I am a videographer/video editor who is interested in purchasing a computer to edit photos, music, and video of professional quality at home.
Here at the TV station I work at the common opinion seems to be, “If you want to do high-level graphics/sound work you GOTTA get a Mac (instead of a PC).”
Yet, the workstations we use here for our Avid Media Composers are Windows 2000 Professional-- NOT Mac. They seem to work just fine, and we get the product on the air every day with no problem.
I’ve been hearing this “Mac is way ahead of PC for pro graphics applications” for years. Yet I can’t imagine the engineers over at Microsoft are complete idiots who have not tried their darndest to make their OS work as well with Avid, Pro Tools, PhotoShop etc, as Mac does. Plus, PC’s seem to be cheaper.
I know a little about both systems since I have edited on both-- I find the Windows interface easier to use.
Might I be sorry later if I bought a high-powered Windows-based system (rather than PowerMac) to do my broadcast quality editing at home?
The engineers ar Microsoft aren’t complete idiots (just mostly idiots ), but they can’t get a Windows computer to have performance-parity to a high-end Mac. That’s because Microsoft doesn’t make the hardware, so they have no control over what video cards/motherboards/etc. your PC will be using – the best they can do is write some software and hope your PC’s setup can support it.
For print work (Photoshop, etc.), the disparity is even greater; the Mac OS has comprehensive color-correction (ColorSync) built into the system, to ensure that the colors on your monitor and from your scanner and from your printer all match. There is nothing close to ColorSync in the Windows world, and most printing firms have stories of someone whose $50,000 print run was blotched because the client used Windows, and the colors they thought they were going to get didn’t match what their files said to use. Many places won’t even accept jobs from non-Mac users, to avoid the hassles and costs.
Finally, Avid has been losing ground in the video-editing realm the last few years to Apple. A good Avid workstation will cost anywhere from $50,000-$80,000, and 95% of that functionality can be duplicated with a $5,000 high-end PowerMac running Final Cut Pro. Apple’s recent acquisitions of several high-end graphics firms has only spooked Avid further; expect some big announcements from Apple in the next year or so along these lines.
Bottom line: when someone tells you “you can do graphics work just fine on Windows,” make sure their credentials go beyond using Paint Shop Pro to dink up some graphics for their web site.
Another question you should ask yourself is who you’re going to want to swap files with. Are you going to be sharing your stuff via the PCs you have at work? Are you going to be sending out work to printers (who’d probably prefer a Mac)? You say you’re going to do broadcast-quality editing. Will you be sending your stuff out to stations? Do they tend to use PCs or Macs?
rjung-- i suspected that color correction might be a roblem with print applications… and that definately gives me pause.
also-- Avid was originally made to run on Macs – it’s only within the past few years that Avid has made PC based software. Having used both Avid and FinalCut Pro I can tell you that Avid is a superior editing program ( i’m speaking of Composer and NewsCutter – NOT Xpress, hich is comparable in quality to FinalCut Pro) Final Cut can not handle most of the 3D applications nor realtime effects as well as Composer and NewsCutter. But choosing Avid does not mean choosing PC because it is available on PC and Mac.
ratatoskK-- my editing would be output to digital tape so whether the TV stations use PC or Mac doesn’t matter.
however, the advice you guys have offered-- along with other advice I’ve received makes me really lean towards Mac.
I’m not a pro-level video editor (I’m strictly a very happy amateur), but the few times I’ve run across Avid vs. FCP discussions, there’s almost invariably a number of folks who talk about tossing their expensive Avid setups and going for FCP instead.
The word is that Avid had been planning to phase out their Mac development and go exclusively with Windows (presumably because they make more money with the Windows packages), but their plans to tell Mac customers to toss out their hardware and buy new Windows PCs got derailed by the growth of FCP’s popularity. Avid is now remaining committed to the Mac because doing otherwise would be tantamount to suicide.
And IIRC, I believe Final Cut Pro 3 supports real-time effects entirely in software.
I’m not familiar with the Mac CMS. I know ColorSync have been built-in for a long time so you’d expect it to be fairly advanced by now. There wasn’t even a built-in CMS in Windows until Windows 95, and that (ICM version 1) wasn’t very good. But is the current Windows CMS really that inferior, and if so, how?
CMS in Windows is better now, largely because they finally adapted the ICC color management model, but its support in Windows is inconsistent and spotty. Finding color profiles for Windows peripherals is still a bit of a crapshoot, Windows’ gamma settings for monitors are still too dark, and many graphics/scanning/imaging programs don’t create color profiles for the images they use. You’re okay if you stick with a few big-name peripherals and software titles (Photoshop is always a safe bet), but if and when you want to move beyond, it’s finger-crossing time.
), but they can’t get a Windows computer to have performance-parity to a high-end Mac. That’s because Microsoft doesn’t make the hardware, so they have no control over what video cards/motherboards/etc. your PC will be using – the best they can do is write some software and hope your PC’s setup can support it.