PC or Mac

[Carl Walters]

I have been using a PC for the past couple of years with Pinnacle studio. I got sick and tired of all the crashes and lost work, and now our turnover of wedding videos has increased dramatically I needed something which was going to be reliable and quicker. I opted for Adobe PPro with the matrox RTX100 card with a dedicated new system built up and a steep learning curve but after only a couple of jobs the system has been letting me down again. The number of hours I am losing because either the system wont capture correctly or when it does i then lose work or have to open new projects to keep working on the old one. Dedicated Support forums don't help much other than "try re-installing etc". Why should I? I have built a system up using their recommendations, spent a fair few quid and still the system is unstable. A friend of mine uses the Mac for music editing and keeps suggesting I get a Mac for video. I am prepared to spend more money on a new Mac with Final CUt Pro, if i can be sure of getting a stable system. Any suggestions? Any one made the swap who is editing on a pro basis. I don't want to spend 3-4 grand on another system that is going to let me down in a similar way.

[Rob Lohman]

Disclaimer: the following is purely PERSONAL opinion and not a
gathering of facts

But, I feel that Premiere has to be one of the most unstable NLE
platforms I've seen, ever. Especially in the old 5.x/6.x range, but
even in the Pro range now. It is the MAIN reason I switched to
something else. So in my mind sticking to that in combination with
a Matrox RTX100 card wasn't such a good choice to begin with.
But again, that is personal.

My first question to you: what operating system are you running
this all on and on what (kind of) hardware? I'm assuming XP
since you are running PPro. For example: Mac's are all built alike
and to high standards. A lot of PC's are homebuilt or bought as
cheaply as possible with lesser quality components often in those
cases.

Mac might be better suited for you, but ask yourself the following
questions first:

1) are you really prepared to spend the money to get one, get FCP HD, get any other things you may need etc.

2) is everything you do on your PC available on the Mac as well in one form or another (might be less relevant if you also keep the PC)

Personally I just switched to Sony Vegas and never looked back.
I can't afford to switch computer platforms due to my investments
and job. Since switching I've only had 1 problem with Vegas and
never any other. It has worked brilliantly. I do suggest you
check out the demo before making a decision on switching.
Keep in mind that your Maxtor card is worthless with Vegas, but
it would be with a new Mac as well I presume.

Also there have been numerous discussions on this very topic
before. Extensive ones even. Please please review them before
we get into another thread on the matter:

PC or MAC 1
MAC vs. PC laptops
PC or MAC 2
NLE on MAC vs. PC
PC or MAC 3
PC or MAC 4
PC or MAC 5

p.s. to anyone: please do net get into platform wars. Thank you.

[Carl Walters]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the reply. Regarding what system, It is a homebuilt, but used only for video editing and built to the recommendations of Matrox. Pentium 4 3ghz, 1 gb ram, Msoft XP pro sp1, 40Gb boot disk, 120Gb A/V disk, 80Gb export disk. Asus P4C800 motherboard, Radeon 9600 pro card, matrox rtx100 card. All the software (adobe, windows etc) is genuine, (no copies), all the drivers are latest available.
I was interested re your comments about vegas. What sort of speed can you edit at, for instance as with ppro woithout the matrox card, it's quite slow and all the transitions have to be rendered before you can view them in realtime. Does vegas work this way. I don't want to download vegas yet onto my main machine, as i'm half way through a project, and my laptop which I use for internet use would not be suitable for editing anyway. My main concerns are stability and speed. I am now shooting at least one wedding a week and I need to be able to reliably load in the footage, edit and export to DVD within that time. I appreciate the mac is a lot more money, but if i'm getting problems as is, then the cost is not an issue, time is.

[Rob Lohman]

It sounds like you are thinking thoroughly about this and are
clearly looking at your options. That's good!!

Well I would say install Vegas on your laptop and see what it
does there. Vegas 4 (we are now at 5 which seems to be a bit
slower) did realtime transitions on my DELL Pentium 2 900 mhz
laptop last year.

It screams on my current systems. It is very fast and stable. It
can playback HD in realtime on a good enough CPU. I've never
not seen it do transitions etc. not realtime. Ofcourse, the more
filters and effects you add the slower it will get.

It also depends on the size of your preview screen or whether
you output that over firewire to a monitor (slower due to the
need for realtime DV encoding).

Sounds like a good plan to not install anything on your most
important machine while you are in the middle of work! What
kind of laptop do you have? It will probably run Vegas perfectly.

[Carl Walters]

"It also depends on the size of your preview screen or whether
you output that over firewire to a monitor (slower due to the
need for realtime DV encoding)."

At the moment I use a portable tv set as my main preview monitor which gets it's feed from the matrox break out box. The actual software is viewed on the PC screen, I can use two screens but found the system kept crashing when I connected the second screen, again the dedicated support was the usual, try reloading etc. Will I have to change to a different monitor with Vegas?

