, that Apple goes to ARM for the desktop Real Soon Now. But I digress… killing time while I restore a RAID from backup.
-Dave
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[Dave Haynie] “I set up a virtual disc link for the HDD, start up VirtualBox (free virtual software), and launched, in essence, my old PC in a window on my new PC.”
That’s a great idea. I didn’t know VirtualBox would boot from a physical disk. I virtualized my Windows XP computer so I can run it on my Windows 7 PC in case I need any programs from XP. Virtualization is an awesome technology. I just took a course at BerkleyX via edX.org and they gave students an Ubuntu VM to do their Ruby on Rails homework. It’s great to have an environment all set up and ready to work.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Dave Haynie] “Windows has done real preemptive multitasking for quite some time. The Windows NT kernel, at the time, was actually more advanced than any version of UNIX around. Some UNIX-like operating systems, like MacOS, have caught up, at least to some degree.”
I only know what I see and I have had Windows application lock up the entire machine to the point where I have to hard reset the computer. I have NEVER had this experience with OS X. I can go to the “Force Application” menu on my Mac and I press it ONCE and the application is gone. Not always the same experience on Windows. Even when Windows can terminate a program it takes several presses and several minutes for Windows to finally dispatch with it. So if Windows has preemptive multitasking it is implemented poorly because the kernel is definitely not in charge of the processes running on it.
[Dave Haynie] “…so a misbehaving program could lock out every other program. Today, you’d have to lock up a hardware resource for that to happen… also possible in pretty much every other OS.”
This must be what I’m experiencing. OS X does not have this problem. In Unix, kill means kill! In Windows kill means shut down the computer and reboot.
[Dave Haynie] “Back to UNIX… MacOS is actually best described as “UNIX-like”, not UNIX. The kernel is CMU’s Mach 3.x kernel, with decades of Apple modifications (like getting decent multimedia performance… historically, UNIX didn’t even care about this sort of thing). But classic UNIX defines a “macro-kernel”… the kernel has pretty much everything including the kitchen sink in it, including all drivers of any kind.”
You can say the same for every modern Unix system. Back in 1995 when I ran Slackware on my laptop, everything was compiled into the kernel. If I needed to add a driver, I had to recompile my kernel. Ever since the Debian distributions started using dynamic modules every other distribution followed suit. So every modern Unix system is “Unix-like”. Unix has evolved. I still call them all Unix.
The bottom line is that OS X is more efficient at using resources than Windows, and so is Linux. I specifically switched to a Mac because my day job requires me to run multiple virtual machines and OS X can run more VM’s simultaneously than Windows 7 on the exact same hardware. This is a fact because I proved it in order to justify my Mac purchase. I can run 3 – 4 VM’s on OS X but Windows bogs down after only 2 VM’s slowing down to an unusable crawl.
[Dave Haynie] “Pre-NT versions of Windows always slowed down for me over time, and since I was trying to do realtime stuff, music and all, this could need a re-install every six months. That never happens in modern Windows.”
What “modern” version of Windows are you talking about? Because I have had to re-install XP at least 3 times over the years that I have used it because it became unusably slow or unstable. The registry is constantly getting messed up in Windows causing all sorts of problems over time. Max OS X has no such problem. I inherited my first MacBook Pro from a co-worker who had left. It was 3 years only and it was still faster than my brand new Windows 7 laptop that I gave up for it. I’m just relaying my personal experience after having used Windows for 20 years (since running Pagemaker on Windows 3.1). My Mac is a far more productive environment for me.
[Dave Haynie] “Of course, Microsoft has recently ruined desktop Windows by grafting their tablet UI on it, as many folks have discovered in Windows 8.”
Well… I left Windows before 8 came out but Microsoft does seem lost in the weeds. My Mac has seemless integration with my iPhone and iPad without making my desktop look like one. Microsoft, on the other had, is clueless on how to handle multiple form factors. One size does not fit all as Microsoft is finding out from customer backlash.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] ” [Dave Haynie] “…so a misbehaving program could lock out every other program. Today, you’d have to lock up a hardware resource for that to happen… also possible in pretty much every other OS.”
This must be what I’m experiencing. OS X does not have this problem. In Unix, kill means kill! In Windows kill means shut down the computer and reboot.”
Kill is relative, even in UNIX. When you send a normal kill signal to a process (SIGTERM), it’s just a signal to that process… a bit is set. At some point, that process’s signal handler will respond to that, and take the appropriate course of action. Usually that’s “clean up and exit”, but the program can do whatever it wants to do. It could ignore that, or it could even hit a big in the function responding to SIGTERM, causing the program to hang.
In Windows, the equivalent is a WM_QUIT message, sent through that same single message queue. In theory, if the application doesn’t reply to a WM_QUIT message, the OS will intervene — that’s when you see that “program is not responding” pop-up after you hit the close box and nothing happens. Once the program responds to WM_QUIT, it’s just like SIGTERM.. it’s left up to the program to quit, or not.
The “not”, in either case, may be trying to shut down asynchronous I/O. You have a thread that’s dealing with I/O, and it’s stuck waiting for something to finish. So the main program gets the “quit” message, but other threads or processes may not be able to respond. This is the same in UNIX as in Windows, too.
There’s also a signal call SIGKILL in UNIX; that’s what you get when you type “kill -9 ” from a shell. When you send a SIGKILL, the signal is not handled by the process it’s sent to, but rather, by the Init process, which is basically the king of all processes. There are a few cases in which SIGKILL can be ignored.. but not many. Windows doesn’t use a message for this, because as discussed, messages can be ignored.
Some of problem in Windows are what’s actually being done versus what’s expected. When you fire up the Windows Task Manager, go to the Applications window and select that misbehaving application, and click on “End Task”, you’re really just sending WM_CLOSE to that program… the same thing that’s supposed to happen when you click on the close box. So it’s not terribly powerful if the application is hosed, but does have the advantage of letting the application clean up after itself if it is still listening.
If you go to the Processes Windows, select a process and click on End Process or End Process Tree, you’re doing something more powerful. This actually calls an OS function that starts killing the process you’re clobbering (and in the second case, any child process started by that original). The OS can apparently clobber any user-mode aspect of the process immediately. But anything that’s kernel level can’t just be killed. So if the offending process happens to be doing some I/O, for example, that’s waiting on a kernel process and can’t be killed. The OS has to signal that kernel resource (often some driver somewhere) to cancel whatever it was doing and clean up. That doesn’t always happen quickly.
Again, UNIX itself is no different, and I’ve had plenty of Linux programs that hang and stay hung (occasionally even those I was writing). I think Windows is still more prone to this for whatever reason. The flow of code in a Windows program is often convoluted; for a Windowed application, you’re actually building a bunch of subroutines that are going to be called by Windows, which may then go on to call Windows functions, which may in turn create other unexpected things, like interprocess communications turned into message queue events (eg, parallel events being converted to serial, a bad hangover from before the Windows GUI was multitasking).
MacOS may be better still. I’m not sure how much of the original Mach idea of Microkernel architecture they’ve kept, but that’s a big help. As I mentioned, Windows can clean up user-mode stuff pretty easily, but the kernel stuff can be problematic. Same with any OS — they have the same kind of problems, even if they differ by degree. But the more “stuff” you have running in user mode, the less likely you are to run into something being locked because of waiting on failed kernel resources.
This is very different than Linux. Linux is still very much a macro-kernel. No, you don’t have to compile everything in to change a driver. But the drivers basically work like plug-ins do in NLEs and DAWs… they make the kernel modular, but they’re still run entirely within the context of the kernel.
-Dave
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