Switching from Mac To PC Questions

Azo

Hey everybody I have some questions and need some advice. I have 2=Mac Pro's and and 2=15" MacBook Pro's one of which is a Retina. I am actually all in on the Mac side of things iPads, iPhones "bunch of apps", 2 Apple TV's, 3 Apple routers etc so this is a big deal for me to switch. Sadly the writing is on the wall for the Mac Pro. I waited patiently for them to come out with a new Mac Pro and when they did they came out with the Mac Pro that was not upgradeable. From a business point of view makes sense but for me its a bummer.

That being said my plan is to build a X99 system with an 8 core processor, 64 gigs of ram and probably the Nvidia Titan with 12gb of ram for DaVinci Resolve. My most current system is a 6 core 3.33ghz Mac Pro with 32gigs of ram, and a GTX980 unfortunately the Mac Pro chokes on 4K files with DaVinci Resolve. First question... How would I go about exporting a ProRes file from Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve I vaguely remember somebody saying that you can't. Is there some type of application or plugin that I can buy? Also in terms of playing the video files what video player would you guys recommend. Do you guys have any recommendations for virus scanners? I also need a program to backup all of my hard drives and SSD's so I would appreciate any suggestions.

This system will be used for Photography and Videography no video games. So any suggestions on motherboards, processors, sound cards, memory etc would be greatly appreciated.

bannedindv

Www.insanelymac.com

eatstoomuchjam

Wait, the Mac Pro is choking on 4K files? Those system specs sound like they would be way more than enough to handle 4K - what are you using for storage and how is your storage connected?

Ralph_B

Prores is not officially supported by Apple on PC. However ffmpeg will allow you to encode Prores on Windows. Here are two tutorials:

I just built a machine very similar to what you described. I love it! A recommendation - use a dual radiator water cooler for the 8 core 5960X . You absolutely should overclock it. Mine is running stable at 4.4GHz. Motherboard is an ASRock Fatal1ty X99X Killer/3.1. Works great. Graphics card is an EVGA GTX 980 Ti to which I've applied an 8% overclock. That's enough to bring it on par with a Titan X.

CFreak

@Azo I was also waiting for a better mac tower, instead I built a Hackintosh with 3770K 4 core hyper threaded processor on a Z77 Gigabyte board with a GTX 580 3GB GPU. All parts recommended by Tonymac.com. It was at the time, like the highest end iMac in a PC box with cheaper and upgradable parts.

In Premiere CC 2014 on a 1080 timeline I can multi cam 3 1080 streams. If I add a 3rd stream of 4k (2x 1080 (GH2) and 1x UHD 4k (GH4) downscaled to 1080) I can still multi cam when it's fresh, but, after a rough cut there is often lag, jumping around on the timeline. I think it is a GPU bottle neck generating the thumbnail files (that I like to see). Turning off thumbnails, does speed things up. All media files on a separate sata3 SSD, & 32 GB of RAM. I have read GH2 .mts files can bog it down. Re wrapping them in Clipwrap to .mov (no transcode needed) can speed things up.

I have yet to edit or output anything in 4k, so can't comment on the performance.

But it sounds like if you can't edit 4k on your fastest old-skool MacPro (4,1 Nahlem?) there might be somewhat of a disk bottle neck going on. There are some good articles on how to ideally set up a system to edit in Premiere, cache disk SSD, scratch disk SSD, boot disk SSD, etc.

I would check with something like the app Cuda-Z that the GTX 980 is working as it should. http://cuda-z.sourceforge.net from the cuds/Nvidia side. There are issues using that card either on a mac, on a hackintosh or in premiere, I don't remember the details.

You can also add a USB3 (for externals) or a Sata3 card (for internals) via a PCI card to your old skool mac. They are pretty powerful having Xenons. My 2012 hackintosh geek benched at 13,000 while my old 2008 macPro (with gtx 570) came in at 10,000. I did use it to playback some GH4 4k anamorphic footage in vLog, unsqueezed basically to 5k and in CC2014 premiere was able to play it (no filters) and I could add Luts to see the results and play it.

Chaos123x

Sounds like you need faster hard drives not a faster computer. Maybe look into a raid drive. I have a Promise Pegasus R6 raid that handles multiple streams of 4K. I never use it though and want to sell it. Want to buy it? lol. You need Thunderbolt though.

Azo

Hey guys thank for all the recommendations. Just and update... I sold my 6 core 3.33ghz Mac Pro for $1000 to this guy I know who will use it for photography. The Mac Pro that I had was just a little to old can't cut it already. I was looking at some of the X99 motherboards and it simply blows away what I currently had with the Mac Pro. The X99 motherboards have Turbo M.2 slots that provide up to 32GB/s holy crap. They also come with whole bunch of USB 3.0 ports, SATA connections etc etc.

