Mac -> PC transition... ?

[Paul Russell]

Only get Firefox from Mozilla.

 

[Christopher Barrett]

Heh, I installed Windows via Bootcamp on my 12 core to start getting used to it, and yeah... Resolve did seem so much more responsive. I'm going to get a Trojan Magnum to install over my ethernet port.

 

[JC Bendock]

For a newcomer there will be a curve. Learning to optimize and disable unnecessary tasks will come with time, just like trashing preferences, repairing permission and holding CMD+OPT+P+R on startup did.

For prores you have many options, even some free open source ones. (google: proress on PC) For me, the easiest was to set up a watch folder on shared storage. Drop in my file out comes a prores.

Its silly that people still say windows has virus problems. Sure it does, If you go download freeware from sites like "superMegaFreeDownloads.com"[sarcasm] Personally I have not had a virus on any of my system since the XP days. I also have no antivirus installed, probably never will. There is a general rule to follow, Free usually never means free.

As for OS, I spend most all my time in the software, so other than the perpetual apple file bar they are the same, oh and you close programs on the top right. Actually there are some really nice OS features that I miss when on mac.

Honestly it comes down to options & upgrades. My last mac pro 12 core fully loaded (still in service)was nearly 15k, My 3930k 6core oc'ed to 4.1ghz maxed out with Raided uEFI ssds for startup(zero to desktop in 5 seconds), 64GB 2400mhz ram, everything!! blows the mac away @ half the price. Your system sounds even better. In the end Davinci/Premier/AE and the rest of the family have never been happier. You will be too.

 

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Heh, I installed Windows via Bootcamp on my 12 core to start getting used to it, and yeah... Resolve did seem so much more responsive. I'm going to get a Trojan Magnum to install over my ethernet port.

Hmm, are you sure? Resolve used to run worse on Windows, due to Resolve being a Unix-app ported to Wintel.

 

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Honestly it comes down to options & upgrades. My last mac pro 12 core fully loaded (still in service)was nearly 15k, My 3930k 6core oc'ed to 4.1ghz maxed out with Raided uEFI ssds for startup(zero to desktop in 5 seconds), 64GB 2400mhz ram, everything!! blows the mac away @ half the price.

Interesting how so many people claim that i.e. a six core 3930k blows even a 12-core Mac Pro away... in fact I have six 3930k computers at my atelier and one 12-core MacPro. The 12-core MacPro is about 50% faster than the i7's...

 

[Jonathan S Strauss]

There are lots of reasons people go from mac to pc. The main ones are the unlimited custommization available which everyone loves.


We specialize in upgrading the mac pro http://www.barefeats.com/mp12c346.html and all new benchmarks of our systems are coming out compared to the new mac pro. We also offer 3GHZ 10 core models of the new mac pro.

While we do distribute upgraded Z820's in the PC world we can tell you that our repair rate and customer service rate from the apple side is much less than the PC side. In a world where up-time is the absolute most important thing, even more than performance, be very careful going the pc route. Remember you can now use titans and all the variants in a mac pro starting with maverick.

When I first started out I would actually build liquid nitrogen cooled edit rigs . I was upclocking a 3GHZ pentium 4 to 5GHZ back in 2000 when I was 13 years old

 

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

There are lots of reasons people go from mac to pc. The main ones are the unlimited custommization available which everyone loves.

In a world where up-time is the absolute most important thing, even more than performance, be very careful going the pc route.

Exactly!

 

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

If you find the Apple OS elegant, that is your subjective call to make.

Tim Morten, I tried to give my take on to following question, how is that not asking for subjective reasoning?:

what are the advantages you see in the Mac platform?

Can't put a Titan of any flavor in the new Mac trash can...

Sorry, but parallelization of non-competitive GPU's is unimpressive.

You are highly unskilled to give an opinion if you actually believe that D900/W6000 are non-competitive to nVidia's offerings... end of debate.

 

[Scott Brown]

Sometimes the fastest road isn't the most fun to drive - PC guy to a Mac guy and I just wouldn't go back :smile

 

[Brian Merlen]

As a tech that deals with both I like the mac side more. I have used PCs most of my life, but for the life of me I can't seem to get them to be stable. I don't want to turn it into a pc vs mac thread, but I rebuilt my mac only 3 times in 4 years now. I have never had a PC that good, and the last rebuild was a bad drive, so not even the Macs fault...

