Are Macs *THAT* much better for editing over the PC?

[thirdlegstump]

Originally posted by: johnsquare
people with the Mac tend to upgrade less than those with PCs

That's because the upgrades come with "Mac" prices and the users are already too broke after purchasing the Mac

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: deathkoba

Originally posted by: johnsquare
people with the Mac tend to upgrade less than those with PCs

That's because the upgrades come with "Mac" prices and the users are already too broke after purchasing the Mac

:thumbsup:

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: johnsquare
buying a Mac is surely something that gives u a peace of mind (knowing it would not break down so easily...) unlike the PC.... but learning to use a Mac another question.

Go for the Mac... people with the Mac tend to upgrade less than those with PCs wherein technology is really constantly changing..

When speaking of power... both have their own advantages... but still .. buying a PC still has more chances of giving ou some hardware and software problems....

For gamers... a Mac is a no-no....

None of this makes sense, at all.

Hmm, none of my hardware on my 2 year-old PC has broken down, all the software is running fine. Haven't had XP fail once. No virus/spyware issues ever. Everything is running smoothly. Haven't even upgraded a single thing and it runs even new games just fine right now.

Mac and power advantages doesn't go in the same sentence. I know lizzy hates me to say this, but benchmarks show that even software originally designed for the mac runs better on a PC. Fact is, mac hardware is waaaay behind. Why else would even mac lovers question Apple when they claimed the G5 was the fastest desktop? And guess what, all the benchmarks showed it wasn't, even benchies found on mac websites.

You want piece of mind? Dude, you're getting a Dell.

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Nope, not at all. As I mentioned earlier, today's various computer hardware platforms are sufficiently different from each other that they each do better at some things than others relative to the competition. Photoshop has always run particularly well on Macs due to good optimization for Apple hardware, and that's one of the main reasons Apple emphasizes it in performance comparisons. But even with that, some recent independent Photoshop comparisons show the fastest PCs beating the fastest Macs, so there's no clear advantage for Macs any more even for Photoshop.

I invite you to do a simple performance test on any iBook or Powerbook and let us know what happens: take three separate DV video clips and put two of them in separate PIP windows (about 1/4 screen each) over the third clip as a background, then see if you can get that to play in real time without dropping frames. I'll be impressed if it works.

Really, what evidence do you have to back up what you just said? Benchmarks posted on PC websites? Are you still believing that BS posted on PC websites? Until you do benchmarks yourself, perhaps you may be able to say "fastest PC's are beating the fastest Macs." Until then, you really cant say anything.
I am able to assume I can do well against my friends PC in video editing due to personal experience through Photoshop. FCP takes advantage of AltiVec as well as photoshop.

Adobe Premiere has had one of the best available HDV editing solutions for well over a year now, and that's already been upgraded to work with the Sony FX1. As you pointed out this is provided by a third-party vendor, but unlike the current FCP solution it provides a practical workflow without lengthy transcoding required. (Capture is real time or nearly so on a reasonably fast computer, compared to about 7X realtime for transcoding on a good Mac.) And if you don't trust third-party solutions there are at least three currently shipping PC editing solutions which support HDV directly, and all of those have also been upgraded for the FX1. All told there are five shipping HDV editing packages which work with the FX1, and all of them are significantly more efficient in terms of workflow than FCP-HD. Did someone at Apple fall asleep, or what?

Did I not just give you a link that shows you a third party program that lets you edit HDV with FCP? Perhaps you dont read my posts well enough? I guess I should post it again. Here you go.

As far as I know there is currently no video editing solution for Macs which can actually edit an unconverted HDV video file. There are at least three major editing programs for PCs which can do this today, with at least one more due next year (i.e. Avid). So with PCs you get more choices with better performance at lower prices, and in this case you get it a lot sooner than you get it all on Macs. I'm truly surprised that Apple hasn't done more to address this issue.

And I will post the link again. Here you go. As I said in my earlier post, you can edit HDV with a third party program with FCP. But it seems you disregarded it.

