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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Mac vs. Windows...

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3 years ago switched to Mac, and now completely mac based for everything, from Nuke to Resolve. It was a big move for me, as i was former Microsoft employee etc, but havent looked back.
At my wife's medical practice, where i am the non clinical partner its all PC, NHS Highland is all Windows based, and it drives me nuts, how slow it is, compare to my home office Mac setup.

Andrew.
 
Well in the perfect world i would prefer Mountain Lion with the body of a PC! oh wait!!! its called a Hackingtosh Everybody wins!! sweet....
 
Whatever gets the job done. For machines that need to do very specific tasks or batch encoding/transcoding with lots of hardware-specific components then I tend to turn to PC. For ordinary daily tasks I prefer the Mac as my main workstation.
 
I'm a mac man, FCPX has a great workflow, as others have stated the 15" Retina MacBook Pro is a beast which I happily own, and the fact we can have a rocket card hooked up to it through a thunderbolt enabled device is really just icing on the cake for me! I still use windows every once in a while(very rare) when someone I'm working with doesn't use mac.
 
Mac. And I have heard some insider information about what they're up to, and if they keep with that I'm sure all of us Mac users will be happy this year.
 
Mac.

While I am sometimes envious of Windows having the latest hardware (especially the last couple years) and like the flexibility, my priority has usually been in line with Apples - I want the technology to get out of my way so I can get my work done. If that means not having the latest processor or video card, so be it.
 
A few months ago we had a premiere in one of Mexico's Cinepolis Macropantalla (large screen) theaters. Due to a vehicle theft on the very day of the premiere we had to resort to connecting a five-year-old macbook Pro to the theater's 2k projector using a DVI-to-DVI cable. We had to trust the laptop to play back 1080P material for two hours using quicktime player without any kind of pop-up or glitch or freeze-up or dropped-frames. The theater was packed. The mac performed flawless despite its age and the image quality on the big screen was astounding considering we weren't projecting DCP. That was one of the scariest things I had to do in a while. It also kind of made me question the whole DCP expenditure thing. Now I know for next time. Just show up to the theater, plug in your mac and your set to go.
 
We are an all PC studio here..... we have dozens of machines..... all hand built. I'm not sure what all this "every PC has failed me" talk is. It just seems like people are towing Apple's corporate line. I'm not sure what all these things are that you guys do on Macs that are so much easier and intuitive than on PCs. Can someone maybe post a 10 item highlight of specific things OSX does better than Windows?
 
People need the flexibility to use mac/pc/linux. Here's what I use:

1) Apple - Almost always "on" me as I travel - Iphone/ipad/macbook pro
2) Windows - fat pc's that have things like nuke/modo/realflow/adobe_cloud on them
3) linux - All my serious works occurs on linux - a personal super computer , linux grid, cloud processing (now even nuke/modo/realflow are on linux)

Digital Cinema professionals need to be proficient on all three systems. All the programming I do is python, which runs perfectly on all three (python runs on apple/windows/linux).
 
PC all the way.

1) Cutting edge hardware. We can build anything from a small batter powered computer up to an 8-CPU 80 core monster.
2) Windows 8. I am in love with the Surface Pro. It blows people away when I start editing or compositing 5k RED footage on something that they think is an ipad.
3) The Taskbar. I even talked to one of the lead designers from the original Mac days and he agreed that the dock was a disaster. The Taskbar is the best app switing paradigm. That's why both Linux and Windows use it. It just works better.
4) Speed. Speed. Speed. Speed.
5) App compatibility. Lots of programs either are exclusively PC or at least get updated first for PC. I don't want year old software in exchange for an Apple Tax.
6-100) Two mouse buttons. Apple kind of has two mouse button functionality but it's half heartedly implemented. We aren't mentally handicapped... we can figure out two buttons and it makes things way easier.

I've really tried hard to like Linux over the years but every single time there is just package incompatibility and DLL hell. Every.Single.Time. When I'm on betas for software too it's always "I'm getting an error." and after 10 days of troublehsooting the developers find some esoteric package whose build number isn't perfect so they then start replacing that package which breaks Maya and so on and so forth. To paraphrase an acquaintance who was a supervisor at ILM "I think 90% of our IT staff's problems were because we used linux." Linux is great in theory but it's way too fiddly in my opinion for the slight performance improvements (if any). You spend way more than $80 in support time trying to get it to run smoothly. Windows and OSX are just so much more mature in this regard for installing an application and everything playing nice. Too much fragmentation and lack of order on the Linux side of things.

I worked in a linux pipeline that switched to a windows pipeline and all of our little annoying nagging bugs in all the applications seemed to just disappear overnight.
 
I can't see ever going PC unless they drastically become different and is clean and easy. That never happen cause PC folks love to tinker. They like code and are hardware hobbyists. They like the ability to do anything (which usually is good but can also lead to glitches and those that try to take advantage...like viruses and hackers).

To me, PC and Windows always felt clunky and cluttered with "windows" files like ".dll" The average customer won't care about these files. In a mac world (for the most part), one app is one icon...not one folder filled with app files that you can't open or touch/move. Why show us what we don't need to see.

PC just has a different mentality. That's why I love the MACs. I love laptops over towers too (although I understand the need for the power).
 
We have a mix here.

Sound/Offline/dailies and some gfx work on OSX, heavy lifting cgi/compositing on windows and Finishing on Linux.
 
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