Thread: iMac?

Originally Posted by MSG

yeah, iMovie is shit, we use Final Cut Pro. Personally I hate FCP, and much prefer adobe. Frequent crashes, annoying rendering issues and terrible capturing glitches (using dedicated DV decks, btw) really put a damper on workflow. Then again the capturing issue could be our shitty camera/tape situation. At home I use After Effects and Premiere for video, however I cant speak for how well they run on the mac. Never had real problems for either on Windows.

Final Cut Pro is a professional tool though, and it costs several hundred dollars. iMovie comes with every new Mac for free.

Originally Posted by ninja9578

Final Cut Pro is a professional tool though, and it costs several hundred dollars. iMovie comes with every new Mac for free.

Exactly, iMovie isn't any better than WMM.

thats the idea, I used movie maker ALL the time back in middle school when I used to make movies with my friends. We'd always brainstorm completly insane, epic ideas for movies, that sounded good in our head but once we filmed and edited we realized we were thinking waaay out of our league. those were the days... haha

Originally Posted by Demon Parasite

I've heard FCP is basically Premiere with a different GUI.

Only started using Premiere recently but yeah, havent noticed any differences whatsoever, except that Premiere can import a wider variety of file types/codecs (moot point for professionals, all they use is Raw DV, but whatever). Premiere also integrates very well with the rest of the Adobe suite like Encore and After Effects

Originally Posted by [SomeGuy]

Sexy avatar, by the way.

Thanks, it reminds me of AlexD's avatar

Originally Posted by Demon Parasite

Exactly, iMovie isn't any better than WMM.

iMovies has far more powerful editing tools and effects. Not to mention that WMM can't encode the internet standard of H.264.

Does WMM have video stabilization tools for shaky videos? Interpolated slow motion controls? Time laps controls? Keynote transitions? Greenscreen capabilities? Plug ins? Digital zooming?

Originally Posted by ninja9578

iMovies has far more powerful editing tools and effects. Not to mention that WMM can't encode the internet standard of H.264.

Does WMM have video stabilization tools for shaky videos? Interpolated slow motion controls? Time laps controls? Keynote transitions? Greenscreen capabilities? Plug ins? Digital zooming?

Are you really going to make a movie that uses things such as green screens in iMovie? That's just plain stupid. Most of those features don't seem that useful, and yes, you can do slow-mo, time lapse, and transitions in WMM. Stabilization is only if you're too stupid to use a tripod to make a video, and it doesn't always work that well. I've never looked into plugins for WMM, because I'm not an idiot who uses programs bundled with my computer to make videos.

You're taking some pretty boring videos if you're using a tripod. What do you do hiking or in a video? It also uses H.264. I have no idea while why Microsoft refuses to use the media standard. It's compression is more than twice as good.

Originally Posted by ninja9578

You're taking some pretty boring videos if you're using a tripod. What do you do hiking or in a video? It also uses H.264. I have no idea while why Microsoft refuses to use the media standard. It's compression is more than twice as good.

I'm talking about making short videos or movies, not just recording where I go. I guess it all depends on your needs. I use Vegas anyway, so I don't know much about either editor, aside from the fact that they both suck.

Originally Posted by ninja9578

This statement is about a decade out of date. It's almost as out of date as "Macs have a one button mouse."

...

As for software, Apple software is far better than the Windows equivalent. Windows has Office, OSX has iWork, Windows has Paint, OSX has GIMP, Windows has Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player OSX has iLife and iTunes.

Unlike the Windows of Quicktime, the OSX version is stable, faster, and can play any type of media.

Best of all, the average lifespan of a PC is just over two years, where as the average lifespan of a Mac is 6 years.

...

In fact, OpenGL Windows games will run better on a Mac using darwine than on Winodws because it manages multithreading and memory better.)

I'm going to tackle these points one by one.

Out of date:
Reasonable rebuttal. Macs are still not cheaper than PCs though.