So really, you've got no argument there. You can edit HDV with FCP. And here is the link once more. Here you go.

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Originally posted by: malak

Originally posted by: johnsquare
buying a Mac is surely something that gives u a peace of mind (knowing it would not break down so easily...) unlike the PC.... but learning to use a Mac another question.

Go for the Mac... people with the Mac tend to upgrade less than those with PCs wherein technology is really constantly changing..

When speaking of power... both have their own advantages... but still .. buying a PC still has more chances of giving ou some hardware and software problems....

For gamers... a Mac is a no-no....

None of this makes sense, at all.

Hmm, none of my hardware on my 2 year-old PC has broken down, all the software is running fine. Haven't had XP fail once. No virus/spyware issues ever. Everything is running smoothly. Haven't even upgraded a single thing and it runs even new games just fine right now.

Mac and power advantages doesn't go in the same sentence. I know lizzy hates me to say this, but benchmarks show that even software originally designed for the mac runs better on a PC. Fact is, mac hardware is waaaay behind. Why else would even mac lovers question Apple when they claimed the G5 was the fastest desktop? And guess what, all the benchmarks showed it wasn't, even benchies found on mac websites.

You want piece of mind? Dude, you're getting a Dell.

I dont hate you for it, but the thing is, you continue to believe BS posted on the internet. I dont understand why you believe benchmarks posted on PC websites. What do you expect. Even Mac sites will say the Mac is faster, but do I believe it? Hell no. PC websites will say the PC is faster. Do I believe it? Hell no. Do your own benchmarks and find out which is faster, instead of relying on BS information you find on random PC and Mac websites to see which is faster.

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: Thin Lizzy

I dont hate you for it, but the thing is, you continue to believe BS posted on the internet. I dont understand why you believe benchmarks posted on PC websites. What do you expect. Even Mac sites will say the Mac is faster, but do I believe it? Hell no. PC websites will say the PC is faster. Do I believe it? Hell no. Do your own benchmarks and find out which is faster, instead of relying on BS information you find on random PC and Mac websites to see which is faster.

PC reviewers, Mac reviewers, on the internet or on paper, all say this. I've even seen sites dedicated to mac fanboyism post news saying they are getting fed up with the mac after the whole G5 scandal. It's not BS, get over it. Everyone is saying it in both camps. Pry your fingers from the cute case and get a real machine. You claim to be the almighty test it yourself, then do it. Switch. You'll see.

 

[VTrider]

Okay, the botom line IMO:

The OP asked if it was 'truly worth it to scrap his PC for a Mac for video editing'. Judging by his PC in his sig, his system is more than capable and efficient for home video editing. I've been doing video work for years on a lesser system, Athlon XPs/RAID 0/mega RAM and I have no complaints, I don't wait forever for things to render.

I meet people all the time that tell me I should get a Mac when they find out I do video editing, I ask them 'why'. - do they ever give me a justifiable answer, you take a guess. It's all relative though as everybody knows, how much you want to spend, what OS and programs you prefer, blah blah blah. True video editors use their imagination and brain to produce quality work on what they have, all you people who spend too much time wondering if you need the latest and greatest 'innovative' equipment are missing the point

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Originally posted by: malak

Originally posted by: Thin Lizzy

I dont hate you for it, but the thing is, you continue to believe BS posted on the internet. I dont understand why you believe benchmarks posted on PC websites. What do you expect. Even Mac sites will say the Mac is faster, but do I believe it? Hell no. PC websites will say the PC is faster. Do I believe it? Hell no. Do your own benchmarks and find out which is faster, instead of relying on BS information you find on random PC and Mac websites to see which is faster.

PC reviewers, Mac reviewers, on the internet or on paper, all say this. I've even seen sites dedicated to mac fanboyism post news saying they are getting fed up with the mac after the whole G5 scandal. It's not BS, get over it. Everyone is saying it in both camps. Pry your fingers from the cute case and get a real machine. You claim to be the almighty test it yourself, then do it. Switch. You'll see.

