Thinking of making the switch from Mac to PC. Any opinions based on personal experience?

[Greg Janza]

I made the switch just over a year ago with no regrets.

A few suggestions to make the switch as smooth as possible:
1. go to the Adobe hardware forum and get recommendations on the best possible system for your budget. There are numerous options.
2. If you can stretch your budget a bit you can also have Thunderbolt3.
3. The main hurdle in making the switch is getting used to the endless myriad of settings on the PC side as opposed to the simple system
preferences on Mac. Watch tutorials to get up to speed.
4. If your workflow has always involved Quicktime and Pro-res, get up to speed with the equally high-quality DNxHD codec.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Eric Merklein]

Hello Oliver.

I purchased an Asus Rog GR8 with a 500 ssd and 1TB drive, a 1060 Nvidia card on board, and duel quad core processor for $1,000. I added RAM to get to 32 gigs and the system is lightning fast. The thing looks cool and can be picked up with my fingers.

I attached a GLYPH raid stack via USB3 and that works great too.

It seems to me that the ever growing gaming community has spurred development of lower priced, hard as nails PC’s.

Gamer’s beat the heck out of their computers, so sellers like ASUS have to meet their needs.

Eric

[Olivier Prudhomme]

[greg janza] “2. If you can stretch your budget a bit you can also have Thunderbolt3.”

isn’t this the kind of things PCs allow you to install later? Which would be great because I agree I should have it

[greg janza] “3. The main hurdle in making the switch is getting used to the endless myriad of settings on the PC side as opposed to the simple system “

this is actually my biggest worry. I know Macs so well that I don’t want to be stuck when a client is in my edit bay…

What is your current setting as far as graphic card?
I want to be ready to work with 4K which my brand new iMac failed to deliver on (hence being returned to bestbuy). I had to create proxies
As far as processor it seems that i7 is no brainer.

Los Angeles – TV Promo Editor – FCP – AVID

[Andy Patterson]

Your best bet is to get the i7 8700K Coffee Lake CPU. The K version is money well spent. The GTX 1060 GPU would be the minimum. If you can afford a GTX 1080 Ti go for it. 16 GB of RAM works OK but 32 would be much better. If the case isn’t 100% what you want you can trick it out yourself.

https://youtu.be/7iBupfKWP28

[Greg Janza]

[Olivier Prudhomme] “isn’t this the kind of things PCs allow you to install later? Which would be great because I agree I should have it”

that’s what i thought when i started looking to add TB3 to my system and I quickly discovered that for my system, TB3 compatibility required me getting a new motherboard. It’s not a difficult process to swap out a motherboard though. You need to determine what CPU you’re going to purchase and then find a motherboard that’s compatible with that CPU and chipset.

Here’s a list of TB3 motherboards:

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/products?tid=15&field_company_nid=All&field_prod_os_value_many_to_one=All&field_prod_tb_version_value_many_to_one=tbv3

I have an i7-5820k cpu and so I went with a gigabyte x-99p-sli motherboard. My system is pretty fast but my cpu is now a couple years old so you’ll probably go with a newer CPU. Look at the specs of the motherboards and each will say what CPU’s are compatible.

[Olivier Prudhomme] “I know Macs so well that I don’t want to be stuck when a client is in my edit bay…”

This is the biggest challenge but I wouldn’t let it stop you from going to a PC. Windows 10 has a graphical interface similar to OSX but where windows becomes a bit daunting is that many of the older windows settings which are located in the old school control panel are also still in use so it’s a matter of getting used to two sets of control panels. This is where youtube will be your best instructor. The tips and tricks are endless as well as troubleshooting ideas.

[Olivier Prudhomme] “What is your current setting as far as graphic card?”

I have the GeForce GTX 970 and I’m very happy with it. At this point though you’ll probably want the 980 card.

[Olivier Prudhomme] “I want to be ready to work with 4K which my brand new iMac failed to deliver on (hence being returned to bestbuy). I had to create proxies.”

