I'd bet it's never going to happen ( Vegas on Mac platforms ), and I don't mind that.

You and I would have to pay for the development of the software to increase it's reach to a small percentage of computer users, when Mac's run windows fine and people can add Vegas to their arsenal no matter if their using Apple PC's or one of many windows native PC's.

No-one has even mentioned hackintosh solutions in here that I saw btw.

Really though, who gives a rats rear end what someone uses? No-one says Michelangelo wasn't an artist because he used the wrong chisel. I've never heard anyone scoff at the Sistine Chapel saying, "heh, ya, but he did that with ____ paint brushes, that's not real art".

People don't care how you make something, they care what you make, they say, wow look at that beautiful creation.

Anyway - that's my .02
Dave

The PC and the Mac both are perfectly valid and useful computing devices. Like I said earlier, it's all about getting work done and you choose the software that performs the work you need to do and then buy the computer that runs that software.

As far as being able to easily swap drives, I have some inexpensive drive bays from Addonics that allows me to simply insert a bare SATA drive into the front of my computer. Doesn't really get much more simple than that.

Regardless, it's all about the software, not the hardware.

I have more than half a dozen plug-in drive bays in various machines here, I was just reflecting on the speed and convenience of swapping out any of the four internal hard drives in the Mac Pro.

I just noted that HP's new Z800 workstations offer cable-less connections for its drives also, this is progress.

I also like the quietness that comes from having a chassis made of 1/8" solid aluminum, rather than the boing-boing sheet metal in even the better PC boxes I've seen. Perhaps BOXX has this, I don't remember.

Apple is definitely not a believer in Blu-Ray, they think it is a dead end with the current BR consortium politics.

I've been agnostic, but I'm beginning to think BR will be just a fond memory if the consortium doesn't make the format affordable for independent videographers, offering full functionality without outrageous fees.

The primitive BD-R disks that can be made today don't provide serious competition for DVDs, in upscaling DVD players especially (that have sold for as little as $19.95 on sale).

Remember that HD-originated footage is likely to look better than SD-originated ditto on an SD DVD disk, especially with 4:2:0 staying 4:2:0, instead of NTSC 4:1:1 being cut to 4:1:0 (a tiny 12.5% of the color information left to look at).

"Apple is definitely not a believer in Blu-Ray, they think it is a dead end with the current BR consortium politics."
No. They just made the fatal mistake of backing the wrong horse and are now finding hard to swallow the pride and backtrack.




"The primitive BD-R disks that can be made today don't provide serious competition for DVDs, in upscaling DVD players especially"
Sounds to me like a typical Mac user's excuse.
I know through personal experience that the Blu Rays I both purchase and EASILY create with my PC.... say otherwise.

"No. They just made the fatal mistake of backing the wrong horse and are now finding hard to swallow the pride and backtrack."

What horse, they backed neither of the players in the HD 'war'.
They like M$ knew both horses were going to be scratched.


Bob.

"What horse, they backed neither of the players in the HD 'war'.

They WERE bending the HD DVD direction. Read the archives.
They were (and still are I believe) members of the BDA as well as of the dvd forum (basically HD DVD) They sat on the fence for quite a while keeping a low profile and it LOOKED at one point that they were in fact going to go Blu Ray.... but then quietly started gearing up to be able to produce 3x DVD (HD DVD on dvd media). Apple users were at one point (and still are i think) capable of producing 3x dvd.

Both horses BTW have NOT been scratched. We know HD DVD is gone but BD still remains to be seen. It's doing well (or bad) depending on who's numbers you believe.

Apple has always excelled at industrial design, but does it make my video look any better? Are people sitting at home saying, "Wow, that was a great program, it must have been made on one outrageously pretty computer."

"Apple has always excelled at industrial design"

I will give Apple that much. They seem to be intensely concerned about making 'pretty' things.

"Apple has always excelled at industrial design, but does it make my video look any better?"

I'd dispute the idea that they've excelled at industrial design but that's another debate.

As to the question, yes. They do know how to make what's produced by their boxes and software look better. Just look at a DVD that anyone can pretty easily make from one of their latest boxes and the software that comes with it. This isn't a trivial issue. Smick looking DVD menus set the scene for what follows and this is a relevant issue for DVDA.

