pc or mac.

[Roger Bansemer]

Hi John, It’s always a personal preference. Those of us who use PC’s are outnumbered by those doing video with the mac. Most professional houses use the mac I think.
Vegas is great in my opinion and I love it however Vegas 11 is not nearly as stable as Vegas10 and I think a lot of Vegas users have found Vegas11 to be very troublesome and buggy. I certainly have.

Roger Bansemer

[John O flaherty]

many thanks roger, food for thought there! john

[John Rofrano]

[john o flaherty] “I hope soon to buy a new computer to upgrade to vegas 11, is a mac better than a pc”

Hardware wise they are both Intel computers that use the same processors. A good PC is equivalent to a Mac. Obviously a $499 PC is not going to be as good as a $1,500 Mac so don’t expect that. On the high end ($5,000-$6,000 range) a Mac Pro is cheaper than an equivalent BOXX or HP. I personally prefer Mac hardware.

The OS is a different story. Mac OS X is a more robust operating system than Windows 7. This is primarily due to it’s Unix heritage. I’ve run Windows 7 and Mac OS X on the same hardware and Mac OS X is definitely faster and can withstand a heavier workload without bogging down (just my personal experience having used both). I’ve never had a BSOD on a Mac and I’ve never had an application lock up the entire OS like happens on Windows. As you can tell, I prefer Mac over Windows.

[john o flaherty] “i presume vegas 11 is available for a mac?”

No, it is NOT! So you would need to run Vegas Pro in a Windows Virtual Machine or use Bootcamp with Windows on a separate partition if you buy a Mac.

[john o flaherty] “any advice help appricated guys. “

It’s more of personal preference than anything else. I like using a Mac because I spend a lot of time on my iPad and iPhone and everything syncs seamlessly with iCloud so that my contacts, notes, documents, garageband projects, etc. are all available on every device all the time. Windows has nothing remotely close to this kind of seamless integration.

Because I choose to edit video with Vegas Pro, I have a Windows 7 64-bit Core i7 HexCore workstation that I just built. It is a necessary “evil” because Apple has not updated the Mac Pro line in several years and I wasn’t going to buy old technology from Apple. Otherwise I would have bought a Mac Pro. If you are looking to buy an iMac, they may be due for a refresh as well, so it might not be a good time to buy Apple right now since it looks like updates to the iMac and Mac Pro product lines seem to be coming soon. (although the Mac Pro might not be updated until next year and iMac looks like it might be refreshed before Christmas). This is just speculation based on the current rumors. 😉

[Roger Bansemer] “Most professional houses use the mac I think.”

Roger is speaking from experience here. I worked with him on his PBS series and when we went to post houses to get HDCAM tapes made, almost all of the post houses requested Apple ProRes422 format which can only be created on a Mac. If you sent them non-ProRes files, they charge a conversion fee. The conversion fees to do a 13 week TV series exceeded the cost of a MacBook Pro with FCP so it would have been cheaper to buy a Mac just to convert the footage to ProRes than paying the fee. So depending on whether you need to work with post houses, a Mac might be a better investment.

~jr

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

[Steve Rhoden]

Another important question to ask is: what are the tools/software
you are going to use if you are considering going to a Mac.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956

[Tracy Cao]

Mac is better, if you can afford it, selecting a mac is smart decision.

[John Rofrano]

That use to be a more important question when the Mac was RISC based but now that they run on Intel, the answer is simple… You can run more software on a Mac then you ever will be able to on a PC because a PC can’t run OS X but a Mac can run Windows. So a Mac is a more versatile platform to own. Even if you only run Windows in Bootcamp you still have the option of generating ProRes files or collaboration with FCP shops if you need to.

