Erik Lindahl
Forum Replies Created
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If you need the kind of power a Mac Pro gives you (Quad Xeon 5100 system) it’s very good value for your money – even cheaper than Dell or home-brew systems.
Other than that I know facilities that send files Mac -> PC -> Mac -> PC and the two problems they had where font’s and filenames, especially long names with non-US characters. This included layers in Photoshop too. This was however prior to AE7 so things might have changed (AE still doesn’t handle longer than 32 char filenames which is a bit 1991, but hey…).
So with some discipline you should be able to do it fine.
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Actually AE 7 is much more powerful in this aspect.
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I also must put in a sidenote to the AE test they run and it’s really a “strange” one cause G5’s usually kicked Wintel bye far on that particular one, but on others they sometime got beaten. Never the less it’s impressive (and strange) to see AE how fast in this case on the Mac Pro and FCP so slow.
I’d like to see a more varied test before I take the verdict to court so to speak. FCP might suffer from slow QT performance on the intel side. In QuickTime a Dual Core 2.3 G5 is 2X faster than a 2.0 Ghz Core Duo
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And what happens when you need to do dirt cleanup, where you need a paint system?
You buy After Effects (+ Automatic Duck) and/or Shake and you’re done. But I guess it depends on how much you do this or that kind of work. -
It seems you have some insight here Mike – How does a Smoke perform interface/user wise compared to a high-end Final Cut or AVID Symphony Nitris System? I ask this cause I was surprised at how poor the Nitris worked when I tried it earlier this year. This is in terms of user interface feedback / realtime performance. For it’s price I’d reckon it should shoot my FCP-station out of the water, but that wasn’t my experience at all.
Also, what ball-park figure does a Smoke land on these days?
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No, FCP can render internally at 8, 10 och 32-bit precision to an 8/10-bit YUV och RGB codec. The higher depths make a huge difference on certain type of comps.
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I’d say that depends a lot on what you do.
Straight SD or HD 10-bit editing shouldn’t have any noticeable difference. When you’re looking into color correcections things could be different. However, if you complement a FCP suite with Final Touch for CC’s you’re competing even with a Luste system from what I’ve heard (Final Touch uses a 32-bit float internal rendering for everything).
I’d say in the end it really depends on what you do. Scaling images will differ depending on software and scaling algorithm. However, FCP with a Kona 3 card has some of the best SD <-> HD conversion available even in realtime.
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I’d agree with all above: it depends on your needs. If you want or need Preimier you’re stuck on a windows PC. If you feel more confortable in OSX/FCP/Shake etc you can go that rout. If you can wait a month or so, Apple is likely to introduce their Intel-based Pro-desktops the beginning of August. These will give you the best of both works – dual boot in OSX and Windows.
The sad thing is, After Effects will be crippled until a Native OSX-version for intel is released. You still have the windows-option here however.
For me the choice is simple – I simply can’t stand Windows. But this is quite much a personal preference. Now that Shake is down a “pennies price” the OSX plattform feels for me very stable.
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It truly does help on renders and previews. Nucleo Pro, that is “nucleo next generation”, will do this and much more (speculative preview or renders, background renders etc.). This will be out soon I reckon (it was announced at NAB).
For non gridironsoftware tests on Nucleo have a look at my Quad G5 Review:
https://www.fcpug.se/forum/showthread.php?p=1337Nucleo sure makes a difference! In short a Dual processor machine Nucleo can beat a Quad processor with out it and a Quad machine really screams. Then on some tests, it won’t do much good.
On my 5 comp tests the results where:
Dual G5 AE: 693s
Dual G5 NU: 462s (1.5X faster than without it!)Quad G5 AE: 454s
Quad G5 NU: 230s (2.0X faster than without it!) -
You could try turning OFF the OpenGL preview. You can switch between OpenGL and Software in the preferences. I’ve had issues with OpenGL and only use software. For simple comps OpenGL seems ok, for more advanced comps OpenGL seems to get “swoped” quite quickly.