Premiere system purchasing advice, Mac Vs. PC.

[Matthew Woods]

Thanks for your advice, Tim. Some good info there. You mentioned BOXX, can you name a few more of these professional integrators? I had tried doing a google search for places like that, but maybe I didn’t have the right keywords. The only people, I knew to make pre-built windows machines are places like Dell, HP, etc who don’t have a clue about what hardware you need for editing. Maybe I’m not reading enough ads on the cow.

As to the virus thing, I’ve found that the virus protection programs often slow down the computer and are are a real hassle. I’m not sure how the virus got on the office PCs. I think it was spread by email. I don’t think anyone in the office visits a lot of pirate sites. If it was for my own machine, I’d feel a little more comfortable diving into it, as I can usually identify suspicious emails. Is it unreasonable for our editor to expect to be able to check her email on her edit machine?

Even aside from viruses, I don’t know what maintenance you need to regularly do with a PC. We have a PC laptop running Vista at home, (hand me down from my mother in law), we mounted it in the kitchen and use it exclusively to stream netflix, and hulu. We don’t do anything else on it. When I first got it, I reinstalled windows, and removed all the bloatware from it, and it was running very snappy. I have noticed over time it is gradually getting slower and slower to respond in the finder. I don’t know if it needs de-fragged, or needs some other maintenance. PCs always seem to slow over time, and I don’t know how to fix that.

Thanks for all the help,

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Tim Kolb]

Are you using Internet Explorer? What browser you decide to use has an impact as well, though Vista was an unfortunate awkward puberty stage on the way to Windows 7. I suspect if you ever decided to put Windows 7 on the machine, it wouldn’t be as finnicky.

Clearing the temp files might be something you want to do as I have no idea how Netflix buffers, etc.

My daughter’s laptop is the only Windows Vista machine we have and I really don’t like that OS…skipped it entirely for my edit systems.

I’ve used Boxx and they’ve been great.

Alex from DV411 is on several of these forums, they handle HP z800 systems, which are high-end professional workstations, and they have the support after sale too, and Alex knows his stuff.

ADK has a good reputation, but I have no first hand experience wuith them,

Puget systems is a new player on my radar…I’ve heard from some users who have used and like them recently…

Safe Harbor is another system builder based in the midwest, they have several platforms they work from…

I’m sure there are some I don’t know about as well.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

As far as getting email…I tend to use a 400.00 laptop sitting beside the edit system anyway…though I know of plenty of Windows editors who have their email open all day.

Having a web mail client like Gmail seems to have almost no impact as the computer isn’t constantly “pulling in” mail to a local client like Outlook or Thunderbird…but that’s my personal experience, everyone is different.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Matthew Woods]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the list of integrators, and suggestions. In answer to your question about the home laptop, I’m running chrome as the browser. Don’t touch IE. I really didn’t like Vista either, and haven’t had much experience with 7.

I’m still a little reluctant to go with a PC, but your information has been really helpful, and gives me some places go to find out more. I’ll check out those integrator sites, and talk with our editor and my boss about how we want to proceed. Thanks also to John-Michael for recommending the GTX580 video card. Thats good info to know.

One last thing on Premiere bugs. Overall, we have been happy with the speed and interface of Premiere on the mac. Some of the bugs have been really painful though. I thought I’d list some buggy issues we’ve had on the mac platform and see if you PC folks have ever encountered them. If switching to a PC would fix these, it would make our editor very happy.

On the mac we have had these bugs that have driven our editor crazy. We tried upgrading to 5.5 to fix them, and encountered a new bug that caused us to go back to 5.

Issues with dissolves when rendered, They sometimes pop on at about 20% then dissolve the rest of the way in. This issue is in PP5

Issues with the first keyframe of a key framed clip sometimes changing value after saving.
This issue is in PP5.5 and we couldn’t solve. It was really frustrating and made us go back to PP5 till they fix it.

Audio occasionally drops out for a few seconds randomly on playback.
This happens in both 5 and 5.5.

Bloating project files that grow to gigs in size and take forever to load.
This happened in PP5 a year or so ago, but seems to have been fixed.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

I used to have to deal with big slow loading projects on CS3 but CS5 has been fine. Admittedly, I haven’t done a really huge project since upgrading. I’ve never had any of the other bugs you describe.

Couple of other things I should mention.
“Viruses” on the PC. Actual viruses don’t really exist any more, the proper term is “Malware”. I cringe every time I hear a Mac user talk about PCs being inferior because of “viruses”. Kinda like your instructor talking about A/B editing in Premiere.