The laptop I am using is a Compaq Evo N115, AMD athlon 4 1600+ 1.4ghz, 256mb ram. How would I capture the video into the laptop as i don't have a PCMCA adapter card? If Vegas would run on the laptop that would be a bonus as I would not be stuck to the studio.

PS thanks for the swift replies.

[Glenn Chan]

In my experience Vegas crashes about as much as the Final Cut systems I've seen. (Maybe once every 10 hours or something)

It is kind of close enough to rock solid.

If vegas works, it definitely makes sense to get it instead of a Mac / Final Cut.

The laptop I am using is a Compaq Evo N115, AMD athlon 4 1600+ 1.4ghz, 256mb ram. How would I capture the video into the laptop as i don't have a PCMCA adapter card? If Vegas would run on the laptop that would be a bonus as I would not be stuck to the studio.

Vegas should run pretty well on that system, about half the speed of a Pentium 3.2ghz (laptop). You can get decent previews going if you preview at half-size (which if you dont have enough screen space you will probably have to). I think you have enough RAM too (vegas doesn't need a lot).

An alternative is to preview video out through firewire. THis will give you more screen space but may slow down your previews a little.

To capture video, you should try to use firewire. You could also capture on Premiere and send video over through a network (there may be disadvantages to this, such as the footage may be hard to recapture).

More screen space would be great though.

2- There's also Edition and Avid, which I have little experience with. With Vegas you are unlikely to run into configuration problems.

[Rob Lohman]

Carl: you will need firewire to capture on your laptop. Most
laptops seem to have. Yours might not and if you don't have
any PCMCIA it will not work for you.

BUT, it might work as a mobile edit station though. Capture on
another system to either the local harddisk or an external
harddisk. Then move this harddisk to your laptop or connect it
over a network and copy the files. Then you can edit etc.

I'm doing all my work on my laptop which is DELL laptop with
firewire and all sort of nice goodies on it.

[Dylan Couper]

Vegas 4 (or 5) will make you so happy you'll cry.
I've probably spent hundreds of hours in front of Vegas in the last year, with only ONE (technically, possibly two) crashes. In a year.

The other thing may be your homebuilt system. Not sure the level of your building skills, and I'm not knocking them, but your may also find that a pro-built PC might solve lots of your issues. Doesn't have to be custom built for editing either.

[Carl Walters]

Thanks again for the replies. Regarding the homebuilding Dylan,(and no offence taken), I have built quite a few systems in the past, and because this one was being used for pro use I had the help of a good friend who is a computer engineer/software developer. He oversaw the build up from taking it out of the box to installing the software. I've not had much call to use the PCMCA socket on the laptop so don't know that much about it. Can I get a PCMCA card with a firewire input as this laptop does not have a firewire socket? if not then I think the only way to transfer footage would be using the network.

[Rob Lohman]

It is pcmcIa by the way, notice the extra I. Or PCMCIA in proper
caps. Yes, there are firewire adapters for PCMCIA.

[Carl Walters]

I've downloaded the vegas 5 trial and ordered a PCMCIA firewire adapter card. I'll let you know how I get on.
Thanks for all the replies...appreciated. Carl

[Darrell Hinton]

Carl, I also used to be a purely PC man. Although, when I got my DVX100 (last year) I decided to make the leap into the MAC world so I could take advantage of FCP4's ability to edit 24fps. I admit that I was a little apprehensive in making the change, but I have absolutely loved my MAC since the day that I got it and have decided to never purchase another PC (I have had many problems with PC). I have had no problems with my MAC so far, though thats not to say I will not have problems in the future since my MAC is only a year old. I also have had no problems with FCP crashing or anything like that. I just thought that I would give you my input, good luck.

[Eric Stemen]

I love my pc, internet explorer and music match crash on me sometimes, but i've only had premire pro crash on me one time, and since then i just set the auto save on it to every 5 mins so even if it does crash it's not a big deal.
I'd say just make sure you get high quality parts if you build a pc.

My last pc (store bought) was a nightmare, it would throw me out of games every 15 mins or so, possibly due to a weak powersupply(200 watts)

asus 879n8x-e motherboard
512 mb ddr3200 corsair xms series ram matched dual channel
2500+ amd mobile overclocked to 3200+
Some really nice heat sink + artic silver 5
ati 9800 pro graphics card + heat sink on ram, better heatsink on procesor and artic silver 5
120gig hitachi hd 7200 rpm 8mb cache
aopen dvd burner
liteon cd burner
generic firewire
generic flopy
case with amd certified 400 watt powersupply

[Carl Walters]

Just to let you know, I have decided at the moment to stick with the PC. I have ordered the upgrade to PPro 1.5, hopefully that will address the majority of problems I was having with ppro. It is also the cheapest option at £81.00. I have the trial version of Vegas and will see how that performs aon the laptop.. As I have said earlier in the post, I have built up quite a high spec system and do know my way around ppro fairly well, it would only entail spending more time learning a new system if I change. If this one doesn't satisfy then I will be reviewing the other systems again.
Thanks to everyone for their input.