Then prove that they "all say this." Benchmarks are BS, but it seems you dont want to believe it. Go ahead and rely on those benchmarks. Its not BS you say? Then back up this statement. Cute case? Maybe you should pry your hands off that machine full of neon lights. And how do I claim to be almighty? Because I say to do the benchmarks yourself? Can you explain how that makes me almighty? Otherwise, you shouldnt post idiotic comments like this.

 

[JimGunn]

I'm a pc user, but two close friends of mine that work with me part-time are long time Mac guys. Since I'm a heavy Premiere user, since 6.5, now a Pro 1.5 user and Encore (DVD authoring) user, and those apps only work for pc, I couldn't even try a Mac if I wanted to unless I decided to spend several thousands of dollars of more money on new Mac hardware and software to replace the three (soon four) pcs I now use. It doesn't matter which one is marginally better on a specific task like video editing, you kind of have to pick a camp now and stick with it for the forseeable future. Familiarity and cost make pc the only feasible choice for many even though I can respect Mac too.

 

[addragyn]

Dude that is some FUD about FCP. You're being disengenious about HD(V). If you don't want to use FCP there's the Avid stuff, Media 100. Not only can you do HD work on a Mac in real time you could do it before you could in PP.

Plenty of people in the business seem to find FCP adequate.

http://www.apple.com/pro/filmvideo/
http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/stories/

Films
Cold Mountain
Napoleon Dynamite
Lady Killers

Shows
nip/tuck
24
Scrubs

- - -

Guys, Apple got a lot of hype by being magnitudes cheaper than competitors for video work back when FCP was new. (Not talking about wedding videos here.)

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Dont forget Van Helsing!

 

[halfadder]

I was able to visit a post production facility in San Antonio last week and was given a short tour by one of their editors and their tech guy. They mainly work with high budget television ads. All of their standard definition video was edited on Apple G4 and G5 systems with Sony DVCAM via FireWire. They also had two high definition systems, one was a Silicon Graphics Inc (sgi) Octane2 running Discreet Flame. The other was an older original G5 (dual 2.0 GHz) with 2 older original Xserve RAIDs (2.0 TB each I think??). They said the SGI was the workhorse for doing effects, but the Mac was great for general HD editing and simple effects (like what you'd see on a sitcom or documentary done in HD). Video came from a short rack of Sony HDCAM video decks. As they explained it, HDCAM is a compressed format, but only on the tape itself, they transfer and edit the video as an uncompressed raw digital video stream, anywhere from about 100 to about 200 MBytes/sec!!

Both machines had monster "breakout boxes" on the HDCAM rack for all of the HD inputs and outputs. The SGI, which itself is a huge blue box, had a large flat blue breakout box covered with all sorts of different types of analog and uncompressed digital SD and HD video inputs and outputs. The Mac had a smaller silver breakout box with what I understood to be just one set of SD inputs and one set of HD inputs. The other impressive thing was the RAIDs on the SGI. There was a huge stack of black RAID boxes connected to the SGI Octane2. Each had a ring of LEDs surrounding a little two-line LCD display to represent activity and disk thruput. The tech guy loved to talk about the "fiber storage" on the SGI and G5. I assumed he was refering to the FibreChannel interface between the RAIDs and the machines themselves.

I did see a few PCs in their office. They ran Maya on G4s, but they also had 3DSMax on a couple PCs. While 3DSMax is only for Windows, apparently the SGI and it's Discreet Flame software is able to use 3DSMax files to mix 3D with the HD video.

Before I left, I asked the two guys what they thought about the new Apples and their performance (after all, their offices looked like advertisments for G4 and G5 minitowers and Apple 23" monitors!!). They both just sort of shrugged and said the editing and compositing machines do their job well and are faster than the humans that use them. But they did also say that for 3DSMax and Maya rendering, no matter how often they upgrade their machines or render servers (which I didn't get to see, but I understand they use rackmount Linux PCs for rendering Maya files) no matter how much they upgrade, their animators always have to wait for rendering.