A Virus is a malicious program which infects a computer interfering with it’s operation or causing a complete shutdown. Now such things are non existent cause the only reason people write Malicious programs is to make money.

So the proper terminology:
Malware: generic term.
Viruses are a subset of Malware which isn’t profitable and therefor have disappeared, (comparatively speaking.)

This has another affect. If you Keep your editing PC up to date and dont use the web you will “never” get malware. That’s because malware basically comes from one of two places: E-mail, and compromised websites. The third possibility, a worm from an infected PC on your network, is very very unlikely if you keep your computers updated.

My point is that you need to forget everything you remember about “Viruses” on Windows cause your information is outdated.

ok, End rant.

A note about the GTX580. It’s a dual processor card, but PP only uses one processor, so a GTX570 might be exactly as fast with PP. I haven’t seen data comparing the two. DiVinci will hopefully be able to use both processors. One thing is sure though, there is no reason to get a Quadro. There are only a few odd circumstances where a Quadro will outperform a GTX do to the extra RAM.

[Tom Daigon]

Semantics….call it whatever you want…Malware..Virus. It still means that the PC is vulnerable in a way that Macs are not. I need web access to email clients, upload approvals, download audio and graphics,do research on projects and a bunch of other reasons. I have owned both and there is less cause for stress on the Mac. Which is ironic since the Mac Pro sounds like its history which will motivate me back to the PC platform 😀

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.6.8
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digital / Areca 8tb. raid
Kona 3

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Technically, Mac’s are more vulnerable, but Malware writers continue to focus on Windows cause of the install base.

At some point there will be a massive attack against Macs, and hopefully they learned their lesson from MacDefender and will be ready this time, cause they certainly weren’t ready for MacDefender.

[Matthew Woods]

Careful John-Michael,

I’m trying to keep ideology out of this. I’m a mac guy, that I’m even considering switching our editing suite to PC says a lot. I’m trying to be open minded.

Anyway, Viruses/Malware whatever you want to call it, our company has been burned by it in the past. I’ve also been burned by antivirus software. Symantec/Norton Antivirus caused more problems than it solved. As far as I know, the only mac malware out there requires you to consciously install it, and enter your admin password. You can’t just visit the wrong website, or open an email attachment. I know windows 7 has supposedly improved a lot of this, but I still have bad memories.

I’m curious though do you never use email or the web on your editing machine?
Running the constant updates required by Windows to “stay safe” scares me as well, as updates sometimes break things. I’m usually wait a few weeks update, and check these forums to make sure nothing important breaks before I run one.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Don’t forget, as I mentioned before, I love Macs. I have a 3.5 year old MBP which has served me very, very well. So I would like to think that I’m being objective here as someone who uses both Windows and Mac every single day.

You are quite right and your points are valid, but I’m trying to point out that your Bad Memories are exactly that: Memories. A lot of what you remember is no longer true.

Symantec/Norton Antivirus was indeed quite horrible for a while. I haven’t heard any complants about any
Antivirus/Antimalware software eating your computer whole for the last year. I think they learned their lesson.

The Latter versions of MacDefender did not require a pasword, although the install process wasn’t without user intervention. It’s only a mater of time before a deadly program comes along. As long as Safari defaults to “Automatically Download ‘safe’ Files”, Mac will never be secure. That’s the whole problem. Apple doesn’t seem to care about security. By comparison, IE9 checks all downloads against a white list and black list, blocks anything on the black list, warns you about files not on ether list, and still doesn’t download whitelisted files unless you click “download”.

Updates do sometimes brake things. I personally haven’t had an update brake CS5 yet. Windows does lots and lots of VERY small updates, which tend to fix very very specific things, and since they’re almost all security related they should have no impact on editing software. Turning off automatic updates is far more scary then leaving them on, in my opinion. Just ask the Hospital who turned off automatic updates on it’s surgery room computers, and then got hit with conflicker, a worm which used a long since patched vulnerability.

[Tim Kolb]

I get email on my edit machine frequently…download software and updates…etc.

I think having email on a web client like gmail can help some of the anxiety, but overall it’s been some time since I’ve seen a virus/malware/whatever that comes from a source that anyone who uses email wouldn’t recognize…

I’ve seen more people with Windows machines cause themselves pain by loading up shareware and free software…including some free anti-virus apps…than anything else over the last 5 years.

Mac users know about Norton’s…I was a Mac user who absolutely trusted Norton and when I went Windows, Norton was a debacle…no question. These days I run McAfee on everything with no operational impact that I can see…and it’s quite aggressive when the web browser is open if that’s a concern.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor