-
Slightly OT: An excellent report on the costs of premium content
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
This is an excellent article (written by a windows fan) on the actual performance costs involved with DRM and Premium Content protection employed by Vista and how it affects HD output, software developers, and hollywood’s influence on everything.
I’m not posting this to smash windows Vista, but to be a warning to those that are considering major purchases of pc upgrades in an HD production environment. My first thoughts were, “How can anyone work on this OS in an editing/designing capacity?” It almost appears that Windows has given up on the content production world forever (think adobe premiere and sony vegas) and surrendered it to Apple so that Vista can focus it’s attention on office and home users. This theory is echoed by rumors of Apple withholding it’s next big release until the release of Adobe’s CS3 AND by Premiere’s return to the Mac – even in the face of Final Cut’s competition. Imagine how nearly impossible it would be for Adobe to design drivers and seamless product functionality with Vista with all of the pitfalls (refusal to play HD content, intentional quality degredation, random restting with power supply fluctuations, etc) purposely placed in the way of development and listed in this article. While you’re spending all your resources complying with Vista’s demands, try to innovate and advance your product to the next level in the face of difficult competition. Eventually, the costs involved may be a death bell to PC companies that are barely making ends meet as-is. If you are Adobe, your 5 year plan must be very “Rock in a hard place”ish. The only choice in long-term survival is to go back to mac, who is welcoming them with open arms.
So, how does this relate to business and marketing? If you’re considering upgrading all your After Effects/Premiere/PC/XP machines to Vista, you may want to consider moving to Mac in regards to your actual production machines. Keep the pc for Quickbooks, schedule-all, etc. In a few years we might end up in a world where Apple provides the only pro-level system capable of realistic editing and designing – mostly because XP won’t be around forever and Vista seems designed for viewers, not creators. My guess is that PC’s are going to leave the ‘pro’ world behind in the next 5 years – an idea that could make savvy business sense for Microsoft, not so much for everybody else.
Just my two cents – I’d love to hear other’s thoughts on the matter.
John Davidson
John Davidson____ writer | producer | director____https://www.magicfeatherinc.com
-
2 Replies
-
Your president’s day challenge – try not to make this another Apple vs Windows fight to the death.
Let’s save that for the ring.This is more about the longer term plans for MS and whether or not those of us in the production world should be considering moving our NLE’s and production equipment to macs.
John Davidson____ writer | producer | director____https://www.magicfeatherinc.com
-
Hi John
These DRM issues do look likely to cause serious disruption for Windows developers wanting to issue fast driver fixers (e.g my black magic board has major new drivers every couple of months) for Vista – as you suggest. I’m thinking keep everything on XP for now.
I can only hope that MS will look at this and find another solution to their issue – maybe “source licences” for driver verification for known production equipment developers, so they can patch quickly without awaiting MS certification and without triggering hardware downgrade?
And third parties might help – was there a rumor that Creative Labs were going to look at restoring a hardware abstraction layer for audio on Vista, exactly to help with these issues?
Not to forget, it’s not that long since Apple’s approach to color space in HD was causing concerns – and those auto gamma changes in and out of Quicktime still bug me!
Hardware wise, perhaps we should be encouraging developers to port their software to open source operating systems running on high-performance commodity architectures …. Linux on Intel architecture anyone?
Perhaps we’ll come full circle to the SGI / Smoke approach after all. Don’t know if you’ve seen https://www.jahshaka.org/ – but I guess it would be well within scope for Adobe to port their software into a Linux distribution … !
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up