Tim Wilson
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COW Coins
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Aharon has been such a big part of OUR family that I’m happy to post a picture of HIS family!
Many many thanks for anything. I’m glad we’ll see you around at least now and again…
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
[Steven Gonzales] “I thought a thread was either removed, or posting within guidelines was allowed. Now there’s a third option of scolding down a thread?”
Scolding, moderating. Potato, tomahto. The point is that it’s time to moooove along since all the points have been made and are just being repeated.
Except for any points regarding my big giant forehead. But those belong on their own thread.
Otherwise, pretty please, moooooove along, to spread signal and joy throughout the noisy land.
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Remember the part where I said that nobody needs to add anything? 🙂
Seriously, lots of folks out there waiting for your help. Mooooove along please.
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The reset button has been pressed. Good points made all around so worth keeping the thread up….but nothing needs to be added. Thanks to everyone for participating.
Be sure to leave your card in the bowl for our drawing for a free lunch at Bertucci’s. We validate parking.
Hey, and your wife called. She said to bring her some flowers.
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
Ah, but now you know about my big giant forehead!
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I’m a big fan of school too. I’m especially a fan of a general liberal arts education. Among a couple of folks I’ve run into recently, Jim Rygiel (Oscar-winner for Lord of the Rings) says that his most important foundation was a graduate degree in architecture.
Bill Powloski is the VFX Supervisor for Weeds and Pushing Daisies — somehow appropriate, no? He’s a hardcore production guy, came up as an editor, then a DP. Still spends a lot of time on the set working with DPs. His biggest influence: paintings.
Anyhoo, I love the idea of production DVDs. Coverage? Killah.
Which of you kids is going to do it?
Seriously, all of our DVDs are done by volunteers who step forward…well, not volunteers because we pay better than anyone in the business…but people have been coming to us. Anyone who wants to do a DVD on any aspect of cinematography, screenwriting, etc. — heck, anything else, including ventriloquism or puppetry — drop me a line: tim at creativecow dot net.
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
[Sebastian Alvarez] “Vista 64 is also useful, as far as I’ve read, if you have 4 GB of RAM or more”
Outside the needs of 3D artists and scientists — whose applications are optimized for 64 — you’ve on the one area where I think there’s a legitimate reason for other folks to consider 64 bits. I didn’t know about the limit for a single application, but I know that the 32-bit OS can only access 3.1-3.5 of installed RAM. If you’ve only got 4 MB of RAM, it’s simply not worth it, imo, but if you have more, I’d say go for it.
And for all the well-founded observations here about the need to find workarounds for 64-bit issues, the truth is that before SP1, the 64-bit version of Vista was overall *more* stable than 32. Early adopters were typically in enterprise environments with very narrow tolerances. MSFT — to its credit or otherwise, depending on who you ask — has always aimed a bit over median use cases for maximum development efficiencies. That’s why there are different levels of Vista — it’s not reasonable to ask people to pay for features that were never designed for them.
(BTW, rather than point at MSFT and laugh, wouldn’t you really rather that ALL developers do the same? Adobe has started down that road, and I think others will too.)
Anyway, my point is that the median use case in the enterprise is much higher-level than in the studio or the home.
Fortunately, things are now about where they should be, so *other* than using well over 4 GB of RAM, there’s not much reason to look to closely at 64 *for Vegas, Sonar, etc.* But if you have the RAM, and are using 64-bit addressable apps, 64 looks pretty wise.
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I’ll be honest, I have profoundly mixed feelings.
I hadn’t thought about the real estate issue. I’m not finding it a problem so far, but I might reconsider when there’s a thread of 20 posts, all with avatars. So far, not so bad though.
My biggest concern was introducing a bunch of skulls and Star Wars figures and such, but so far, so good there too.
The more I think about it, the more I see one profound upside, which is to foster a deeper personal connection. We took one step by requiring real names, and this is potentially an even bigger one…as long as people use “real” avatars.
