Mac or PC?

[Stephen L. Noe]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

Stephen: what's your editing performance like with HDV and what are your editing computer specs? Does Liquid still grind away with "background rendering" instead of letting you see your changes right away? And does it still litter your hard drive with hundreds of obscurely named files, or have they simplified that process? I did one project with Liquid a couple of years ago and haven't touched it since; maybe I'll take another look at the latest demo.

Kevin,

1 edit suite specs: SYSTEM#1-LE6 P4 3.4HT 1GB Ram-SATA-PCIe X600/256 Sony DL/DVDRW Moviebox Deluxe, Contour Shuttle

RT yellow slice does not require render at all until final output. RT for HDV can be ported out to MovieBox Deluxe or the ProBob SD NTSC or PAL. (That's GOLD amigo). That means you can preview HDV to an SD monitor RT or you can use you dual head video card to monitor RT DVI if you have an HDTV hooked up to your computer.

Media managment still uses it's own database but now the search (and destroy) functions allow you to purge complete by name. I know what you're saying about version 4.5 and 5.0 Edition's media managment. It took a rocket scientist to figure it out.

[Emanuel Costa]

And for DVCPRO HD? Mac or PC? Is it possible @ an affordable, simple, laptop?

[Dan Euritt]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

Sounds like Apple may be a step ahead there as far as H.264 encoding and HD DVD setup is concerned

try encoding an h.264 file with the apple encoder, and then tell us how long it took... there are multiple choices for h.264 encoders on the pc side of the fence, nero especially rocks... when it comes to encoding just about any video format, pc's are by far the best choice.

since tommy specifically asked about hdv, i'd suggest that he take a look at this thread: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=54258 ...maybe one of these mac guys will weigh in here and explain why fcp can't handle a native m2t hdv file, hmm? i bet stephen can tell us if it'll drop right into the liquid timeline?

i'd also like to see a mac guy download the fs-4 raw dv file at my codectest.com website, and tell me if there is any mac software that is capable of pulling the second pair of audio tracks out of it.

to put it another way, there are well over 10,000 more software packages available on the pc side of the fence, that will never be written for macs... don't like vegas? try premiere, liquid edition, avid, etc... you can't do that with a mac.

so if you think that mac is for you, just make sure that it'll do everything that you want it to, before you step up to the plate... and for the record, i literally can't recall the last time i saw a bsod on either of my win2k or xp pc's... vegas 5, for instance, has been rock-solid for hundreds of edits per project; i have never been able to crash it.

[Paul Wags]

I'm with your DAN.

As most will find out soon, encoding straight to a DVD from the HDV timeline is better than DVD to DV to DVD or whatever you go out to.

I also wanted to make a NTSC file from a 50i HDV timline. I found that Video Xpress does an amazing Pal to NTSC (yes even better than procoder and DV Atlanits) conversions but would not run from within the HDV timeline.

Well after abit of surfing, there it was a tiny frame serving program on the net that lets me output straight to the encoder from the HDV timeline. And the best thing is it was FREE.

PC's have so many otions when it comes to software.

Paul

[Stephen L. Noe]

Originally Posted by Dan Euritt

...fcp can't handle a native m2t hdv file, hmm? i bet stephen can tell us if it'll drop right into the liquid timeline?....

... download the fs-4 raw dv file at my codectest.com website, and tell me if there software is capable of pulling the second pair of audio tracks out of it....

Yes, m2t's directly import in Liquid 7 and yes the Firestore's raw dv is supported in Liquid just by linking to the file.

Dan, your file has V.O. on one stereo pair and music on the other stereo pair.

In all fairness, don't you have to go into the firestore and tell it what editing app your capturing for? Liquid likes demuxed files or audio embedded but I don't know how FCP likes it's DTE files formatted on the FS4.

[Stephen L. Noe]

Originally Posted by Emanuel Costa

And for DVCPRO HD? Mac or PC? Is it possible @ an affordable, simple, laptop?

On PC you've got two choices for DVCProHD (currently) Avid XpressProHD or Canopus EdiusHD.

I'd expect Liquid Chrome HD to follow suit but we'll see what Avid does with Chrome.

[Dave Perry]

Used both, prefer Mac.

[Dylan Pank]

I thought we knew the answer to this! Macs are more likely to give you cancer, but a PC will induce low birthweight in pregnant women or...

Oh and FFmpegX,

the second track is Garbage BTW, as in the band, Garbage.

