New Mac Pro? I’m waiting patiently

[Gary Huff]

[Jeremy Garchow] Have you tried this? This would be the worst situation of them all. At least Bootcamp is a supported venture.

Have you? It used to be a huge PITA, but now it’s quite streamlined, and given the new unified NVIDIA driver architecture for OSX, seems like it’s getting easier.

However, you can’t just go out and purchase an pre-built machine. That’s fraught with potential difficulties. The best chance of success is to find components that are most compatible, and there are some great resources for helping you do just that.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Have you tried this? This would be the worst situation of them all. At least Bootcamp is a supported venture.”

No, but then again I am happy with win7 and moving away from anything Apple so I haven’t really looked the odds and ends.
However, due to the legal situation in Europe, you can buy legit Hackintoshes in Germany for example.
It’s mainly small companies offering them, not too many, but they do offer support for those machines. Eg: (https://pearc.de/).

[Jeremy Garchow] “Linux doesn’t have the history/baggage of Windows or MacOS. I would think that people would be more intrigued than “frightened” especially when it’s such a “DIY” culture. Plus, none of the most ubiquitous NLEs run on Linux. “

True, but most compositing, color correction and restoration tools have a very strong standing and background on Linux. There was a time when almost none of them were available on the Mac in the old PPC days, prior to Apple buying Shake. That situation might reocurre if Mac towers fall and strong gpus are not an option.

[Bobby Mosca]

I disagree. I will still have to jump online for stock footage, emails, research… whatever, and I’m comfortable doing that on the Mac. If I have to move to Windows for my editing machine, it would take an act of Congress to get me to go online with that thing, or leave it connected at all. I haven’t caught a virus in decades on my HP because I know what I’m doing, but I never feel safe on it. Working on Windows is just a sole-sucking enterprise.

[Gary Huff]

[Herb Sevush] Many of my deliverable are in ProRes and there’s no good way to encode it on a PC that I’m aware of. I’m hoping, hard, that either someone comes out with a good, reliable PC ProRes encoder or that the market opens up to other deliverables (DNxHD ??) but for the moment I’m shackled to OSX.

This is Apple’s fault. They finally included the ProRes codecs in QuickTime 7 (Win) in 2008, but only for decoding. You could easily encode to ProRes if they’d open it up in QuickTime, but so far that functionality remains locked.

Wikipedia has some information about third-party software that can encode ProRes on Windows. You can also do it for free using 5DtoRGB for Windows.

[Jason J rodriguez]

[Herb Sevush] “Many of my deliverable are in ProRes and there’s no good way to encode it on a PC that I’m aware of. “

FFMPEG now supports ProRes 422 encoding and decoding on all platforms (OSX, PC, Linux).

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Herb Sevush]

[Gary Huff] “This is Apple’s fault.”

It seems more like a marketing decision, and it’s working, at least in my case.

[Gary Huff] “Wikipedia has some information about third-party software that can encode ProRes on Windows. You can also do it for free using 5DtoRGB for Windows.”

Reliability and ease are key for me. If I’m switching to PPro on a windows machine I want to be able to encode either from within PPro or AME – I’m not messing up my workflow by editing in ProRes then exporting in something else only to have to re-encode in ProRes. Life is hard enough.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Gary Huff]

[Bobby Mosca] If I have to move to Windows for my editing machine, it would take an act of Congress to get me to go online with that thing, or leave it connected at all.

But wait, there’s more!

I haven’t caught a virus in decades on my HP because I know what I’m doing, but I never feel safe on it.

So you haven’t gotten a virus in decades, but yet you don’t feel safe because of… (drumroll please)…PROPAGANDA!

I haven’t gotten a virus in decades either. And I feel completely safe taking my Windows machine online.

And given that OSX/iOS is itself also not immune to malware, why do you still feel safe taking your Mac online?

Propaganda for $500, Alex.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Herb Sevush] “Networking is much. much easier in OSX. I have a mixed network of Macs and PCs and I’m forever having network problems on the PC side. Everything about setting up and maintaining a network seems easier in OSX. You can take into consideration that I’m a network moron, for anything complex I have to get outside help.”

My experience is the exact opposite. I find networking with OSX a disaster zone, burnt earth (which is a shame because it is unix based). The network stack is buggy, making it work smooth with Netatalk on the Linux side needs lots of tweaking and it has some bugs, NFS is bad and requires tweaking, Samba isn’t smooth (when it was still part of x), iscsi doesn’t exist out of the box and requires a free tool from one vendor. On the other hand, our Linux severs and windows machines communicate without any issues right out of the box.

Prores: agreed. But that’s not windows fault but because Apple wisely chose to make it decode only. I think there will be shift towards other codecs over time, especially when towers go. If you want to see a great example of bad Apple software you just have to look at Quicktime for windows. Exporting to a cineform .mov takes about 6 times longer than exporting the same material to cineform .avi.

[Gary Huff]

[Herb Sevush] “Reliability and ease are key for me. If I’m switching to PPro on a windows machine I want to be able to encode either from within PPro or AME”

And that is solely Apple’s fault. Premiere is required to utilize QuickTime 7 to encode QuickTime files under Windows (outside of writing in the functionality from scratch), and until Apple allows encoding to ProRes using QuickTime 7, it’s a no-go.

[Herb Sevush]

[Jason J Rodriguez] “FFMPEG now supports ProRes 422 encoding and decoding on all platforms (OSX, PC, Linux).”

As I just posted elsewhere I need to encode from within editing software, otherwise the encoding re-encoding steps kill my workflow.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf