Anyone tried running Vegas on Mac Hardware?

[John Rofrano]

Lots of people run Windows (and thus Vegas) on a Mac either via Bootcamp or VMware Fusion virtual machine (or both). There is nothing magic about Mac hardware. It’s just an Intel PC and like all PC’s you should buy the most powerful one you can afford for video editing. Preferably a 2.6Ghz+ QuadCore with 4GB of memory or more.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Ben Edwards]

Thanks john,

So you are saying a iMac is not generaly powerfull enough to run Vegas (I beleve only the very latest/most expensive have 4 cores, i.e. I need a i7, i3 is not up to the job?

Regards,
ben

[John Rofrano]

[Ben Edwards] ” I need a i7, i3 is not up to the job?”

i3 is great for surfing the web and answering emails. I wouldn’t attempt to edit HD video on it. You might get away with an i5 but if this is your business, buy the right tools for the job (which is an i7).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Scott Francis]

iMacs are also hard to upgrade as everything is pretty much internal. You cannot swap out hard drives, graphics cards or even upgrade the ram on your own. With HD space being a premium with editing, this is an issue. I believe you actually have to remove the front of the screen with a suction cup to even attempt any form of internal upgrade. With that said, I would get a G5 tower so you have options for upgrades….good luck!!

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Dave Brandt]

A G5 tower??

You\’d have some fun trying to run windows on that!
An i7 iMac is very good for Vegas, and by using an external FireWire 800 drive is good enough for most work. Although as mentioned before a mac pro offers upgradeability.

[Scott Francis]

SORRY!!! Totally meant Mac pro…..

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Al Bergstein]

I’ve had some experience (not recent but about a year ago) running Windows on a Mac under Bootcamp, and at that time I had problems with it blue screening, usually over video issues. It was so bad that when it bluescreened, it needed to have the Windows OS reinstalled (!). It was too much work, for the meager amounts of work I needed to do on bootcamp, so I gave up. And I am a *very* technical user who has worked with the Mac OS and Windows since both were V1.

Also the video card on my high end Mac laptop ran *really* hot, much hotter than when I ran the Mac natively. So hot, I was afraid to let it run overnight. So I decided to bite the bullet and get a dedicated Mac for FCP. I run one monitor and feed both machines into it. Just as an aside, I find Vegas much easier to use on a day to day basis. The comparison is that sometimes you need a dumptruck, sometimes a pickup. Vegas is like a pickup, small lightweight, fast to handle, and does my meager needs well. FCP is extremely cumbersome, in my opinion, what with it’s very specific scratch drives, log and transfer, etc. Just way more work than I need unless I’m working in a team with others using it.

Now, these issues bootcamp issues may have been fixed, and you might as well try it. But be prepared to pull the plug if you encounter blue screens. The question is what is your time worth.

I’ve also tried both virtualization tools, VMWare and Parallels. I ended up using Parallels for quite some time, and it’s quite good. Not as knowledgeable about VWWare on Mac, but it seems to be pretty well recieved. I don’t think I’d try and run something as hardware intensive as Vegas on a VM though. It’s not what these tools were made to do. The abstraction layers between the hardware, the OS, and Virtualization layer, then another OS and then Vegas, is likely to create performance problems. Virtualization was developed more for light duty use, say occasional needs for data entry, etc. I know, I worked for one of the companies that created virtualization, and know why we built it, and what the design criteria were.

But if your needs are very simple, then maybe it would work. Be forewarned, most software vendors do not offer support (like Boris?) for running their tools in a virtualized environment. It’s too hard to reproduce the problem.

And I agree with John, to do Virtualization right, you need a very fast machine, with specific processors that are developed for virtualization and the more RAM the better. For Bootcamp, you don’t need anything special since it’s just another OS running on the machine, and the only problems occur with the Apple bios, which is what likely caused my crashes and probably had something to do with the graphics card overheating under Windows.

For virtualization on Windows (Windows 7 running Windows XP) I did a lot of research before deciding that the lowest end machine that would suit my needs was an HP AMD Athalon II X4 620 Processor. This is one of the processors designed to support Microsoft virtualization. Only problem I can see is that expansion in the box is very limited, and the power supply is small. If I bought it again, I’d step up to one of the HP workstations, which cost as much as a Mac Pro. If I had it to do all over again, or when the time comes, I’m likely to sell the Mac and FCP and buy Adobe to use alongside Vegas on the same box. I have too many OS’s to manage right now (G).

I am unsure about whether all Apple machines are designed for virtualization. You *can* run virtualization on Windows machines that aren’t rated, but the ones that are work much better, run much faster. And you might be able to *run* virtualization on any Mac, but some might perform better than others.

Sorry for the long story, hope this helps make your decision easier.

Alf

[Ross Wissbaum]

I run Vegas on several Macs using Parallels and Windows 7 and really have no issues. RAM is the key when running a virtual machine as both systems are trying to use it. I’ve even run Vegas Pro 10 on my new Mac Mini with no issues. It ran okay with the original 2gig of RAM but runs much better with the 8 gig I now have on that machine. The mini is not as fast as the Quad i7 Windows machine in the studio but the 8 core Mac Pro runs circles around everything even running Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 in coherence mode.

[Al Bergstein]

Great to hear. I’ll have to try it sometime. As usual, technology seems to get better as time goes on.

Alf

[Greg Barringer]

I learned the hard way the you should install Windows 7 Professional 64 bit if your Mac has dual processors. My Mac Pro dual quad core with 8GB of RAM would only use 2GB of RAM and One processor with Windows 7 Professional 32 bit. I’ve also been advised that the Home version only recognizes one processor. I just purchased the 64 bit version of Windows 7 Pro.

My advice, buy a Mac Pro and install Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.
Boot Camp will run Windows natively and is the fastest option but you have to reboot to switch the OS. VMware Fusion or Parallels runs the Mac OS and Windows at the same time and you can easily switch back and forth without rebooting but it will be slower.