So I’m more open to it than I was even last night. But I look forward to hearing other views.
tw
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
First, welcome to the brave new world of Windows on a Mac! Note that we’ve got a forum on this very topic here at the Cow, where I’m one of the happy hosts.
I also cover some of these general issues in articles here and here
Please check out those articles and that forum for some of the general questions, but for now, here’s a summary of those general topics.
–Go Vista. It’s stable, and it’s fast. (Not that it matters to YOU, but it’s also my favorite OS yet…this from a full-time Mac user since 1984.) Just make sure your drivers and apps are good to go with Vista…and by now, most are.
More important, XP support ends after April 14 ’09. No reason to wait.
–Ignore 64. As Douglas and Franklin note, more disadvantages than advantages. If you NEED it, you’ll know it. If not, your life is easier without it.
–The only reason to consider Fusion (and do go with Fusion rather than Desktop) is to run both OS X and Vista *at the same time.* This would allow you to drag and drop between them, copy a file in Mac and paste in Windows, stuff like that. Is that really what you need?
If not, use the Boot Camp Assistant to create a Windows partition, and boot into that. It’ll be very nearly like running a Windows PC that has no idea that it’s a Mac or has OS X installed anywhere on it. Please see the forum and articles above for details.
Now then, if you really really really want to run Vegas, Sonar, etc. AT THE SAME TIME you’re running Mac OS X, it can be done. Swing by the VMware website, and you’ll meet plenty of folks using Fusion to run Audition, On Location, Ultra, and other audio and video apps. Here’s one and here’s another.
While his project doesn’t look too tough, here’s part 1 of a guy working with Edius under Fusion.
So yeah, audio, video, Fusion, it can be done. But it can also get really, really complicated, which is why we have a separate forum for it. (Again, virtually painless if you’re using Windows on your Mac all by itself.)
Electronic Musician has a story about what you might be in for if you want to use Sonar and Vegas under Fusion. I’ll skip to the end:
I easily got a dozen audio tracks playing, several with Sonar’s CPU-intensive Perfect Space convolution effect, as well as low-latency input from my MIDI keyboard controller triggering the Rapture soft synth. I also installed Sony Vegas 8, a 32-bit app, to see how it would perform, and after running ten stereo tracks, each with two Track inserts (and a 10-minute animation for good measure), I figured I was in good shape. Overall, both programs seemed very responsive…
Cool!
Here’s the part I’m leaving out of his story:
–tweaking monitor resolution
–discovery that Sonar’s audio drivers wouldn’t work, but fresh ones from RealTek did
–trying to run external interfaces required new ASIO drivers
–lots of poking around online and trial-and-error to discover all of the aboveHe also mentions one of the least known, but most important troubleshooting tactics in the world of dual-platform computing: get the latest drivers for your wireless card. If you’re still getting problems you can’t explain, turn off your wireless connection altogether in Device Manager.
Strange but true. You won’t believe how often this will be the solution to a problem running Windows on Mac.
If you’re willing to take the time, Electronic Musician also has some great tips on using music and MIDI in both OSes at once, optimizing your Mac to run Windows, etc.
Anyway, I hope I’ve covered enough of the Vegas, Sonar, et. al. side of the story to get you started.
And if you need help getting started with Windows on your Mac at all, swing by the Windows on Mac forum for more help.
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
As Ron replied in the “Just Curious” thread below, started by fellow forum leader Jeremy Garchow,
We do it as there are so many impatient posters here that click the button over-and-over immediately and we spend far too much time removing double, triple, quad and even more repeated posts of the same thing due to this impatience.The additional benefit is bot prevention. Once a spambot hits that wall, it stops having fun and tends to go away.
With the overwhelming number of posts daily, we do what we can to automate issues like these. The one-minute post delay has saved us sooooo much time, and generally made the Cow an even nicer place to roam. Sorry for the inconvenience, but we find it to be one of our most valuable tools, a true lifesaver.
FWIW, it’s been there about a month and, while there could easily be more, this is the second query on it.
Thanks for understanding.
Best,
TimTim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine!