Avid on Mac via Bootcamp
 

Hello all,

On a mac, has anyone used bootcamp to run Avid MC on Windows XP? I know it's not supported by Avid, but would it work?

Is there a reason you need to run it in XP? Because Avid Media Composer runs on the Mac.

It is said best in this forum thread:
http://community.avid.com/forums/t/60456.aspx


"Note that these Adrenaline and Mojo/Mojo SDI systems are NOT qualified on the current Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) due to an issue with the OS X 10.5 FireWire driver and therefore customers should NOT upgrade their OS X past 10.4.11. Further, new Apple workstations shipping with Max OS X 10.5 (Leopard) are NOT qualified with Adrenaline and Mojo classic systems. Customers wishing to use Avid hardware with the latest Apple hardware and software MUST upgrade to Avid Nitris DX and/or Avid Mojo DX hardware."

Devin,

If that is the case, I think you'll suffer in performance running XP in boot camp which as I understand is sort of an emulation mode so it is going to run slow, especially if you're also trying to power outboard I/O gear.

This is just my guess and I admit that I haven't tried running anything on the MAC via boot camp.

Good Luck

I run Windows XP using Parallels, but not for editing.
There isn't any reason why MC wouldn't run on it that I know of as long as the machine is powerful enough to run it via the emulator.
It is exactly the same as running XP on a PC.
I don't know how much the emulator affects performance. I use it mainly to run a database although I sometimes play back video files in XP too.

Bootcamp is not an emulator - it's a separate partition that launches windows natively - effectively it's just like dual booting two different versions of Windows or Windows and Linux on a PC.

Assuming that the drivers and graphics package all work with whatever hardware you need to intergrate, once you have loaded bootcamp you effectively have both a PC and a Mac with the same specs.

In some benchmarking Mac's running bootcamp results in better performance than similiarly spec'd PCs.

I have a brand new Macbook Pro 2.6G running Xpress Pro 5.7.2 on Windows XP.

Works fine.

Running on Bootcamp?? That's really cool Vito. I wonder if it would run on Parallels? I could switch between FCP suite on MAC OSX and Avid/AXP on XP?

Has anyone tried this??

Yep. Just downloaded 5.8.4 from Avid and installed it last night. Even better so far, cause 5.7.2 was defaulting to the legacy overlay mode, which sucked. 5.8.4 seems to like the video driver better.

Haven't done anything extensive yet, so I'm not sure it's bug free.

When I upgrade to Media Composer, I'll probably just install it to the Mac side (can't put 5.8.4 on Leopard).

Don't know about that, though I suspect it would run better with Bootcamp, since it's not an emulator.

Yeah, I've got Final Cut Studio installed on the Mac side. Finally starting to learn it with a home movie project. I'll stick to Avid for my paying work for now.

Also, you can install MacFuse and NTFS-3g on the Mac side, and get full read/write ability to NTFS drives for free. I've successfully captured HDV footage to an external USB NTFS drive using Final Cut. Put MacDrive on the Windows side, and you have full access both ways from both OSes.

By the way, I realize now that some versions of Avid on Bootcamp seem to not like MacDrive. With 5.8.4 I get an error on startup of the program and it refuses to load with MacDrive enabled.

Other than that, all seems well.

As for running anything hard core video or photo editing on Parallels or Fusion, they're just not up to par. External drive support and dual monitors are two of the issues. I've tried Sony Vegas through Parallels, if more of the hardware was supported, may not be bad but not near as fast and safe IMO, as running it on a straight, clean Bootcamp XP partition.