Comments

RBartlett wrote on 10/2/2006, 2:45 AM
My concern would hinge around the less virtualized aspects where a pseudo-hardware layer is inserted between the guest and the host hardware.
So firewire device access and preview could be painful in Parallel, by comparison.
YMMV
rmack350 wrote on 10/2/2006, 11:41 AM
It sounds like the difference between running Windows under Wine in Linux Vs using a boot manager to just choose windows at boot time.

All this stuff for apple to run Windows is kind of old technology in Linux. Generally, it's much more of a sure thing to use the boot loader to boot Windows. On the other hand, it's more convenient to run Windows apps from within the 'nix OS.

Rob Mack
Coursedesign wrote on 10/2/2006, 12:39 PM
Parallels Workstation is vastly more advanced than Wine, even to the point where in certain cases it can run some Windows apps faster than under Windows itself.

It is a very well behaved virtualization environment, including with I/O drivers.
Logan5 wrote on 10/2/2006, 1:17 PM
Parallels = no Direct X
dhill wrote on 10/2/2006, 2:32 PM
no direct x support? Hmm that's no good. I searched the FAQ questions on Parallel's site and didn't find that info.

So, I'm wondering if you are running Parallels if it slows down performance? Are two OS's are running at the same time? Not sure how that works. Obviously with bootcamp only only OS is running at a time.

Thanks for the replies as always!

Derek

Logan5 wrote on 10/2/2006, 3:01 PM
I've got the Parallels box and right on the side of the box reads:
"Does not support DirectX; may not be appropriate for 3D gaming"

its the latest version of parallels it just came in last week

edit
Try system requirements for info on directx in Parallels
OdieInAz wrote on 10/2/2006, 3:49 PM
I am running parallels on my macbook and V6 "just fine" The are a few issues. 1) Parallels only sees one processor, so I don't think I'm getting the full benefit of the core duo. 2) access to OSX drive is via "shared file" sort of utility that Paralles supplies. Not a real problem, except for external hard drives USB or Firewire) gets a little wonky. 3) the fan kicks in as Parallels seems to heat things up more.

So, I don't parallels is necessarily good for rendering - but then on the macbook, it value swtiching rapidly to OSX and XP.

On a MacMini with boot camp - it really screams with bootcamp/XP or OSX. Using MacDrive to access OSX hard drive space works fine - except for 1 thing: I havent' been able to get DVDA 3 to read the prepared vobs if I put them on the macdrive. So I just prepare to the NTFS drive. burns just fine after that. Must e some software issue ith MacDrive and DVDA.

If I were doing just one MAC, I'd pick bootcamp for the performance in rendering and live with rebooting all the time to switch. I don't do any gaming. Sometimes I pop up Paralles just because of some web site that is IE dependent. Maybe I should try FireFox
futura wrote on 11/5/2006, 5:55 PM
OdielnAz,

You mentioned at the start of your post that use Vegas 6 in Parallels - but then at the end state you do most editing under BootCamp.

Have you tried running Vegas 6 within Parallels - how does it perform for overall editing? I understand the single-proc issue, which is a bummer. I was sort of thinking of this option for myself but I would probably rely on network rendering on an existing dual-proc XP box that I could send my tasks to.

I am primarily interested in how well Vegas 6 performs under Parallels as I'd like to avoid the Bootcamp partitions and wasting space on multiple XP installs.

You mentioned shared drives for an external gets a bit wonky - is that performance, or some type of a configuration thing? Based on your experience, if I had a Firewire 800 drive, shared to Parallels - do you think it would perform well enough to work with Vegas 6 under Parallels?

Thanks a lot,
Aaron
OdieInAz wrote on 11/6/2006, 1:49 PM
Wonky -yes. Might be operator malfunction.

Firewire won't work at all with parallels - I don't think they support it yet. I haven't tried to capture in Vegas 6.0d inside of parallels, but I can't see how it would work.

You can connect a USB hard drive formatted NTFS - if you hot plug it in after you start the Windows session. If you plug it in before, OSX complains and gives you the option of Ignore or Initialize - something to do with NTFS I believe.

I tried using an OSX formatted drive on the UBS - and that worked fine for OSX. However, parallels doesn't seem to know that usb dirve is there in this case. Doesn't show up when using windows explorer. Maybe I'm doing somethign wrong.

the explorer pane in Vegas 6.0 doesn't like the parallels shared folder. If you try to explore through that, then Vegas will crash every time. I just use Windows explorer and drag the file to the timeline.

Once I finally get things running, editing seems reasonable - to me. You should download the 30 day trial and see what works for you. Playback window is a little choppy, but that is probably the USB interface. I'm not sure if it is really runnign UBS 2.0 or not, as Windows XP complains about runing USB 1.1, but that might be a software bug.

Rendering is definitely at a disadvantage under parallels.

My thought? i only do light duty stuff under parallels and V6. No firewire captures. If this is to be intense editing, I think I'd go with boot camp. You don't need to waste a lot of disk space, just something like 10 GByte to be safe. Nice to have some spare GByte for DVDA to put the burn image.

For everything else, use MacDrive6 / BootCamp / WinXP. This way you never really loose many GBytes as MacDrive has all the MAC drive space at it's disposal. OSX will see those files too.