Vegas and Mac

hallewoode wrote on 2/19/2009, 9:39 AM

So, I'm going to be switching to Mac. FCP will have to be my editor of choice, because I'd rather that than Premiere. I don't want to leave my Vegas, but I'm seriously done with Windows. (Please, no debate, I'm not interesting in a pissing contest between OS's.)

I've heard that Sony and Apple don't like each other (don't know if that's true or not), but I love Vegas. I LOVE it. But I can't just stick around on what I've come to understand is a faulty operating system for it. I'm done having to reformat my computer, customize the crap out of everything, then get an error message because something was turned off that shouldn't have been, etc.

I just want a clean OS. So, I'm leaving when money allows.

But, I think Vegas is much more intuitive in its approach than any of the other editors. I enjoy the process when I'm in Vegas. Can't say the same for the others -- it's a chore, a task.

And while I'm at it, I am even more infatuated with Acid Pro 7, not for its looping (I hardly use loops except for quick stuff), but rather, for its MIDI mixing. Import a Human Playback-programmed MIDI file from Finale, plug in the Garritan Personal Orchestra, and I can tighten a score down to the frame, easily.

Both of these programs I'm going to have to substitute with others.

But I'd rather not.

I'm not going to run Windows on Mac, it's about the OS, that's the issue for me.

Sony, what is it going to take to get you hooked up with Apple? You'd look fantastic on a Mac.

Know that, the moment you and Apple work out whatever you have to work out, I'm here. Vegas is my editor, and Acid is my music box. They'll always be my tools of choice, if I can have 'em.

Think about it. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

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Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 3/4/2009, 8:29 AM

They say the new Mac Pros are twice as fast as last year's version.

I have a 2008 Mac Pro and found it to be extremely well designed internally. Especially the way hard drives are added and PCIe cards are handled, I just love it. And the silence... 32GB ECC RAM is a nice capacity to have also (for an 8-core machine, as with fewer cores it's not likely that this could used to full advantage).

It is significantly better built than my otherwise great HP xw8600 Windows workstation (which I spec'ed with a custom HP version of XP that has many features from Vista, without the hassle).

I swapped out last year's 320GB system drive for a very fast 3-platter 640GB WB drive, looks like this is the new standard also.

Now if only someone could develop a Windows version of SuperDuper!, a $25 disk cloning and backup program for OS X that is my favorite system utility of all time.... I'd pay $100 for a Windows version, easily.

there are some pretty good places and probably best machines you can buy with choices of Vista or XP

I didn't say you couldn't buy Win XP. I said it is considered by Microsoft to be obsolete and is getting only limited support as a legacy product.

a lot of upper 3D apps don't run at all [on OS X]

Drat, I wasn't aware that the most "upper" of all 3D apps, Maya, was no longer supported on OS X.

Could you please contact Autodesk to request they update their web page on supported platforms for Maya? They must have just dropped their OS X support, surprising since they say they support the last three versions of Maya on OS X.

Vegas does not need pro-tools

Many customers do, and then you have to decline the job.

And high-end work may require capabilities in Pro Tools (or equivalent) that are not in Vegas. This has been discussed here before.

Coursedesign wrote on 3/4/2009, 9:46 AM

Everything from Adobe to ( insert whatever you please ) runs worse on OSX than on XP.

From 9 months ago on this forum:

Today, it seems AE CS3 is doing significantly better on the Mac Pro than on PC workstations. One real-life test I saw recently rendered the same heavy-duty clip in 6 minutes on his PC workstation and 84 seconds on his supposedly comparable Mac Pro. One component of the difference is likely to be the Mac Pro's 1600 MHz FSB. Also its memory bus has top performance, but I'm not up to speed on comparing it with top PC work stations.

newhope wrote on 3/4/2009, 3:24 PM

Vegas does not need pro-tools

You're quite correct! If everything I did was generated in Vegas, besides it's cluncky AVCHD performance but lets ignore that for the moment, I wouldn't need to use other audio applications like ProTools.

However, I work in the professional broadcast arena where Vegas isn't generally used and doesn't have all the options needed to deal with material generated by other NLE's. It's also typical of professional production processes that audio isn't completed in the video editing suite, except for news and current affairs. So being able to take your project's sound to another facility, or receive your raw sound edit from another application, like AVID or FCP is absolutely necessary.

Vegas tends to fail these basic functions with poor AAF implementation. Just try importing an AAF, created in a stereo project, into a 5.1 project in Vegas. I haven't tried this since Vegas 7, but when I did it reset my project 5.1 to stereo. Fairly heart stopping as I was only importing some ADR into a final mix, thank god for UNDO. In the end I had to output BWF files using ProTools, oh yeah that's something else Vegas can't do, and import the BWFs into Vegas... well at least it can import BWF.

deusx you seem to take offense at us pointing out where Vegas needs to be improved.

