[John Rofrano]

[greg janza] “I think overall you and I are coming at our conclusions from opposite ends. Your many years of PC frustrations are not that dissimilar from my many years of Apple allegiance which became a long slow decline in allegiance due to their lack of component options lack of upgradeability and ever increasing product cost, which to me, can’t be justified.”

Yea, that’s exactly what I figured.

I have to admit, I did get really, really pissed at Apple when they removed the brightness control form macOS for my Apple 24″ Cinema Display. I forget if it was around Yosemite or El Capitan but I couldn’t believe it! They make a display with absolutely no physical controls of any kind and then they drop software support for it so that it stays at 100% brightness forever. Luckily I found an app to adjust the brightness, so I guess I’m already experiencing some of the frustration when Apple makes a bone-headed move like that one. (What were they thinking??? …time to buy a new Mac of course) 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[greg janza] “John’s PC experience is by no means the norm and so it would be foolish to extrapolate that to the overall PC experience. “

Hmmm… I have been using a PC for over 35 years! Let me give you my “PC Experience”: I used CP/M on my Apple ][+ with a Z80 card before the IBM PC was invented (the pre-cursor to PCDOS). I’ve used PCDOS 1.0 – 5.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 286/386, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10 (I wasn’t foolish enough to use Vista or 8.0). I’ve bought PC’s off the shelf. I’ve built my own expressly for video editing several times. I have pretty much seen it all. Maybe I’m not the norm? but what is?

Here is my PC experience that I know has happened to others in one form or another: Two days before I was supposed to demo my software at the National Association of Broadcasters convention, Microsoft decided to apply a .Net Framework update to my PC which rendered my compiler useless (I’m a software developer). There I was with two days remaining to get on a plane and my software wouldn’t even compile! I was running around the shop trying to find a PC that hadn’t been updated to move my work to and had to install my complete development environment on it which wasted an entire day. That’s when I learned to turn off automatic updates and only allow an update to run after making a full backup of my computer in case something goes wrong (because eventually it will).

Guess what? Windows 10 doesn’t allow you to turn off automatic updates! Oh, you can disable it in the Services app all you want and Microsoft will mysteriously re-enable it from time-to-time and continue to download updates without telling you because they obviously know best. (I’ve had it happen to me on VM’s that I maintain for compatibility testing) Wait until you have a critical customer deadline and your PC stops working because Microsoft has applied an update without your consent that breaks the software that you depending on for your business. Because it will happen if you use Windows long enough. It has happened to me several times in my 33 years of using Windows since it was first introduced. Most of those times I’ve had a backup… once I didn’t. It only takes once to impact your business. Yes, this could happen with a Mac but so far, Apple has allowed me to choose when to apply an update and Time Machine keeps my Mac backup updated hourly.

Then there is reformatting your Windows computer and re-installing all of the software every 3 -4 years. Windows computers get slower over time because the Registry gets larger and larger with every software package that you install and uninstall. After a while, it gets corrupt and things start behaving badly. The only solution is a reformat. Anyone who has used Windows for several years has encountered this. Why do you think there are so many registry cleaners on the market? (some of which do more harm than good) It’s a horrible Microsoft design that Mac’s don’t have to deal with. My 2013 MacBook Pro runs just as fast today as it did the day I got it. No central registry to bog down performance. You probably haven’t been using Windows long enough to experience this but you will over time. Yes, it’s all shinny and new in the beginning but then it’s downhill from there.

As I have said many times, you couldn’t pay me enough to work on a Windows computer again. I’ve only used a Mac for the past 4 years but the experience has been very enjoyable and nothing like the problems I had with Windows. Windows 10 seems to be the worst with Microsoft declaring that it’s now a “service” that they continuously update. Greg, I know you’ve been using Mac’s for 25 years so maybe you have similar stories and I respect that you probably do. Maybe I need to spend 30 years on the Mac to have those kind of stories? Check back with me in 2043 and we’ll compare notes. ????

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Shawn Miller] “Yeah… but if your applications require substantially more horsepower than Photoshop, the aesthetics of the computer you run them on would probably be a lot less important to you. ☺”

Well, if your applications are running sub optimally for the platform I would agree. But…

[Shawn Miller] “LOL, that’s it!! If this thing saves me days of render time and thousands of dollars per year, I wouldn’t hesitate to use it!”

Speaking of saving rendering time… Here is the results of a 2 minute 4K Timeline export on a 2016 MacBook Pro which took 3.27 minutes for FCP X and a wapping 58.42 minutes for Premiere Pro! (FCP X is ~18x faster !!!) Even running Premiere Pro on a Dell XPS with the same specs it took 18.51 minutes which still makes FCP X 5.6x faster than Premiere! It’s not about the hardware speeds and feeds, it’s about how much work you can get done with the hardware and software combined.