Software:
Ok. iWork is in no way superior to Office. Have you used office 2007? iWork is on the same level as OpenOffice.
Comparing paint with GIMP is like comparing notepad and iWorks. It's not the same class of program. Also there's the fact that GIMP is free and works just as well on windows.
MovieMaker is included free with Windows whereas iLife must be bought separately. EDIT: (or so I thought! WMM and iMovie are still both useless though)
Finally, I have friends who use Media Player over iTunes because they prefer it. It all comes down to how you like to manage your music. Also, iTunes works just as well on Windows, no emulation required so you can hardly use it as a valid argument for why macs are better.

Quicktime:
Who uses quicktime? It's rubbish. I've used it on both Mac and PC (yes I own both) and it is significantly worse in terms of functionality and performance than VLC which is available on both platforms.

Lifetime:
I have a computer which I used to play all my games on till recently. I bought it back in 2002 or something. At the time it was less than $2000 AUD. That computer played every game I ever owned up until Crysis (which to be fair, slaughtered a lot of new computers) and happily upgraded to Windows 7 recently.
Significantly longer lifespan than 2 years.

OpenGL Games:
Darwine is just a port of Wine. Wine is an emulation program. If you seriously think that you can load up an OpenGL game in emulation mode on a mac and have it perform better than that same game running on the same system with windows installed natively then you probably shouldn't be allowed on the internet.
There's also the fact that Darwine/Wine often fail to work with OpenGL at all (See: Google).

iLife comes with every new mac.

I never said they were cheaper, I said that they were competitively priced. The original accusation was that they were way more expensive than a PC, which is not true.

Office is a disaster. LaTeX has been the standard word processing tool for 30 years, and iWork uses it as the back end. Microsoft claims that they get requests every day for features that Office already has. Most of the coming from professional users, if a professional user can't find a feature, it's very poorly designed.

Wine is not an emulator, it's just a layer that tricks programs into thinking that they are running on Windows when they are not. There is no emulation what-so-ever. Everything runs at native speed both on CPU and GPU, and for things like games, memory management is key, which UNIX runs circles around NT.

I corrected my comment about iLife being a separate product shortly after posting. My mistake.

I didn't say you did say they were cheaper.

RE: LaTeX / iWork, if that is the case, why have I never seen a LaTeX formatted file in my entire life? And why do packages like OpenOffice show off their compatability with the .doc/.docx format rather than LaTeX? Everything just seems to be distributed in .pdf or .doc.

Office's new layout with 2007 just took some getting used to. Once the initial learning curve is over, it's significantly faster to use than 2003 / OpenOffice / iWork. For me anyway.

You're right about Wine not being an emulation program. I was getting confused with the old Darwine that I used to run on my Mac Cube which had to be paired with QEMU because of the PPC processor.

I'll give you the Apple hardware though. It really is beautiful. Some would say that the new MacBooks are just large lumps of aluminum but to me they just look uncluttered and shiny. Core 2 Duo MacBook + Bootcamp + Windows 7 RC -> my ideal work PC.

Originally Posted by bobthemonkey

RE: LaTeX / iWork, if that is the case, why have I never seen a LaTeX formatted file in my entire life?.

You're joking right? I'll bet you 98% of everything you've EVER read was LaTeX formatted.

You're right about Wine not being an emulation program. I was getting confused with the old Darwine that I used to run on my Mac Cube which had to be paired with QEMU because of the PPC processor.

Yes, if you ran a PPC, then Windows software had to be emulated, so it ran slowly. On x86 Macs, Windows programs run as fast or faster (because of better memory, thread management) than they do on windows.

I'll give you the Apple hardware though. It really is beautiful. Some would say that the new MacBooks are just large lumps of aluminum but to me they just look uncluttered and shiny. Core 2 Duo MacBook + Bootcamp + Windows 7 RC -> my ideal work PC.

Yep, the unibody also cuts down on weight, increases strength, maximizes battery space (find a Windows laptop with a 10 hour battery.) Granted, some of the cost does go to just having the Apple name, but it evens out considering the stability of the hardware, how cheap the software is and how little you have to spend on tech support and virus protection.

Hmm. Might have to try out Wine next time my mates and I have a giant AOE2 game. Half of us have Macs and we usually just use Virtual PC which is a nightmare. D:

Also I know this sounds petty / like a tiny problem but on MacOS, how do you put up with not being able to instantly maximize a window? That was always one of the huge things that bugged me about it when I had a Mac.