As I said, if Vegas did some of these things a whole lot more people would use it in the professional arena. Hell, I won a professional sound guild award for a 5.1 project I mixed in Vegas, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002975/Death's Requiem[/link] so I hardly hate the application. I just know where to use it, where it works best and, unfortunately for me, some of those areas have been slipping behind to other applications that can do them better... AVCHD being the most pressing for my personal production process at the moment.

As for the O/S wars.... I rarely run into problems using OSX on my MacPro but running Windows XP on it and my other PCs (yes I have both Mac and PCs) my experience is less than stable. I even have to replace the MSDV.sys files because I run a Sony DSR-30P VCR and the later XP SP2/3 DV and 1394 drivers won't talk to it unless I replace the SP2 drivers with the originals from the first release of XP.

On OSX however I have had no problems with the deck through all the releases of OSX 10.3, 10.4 and now 10.5.x. You can look up the problem on the Microsoft Support site, of course they blame the problem on the Sony 1394 implementation on the DSR-30P not being fully compliant with the current standard. It probably isn't but Apple seem to have managed to write drivers that work regardless. Microsoft's attitude is that it's someone else's problem and they aren't going to fix it.

Sony, of course, won't fix it because it would require hardware and firmware changes to DSR30P... now it's all a moot point as the DSR30P is old technology but all this happened when it was still in production.

Like I said, I choose and use the best program and platform i have for the process be it Mac or Windows. I'm not pedantic about it nor am I O/S centric.

New Hope Media

michaelshive wrote on 3/4/2009, 4:50 PM

If you love Acid but are moving away from PC give Ableton Live a chance. I love Acid but since we're Mac-only now I've been using Live quite a bit and really like it. It does pretty much everything Acid does - just differently.

Coursedesign wrote on 3/4/2009, 5:00 PM

And if you have a firewire interface such as the M-Audio FW410, etc., it probably came with an older version of Ableton Live that can be updated to the latest and the greatest for far less than full price.

deusx wrote on 3/5/2009, 9:40 AM

>>>They say the new Mac Pros are twice as fast as last year's version.<<<

And those Motorola chips were 5 times faster than any intel chips of that time. If papa Steve says so, must be true.

>>>Like I said, I choose and use the best program and platform i have for the process be it Mac or Windows.<<<<

Same here. Windows runs fine, does not crash, all apps run on windows, all hardware runs fine ( I've never experienced any firewire problems with XP, and I get latencies of 2ms in Vegas with any number of tracks that I use, even on a laptop.

newhope wrote on 3/5/2009, 11:56 PM

Same here. Windows runs fine, does not crash, all apps run on windows, all hardware runs fine ( I've never experienced any firewire problems with XP, and I get latencies of 2ms in Vegas with any number of tracks that I use, even on a laptop.

Great, I'm not advocating that you change... my attitude is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'm just relating my experience both with PCs/Windows and Macs/OSX and Windows along with Vegas, DVDA, FCP, Motion, Color, DVDStudio and ProTools LE and HD, working in mixed platform environments and collaborating in broadcast and film production/post production with other professional users.

While I was just producing my own corporate productions on SD DV Vegas did just about everything. I separated that work from my broadcast and film work which tended to be in other facilities where AVID, FCP and ProTools are the norm.

These days the distinctions for me have blurred. I'm producing video content in HD for broadcast and corporate in my own studio, sound designing and mixing for broadcast and film as well and collaborating on projects that come from a variety of sources, platforms and operating systems.

It would be great if Vegas allowed me to do all that, unfortunately it doesn't, not that it couldn't but SCS hasn't supplied all the requirements to allow it to effectively import and export from other applications.

As to whether the new Macs are faster in the end what does it matter?

PCs and Macs these days are running the same Intel processors (unless you are using AMD) and the Mac Pros are server level Zeons but you can buy them in HP and Dell PCs as well. The new i7 CPUs will be fast in any computer but next year there will always be something faster if you want to pay the dollars.

Besides if you really want to dis FCP all you need to say is that it is still a 32 bit application running in a 64 bit (OSX 10.5.x Leopard) operating system. Guess I'll have to wait until Final Cut Pro 7(or Final Cut Studio 3) arrives before it jumps to 64 bit native. If that is what Apple have planned that is.

New Hope Media

Coursedesign wrote on 3/6/2009, 6:44 AM

Well put.

The performance improvements in the 2009 Mac Pro workstations are from Intel's new Nehalem architecture that includes faster memory transfers, faster bus speeds, and much faster coordination between multiple cores (they took a page from AMD).