Just yesterday a fellow Vegas user commented on this, along the lines of "not everyone does wedding videos". Of course one can build their own but the out of the box experience is important.

Bob.

"I'd dispute the idea that they've excelled at industrial design but that's another debate."

My point was that they make some good looking computers. They do not necessarily excel at functional industrial design. For example, what were they thinking when they didn't put user replaceable batteries in their iPods and iPhones? Why did they hang on to the concept of a single-button mouse for so long? They also don't seem to give much value to backwards-compatibility. "Oh, you want to run our latest OS on your two-year-old computer. Uh, sorry."

John Cline: "Hmmmm... I've never known NTFS to be the cause of any disk I/O slowdowns. You do realize that Firewire 800 is limited to about 100 MB/sec? Your 10k RAID0 array is being choked by the FW800 interface and NTFS has nothing to do with it. Some of my machines have a two-drive RAID0 set up using plain old 7200rpm Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB SATA drives and I can play uncompressed HD all day long."

I actually do not reach the bandwith limits of a FW800 attachment. The slowdown is from the FS itself (MFT traversal, chunks access on two 500G plates). This is by design and there is little one can do against this. I too can play HD even with the internal HD which is a 7k2 SATA. That's ok. But when it comes to deal with large files on large volumes the not so good streaming I/O performance of NTFS appears.

There is an interesting paper (http://www.letterp.com/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf) by Dominic Giampaolo. It's not comprehensive and the obscurity about NTFS internal design does'nt help. Anyway, the numbers reveal some problems. Given the bench was made with small files on small volumes, one can imagine the impact when playing with 1T disks hosting large HDV. One interesting outcome of those tests is that NTFS is more CPU consuming than the others. So, when working, considering the inevitable context switching between userland and kernel, the CPU overhead and page faults will decrease performance significantly. I'd love te be able to run seven with a native XFS subsystem. The guys at SGI did the job right and the industry wasn't wrong using the famous O² workstations. XFS is a robust successor of Berkeley FFS.


Terje: "And so is HFS. Hopefully they will both be updated soon. If only the PC makers had gone with SCSI back then. Even in serial form ATA is an appalling way to connect a hard drive to anything."

I am not sure HFS is derived from the original FFS aka UFS. I never wrote that HFS (+ or not +) rocks. The idea I have is that OSX kernel being a direct descendant of FreeBSD 3 it should be easy to add (for example) XFS support. I am not a fan of Apple but everyone has to admit that NTFS is the unique modern filesystem implementation that requires regular defragmentation to keep its performance level. This is bad, really bad. Even the first release of FFS back in the beginning of the 80's shows around 0,7% average fragmentation after months of intensive use. There are also design flaws like the famous copy/move "feature".


From my own experience, even based on "feeling", after more than 20 years in the IT industry, NTFS is a FS with interesting features but it's design is somewhat flawed. Don't ask me were and how, the design is top secret. All we have are benchmarks and day to day frustration.

The earlier plastic iMacs were abominably ugly imho, and the single-button mouse should get some kind of award for worst idea of all time (at least they relented a few years ago).

I'm actually in agreement with Apple on the concept of batteries that can't be replaced in daily use, just my humble opinion of course. It makes for a sleeker phone or greater battery capacity.

Should it ever be necessary to replace the battery (most likely some time after its obsolescence), this can be done by a number of qualified outfits for very little money, just like with the iPods.

And I was happy to get a new OS (3.0) gratis for my one-year-old computer (aka iPhone 3G), and I think those with the original two-year-old iPhone computer (also running the BSD Unix-derived OS X) got the upgrade for free also.

For desktops, OS X through the current 10.5 Leopard is Universal Binary compatible with ye olde PowerPC architecture as well as Intel. The last PowerPC computers were manufactured what, four years ago?

Please keep in mind that there are a lot of people who wish Microsoft hadn't been so insistent on compatibility with ancient PCs... Windows could have been a lot better without that ridiculous compatibility stretch, and at what cost would that have been in practice? Compared to the benefits?

How is it that this type of religious platform discussion doesn't happen with cars anymore?