 

[halfadder]

Did I mention that I love this stuff?
When it comes to trade shows, some guys love E3. Well, as for me, I like E3, but I love NAB and SIGGRAPH!

 

[hopejr]

HAHA to kwshaw1!!!!!

BTW, kwshaw1, when u mentioned that Avid was coming out with HD next for PC's, you forgot that it's also coming out for Macs next year too.

 

[halfadder]

The big boys have been playing with HD since 1990. Pretty soon HD will even be on our cell phones.

 

[imported_kwshaw1]

Dude that is some FUD about FCP. You're being disengenious about HD(V). If you don't want to use FCP there's the Avid stuff, Media 100. Not only can you do HD work on a Mac in real time you could do it before you could in PP.

Perhaps it is a bit unfair to emphasize FCP's current biggest weakness, but I do sincerely think it's a problem that the Mac platform lacks a practical HDV workflow option. The heart of the issue is that FCP itself is not capable of editing HDV footage directly, so all HDV solutions for FCP require a very lengthy transcoding process to convert HDV to DVCProHD before you start editing. For example, read This article and note the author's conclusion at the end:

"I?m a Mac person, so I hate to admit this, but I?m being very honest: The workflow solution using CineForm Aspect HD and Premiere, as well as the quality of the image, is, hands down, the winner at the moment. "

I've also discussed this at length with one of the most ardent FCP advocates on the Creative Cow forums, and he eventually admitted that it takes him about seven minutes per minute of source material to transcode HDV prior to editing it. So if you're doing a fairly simple project with, say, five hours of source footage, you're looking at a total of 35 hours of transcoding time before you can even get started editing. And as the writer quoted above noted, some PC-based HDV editing solutions are actually higher quality than FCP, because they used an editing codec which does a better job of maintaining the original HDV source resolution and image quality than DVCProHD can do (see http://www.cineform.com/technology/quality.htm).

Clearly Apple has some good solutions for editing "real" HD footage, but few of us will ever have the opportunity or budget to work with that. Meanwhile, HDV is poised to become the most significant video format since the introduction of DV, because it delivers high-definition video at a price independent producers can easily afford. Apple's failure to offer a good solution for this format more than a year after it was introduced is a huge gap, and one which they have indicated they are working to address. In the long run this may even out if/when Panasonic ships a low-cost DVCProHD camera, but that appears to be at least a year away still. So we have a situation today where PCs are simply the preferred platform for editing HDV, and people are buying the Sony HDV cameras as fast as they can get their hands on them. I have no doubt Apple will adapt FCP for HDV eventually, but as of today they're late to the game.

 

[hopejr]

I fail to see you say anything about Avid, or any software other than FCP for that matter. Apple isn't the only company that writes software for OS X. FCP isn't the only video editing software available for mac. Many of us in this thread have mentioned alternatives to FCP. Stop ignoring it.

 

[imported_kwshaw1]

Really, what evidence do you have to back up what you just said? Benchmarks posted on PC websites? Are you still believing that BS posted on PC websites? Until you do benchmarks yourself, perhaps you may be able to say "fastest PC's are beating the fastest Macs." Until then, you really cant say anything.

I am able to assume I can do well against my friends PC in video editing due to personal experience through Photoshop. FCP takes advantage of AltiVec as well as photoshop.

What's funny here is that you're criticizing me for not doing a personal side-by-side comparison, yet you haven't done the same comparison for purposes of video editing and apparently haven't done the simple test I proposed for measuring video editing performance on a laptop. If you don't understand that some applications run better than others on any given computer hardware then you really shouldn't be making any statements about Mac vs. PC performance, because this is a fundamental aspect of cross-platform comparisons. It's been obvious for years that Photoshop is a program which runs particularly well on Macs, and that this is less true for many other widely used applications.