So you don’t need some big behemoth of a PC with fans screaming like a 747 on takeoff when you have software that is optimized for the hardware it’s running on like we have on the Mac. Think about it. PC developers need to make their software work with 100’s of different GPU’s. Mac developers have a handful of configurations to support so the software can be extremely optimized for the platform.

The chart above speaks for itself. Premiere Pro runs better on Windows than on a Mac but it still doesn’t runs nearly as fast as Final Cut Pro X on a Mac so yea, if you are a Premiere user, Windows should be your platform of choice and you should buy the biggest beefiest PC you can afford. FCP X editors don’t need that much power to get even more work done on a Mac. The problem is not PC vs Mac as much as it’s Premiere running better on a PC. Since I don’t use any Adobe products, the Mac gives be both aesthetics and performance. ????

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Eden McD] “Attached is a screenshot of a completed mask acting as if it were disabled.”

That’s because it is!

Try enabling it by checking the Mask checkbox.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Shawn Miller] “I wouldn’t care if my computer case was hot pink with purple stripes and had “My Little Pony’s First Computer Friend” scrawled across the side.”

Shawn… I think I found your next computer case! ????

lol (…no ponies were harmed in the making of this case)

ps. This photo created on a aesthetically pleasing Mac. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Paul Golden] “I’m torn between learning Motion or Fusion (totally different workflows) but AE is still a great jack of all trades, so I will suffer some while longer. Apple has already shown that it can get a graphics program like Motion to play in real time, at least for simpler stuff.”

I would recommend Motion which is more like AE workflow than the node based workflow of Fusion. I moved from AE to Motion and Motion was infinitely easier to use. You don’t have to learn cryptic script commands like “wiggle” to get stuff to move. Motion has behaviors that you select from a menu and they just work. Way easier IMHO and just as powerful. I am completely Adobe Free (FCP X, Motion, Compressor, Affinity Photo, & Affinity Design).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[andy patterson] “Any cheap Apple laptop running FCPX will allow you to edit h.246/mpeg4/AVCHD with ease using FCPX. The same cannot be said about Premiere Pro. Why is that you ask? Because FCPX uses Intel’s Quick Sync.”

Well that’s the point isn’t it? I don’t need a beefy Mac to edit with FCPX but I do need a beefy PC to edit with PPro. ????

[andy patterson] “Some FCPX user think if you get a $4,500.00 Mac Pro the performance gap between FCPX and Premiere Pro will widen. That is not the case. Do you know why?”

I’m pretty sure that FCP X takes full advantage of the D300-D700 dual GPU’s in the current Mac Pro and it will do the same with the Vega 56 in the iMac Pro. We will have to wait and see. I would be very interested in those results. The problem is that Adobe uses the proprietary NVIDIA CUDA API instead of the open source OpenCL API and Apple and FCP X uses OpenCL which works better with ATI cards. So yea, Adobe works better on a PC unless you bought a PC with an ATI card, or you put an NVIDIA card in your 2010 Mac Pro (I realize you can’t do this with the 2013 Mac Pros). This is an Adobe problem which I don’t have because I use FCP X.

Apple’s problem is that they don’t upgrade their Pro desktops every year and every year faster GPU’s come out and, as you pointed out, a PC allows you to take advantage of these faster GPU’s immediately. So Apple has completely dropped the ball with the Mac Pro 2013 not so much that it’s not expandable, but because they didn’t expand it themselves every year. So I can’t argue with you there. Hopefully they have learned a lesson and will make the next Mac Pro expandable again.

That video is funny. It’s basically saying that a brand new 10-core PC is faster than a 5 year old mid-range Mac Pro (he had a 6-core D500 not the 12-core D700). Well Duh! A brand new PC is faster than a 5 year old PC too! The Mac Pro wasn’t actually that much slower considering it’s age and mid-range specs.

Apple let their Pro technology languish on the shelf. You can’t compare a modern PC to a modern Mac Pro because there are no modern Mac Pros! The newest Mac Pro is almost 5 years old now which is ancient in computer years. However, I am editing with a 2010 Mac Pro 12-Core which is almost 8 years old and I would never edit with an 8 year old PC. They just don’t hold up that well and they slow down terribly over time because the Windows registry. I use to reformat my PC every 3 years to gain performance back. I don’t have that problem with macOS and I am quite happy not to have to worry about that anymore. Same is true for laptops. Even the “gold standard” Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad laptops start rattling and come unhinged after a few years but I have a 7 year old 2011 MacBook Pro that is still solid as the day I bought it. I put an SSD in it and it’s like a new Mac and shows no sign of stopping.

