CS5 on a mac running Windows or just FCP on a mac...Help?

M

MagicCat

Well-known member
I have been building PC's for 17 years now, I'm tired. We have a project coming up that may allow us to freshen up our PC's with newer faster CPU's, Boards, Memory, ETC, (which is the typical routine) or, simply flip to Mac.

Last year, I ran into a guy that worked at a major cable network. He mentioned they run all adobe products on Macs, but ran their macs on Windows. He further explained that these Mac/Win/Adobe machines would out perform a BOXX Brand Windows editing system of similar specs, substantially.

Im seriously thinking about all this. Im deeply tired of spending 25% of my time tweaking/fixing our PC's to do what most of my colleagues machines do every day, and seemingly do without crashing or hesitation.

I want to run PPro CS5 as my primary editing platform so we can keep things running here. FCP will come one day in the future. I will have about $4,000 bucks to spend. It does not help much to only have 1 machine, so Im considering getting a Macbook Pro of some sort to boot. Hopefully, all for under the $4,000 price tag???. We work primarily with P2 and some Canon SLR formats. 95% of the time, it is HD. Right now I have two Quad core PC's with CS5, 8gb memory, and GTX285 Cards to open up the Mercury Playback engines. I want something that does more, not something that wants MORE from me.

Oddly, another colleague/company owner said he may be going the opposite way, he mentioned that CS5 Premiere, is outperforming His FCP machines, and is considering buying PC's. He mentioned he did not consider the Mac/Win/Adobe option.

Im not OS Biased, or hardware biased, I don't care about looks, status symbols, or if I have to have pieces parts laying all over my desktop strung together by wires and duct tape, I just want it to work and put dinner on my table as well as my employees. Any constructive/open input would sincerely be appreciated.
 
Stop home building PCs and BUY one. My 2.5 year old Dell 8-core has been utterly faultless. I am running Avid on it now. My previous two editing machines have been Dells, and they have been faultless also. Adobe and Avid both publish systems for use with their software. Buy one and be done with it. Or buy a Mac. Adobe, Avid, and FCP will run on that platform. Hardware costs for professional grade machines are quite similar. Mac has a few advantages in some areas, PCs in others. All the big talk from one side or the other is just posturing, or people's bias.

Good luck with your choice.
 
MagicCat said:
I have been building PC's for 17 years now, I'm tired. We have a project coming up that may allow us to freshen up our PC's with newer faster CPU's, Boards, Memory, ETC, (which is the typical routine) or, simply flip to Mac.
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With the Adobe products there is no reason to flip, unless there are other advantages.

I personally prefer the Mac, mainly because of the underlying OS is 'Unix' (wll Mach micro kernel below that... but I digress...), and as such there are a number of command line tools that I use all the time and assist my outside of the standard 'window+app' environment. Cygwin just never did the same for Windows, that having a reasonable approximation to unix does...

The 'other' difference that I've seen between Mac and Windows is when a application goes south. I have had a better time with killing off the errant app in the Mac, without having to do the cntrl-alt-del option... I've not had a Windows 7 setup, to see if this has 'improved' of the past, but Vista and XP were pretty abysmal in this regard.
 
PerroneFord said:
Stop home building PCs and BUY one.
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This is pretty much the Idea... I have built well over 40 systems since 93, and if nothing else I have learned, I understand deeply that you get what you pay for in terms of components. From Mainboards to memory to Power Supplies. You system is as stable as the cheapest component. I don't skimp, but I do try to remain practical out of financial necessity. We have had some real screamers over the years, but, at the expense of my hair loss at times.

It would be really nice to call and ***** at some rep over the phone for once,... have them come in and fix it or give me a loner,.... than to spend what little precious time I have left on this earth fighting with something that my patience ran out on, and my spirit burned out on, years ago.

Although, in the old, "Bang My Head with a hammer routine", I must admit....I have never really had 3 or 4 grand to throw at a single build.... That does change the Home Built perspective a bit, and, we already own the editing platforms.

I just want to weigh out my options this time around, Im not hindered by a typical $1,200 budget for a build.

