PP5.5 Windows vs. Mac performance

omnikron

omnikron

Well-known member
I do not want to start up a Mac vs. PC argument here, but FCPX is not in my future and I want to go with Premier Pro. The question is should I go with Mac or PC?

I'm really at a crossroads, and I personally prefer to stick with OSX but I'm curious if anyone has done any performance comparisons between Premier Pro 5.5 in Win 7 and Tiger. Both should be 64 bit and run at pretty much the same speed right? Adobe products typically run faster in a Windows environment I've heard, but I'm wondering if that's still the case.

Anybody have any input on this based on experience?
 
According to other releases, the Windows version is a tad more snappy (5-10%) than the OSX counter-part. However, the OSX version can encode into ProRes when used on a system that has FCP installed -- this is a very useful thing to be able to do.

Over all I think it is after effects that sees a real noticeable leap in performance when compared to the mac version. I am not sure why that's the case, but it just seems that way.
 
Thanks tfg, that's interesting. What do Windows users typically output their projects into? I typically use ProRes for my mastering in FCP.
 
There are also a few small things which are better in Windows, such as external HD preview options, and support for more MPE-supporting graphics cards. So, if I were advising someone entirely platform-agnostic out of the gate, I'd say Windows.

But if you have a lot invested in the Mac OS, you'd have to decide if the advantages of Windows are enough to have you adapt to a new platform. There are advantages to Windows, but I don't know that they're world-changing.
 
Huh, interesting! Thanks for sharing that. Bummer I can't get that on the Mac version. My Hackintosh has a graphics card which I can get to work with CUDA with some modification it looks like, but I guess there's no way to output from the HDMI port on my card to a HD monitor at full res with the Mac version it's saying...
 
Let me start out be saying I had all but dumped windows years ago, with the only program I ran (via Fusion) being my Accounting software. We were all Mac. I told myself I'd never load Windows again.

So, having come from FCP7, being totally disappointed with FCP-X, we naturally started out running Premiere Pro on Mac (8 core + 16GB Ram and a 27" iMac Quad i7 with 12GB). Because the graphics card couldn't be upgraded in the iMac we built a windows 7 pc (i7, 16GB ram, GTX570) and was surprised how much snappier PP was on Windows than even the 8 core Mac Pro + Cuda. We've now got the iMac on ebay and will build a second windows 7 box once it's sold.

Using the software is identical between Mac & Windows, other than the obvious open/save dialogs and the various codecs in the Media Encoder. If you install Quicktime in Windows (free) you can read all your ProRes files but you can't export to ProRes. Lots of options, including the (free) Avid DNxHD 8bit and 10bit codecs which can also be loaded on the Mac (so they are cross platform). Given all the marketing hype by Apple that ProRe was 'Pristine' (Apple love that word) we were pleasantly surprised to find that DNxHD is at least as good and actually out performs ProRes in some scenes (use the difference filter in AE to see the differences).

We found that Premiere Pro has some bugs on Mac that don't appear to be present in Windows, in particular when you are merging projects (i.e. sequences from more than one editor), the Mac version seems to have created some corrupt projects whereas we had no problem merging on Windows so far. Needless to say, we always merge them on Windows now.

We found that Encore is also less buggy on Windows. The Mac version seemed to crash from time to time whereas no crashes so far on Windows.

I could go on, but coming from an "All Mac - Hate Windows" to "thinking about dumping Macs" has been quite a turnaround.
 
The biggest shortcoming on Mac hardware is limited compatibility with NVIDA CUDA GPU's. CUDA support is of major importance in PPro.
 
@Exact: I've also been in the same shoes, "I'll never go back to Windows again!!" but I'm also starting to wonder if now is the best time to give it a clean start and try again. Thanks for your feedback. For me, I'm shooting on a Sony EX1 and one of my biggest concerns will be the inability to edit anything I've imported into a XDCAM on the mac in the past. I know there is a way to convert them to .mxf files which I believe is necessary to edit them on Windows, it's just a chore. But there's no reason for me to throw away my Mac partition on my Hackintosh either, so it shouldn't be that jarring of a transition. The other being I'm just not sure what codecs people use in a Windows environment. I'll look up the DNxHD more... is there anything else you recommend as a great inbetween codec? I.E. to go from After Effects to Premiere?
 
Both Lagarith and UT are free and lossless codecs, and work very well as Intermediates. Both have RGB (with or without Alpha) as well as YUV modes. UT even works quite well as source media inside PP.

Neither ProRes nor DNxHD are lossless.
 
Yea I've definitely given it a thought, switching I mean, but I'm far too invested into the OSX platform overall. Switching for reasons strictly editing would be difficult since the platform I edit on needs to be the platform I do everything else on. It's a compromise, but you gotta cut corners somewhere. Luckily I don't depend on day to day top notch performance to make ends meat.
 
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