Uhm.... ever hover over the buttons at the top? The green button is the zoom button.

Yeah but it doesn't do what it should. ><
It /should/ fill the window to the screen or return it to its previous size if it's already maximized.

What it does is switches between two window sizes which can both be changed. Very very annoying.

Why on earth would you want a window to fill the entire screen if it doesn't have enough content to? The green button does exactly what it should, it's called Zoom-to-fit for a good reason, it zooms the window large enough so that all of the content is displayed, why would you want it any bigger than that?

That's one of the most annoying things about Windows. Clicking the button once should bring it to a user defined size, clicking it again should make it big enough to show everything in it, no bigger. Windows fills up the window with white space or makes form fields bigger to fill it up, that's so annoying. You can't see the windows behind it.

See that's annoying. In Firefox, I don't want to have to be clicking the zoom-to-fit button every time I go to a new page / switch tabs / whatever to make it properly adjusted. I'd rather just have it fill the entire screen and expand to fit.

Why would you want to be able to see the stuff behind the current window? On an average day I will have MSN, a few chat windows, firefox / flock and iTunes open. And possibly Eclipse / Word if I'm doing something for Uni. I can't see why I'd ever need to see say... MSN while I've got Word in full screen.
The only thing I can think of is being able to see a web page with information while writing an assignment in Word and in that case I'd just do the fill-to-half-screen with Firefox on the left and Word on the right.

I suppose it's just another matter of preference.

I hope your kidding. Games do not run better on Macs through WINE, and they don't run better on Linux through WINE either. OS X and Linux are bad for gaming, just use Windows 7 RC or Vista. And no, I don't care how good OS X's memory management is, there are still bugs in running the software through WINE.

Originally Posted by Demon Parasite

Games ... Vista.

You can quit.

Originally Posted by Demon Parasite

I hope your kidding. Games do not run better on Macs through WINE, and they don't run better on Linux through WINE either. OS X and Linux are bad for gaming, just use Windows 7 RC or Vista. And no, I don't care how good OS X's memory management is, there are still bugs in running the software through WINE.

I'm starting to doubt that you've had any experience with macs.

Games and Vista is not a good combo.

Have to agree with ThreeLetterSyndrom and [SomeGuy]. Vista + games -> lag, low framerate and often crashes.

XP is still the operating system for gamers and from what I've seen of 7, that isn't going to change quickly.

That said, a few of my friends use Vista on their main gaming computers and say that aside from the slight performance decrease (they have amazingly good PCs) it's fine.

Demon Parasite is right about WINE though. The overhead is still a significant factor and it by no means supports the majority of games.

EDIT: I maintain that if anyone wants to play games, they should buy a console. No hassle, higher portability, better multiplayer, often better graphics, no performance issues ever, etc etc. -misses his 360-

Originally Posted by [SomeGuy]

You can quit.

Originally Posted by ThreeLetterSyndrom

I'm starting to doubt that you've had any experience with macs.

Games and Vista is not a good combo.

I'm sorry you guys are losing 2 FPS in Vista over XP, but fine, or that you need to run those 3 old games that don't work.

In CSS I went from averaging a perfectly playable 45 fps to an unplayable 25 when I changed to Vista from Xp... Might have changed since the service packs (I went back to XP within a few months), but I doubt it's done that much.

Mainly cause Vista was a rubbish OS.

7 is much nicer.

Originally Posted by bobthemonkey

In CSS I went from averaging a perfectly playable 45 fps to an unplayable 25 when I changed to Vista from Xp... Might have changed since the service packs (I went back to XP within a few months), but I doubt it's done that much.

Mainly cause Vista was a rubbish OS.

7 is much nicer.

SP1 actually made Vista a lot better. So yes, it has gotten better since the service packs.

i'd say that buying a Mac is a good idea. with Boot Camp, you can put windows xp/vista on it (you can't really put Mac OS X on a PC even though i'm doing it right now), you can run all the Mac only programs, it doesn't crash AS MUCH, it lasts longer, with an ADB to USB thing you can connect the great Apple Extended Keyboard from 1987 to it.

quicktime on windows sucks. quicktime on mac can play anything.