Should I Build a Hackintosh?

[Desmond Ford]

I'm very interested in building a HAckintosh to use as my primary system for color grading on DaVinci Reoslve 9.0 and Editing in Adobe CS6. However, I do not personally know anyone who has done this and I'm interested to hear any first hand expereinces on whether or not to take the Hackintosh route.

I know that the systems can be buggy, but also super powerful. I'm more interested in the Hackintosh for the power, speed and configurability, and the fact that it can be done for half the price of a Mac Pro only makes it more enticing. Also, I understand that it can it be used as both a Hackintosh and a normal PC, so you get the best of both worlds.

So, what does the community think? Aside from voiding warrantly and support, are there any significant negatives to going the Hackintosh route?



dezzy

 

[Justen Nguyen]

Not sure. Apple's pro line has been very uncertain for awhile. Just saw this article the other day on how to build said hackintosh. Might be worth a look. Might even help you decide.

 

[BrandonChristensen]

Those Hackintosh's now are great.

I wish he had the new Geek Bench score for the October 2012 build.

Regardless, the NVIDIA card support alone is worth it.

 

[jake blackstone]

Hackintosh is fine, but since BM issued a Windows version of Resolve, I see no compelling reason to go that route. Yes, it is cheaper, more hardware choices, etc but it is also comes with a lot of baggage, mainly no support (it is an unsupported configuration as far as BM concerns) and would require endless R&D, trying to make the system stable and reliable. Personally I wouldn't use such an unsupported platform in a production environment. The only problem with the Windows version of Resolve is no Prores writing support. I hope this may change at some point in not too distant future.

 

[Tom.Wong]

there's a script that let's you write pro res on windows, but u can't export it directly out of software. you'll have to render out as a intermediate first like dpx and than convert to pro res. it's time consuming and some might say not even worthwhile. as Jake has been saying, no support means a lot of things. a piece of hardware or software that requires a certain mac os update to run correctly, and that version of mac os happens to break your hackintosh. trust me it happens, and quite often.

and there are more "stable" hackintosh builds if you follow the guides online, but they are usually not the most high end hardware of the batch either. if you want to actually use the parts you want to use, it's a lot of tweaking, finding the right drive scripts, hacks, etc to get things running. and even then one small change could break the whole system. do the research yourself, a lot of people attempt hackintosh's outside the guides and run into a lot of problems. no audio, no bluetooth, no wifi. other issues like no native support for a certain processor in mac os, so power management is broken, and all your fans are running at 100% all the time making your computer sound like a rocket engine.

honestly, i'd just build a really beast pc and stick in windows if you work on the post side of things a lot and when you need pro res, just have a beefy big raid, render dpx and use the script to render pro res. unless your turn arounds and deadlines are insane...

http://www.authorityfx.com/encoding-videos-in-prores-4444-on-windows/


if you're dead set on hackintosh this guide might help you.

http://nofilmschool.com/2012/10/mountain-lion-hackintosh/

for single processor builds, hackintosh's can be a nice option. but going dual processor route I'm spoiled off it, and wouldn't want anything less for a workstation setup, and that's where your choices get more limited and more complicated.

 

[Maz Mawlawi]

There is no reason to bother with hackintosh at all...
What Jake said...
And You'll get better performance with windows (unfortunately)

 

[jake blackstone]

just have a beefy big raid, render dpx and use the script to render pro res

Or you could do your grade on a Windows Resolve, export the project, re-connect the drive with source material to a Mac, that that you may already have laying around, with Resolve Lite installed and render Prores on a Mac. No intermediate DPX needed. That's what I do, when my Mac is busy. I just use PC to grade and then render the project on a Mac.

 

[Desmond Ford]

Or you could do your grade on a Windows Resolve, export the project, re-connect the drive with source material to a Mac, that that you may already have laying around, with Resolve Lite installed and render Prores on a Mac. No intermediate DPX needed. That's what I do, when my Mac is busy. I just use PC to grade and then render the project on a Mac.

Thanks for all the great ideas, but for me the point of building a Hackintosh would be to speed up and ultimately simplify my workflow. I don't want two separate computers.

Thus, it appears that either building a PC or waiting for the new iteration of Mac Pro to arrive are my only viable options. I mean, if Hackintoshes are as buggy as the above posters mentioned, then I wouldn't want anything to do with them because I still work on set sometimes, where reliability is essential. It's very difficult to troubleshoot a technical issue with people looking over your shoulder, as I recently learned.

Now I'll start looking into customizing a PC and then weigh the pros and cons against it versus a Mac Pro.

Thanks for al the ideas though!


Dezzy