And while it's certainly true that we should be skeptical of any performance comparisons we haven't tried ourselves, I'm more inclined to trust comparisons run by independent companies than by Apple. Apple has a vested interest in picking comparisons they know will highlight the strengths of the Mac platform, whereas independent reviewers have less specific interest in favoring either platform. I have yet to see a single independent assessment of video editing performance in which Macs could do typical video editing tasks any faster than fast PCs...if you can find one by all means please let me know.

In the meantime, you're welcome to run the performance test I mentioned earlier on any Macintosh computer: put a layer of DV on your timeline and start adding on separate PIP layers until you reach a point where you can't do real-time playback. On my PC laptop I can do two PIP layers, on my single-processor PC I can do at least 5-6 PIP, and I just read a review in which someone ran 20 PIP layers easily on a dual-processor PC before he got tired of creating new layers. This is a simple test you can do right now without having to compare to anyone else's computer, so by all means feel free to report your findings.

In the end this is all a bit silly because the real reason people pick Macs or PCs has less to do with performance than other considerations. There's no question that Macs have some good video editing tools, but they're not inherently "better" than PCs for this purpose.

 

[imported_kwshaw1]

Originally posted by: hopejr
I fail to see you say anything about Avid, or any software other than FCP for that matter. Apple isn't the only company that writes software for OS X. FCP isn't the only video editing software available for mac. Many of us in this thread have mentioned alternatives to FCP. Stop ignoring it.

If you can, please show me any full-featured editing program for Macs which can work on HDV footage effectively without transcoding it first, or capturing it to uncompressed HD (another impractical solution). I haven't heard of one yet, and neither has anyone I've talked to who's actually working with HDV on Macs. Don't blame me if Apple (and other Mac-based editing software providers) can't get their act together for a new video format when several lesser-known PC companies have managed to do it. It's no secret that Apple is working on direct support for HDV, but they're way behind the competition in getting that implemented.

This will all even out eventually, it's just that today it's a big point in favor of using PCs if you want to get started doing HDV editing.

 

[imported_Lucifer]

What's funny here is that you're criticizing me for not doing a personal side-by-side comparison, yet you haven't done the same comparison for purposes of video editing and apparently haven't done the simple test I proposed for measuring video editing performance on a laptop. If you don't understand that some applications run better than others on any given computer hardware then you really shouldn't be making any statements about Mac vs. PC performance, because this is a fundamental aspect of cross-platform comparisons. It's been obvious for years that Photoshop is a program which runs particularly well on Macs, and that this is less true for many other widely used applications.

You really shouldnt be making any statements about Mac vs. PC performance. You have no evidence that the PC is faster. I know I havent done any tests against a PC in video editing, but I am not comparing all PC's against all Macs the way you are trying to. I am comparing my friends computer to my Mac.

In the end this is all a bit silly because the real reason people pick Macs or PCs has less to do with performance than other considerations. There's no question that Macs have some good video editing tools, but they're not inherently "better" than PCs for this purpose.

You dont know anything at all about todays Macs to make this statement.

If you can, please show me any full-featured editing program for Macs which can work on HDV footage effectively without transcoding it first, or capturing it to uncompressed HD (another impractical solution). I haven't heard of one yet, and neither has anyone I've talked to who's actually working with HDV on Macs. Don't blame me if Apple (and other Mac-based editing software providers) can't get their act together for a new video format when several lesser-known PC companies have managed to do it. It's no secret that Apple is working on direct support for HDV, but they're way behind the competition in getting that implemented.

Dear god, why must you continue to disregard my posts??????? I have given you a link several times that shows you can edit HDV with FCP. How many times must I post it??? If you will continue to disregard my posts, and continue to say "FCP has to transcode it first" then seriously, stop posting. I am going to post the link several more times to make sure you dont miss my posts for the third time.