Decades ago, there was the old "Chevy vs. Ford" thinking going on, and Harleys had license plate frames that said, "I'd rather eat a can of worms than ride a Japanese motorcycle."

Today it seems most people accept that there are different preferences and different needs when it comes to motorized vehicles.

I hope that this level of tolerance will reach also the world of computers.

"Please keep in mind that there are a lot of people who wish Microsoft hadn't been so insistent on compatibility with ancient PCs... "

I'm one of them however it's not just the ability to run on old hardware it's the ability to run old code. Not an issue for me but it seems to be a huge issue in the corporate worlds and that's where M$ makes their money.

My objection to Apple's industrial design is not limited to just Apple. There's been plenty of units from Dell, HP and IBM that use non standard custom parts that make repair and upgrading a nightmare.

The big question is why doesn't Apple let people run OSX on anything other than their harware. There's no technical limitation, it's already been done. As soon as someone makes a commercial venture out of this Apple unleash the legal hounds. If they were to do this and I really thought they were going to when they went Intel then things would get very interesting.

BTW, you can get a PC case made out of solid aluminium, no fans either. Not exactly cheap and therefore didn't sell well.

Bob.

> The big question is why doesn't Apple let people run OSX on anything other than their harware. There's no technical limitation, it's already been done.

Now you are on to something Bob. There are only three reason's that I can think of (there may be more): ;-)

(1) Apple doesn't like to make money and feels that they don't need the profit from the millions of copies of OS X that PC users would buy because most PC users hate Microsoft and would love to use the "superior" technology that Apple has to offer without swapping hardware. (lol)

(2) Mac OS X is just a dongle to sell overpriced hardware and lifting the "artificial" limitation would kill that cash cow. (hmmm... there's something to think about)

(3) The "stability" of Mac OS X is due to the fact that it only runs on an extremely limited set of tightly controlled hardware, and expanding that hardware list would show the world that OS X is just as buggy and unstable as Windows given the limitless plethora of hardware that Windows must support.

Other than that, there is no reason why OS X shouldn't be made available for PC's as it seems to work fairly well on Hackitosh computers from what I've read. I'm just not sure what Apple is afraid of but it must be something serious for them to be so afraid because releasing OS X for the PC seems like a great idea to me. I would buy it just to see what all the fuss was about (and because I'm a geek and curious about this kinda stuff).

(Note: before you flame... my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek while writing this post but it does make you think about what all the fuss is about... it's just an operating system... it doesn't actually do anything... drag, drop, click, linux, windows, os x, pc, mac, it's all the same and who cares? It's just another tool to get the job done.)

OK, at this point you're either laughing with me or laughing at me but hopefully, either way, you're laughing because this thread is silly but fun to read.

~jr

Very much laughing with you!

I do think however that Apple sees the hardware as the profit center. Sell OSX without the hardware and they look at it as a loss rather than a gain.

On the other hand, your comments about OSX stability on the controlled platform are probably the most true. Look at all the complaints we get in this forum about Vegas/Forge/Acid crashing, while others can't reproduce it. I'm sure most of that is due to the millions of different combinations of hardware that can go into a Windows-based PC.

On the other other hand, i still don't know why anyone who has used both Windows and the MacOS would opt for all the extra senseless clicking that needs to be done to navigate around on a Mac. It baffles me why people would voluntarily want to go through so much more finger work to get the same job done, when they can do it faster and easier for less money under Windows. *shrug* Then again, no one ever said computer users were logical.

Mdropp wrote, "Funny - there seem to be just two kinds of computer users in the world: Those who have never used a Mac and those who love it ;-)
I have switched more than a year ago and couldn't be happier. Today we have four Macs in my household and a fifth one (a MacBook) is just on its way."

NOT TRUE

From someone who bought a MacPro 2 years ago, tried imovie and felt it was a complete joke, then bought final cut express, also finding that to be a joke, then upgraded to final cut full version. After two months of using it and having to find a script to do things as simple as batch renaming pictures where with windows such an operation is ctrl, a to select all, right click the first one the say rename. Mac users are in some cult. They drink the Jobs cool-aid and dismiss the faults of their system. For me, I hated Mac and would never go back. Apples marketing department knows what they are doing. Apple is all about being cool. I am not cool and never was cool.

FCP is more than a bit long in the tooth (a major upgrade is rumored for this fall), but it still has features that high end pros need. Those people don't have time to complain however.

Vegas Newbie said:

After two months of using it and having to find a script to do things as simple as batch renaming pictures where with windows such an operation is ctrl, a to select all, right click the first one the say rename.

If your requirements are to get such functionality through a sexy GUI it may not exist on an OSX installed from scratch. I don't know, I never had a Mac to play with. But *nix shells are really powerfull and a batch renaming can be done with a single command line, there's no use to google for a script. Given you know what the shell is, and if you are on the bleeding edge it is very easy to perform macro substitution including non trivial strings manipulations.

This is not an OSX feature, it's UNIX.

One simple example for my evening "problem". I have a lot of wav files to convert to mp3 for space reservation. It's 243 files located in 10 subdirs. Using lame I have to launch the conversion and provide to the lame utility the original file name as input and the same file name with suffix changed from wav to mp3 as argument for output file. If you have little knowledge about the shell it is as simple as what follows:

for d in Var*

do

        ( cd "$d"

        for f in *.wav

        do

                lame -h --preset extreme "$f" "${f%%wav}"mp3

        done

        )

done

How would you do this with the DOS stone age shell provided by microsoft ? How would you do this with windows explorer ?

I think that it is wise to understand and get sufficient knowledge about the OSes to make a good comparison of their respective pros and cons.

Beside that, I'm happy to meet another "newbie" there ;-)

Blink>> Who's got the learning disability here???

You do.

>> mac should be able to run Windows on ntfs without boot camp

It is. On the other hand, you'd probably want boot camp so that you can dual boot into OSX or Windows. Bootcamp is basically a boot loader, similar to what you would use to dual boot into Linux or even what you get out of the box from Microsoft. Your PC uses a boot loader to start Windows and you can start other operating systems from it. It was easier under XP than under Vista and later though.

>> I should also be able to customize my mac seven ways from
>>Sunday with parts bought from any small town drug store

Why do you think you can not? It depends on what you can get at your drug store, but if it works on your PC there is no reason it won't work on a Mac. Does your local drug store sell graphics cards from nVidia, ATI or whatever - swap out the one in your Mac. Does it sell sound cards? Why not give it a shot?

As course points out, the only difference, hardware wise, is EFI. Sooner or later your PC will ship with EFI too. It is vastly superior to what is currently booting your hardware.

>> If Mac = PC then I should be able to run FCP on my PC based machine

What makes you think you can not? I have built my PC from parts I got from Newegg. I run FCP on it no problem. It isn't legal, but I did it as an experiment, so even though I break the law technically, it is a no-harm-no-foul situation, which is actually legal where I am.

Now going through some of the drivel in your other posts...

Coursedesign>>No cables, just a connector
Blink>> And this can't be done on a PC

I am not aware of any PC that has the hardware setup that Apple does. Most of them have visible, loose, cables that connects to disks. Is your different? Can you connect HDs with no cables?

Blink>> burning a proper Blu Ray disk through mac

Apple has ignored Blu-Ray since Apple (still) has the same opinion of it as a lot of the industry, namely that it is over priced, over licensed, and based on out-dated technology. The fact that Apple doesn't make BLu-Ray burning software isn't in any way indicative of the quality of the Mac platform. For the majority of Mac users it is utterly irrelevant at this stage. I would be pizzed, but that is another matter.

Course>>think it is a dead end with the current BR consortium politics
Blink>>They just made the fatal mistake of backing the wrong horse

They did? As far as I can remember, Apple backed neither. Apple appears to believe that disk-based HD is a dead end. I am not 100% in disagreement with them, but I am sad because it will be an inferior solution to BD for years and years.

Blink>> They WERE bending the HD DVD direction. Read the archives.

I would like you to point me to those archives. Google says otherwise.

Blink>> as well as of the dvd forum (basically HD DVD)

Well, not really. The DVD Forum is basically DVD though it was HD-DVD earlier. It isn't particularly odd that Apple is in the DVD Forum, it would surprise me if Sony is not.