Macs are wonderful, Im just not sure that I can justify only getting a few upgrades for my platforms, before the entire machine has to be upgraded as well.... That has kept me away from the Mac-Groundhog-Day loop since day one. We squeeze about 3 to 4 years out of every machine, and it usually will see 3 or 4 major editing platform revisions in that period. My machines now, are at thier end, but they saw Avid Express, Express HD, as well as Premiere Pro 1.5. A GTX285 got me into CS5, and it runs better than any previous build of Premiere, Period. However, it is giving me all it has, and believe me you, we ask allot of our machines.


OK, Im ranting now and defeating the purpose of the thread, sorry... Thanks for your input!!.
 
After watching all the Final Cut Pro videos from Francis Ford and Dean Devlin, I was almost sold on the move to Mac and FCP. Then I checked out CS5 because it could playback DSRL footage natively and thought I could keep my PC and Premiere Pro CS5 could be great foil to FCP. Man, was I wrong. I'm not impressed with Premiere Pro CS5 because of their lack of audio functionality. Sony Vegas is better.

If you're going with Mac then stay with FCP. Morever, when looking for professional editors to collaborate with, they are using either FCP or Avid. We got over 100 resumes from editor and only a few used Premiere or Vegas.
 
MagicCat said:
He further explained that these Mac/Win/Adobe machines would out perform a BOXX Brand Windows editing system of similar specs, substantially...Hopefully, all for under the $4,000 price tag???
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If I may suggest buying a used Mac Pro (or the 'refurbished' models from the Apple website). I find the current generation of Mac Pro models amazingly fast, but just a little too pricey. You'll find plenty of Harpertown 45nm 8-core Xeon machines under the refurbished area on the Apple site, or even craigslist. They still perform like a dream and are substantially cheaper.

MagicCat said:
I want to run PPro CS5 as my primary editing platform so we can keep things running here. FCP will come one day in the future.
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Ppro CS5 will run great on OSX (albeit a tad faster on Windows, so I hear). As other users have said though - Ppro is a little short on the professional audio tools, particularly when syncing external audio files. If you generally avoid syncing external sound then you'll likely never run into that barrier. However (and I speak from experience) sometimes you'll appreciate the raw stability of FCP over Premiere. FCP is notably slower in most tasks, but rarely ever crashes if used correctly. Plus, keep in mind that FCP can have several projects open at once; Premiere can only have one project open at once. So if you're juggling multiple projects concurrently the speed advantage of Ppro is going to be minimized due to that issue.


MagicCat said:
Right now I have two Quad core PC's with CS5, 8gb memory, and GTX285 Cards to open up the Mercury Playback engines. I want something that does more, not something that wants MORE from me.
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I doubt you're going to find something substantially more powerful at the moment, whether you go PC or MAC. I'm using the GTX285 on my MAC and I'll concur that the GPU acceleration is great. The only area where you'll see improvement is during the render stage if you had an 8 or 12 core machine. For most editing tasks, unfortunately, you are pretty tapped out no matter what software you're using.

MagicCat said:
Oddly, another colleague/company owner said he may be going the opposite way, he mentioned that CS5 Premiere, is outperforming His FCP machines, and is considering buying PC's.
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It all depends on what you need I suppose. I've found the OSX platform a necessary tool for versatility, even though I am personally biassed towards it from a UI standpoint too. If you don't need it, however, then why not use Windows.

MagicCat said:
Im not OS Biased, or hardware biased, I don't care about looks, status symbols, or if I have to have pieces parts laying all over my desktop strung together by wires and duct tape, I just want it to work and put dinner on my table as well as my employees. Any constructive/open input would sincerely be appreciated.
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The mac platform is probably going to score you a few points with clients, purely based on broad stereotypes they've learned from Apple marketing. However… I will say this in regards to your duct-tape expression: A Mac Pro workstation is the best engineered machine, ever. Open up a Mac Pro and you'll notice there's virtually no wires inside because everything has been engineered that way (I'll admit this can look a little daunting/scary to someone used to building your own machines, and suddenly feeling like you don't know what you're looking at). The machine is nearly dead-silent and you'll worry a lot less about air flow because there's virtually nothing in the way.
 
this was a load of info. I myself have been wanting a Mac. I would always have a windows machine around tho too
 
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