For a professional video editor, it really keeps your options open because, as Roger said, there are a LOT of Mac based post houses and Mac based video editors. Besides, you can run the full Adobe suite (I use Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects) on a Mac, and there isn’t one tool that I use that isn’t on Mac OS X except for Vegas. There is even Sony Sound Forge for the Mac. Vegas Pro is really the last hold-out and the only reason I keep a PC around. When I’m not editing video, I’m working on my MacBook Pro or my iPad (like I’m doing now). 😉

~jr

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

[Al Bergstein]

While I own both Macs (Mac Pro & Laptop) and PCs (Windows 7 64 bit) there is some food for thought on which is “better”. I agree with John’s general comments, that it is a much larger universe on Mac. My experience with Boot Camp led me to just buy a ‘real’ Windows machine. I found (at the time, it may no longer be true) that I had more problems with Boot Camp than any regular Windows machine (my Dell Desktop is extremely stable, as is my Lenovo laptop). One problem I had was that the high end Mac card overheated routinely in Boot Camp, the drivers just didn’t seem to work as well, likely from Apple’s compatability layer. That same thing did not happen when I booted into the Mac OS. ( I do know enough to figure out how to troubleshoot this, but there did not seem to be answer to it, so I gave up). I also had a lot of BSOD on the Boot Camp drive, and virutually none on native Windows. BSOD are pretty much a thing of the past, as compatability with Windows hardware to the OS is much better. Knock on wood (G).

Hanging out in the Adobe forums, it seems that CS6 is having far more problems on Mac than Windows. And I no longer trust Apple to do the right thing for pros. Whether they are not giving Adobe enough advanced information on how to develop for their platform, or whatever, it’s been much more stable on Windows than on my Mac. I no longer start projects on Adobe on Mac. and don’t get me started on the OS upgrades from Hell on Apple. At least there is no need to constantly upgrade Windows. 64 bit 7 is fine, thank you. But you have to deal with some possibly buggy security fixes from MSFT every month.

Apple has not really given us new high end workstations forever, and appears to have abandoned that market, given it’s refresh cycle on laptops and the consumer desktop. It’s handling of FCP was just amateurish, a fiasco. Ultimately, Apple seems to be moving faster than ever into the consumer market, the FCP thing reminds us that the pro market is a tiny niche of what really is a phone business and service now. MSFT has always catered to the professional market as a distinct niche, as IMHO is doing much better than they ever have there.

I agree with John, that iCloud, iPhone and IPad sync wonderfully on Mac. Haven’t had a problem either with Windows and those items. In fact, WIndows uses the iPad as a storage device, which I’ve not been able to do with my Mac as easily.

But I’ve started using Windows Live Skydrive, and it is a nicer interface than either iCloud or Google Drive, and seems to work fine with my documents. Time will tell. It does work fine on my mac as well.

As to Vegas, it’s just been terribly unstable on my otherwise rock solid machines. Same machine, Vegas vs. CS 6, there is no question. I *love* Vegas’ interface, fast and intuitive. I can edit and finish much faster on it. I *want* it to be better. But I only use it for light duty work, quick and dirty. It just is too buggy for me trusting longer form efforts. Maybe someday. Waiting to see if they stabilize 12 (the beta has not been kind to me). It’s their last hope for my money.

Well, morning coffee over, back to the editing bench. Clients coming in a few hours.

Al

[Ken Mitchell]

Sorry John but I must disagree with your statement you can’t run osx on a pc. I am running Snow Leopard and Windows 7 on my HP Laptop. Flawlessly. and I have a homebuild PC hackintosh running the same. It is easier than ever to do this. You should check out youtube.

[John Rofrano]

[Ken Mitchell] “Sorry John but I must disagree with your statement you can’t run osx on a pc. I am running Snow Leopard and Windows 7 on my HP Laptop. Flawlessly. and I have a homebuild PC hackintosh running the same. It is easier than ever to do this. You should check out youtube.”

Ken, Yes I am fully aware of this and I’m not counting illegal software so I’ll update my statement:

You cannot “legally” run OS X on a PC and no business person in the world worth their salt would bet their business on “hacked” unsupported illegal software. That’s no way to run a business

BTW, I have friends who have build hackintoshs because they wanted to develop for iOS but didn’t want to buy a Mac and they all have reported quirks where certain things just don’t work right but I agree, overall it gets the job done (although it’s still illegal because the OS X license agreement doesn’t allow it and Apple doesn’t even ship Lion and Mountain Lion on physical media anymore and yes… I know how to make physical media from the download). 😉

Point taken… but not recommended (at least not by me)

~jr

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

[Steve Rhoden]

Very good points made on my comments John.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956