Are MACS still king of video and audio?

[supatrupa]

I know years ago that MACS were much better at video and audio creating/editing.

Is that still true today? I have a Pentium 1.9 ghz and it still takes the thing f-o-r-e-v-e-r to compile mpegs and mpeg-2s.

I do 3 stooge shorts 20 min. and the software TMPGE takes about 25 min. to compile from .avi to .mpg.

[Tolly]

this is a good question, that i have heard many opinions of. well i think pc's are pulling up becase of all the support they receive and they are just straight up more popluar. my dad is a graphic artist, and his company will only work on macs, so i think they are still ahead in the graphics world. im not sure if theyre ahead in video and audio, but in my opinion they are! but i believe they would definitely be if apple had as many people as microsoft does working on their side. its hard to compare them though, some computers are better procedures. it all depends on what u wanna do. but i choose a mac, and i believe that macs still do everything better than a plain old boring pc.

[lattedfw]

You're opening a can of worms asking that kind of question. I have several PC's and an iMac DV and do amateur video stuff with both. I'll offer my opinion.

From a general ease-of-use perspective, I think Windows 2000/XP vs. OS X are about the same; I think it's apples and oranges (pun intended). Both flavors of OS, to me, are about as easy to configure and use. In my experience, both are relatively stable, modern and robust OS's. I think OS X has a more polished look to it. I think if Apple made an OS X for PC, it could seriously challenge Windows.

For multimedia and video, its seems that Apple starts the trend (Firewire, DVD-writable), captures a lot of the professional market, then the consumer-oriented products are introduced for PC and Mac. I think iMovie for Mac is outstanding for the casual home user. I haven't used any professional-level video software on the Mac, but I would assume it has the same learning curve and complexity as the equivalent program on a PC.

As for speed of encoding, that's hardware dependent. The G4 processor Macs have a velocity engine that apparently can encode MPEG2 in 2x time (might have that figure wrong). I only have a G3 in my iMac. I know my Pentium-4 1.7GHz PC is faster than my iMac. I'm sure a dual-processor G4 is faster at MPEG2 compression than my P4.

Regarding encoding time-- I use TMPGEnc to encode video to MPEG2. My P4 1.7GHz takes about 56 hours to encode 2 hours of video using 2-pass VBR with 'highest quality.'

[stormcrow]

As a member of the production industry working in studios and doing all the same things on my own. this is my *untechnical* opinion (my technical opinion would be a bit more lengthy as well as slightly different in outcome).

Basically, Apple is still king of the Graphics/Art world. And there used to be a very obvious reason, as there was no real competition for them. But now, pc's technology, software, support, and third-party developers greatly outweigh what Apple can scrounge together. All of the studios I work in use Apple Systems, for Graphics, Editing, and Recording (Except one TV Studio running Win2000). I can't tell you how many times in the middle of projects I've cursed the name of Apple in those studios! Granted, I have a far larger understanding of the pc world, but there are some things that shouldn't happen in the middle of a project.

Anyway, the reason the industry is still using Apple is because they have been, and its much easier to deal with a company that you've been working with for years than to switch-especially when you've been calling those companies all the time for tech support and know them so well!

The thing is now though, everything you can do on an Apple system, you can do on a pc. And yes, their architecture and hardware might do some things better than a compartive pc system, but the difference is, this relationship doesn't work both ways. There are getting to be a lot of things you can do on a pc that are just *hard* to do on an Apple, due to lack of software, or just lack of Apple users at great sites like this to help people out. Yes, all the same things are possible, but when one system has one or two ways of doing something and another has ten, I'd tend to say the second is at an advantage.

But that's my biased, untechnical opinion, like I said.

Plus, I really hate the Apple "Switch" campaigns, which try to make it look like every cool/artsy person in the world uses an Apple--Penny Arcade on Macs