CLICK ME
CLICK ME
CLICK ME
CLICK ME
CLICK ME

 

[imported_kwshaw1]

You really shouldnt be making any statements about Mac vs. PC performance. You have no evidence that the PC is faster. I know I havent done any tests against a PC in video editing, but I am not comparing all PC's against all Macs the way you are trying to. I am comparing my friends computer to my Mac.

Based on my own personal experience, reports from other computer users and a number of independent performance comparisons, I have no doubt that the PC platform as a whole is easily competitive with Macs for purposes of video editing. You have presented no evidence to the contrary for any video-related tasks, and have apparently ignored my requests to do a very simple performance test on any Mac you have available at your disposal. But I'll gladly agree that the G5 Macs are powerful computers and more than adequate for many people's video editing needs, so if you can afford one of those then it's probably not particularly important whether PCs are faster.

You dont know anything at all about todays Macs to make this statement.

Based on your responses it seems like you don't know a whole lot about today's PCs, or else you've chosen to withhold your knowledge in that regard for some reason. I've done the best I can to get accurate information about current Mac-based video editing solutions, and I've yet to see anything compelling to suggest that Macs are "better" than PCs for this purpose. With PCs I have far more choices for effective video editing with a much wider range of pricing options, and that's something which should be readily apparent to anyone who's researched both platforms.

Dear god, why must you continue to disregard my posts??????? I have given you a link several times that shows you can edit HDV with FCP. How many times must I post it???

I read the Heuris web pages and tried to find more information about the Heuris HDV workflow, but I couldn't find enough details to confirm exactly how it works. I did find some notes to the effect that Heuris is expensive and/or cumbersome to configure and use, plus several comments that Heuris no longer sells the Indie HD toolkit, which doesn't appear to have been updated to work with the Sony FX1 camera. So maybe I'm over-stating things to say that the Mac platform doesn't have an effective HDV workflow option, but it certainly seems like Mac HDV users are having to jump through a lot of hoops to do any editing--especially with the Sony HDV camera.

At the very least I'm sure it's an accurate statement that the PC platform has more and better options for working with HDV at this time, so there's no way I would choose Macs for HDV work under current conditions. If I already had a Mac and didn't have a PC I'd undoubtedly make do with the HDV workarounds, but it seems even many Mac users realize the PC platform is ahead in this area. If Apple deserves credit for being the first to support relatively affordable "real" HD editing, then the PC platform deserves equal credit for being quick to support HDV.

In the end you can't clearly say either platform is better than the other for video editing, which was the original topic of this thread. Macs have some good editing tools and PCs have some good editing tools, and people who can afford to are using both platforms to get the full advantages of each.

 

[imported_kwshaw1]

P.S. I did a search on the Creative Cow forums for references to "Heuris" and found some interesting results, including the following discussion:

http://www.creativecow.net/for...&archive=_2004|7|6

It seems that Heuris has never shipped a complete end-to-end HDV solution and tries to get people to pay $5000 (!) for their output encoder, plus there's confusion about exactly how Heuris gets HDV files to work in Final Cut Pro. (Sounds like maybe they just convert to DVCProHD like everyone else, which is what I've been saying.) There are reports of the Heuris capture utility working with the FX1, so that appears to eliminate that issue, but it's clearly not a polished HDV editing solution. For that you'll have to wait for Apple to ship their answer sometime next year.

 

[addragyn]

Lumiere sells an HDV solution for FCP, it's $179. Neither PP or FCP is doing HDV embedded. Both companies have announced support and it's coming for both programs this isn't a huge issue.

The reason Premiere got turned into the much better program it is today is because Adobe got it's a$$ handed to it by Apple. So they regrouped, went XP only and came out with a winner. But it's no reason to blast FCP, I'd say indirectly you could be thanking Apple. I mean that timeline, color correction...

Apple keeps pushing FCP; RT Extreme, Soundtrack, Live Type, Cinema Tools, Compressor, and creating an ecology; xSan, Motion, DVDSP, for it. You mentioned real time performance. Did you see some of the NAB demo videos? You can wring some good stuff when you''ve got the HW, OS and app under one rof.