[Dan Euritt]

lol... it's that sick brit humour :-)

yes, you can hear all four channels playing with the quicktime player, but it is not capable of exporting the second pair seperately, at least on the pc side of the fence.

i see that ffmpegx claims to be capable of two-pass h.264 encoding, which is cool, hope it works better than the qt player... will it actually export the second pair of audio tracks from that test file? not just play 'em back, but export 'em seperately as well.

dv recording on the fs-4 allows you to choose from a whole bunch of dv formats, and most editors can handle multiple dv formats... raw dv is the only thing that i found that allowed access to the second pair of audio channels... plus it takes up less hard drive space than a type 2 avi.

as frank yap pointed out in that other thread, dvrack also stores native m2t hdv files on it's hard drive, so these aren't just firestore issues.

[Garius Hill]

Hi,

I use Premiere Pro with the Cineform codec for editing HDV. Most of your basic editing is real time with that Codec, very fast and pain free. I recently attended the HDV workshop given by Heath and Douglas Spotted Eagle. DSE uses PC and Vegas with the Cineform Codec. Heath uses MAC. Apparently, there have been some issues with the Apple Intermediery Codec. I sure those problems will be corrected soon. I love PC's, I make my living with music and Video and I have everything I need within the PC platform. Saying that, I could be just as happy with MAC. If you have a close bud, that can show you the ropes on one particular NLE, that might make the choice easy. Experience is more important than platform.

Cheers,
Garius Hill
producer NYC

[Gary Harper]

Perhaps the question then might be, WHAT NLE/Platform Combo works the best for HDV? Is it Pentium/Cineform/Premier? MAC/FCP5? Dual Opteron/Avid? Dule Core whatever/whatever? Maybe this is the area that would give the most usable information. In my opinion, the most important thing to consider first is what fits best. The interface and workflow are like owning a comfortable pair of shoes, why suffer if the fit is not right!

[Adrian Vallarino]

I have Macs for personal and work use, and I have a kick ass PC for gaming.
Ive been using computers since I was 14 (23 years ago), I dont think there is a computer out there I havent used. In my opinion Macs are more reliable and a lot more easy and straight forward, you plug it or install it, and it works. And the way all applications interact and comunicate with each other is simple impresive and not available on the PC side.

And one big issue regarding PCs, if you are planing to go online with the computer housing your NLE, then get a Mac.
It dosnt matter how much you protect yourself, if you use your NLE PC to go online also someting WILL eventualy crawl into your system. And ofcourse all hell will brake loose just before that deadline.

[Steve Crisdale]

It all becomes rather moot once you realize that the 'guts' of PC's and Mac's are essentially identical - apart from the CPU and OS that is...

And even that situation is about to change sooner than Mac officiandos would like to admit, with the introduction of Intel Dual-core CPU'd Macintoshes in the not too distant future!!

The only difference will then be the OS!!

If some smart cookie was able to break the proprietry code on the CPU that'll prevent an Intel Mac from running Windows... we could have a machine that'd allow either OS to be used, with the choice of the best software from either platform.

My experience in the publishing industry may well have parallels to what's likely to occur in the Videographic industry.

For years Macs ruled the roost, as "the Professionals' computing platform of choice", and PCs were ridiculed and derided as the sort of substandard trash, that the weak minded and unsophisticated sub-intellectuals of human kind's lower classes dabbled with.

With little fanfare; and even less acknowledgement of it's occuring, almost every major publishing house/group/corporation is now firmly PC based, with their Macs only powered up for backward compatability with older files or those few external design sources who can't break free of the mental chains years of self indoctrination have left behind.

PC or Mac? Wouldn't it be better to ask what's the most cost effective and reliable means of dealing with HDV at this particular point.

Maybe once the Intel Macs are out, they'll add the PC based HDV solutions to the Mac platform... but I doubt that Macintosh's will ever (even with Intel CPUs) be cheaper or more cost effective than PCs.

[some comments removed Admin: no platform wars here, please. Thanks --CH]

[Boyd Ostroff]

Originally Posted by Steve Crisdale

If some smart cookie was able to break the proprietry code on the CPU that'll prevent an Intel Mac from running Windows

Actually Apple is on record as saying there will not be anything in the design of the Intel Macs which would prevent them from running Windows, however Apple does not intend to offer such software. When the Intel Macs were announced a spokesman conceded that a third party would probably introduce a product that would let the machines boot into Windows.

However Apple has repeatedly said that Intel CPU's from other vendors would NOT be able to boot into OSX. But many people think this will happen eventually due to the huge potential revenue stream. Michael Dell commented that he would be interested in selling machines with OSX pre-installed....

(Putting on my moderator hat) Guys, this discussion has been pretty informative so far but seems to be slowly headed in the direction of a platform war. Please try to keep the comments constructive so we don't end up locking the thread (which is how these threads usually end up unfortunately).

[Tim Dashwood]

Originally Posted by Steve Crisdale

If some smart cookie was able to break the proprietry code on the CPU that'll prevent an Intel Mac from running Windows... we could have a machine that'd allow either OS to be used, with the choice of the best software from either platform.

It's already been done.
http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/...9235916,00.htm