CS3 Production Premium on Apple

[Tim Kolb]

I’d be interested in what exactly your system specs are…

At this point the quad-core Xeons are all sort of similar, regardless of what side of the fence you fall on. CS2/3 are both incredibly RAM and throughput hungry.

I happen to be looking for a new system now and after a LOT of investigation, I think I might be leaning AMD one more time. The basic architecture, even when you take into account that AMD does not have quad-cores yet, performs very well and actually outperforms even the quad Xeon architecture on many throughput operations. Intel wins in a render though of course as more cores (when utilized by software) are better for rendering.

So much of my work is still editing, and high bandwidth stuff at that, that I have to look at both sides…and I happen to need a ton of boardslots.

I tested both platforms briefly and I have to say that the Mac side seems to run very, very well. However if your PC is beefy enough, I don’t know how much difference you would see on a similarly configured Mac…

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Jerry Harned]

My system:
HP Workstation xw8200
Dual Xeon 3.4Ghz
2.5 GB ram
XP SP2
Black Magic Deck Link Extreme
Capture & Edit 10 bit SD
Production Premium CS3

I would like to use the elements of the CS3 Suite as demonstrated – copy files from one application into another – which requires all the apps to be in memory. My gut feeling is that a Mac has more memory available to have the multiple apps running simultaniously.

As well, my system seems to want to stop exporting from PP after a few files have been exported. My thought is that this is a problem of memory, which a mac has plenty of.

Jerry Harned

[Eric Addison]

I thought about switching over to Mac for CS3, but I went with an HP 8400 workstation and it’s a great computer. It’s not quite as fast processor-wise as the Mac Dual Quad (3 GHz vs. 2GHZ), but it really does fly. And it was cheaper then the Mac – which is always nice. I’ve had little to no problems running PPro, AE, Soundbooth and/or Photoshop all the same time, moving and updating files…

My advice – do some homework before you buy…

—Eric

[Tim Kolb]

[Jerry Harned] “My gut feeling is that a Mac has more memory available to have the multiple apps running simultaniously.

As well, my system seems to want to stop exporting from PP after a few files have been exported. My thought is that this is a problem of memory, which a mac has plenty of.”

Well…I’d have to assume you’re right on the PC/Mac memory thing, but have you unlocked out to 3.5 Gigs? There is a line of code you can alter to at least do that in the short term…

I run multiple apps on my Dell M90 laptop with 2 GBs RAM and don’t really have any issues myself. Two things…

1. Open the task manager up (Ctl+Alt+Del) and have the “prcesses” tab open while you work for a while. Notice the size of the page file. On my workstation, there was a magic number that you’d hit (for my personal system, it was 1.7 GB) and once the pagefile was that size, you needed to either tap out of the app to change the focus to the desktop or something else to get the pagefile to purge. You’ll see it decrease in size as you click out of the app. It’s not a perfect solution, it’s a workaround, but they have worked on this a bit in CS3, though I never got a chance to get CS3 on that same machine to try to gauge whether or not that particular behavior changed however.

2. Try some editing without the Black Magic card. PPro gets the blame for a lot of issues that are caused by third party products fairly often. The card may at least contribute to, or aggravate the issue.

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Jimmy Brunger]

When researching systems a couple of months ago I was told by HP that you could get the 8400 with 2 x Quad 3GHz Xeons.. Also been looking at Boxx 8300 system which is the same config but with better/more specialzed support and I think slightly better made/tested components. It costs a little more than the HP but probs worth it for the support alone.

Have you tried going to 4GB RAM? each app may only be able to use 2GB, but the full 4GB will be used in total (minus you OS and that PCI Express black hole thingy..) Then there’s the 3GB/switch but I’ve been warned away from that by many. Strangley though on Eyeon’s website they recommend the 3GB switch when using Fusion with a 32 bit OS. Go figure.

Am I right in thinking that OSX 10.5 can utilise more than 4GB RAM then? What is the limit for each 32 bit app? and what is the total limit does anyone know? I’m sort of thinking on the mac route, but the cost of switching all my apps is a scary prospect!

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0