Mac, PC, Adobe and Resolve

Biscardi Creative Blog by Walter Biscardi

It has been a busy busy BUSY time for us since I wrote that “Anatomy of an iMac” article and it occurred to me I have not provided any updates on all the Mac / PC goings on at our shop. Let’s get to it.

We’ve found one little achilles heel using the PC vs. the Mac. One client delivers all their raw footage to us in XDCAM Quicktime files. This is pretty much the one file format the PC will not read natively with Adobe Premiere Pro. So we purchased the Calibrated Software XD Decode software. It sort of works, but the PC really chugs once we start using the footage with that plug-in.

Talking to some other folks, they seem to have this plug-in on an ingest machine to convert the footage over to something else before editing. We don’t really want to do that because the footage was shot XDCAM MXF by the client and converted once to the QT versions for their offline edits. So we don’t want to convert the footage again before we start the final edit. Our solution has been to move the XDCAM QT projects over to one of our Macs since it doesn’t slow them down at all.

Now the editor who was cutting on the PC every day, has cut for the past two weeks on that brand new 27? iMac we’ve been running in Edit 2 since he had a bunch of XDCAM QTs in his project. He let me know in no uncertain terms that he LOVES the iMac and if we got another one, he wouldn’t mind putting that in place of his PC. He was truly amazed at the speed of it, despite the fact that it has less RAM and less processor power than the PC.

Well, that second iMac is on order and we’re going to re-designate the Edit 5 PC as our Davinci Resolve color grading system. The 12 Core Mac Pro that is currently designated as the Resolve will move into another edit suite that needs its Mac Pro updated. That PC has dual nVidia cards, 48GB of RAM and plenty of processing power so it will fit well into its new home. read more...