pc vs mac at 1500 price point

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Peter Reynolds said:
Everything I've been hearing about CS5 has been incredibly positive. I'm
really looking forward to working with it. From all accounts (on the boards
at least), its raised the bar for NLEs.

P.
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CS5 Mercury Playback Engine on Snow Leopard in 64-bit and a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 ($1500) is pretty impressive, particularly in a mixed format, native timeline.

I wish there were less expensive qualified Mac NVIDIA cards, but with this setup on a multithreaded MacPro, it doesn't get much better.

Apple are you listening?

:)
 
I think the big disconnect here is people using Premiere on a Mac instead of a PC. I'm sure it's not as solid on a Mac...didn't Apple just release the API for Flash to be able to use graphics acceleration? What does that say about other third party apps that may not have complete access to the system (thus ensuring that FCP will always run better)?

I've crashed FCP on a Mac as often as I can crash Premiere on a PC...and Premiere has better compatibility/features. As Peter Reynolds mentioned, I've been considering the move to Mac with FCP myself only for compatibility reasons (lost a gig because I couldn't share a project), but I think the talk of Premiere being any less than FCP is, simply, ignorant.

Case in point: I shoot little quick audition pieces for a friend from time and time. I can load the P2 clip directly into Premiere, do a quick trim of the ends, and then export out. Under FCP, I'd have to log and transfer that footage first before I could do anything.

I've also been unable to import PNG files into FCP (I've been told that this is a functionality that FCP possess, but I'm telling you that on a copy of FCP 6 dot something something (I'm not sure of the exact revision), it would not allow me to import a PNG file no matter which way I tried (dragging-and-dropping or clicking Import and going from there). I had to convert to a PSD and then import that...and THEN you have to edit the timeline length of the PSD in order to change the length of that in your primary timeline, which is dumb. In Premiere, you can drop any number of image files into your timeline and adjust their length directly.

You also have the live link with After Effects in Premiere...under FCP I had to render out every little thing I did in AE, and if I discovered a problem, I had to go back to AE and redo it...now you might say that FCP has the same ability with Motion, but Motion is NOT the industry standard that After Effects is.

I also don't feel that Compressor doesn't give you as fine of a control over your export options as Adobe Media Encoder does.

The gauntlet has been thrown, David S., with actual examples instead of just tossing around unsupported assertions.
 
I'm a PC person and even though Macs crash as often as PCs (don't argue with this, please) and in my opinion are less user friendly but if you want to edit it's just so much smoother with FCP then Premiere or Vegas... Premiere i always found too clunky and Vegas not stable enough, FCP on the other hand is fantastic. Smooth playback and compatibility with many codecs. The only software that i can recommend for PC is Avid's Composser.
 
Patryk, which version of Premiere did you last have experience doing any meaningful editing with? And was this on a Mac or PC?
 
I have heard adobes after effects stuff is really good, but arn't (sic) there plugins for fcp that are as good? :cheesy:
 
i really just wanted some info. seems to come down to personal preference alot and as long as you can make a finished product it doesn't matter.

as long as i can send a cs5 project for mastering it shouldnt matter too much if i get a pc or a mac as i havent invested anything on plugins yet

but pcs win cause they are cheaper
 
ted, "pcs win cause they are cheaper" is WRONG position. Think from another perspective, how big of power user are you or anticipate to be? If just casual then yes, cheaper=better but if you are a pro or aiming to be then you want to get the most trouble free environment (as each trouble=lost money). And even though Macs are as trouble prone as PCs from editing standpoint i find that the FCP (which only runs on Macs) is more stable then anything on PCs (Avid's MC excluding).
 
If you are going to be working with HDSLR footage, or just AVC based footage in general (say, as in from an HMC-150), then I would go with Premiere CS5. It's really great for working with those files.

However, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a lot of people's faults with Premiere stems from having used it on a Mac platform. I know that Premiere CS4 was missing features on the Mac version (not sure about CS5) and I have to wonder about Apple having closed off APIs that would increase performance that are made available to Final Cut that Adobe has no access to. So if you're on a Mac, my recommendation for using Premiere comes with that caveat.
 
subtleinspiration, on a mid range PC this is my experience:
Premiere, strobby playback of HD footage, stable operation, mid range to learn.
Vegas, strobby playback, crashes on longer projects, easy to learn.
Avid MC, smooth playback, stable operation, steep learning curve.

on mid range Mac:
FCP, smooth playback, stable operation, mid range learning curve.
 
How does this:

Patryk_Rebisz said:
I'm a PC person and even though Macs crash as often as PCs (don't argue with this, please)
Click to expand...

Jive with this?

Patryk_Rebisz said:
And even though Macs are as trouble prone as PCs from editing standpoint i find that the FCP (which only runs on Macs) is more stable then anything on PCs (Avid's MC excluding).
Click to expand...

I've crashed FCP many times.

Patryk_Rebisz said:
Think from another perspective, how big of power user are you or anticipate to be? If just casual then yes, cheaper=better but if you are a pro or aiming to be then you want to get the most trouble free environment (as each trouble=lost money).
Click to expand...

What about a Windows 7 based desktop/laptop is going to be trouble than a Mac OSX desktop/laptop? Viruses? Never get any. Crashes? Same. Ease of use? I'm going to have to go with Windows 7 on that (using a Mac Pro on a network had wierd issues with navigation that Windows doesn't...i.e. using the back button in a finder window dropped me back to the root of the network every single time which was annoying when I just wanted to back up one level).

Another example: you can get a Sony VAIO with 640GB of hard drive space and a QUAD core i7 for $1300. A DUAL core i7 MacBook Pro with 500GB of space costs $2200. Those two extra cores sure come in handy when you're rendering. You can also get a Blu-Ray burner in a laptop, whereas with a Mac you'll have to spring for an external one, which simply adds to the cost and isn't as portable as having it as your main drive (not for everyone, but as someone who produces Blu-Rays and uses them for archiving, it's a pretty big deal).

As for desktops...forget it. You're looking at $2500 just for starters with a Mac Pro (not including a monitor) with piss-poor specs: 2.66GHz processor, 3GB of RAM, GeForce 120. You could build a Windows-based desktop (and let's be reasonable, your only choice is Windows because there are no Adobe comparable apps for Linux) that would run absolute circles around this thing for about $1000 less.

Frankly, I'd rather have that $1000 to purchase camera equipment.
 
Patryk_Rebisz said:
subtleinspiration, on a mid range PC this is my experience:
Premiere, strobby playback of HD footage, stable operation, mid range to learn.
Click to expand...

It might be that I keep my PCs updated regularly, but I've had excellent DVCPRO HD performance since Premiere CS3 (CS4 was, admittedly, the Vista of Premieres...some great changes, but not as elegant as it could have been performance-wise), and CS5 is almost astounding in the way it plays back AVCHD footage.
 
This thread has come close to the line a few times.

Ted I propose you go into the NLE forums and ask why the FCP like FCP, why the CS X people prefer that. Use both and come up with what fits you and your budget. Consider your ambitions as far as editing. Is this to edit your own small projects? DO you want it fulltime someday? Are you only editing because you MUST?

Good luck!
 
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