So yes, at any point in time, if you want the fastest editing computer, and Apple hasn’t refreshed the Mac Pro line in a while, a PC will be faster but only because it can use newer technology. But as you pointed out, I can get FCP X to work great on a midrange Mac so why waste money on a beefy PC when you don’t have to? I see lots of PC people here on the COW asking what CPU and GPU to buy so that they can edit 4K on their PC and then I see people with an 27″ iMac Retina 5K editing 4K like butter and I wonder why anyone would want to use a Windows PC in the first place when they can just buy a system that works with 4K right out-of-the-box?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Bob Zelin] “I would like to see a consortium group of users hold Apple executives “hostage” (this is an expression of speech – I am not suggesting that someone does something illegal) and FORCE them to answer the question “why won’t you fully cooperate with NVidia”

How about we hold NVIDIA executives hostage and tell them to drop their proprietary CUDA API and focus on adding better support of Open CL/GL so that no one has to work with any vendor… the vendors just need to support the open standards like ATI does and may the best hardware win! ????

I’m sure Apple has better things to do than to retool their graphics engine for proprietary API’s.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[greg janza] “The days of simply writing Windows off are long gone and Apple now has to sell the professional market on why there’s a viable reason to remain an Apple customer.”

OK, so here’s why you should stick with a Apple and a Mac:

Final Cut Pro X vs Premiere Pro both on a MacBook Pro 2016 and, with the same 4K timeline, in Premiere Pro on a Dell XPS 2016 (smaller bars are better)

A 2 minute 4K Timeline export on a 2016 MacBook Pro took 3.27 minutes for FCP X and a wapping 58.42 minutes for PPro! (FCP X is ~18x faster !!!) Even running PPro on a Dell XPS with the same specs it took 18.51 minutes which still makes FCP X 5.6x faster!

This is not only for video. I’m a software developer who spent 30+ years on Windows. I do cloud development and need to have several virtual machines (VM) running on my laptop to do my work. I moved to the Mac when I realized that I could only run 1 or 2 VM’s on Windows before it began to bog down and become unresponsive but I could run 4 to 6 VM’s on an equivalent spec Mac before it started to slow down. I personally witnessed this productivity boost and I promptly traded in my Lenovo Laptop for an equivalent speced MacBook Pro and never looked back.

IBM just converted over half of their workstations to Mac sighting 3x savings in total cost of ownership when compared to Windows PC’s saving up to $535 per Mac per four years in comparison to PCs. So major corporations are moving to the Mac not away from it. You can read about it here:

Switch to Macs from PCs reportedly saves IBM $270 per user
IBM says it is 3X more expensive to manage PCs than Macs

I also teach software development at the university level and I can’t tell you all of the problems students have following along in class with their Windows laptops vs the students that have a Mac. I don’t mean to be cliche’ but the Macs just work and Windows always needs something installed and a reboot before anything works and even then it doesn’t have the unix tools need to do cloud development work so it never works consistently. It’s huge hassle in class!

Also, I have personally had to reboot my Windows PC because of applications that hang and Windows can’t seem to kill them no matter how many times I open the Task Manager and press the Kill button. On my Mac, I open the Force Quit menu and the hung applications quits almost immediately. In my 4 years of using a Mac I have never had one app that didn’t exit when forced to quit but Windows doesn’t seem to have that kind of control and I was forced to reboot to get the program out of memory many, many times. My experience is that Windows is hugely inferior to macOS in a lot of ways. Like I said, 30+ years using Windows, 4 years using a Mac, I would never go back to Windows if you paid me.

So there are lots of reasons to abandon Windows in favor of a Mac and that’s exactly what the IT industry is doing. Maybe the film industry likes higher cost of ownership and sower performance? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BTW, You can watch the FCPX vx PPro test here (it starts at about 5:02):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUY9mZoWv0w
The first part of that video attempts to show that the MacBook Pro 2016 is inferior to the Dell XPS but all it really shows is that Premiere runs better on Windows than a Mac because when you use FCP X it blows Premiere Pro out of the water on the same hardware.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

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[John Rofrano]

[andy patterson] “I would not want MS to force the user to use two separate operating systems and two different programs depending one what device I am using.”

I restfully disagree. ???? Trying to use an application designed for a mouse and keyboard on a touch device is suboptimal at best an unworkable at worst. Apple understand this… Microsoft does not. I love my iPad Pro for what it is and I love my Mac desktop for what it is and I don’t want them to ever behave the same because I use them for completely different purposes and I embrace that they are finally tuned for those purposes and not a generic compromise.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com