NAB Demo Video - Final Cut Pro HD

NAB Demo Video - Motion

 

[halfadder]

If HDV is the next big thing, then I have a strong feeling Apple will totally embrace it. They have too much to lose if they don't. They've only been supporting DVCProHD for a few months, and 100-200 MB/sec uncompressed raw HD for less than a year.

As addragyn points out, if nothing else, Apple has a great one-stop shop for video production -- they make the computer, they make the fibrechannel RAID box, they make the OS, they make the video/audio/effects/animation/dvd-authoring software. They don't, however, make their own videotape decks.

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Based on my own personal experience, reports from other computer users and a number of independent performance comparisons, I have no doubt that the PC platform as a whole is easily competitive with Macs for purposes of video editing. You have presented no evidence to the contrary for any video-related tasks, and have apparently ignored my requests to do a very simple performance test on any Mac you have available at your disposal. But I'll gladly agree that the G5 Macs are powerful computers and more than adequate for many people's video editing needs, so if you can afford one of those then it's probably not particularly important whether PCs are faster.

And like I said, you cant say that todays PC's are faster than todays Macs because of the experience you had a long time ago. You dont use todays Macs at all. So you cant say anything.

Based on your responses it seems like you don't know a whole lot about today's PCs, or else you've chosen to withhold your knowledge in that regard for some reason. I've done the best I can to get accurate information about current Mac-based video editing solutions, and I've yet to see anything compelling to suggest that Macs are "better" than PCs for this purpose. With PCs I have far more choices for effective video editing with a much wider range of pricing options, and that's something which should be readily apparent to anyone who's researched both platforms.

Ok first off, I own a PC, an AMD 2600+. Wicked fast PC, whooped my eMac in photoshop with an average of 40 seconds in tests. Does that make all PC's faster than all Macs? No. I have never said that Macs are better than PC's for video editing. I said that you cannot say that todays PC's are faster than todays Macs without evidence to prove this. So you dont know anything about todays Macs, period.

I read the Heuris web pages and tried to find more information about the Heuris HDV workflow, but I couldn't find enough details to confirm exactly how it works. I did find some notes to the effect that Heuris is expensive and/or cumbersome to configure and use, plus several comments that Heuris no longer sells the Indie HD toolkit, which doesn't appear to have been updated to work with the Sony FX1 camera. So maybe I'm over-stating things to say that the Mac platform doesn't have an effective HDV workflow option, but it certainly seems like Mac HDV users are having to jump through a lot of hoops to do any editing--especially with the Sony HDV camera.

At the very least I'm sure it's an accurate statement that the PC platform has more and better options for working with HDV at this time, so there's no way I would choose Macs for HDV work under current conditions. If I already had a Mac and didn't have a PC I'd undoubtedly make do with the HDV workarounds, but it seems even many Mac users realize the PC platform is ahead in this area. If Apple deserves credit for being the first to support relatively affordable "real" HD editing, then the PC platform deserves equal credit for being quick to support HDV.

Why did you disregard my posts the other two times? Took you long enough to read them. As addragyn stated, Lumiere sells a third party program to edit HDV on FCP. So you cant go anywhere with "FCP cant edit HDV." That needs to stop, because that is false information you are spreading.

In the end you can't clearly say either platform is better than the other for video editing, which was the original topic of this thread. Macs have some good editing tools and PCs have some good editing tools, and people who can afford to are using both platforms to get the full advantages of each.

Ok, now you are confusing me. The whole time you were posting, you were saying that the PC is better than the Mac at video editing. Now you say "you cant clearly say either platform is better than the other for video editing." Which is it? You need to make up your mind. If you dont believe me, I would be happy enough to quote you on this. But I do agree with that statement, we really cant say which is better. If you also agree with your statement, then you shouldnt be posting "the PC is better than the Mac at video editing" anymore.