I like the processing power of the pcs, I like the slots, this cannot be understated. I don't like having to carry a big box on set though. I like that the PCs are expandable, can last for a good 5 years with proper updates. By Apple turning their mac into this form factor we all know we can't just keep updating it like our old clunker boxes we are used to. For some thats no issue, for me, kind of a worry though. If I buy one, and a year later no one likes mine and I can't update my trash can, kind of blowing it for me.

I basically am in the same boat as you, I don't know what to do. I want the power of a pc, the reliability of osx but don't consider bringing a hack to high end sets an option. reliability matters for me, i don't want to run into tweaking stuff on a shoot, no way no how. so for me i think staying the course is my unfortunate reality. for prores alone and the fact i can bootcamp if needed i want to stay mac, i just hope the processing power downfall doesn't kill me.

for instance i encoded for like 20 hours the other day on a previous generation mac with rocket, and i gotta wonder how fast a super build pc would of done it, with many gpus, big raids...i just don't really get what to do about prores, and handing clients massive raids can work, but everyone likes a small drive to walk away with...but encoding to those drives is a throughput disaster so i think i gotta just get it all figured out. i wish mac had more power options too though.. and really hope that the trash can or retina will work for me in high end situations... when processing power counts

 

[Justin Quinn]

Ok, now that I'm thoroughly disappointed with the lack of Heavy Lifting Macs, I've just had a ProMax PC priced out and am fairly settled on this unit but wanted to see if you guys had any additional input.

Here's my initial build: (utilizing many of my existing cards)
[2x] 8 Core Intel Xeon E5-2687w v2 @ 3.4GHz
64 GB RAM
[2x] GTX 780 GPUs
RedRocket Card
OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCI SSD 480GB Boot Drive
Decklink 3d Extreme HD I/O
Areca ARC-1882ix RAID card
[8x] 4TB Hard Drives
1500 w PSU

I'm a bit confused by your opening statement about the lack of heavy lifting Macs. Based on the specs you have listed, the new Mac Pro 12 Core performs close to it. The dual CPU you listed will clearly give you an advantage, but do you really need all that power? Does VFX rendering make up the majority of your work? Because if you're doing primarily editing and color, then the above system seems way overkill to me. However, if you do primarily VFX work on a programs that multithreads well, then it makes sense.

The GTX 780s are great, but so are the D700s, if not better.

Why not go with an external RAID like Pegasus Promise Thunderbolt 2 and add a Magma Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis for your RR and I/O cards?

I will say that when I got my new mac pro, I chose the less cores/higher clock speed option over the more cores/ lower clock speed option. I was a little worried that my renders would be too slow. Well, they are clearly slower than the 12 core, but not so much so that it actually matters to me. I also realized how little rendering is done in comparison to all the editing and grading. It really does make up just a small part of the workflow.

If you're intent on getting a PC, then all the best. I'm sure it will work out well for you as you've clearly done your research. However, I'm with Hans that two systems are better than one. Also, a little trick I learned, if you take the two system route, by one this year, and the other next year after the spec bump, so that you're always working with the latest and greatest. Then you can take advantage of the latest tech and delegate each computer to whatever it does best.

 

[Paul Russell]

We all have anecdotes. I've been building PCs since 1982. My latest machine is W7 x64, which I built in early 2011. 24/7 internet connection, 3 RAIDS and a Cubix Expander hanging out the back, so not a simple box by any means. The Areca 1680 RAID Card died a few weeks ago, but it was easily replaced. Stable, virus-free, ad-ware free as always.
YMMV

 

[Thomas Mathai]

UNIX as an advantage: debatable. Different, not automatically better. The MSFT kernel is an impressive piece of work.

There is no debate about the power of UNIX for handling massive data I/O.

Look at the infrastructure of bigger post and vfx facilities. You'll most likely see some flavor of Unix handling SANs and other I/O intensive needs.

Drag and dropping TBs of data through ANY graphical interface isn't efficient.

 

[Christopher Barrett]

This Mac / PC debate for me wrapped itself up pretty simply. My 4 year old tower is still pretty badass... 12 Core 2.66 Ghz / 48 GB RAM / PCI SSD Boot Drive / GTX 780 / RedRocket and 2 - 8 bay SAS RAIDS providing 800ish MBs I/O. This setup is simply not doing it for me, though and from the benchmarks I've seen, the new Mac Pros will offer no improvement whatsoever. The decision to go PC, then, was pretty easy... 16 Cores @ 3.4 Ghz / 128 GB RAM (1866Mhz) / 8 internal PCI slots / 8 internal HD slots / 4 internal SSD slots this system is going to scream.

We all have different workflows and need different solutions but I feel that this is going to do it for me. Naturally, I'll report back once I've got everything churning out work...

YMMV