Eliminating proxies from my workflow was what started me on the conversion from mac to pc. My specs are now a couple of years old but I have no issues editing 4k in full res and with luts attached. The added part of the equation though is having fast drives/raid and a fast cache/render drive.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Olivier Prudhomme]

Thx for reply Eric

Do you edit 4K w/o proxies?
And was your set up DIY or you purchased it?

Los Angeles – TV Promo Editor – FCP – AVID

[Andy Patterson]

Any 3 GHZ quad core i7 desktop CPU with a mediocre GTX 1060 will edit native 4K Red One, H.264 4K and Pro Res 4K with ease. You can apply several layers and effects with ease. You might have to drop to1/2 or 1/4 resolution to edit in real-time but it is easy to do. If you want to edit 4K Red One R3D files at full resolution the 6 core Coffee Lake and a GTX 1080 Ti might allow you to add multiple effects while still playing back at full 4K resolution. The system in the video is a mediocre 3.4 GHZ Haswell CPU with a GTX 650 Ti for the GPU. Editing native 4K is a non issues unless you want to playback at full resolution.

https://youtu.be/02qEztIwTeY

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[Simon Ubsdell]

[greg janza] “I made the switch just over a year ago with no regrets. “

Hi Greg,

I’d be really interested to hear how you have chosen your system, what types of media you are typically working with, and what if anything you would do differently if you were to do it today. Or not.

And are there applications that you use apart from Premiere that have give you issues?

Thanks in advance.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Greg Janza]

[Simon Ubsdell] “how you have chosen your system”

The process of switching from mac to pc was made much easier by the fact that I had a motion graphic artist friend who had built a custom PC for gaming and when I mentioned to him that I was interested in switching to PC he offered to sell me his system. He had multiple systems and so he was ok with parting with one. My friend had done all of the original work of finding the components and doing the initial build. In an earlier post in this thread Erik mentioned that gamers are driving the custom pc builds and I agree with that statement. A nice byproduct of gamers searching for the fastest possible system is that these same computers are ideal for video editing.

The custom built PC that I became owner of didn’t have thunderbolt 3 though. So I then did my own research to figure out how to add it and that led me to a new motherboard. My OS drive is a samsung 850 ssd and I added two more samsung 850 ssd’s, striped them together and that raid is my dedicated premiere render/cache location.

[Simon Ubsdell] “what types of media you are typically working with”

Most of the media I work with is from a Sony FS7 camera and it’s XAVC-I mode: 4K 23.98P VBR, bit rate 240Mbps. My media lives on an OWC thunderbay 12 terabyte raid. The thunderbay is actually thunderbolt 2 so I have an akitio TB2 to TB3 adapter.

[Simon Ubsdell] “what if anything you would do differently if you were to do it today. Or not.”

I wish I had a TB3 raid but at the time I was setting up my system TB3 raids were just getting onto the market and they were very pricey so it wasn’t an option. I can’t think of anything else that I’d change. I do wish there was a Windows equivalent of Softraid since it’s such a good raid monitoring program but after a long search I simply haven’t found a windows program that’s as thorough as Softraid.

[Simon Ubsdell] “are there applications that you use apart from Premiere that have give you issues?”

Other than the rare random Media Encoder render errors, this system has been very stable. I use Audition, Photoshop and AfterEffects regularly in addition to Premiere and all work without issue.

I think the biggest surprise after having been a dedicated mac user for over 20 years was how much I like working in the Windows environment. And I think a lot of that satisfaction comes from having a system that consistently works and which is very fast and responsive.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Simon Ubsdell]

That’s all really interesting and useful info, thanks very much.

We invested in an Asus ROG gaming laptop a while back for using Premiere on the road and it’s working ridiculously well – even if it looks a bit ridiculous ????

We certainly seem to have a lot to thanks gamers for in terms of machines that also work for us.

[greg janza] “I think the biggest surprise after having been a dedicated mac user for over 20 years was how much I like working in the Windows environment.”

I think the one thing I will miss though is all the little ancillary utilities that I use everyday without thinking I’m even using them, and which are not always easy to replicate outside of the Mac world.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki