-- All right, folks. I'm going to just come right out and say it: For professional digital video editing, I think the Mac sucks. Yep, it bites the big one. And, I'm going to spend the rest of this editorial space telling you why I feel that way.
Understand, I am a Mac user from way back. But I just don't trust the Mac for professional applications with digital video, especially when you're talking about rendering sequences like After Effects composites. I think the Mac OS, as it is sold today, is old-fashioned and shopworn. And, given the hardware choices for the Mac, it's just too damn slow. There's no amount of marketing that will convince me that for video editing and especially compositing any Mac, even with dual processors, can beat a dual processor 1 GHz Windows 2000 machine with an ICE accelerator board inside.
Sure, the new G4 machines are beautiful. Sure, they have a "supercomputer" chip. Yeah, right. It probably seems fast if all you do is run certain Photoshop filters all day. It's all smoke and mirrors, because underneath that beautiful exterior is an operating system that dates back to the days when Boy George was the coolest thing going -- 16 years ago. Hey, that's a long time -- that's 112 years in dog years! And in computer years, well, that's at least a couple of centuries.
You get the point. If you're looking to edit some wedding footage for cousin Sally or put together that montage of your kid's first steps, go ahead and get an iMac DV and go to town. Wait for all those effects to render and wait for the thing to restart about ten times a day. But if you have clients breathing down your neck, you might want to consider a real OS, one that's able to do more than one operation at a time, one that can handle two (or even eight) processors, and one with an operating system that's as stable as the day is long.
The frustrating part of this equation is that Apple is teasing us. At January's MacWorld Expo, there was a carefully orchestrated dog-and-pony show starring the all-new Mac OS X, with the "insanely great" Steve Jobs quacking on and on about this fantastic new OS with all its graphics capabilities, blah, blah, blah. I think those graphics capabilities so far consist of a bunch of artists armed with Photoshop (probably running on NT), simulating a really hip interface that might be actually built someday. I didn't see any real video editing applications running on that fake OS.
Even though Apple promises this and that, namely OS X by January 2001, I don't believe it for one second. I don't expect to see anything running at all on OS X that can edit video natively, even in an absurdly unstable way, for at least a year and a half. Anyone who believes otherwise is being taken for a high altitude ride by Jobs in his new Gulfstream V jet, without benefit of cabin pressurization.
Look at it like this: Microsoft, with its billions of dollars and armies of developers took about five years (from the shipment of Windows NT 3.1 until NT 4 was finally almost stabilized) to ultimately get a multitasking, multithreaded OS to the point to where one could actually edit video with it. Does anyone really think Apple, with its comparatively tiny (albeit enthusiastic) team of developers, will be able to refine its OS in a few months? I don't think so. It'll take them that long just to figure out how to add right-click functionality.
Please don't think I am one of those Mac-hating bigots with an ax to grind against Apple. No, to the contrary -- I have always liked the Mac OS and used it until I just lost so much time with crashes that I couldn't make any money with it any more. I came to a relization that it was Avid and Media 100 that gave the Mac any credibility for digital video editing, not Apple. I was burned by the Mac. I will wait until it's actually ready for professional use before I consider using it again. And, I would predict it to be marginally usable for editing around two years from now -- in 2002. The ironic thing is, that's probably the time a 64-bit Windows OS will be mature enough to edit video, too. All on a 64-bit multiprocessor hardware platform totaling at least 10 GHz (that's gigahertz!).
Which brings up an interesting question for Apple: Will Motorola keep developing chips for the Mac, in light of Motorola's still-hurting hard feelings over Mac licensing? There were some strange reasons why that 500 MHz G4 chip was said to be available and then suddenly wasn't -- and all this was quickly and unconvincingly explained away by Jobs and his PR acolytes. And, will Motorola ever break that mighty 500 MHz barrier? Not any time soon.
And then there's Linux. Our wildest dreams can't predict where that OS will be two years from now. It's safe to say, though, that it'll probably be in more video editing suites than its distant vaporous cousin, MacOS X.
Seems to me like the handwriting is on the wall, and X does not mark the spot
[ August 02, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]