To be clear the Mac Pro had no problems editing 4K footage in Final Cut Pro X or Adobe Premiere. The performance issue was with DaVinci Resolve. I have SSD's that I use for scratch disks so every new project goes on a SSD then after I am done editing I export and archive footage to regular hard drives. This is my workflow not sure if it is the correct way but thats how I do it.

@Ralph_B The information that you provided pretty much sealed the deal for me. Thank you so much for providing the links for ProRes this was actually a big concern for me.

@CFreak I took a look at Tonymac.com looks like I might be able to have the best of both worlds. Newest hardware with Mac OS very intriguing. I kinda have my mind set on Windows only because I am not sure about how difficult it would be to setup a hackintosh and I want a stable system but I will give it a shot ;-) Is your system stable I briefly looked at Tonymac.com looks like some people are having issues.

I will let you guys know how it goes once I get all the components together hopefully I won't have performance issues with DaVinci Resolve. Thanks again guys for all the suggestions.

CFreak

@Azo

So it's maybe a hardware drivers issue with resolve and the video card?

My Hackintosh is the most stable mac I have owned! But you can't just update the OS via the "software update". You need to have a backup boot drive, fresh clone on it, then update (best with stand alone updater from apple, not from the App store) then you run multi beast and re-apply the patches you need for your board/hardware combos. Then test. So it is best to run the last stable OS, now that would be 10.10. My Edit machine is still on 10.8 & works great. Most editors do this anyway. Let other people figure out why something doesn't work with the latest OS and wait for an update. Editors have to work to do and can't "wait" so it's best to run an older OS with all the bugs worked out. Of course, if you use FCPX, it needs you to run the latest OS, to use the newest version, so Apple is forcing you along...

X99/Xenon Hackintoshes have never been perfect, from what I can tell. I just went with the easiest, most compatible, fastest build: Slugnet's video edit build (at that time in 2012) Gigabyte Z77-udh5 board I think.

Chaos123x

Yeah I love to stop using Mac too, Apple had gotten to be a terrible company as of late. They don't care about creative pros anymore or even computers, they are becoming a fashion company. There quality control and customer service have went way down hill too.

 I think my next computer will be a Hackintosh cause I can't bare using Windows (shudder).   It would be cool if Google made a fully supported Linux Distro for PCs and have Adobe jump in with the creative cloud.    Can't really see going to Windows though never ever had a good experience with one running Premiere, my routine is make a edit control save make a edit control save, computer crashes, reboot, never feel safe editing on PC.

Even just with a PC disconnected from the internet with no other apps besides Adobe stuff running on it, I always have huge issues and spend way more time trouble shooting the computer then working on my projects.

Azo

@CFreak

Thanks for the input on your Hackintosh. Since you have had good results with the Hackintosh and I have everything to gain and nothing to lose I will try it out. On top of that I actually have quite a bit of plugins and and templates for Final Cut Pro X not to mention the other software that is proprietary to OSX. I am hoping to ween myself off Final Cut Pro X and use DaVinci Resolve/Premiere instead.

One of the other reasons is because I was also all in with the Aperture program and Apple decided to just say screw it and stopped updating the App. This was a big deal for me at the time because of the way Apple had Aperture structured. It was a pain in the u know what to switch over to Lightroom and took me some time to do so because basically all of the images were inaccessible to Lightroom.

With Final Cut Pro X it is kinda similar. You create different libraries and in order to access the original media you have to right click on the library then drill down from there. Basically for me I don't want to get caught with my pants down like I did with Apples Aperture program. I don't have faith in Apple for the long term in regards to the professional market and am not willing to wait till all of a sudden they pull the plug on Final Cut Pro X as well. Buy the way I really like Final Cut Pro X and prefer to edit with this because of its speed and ease of use. But as I said I have no faith in Apple.

I am looking at the long term and trying to be preemptive in terms of what Apple may do in the future. From a business point of view Apple makes a ton of money on iPads, iPhones, App's and probably has a good profit margin on the MacBooks as well. The professional workstations and applications are diminutive in comparison. So my thinking is like this if a grocery store has an item on a shelf that sells lets say 50 units per month and the very next item sells 5000 per month they are going to give that item more attention and shelf space. Same thing with the workstations and professional apps.

The only downfall about this approach for Apple is the Halo effect. Although this will be my first PC since 2006 if all goes well I might end up purchasing other items as well like notebooks, phones, etc which are generally a lot cheaper then Apple products. Shoots, I spent $5K on just the 2 15" MacBook Pro's that I have. But as I said the professional market is a small market for Apple so they really don't care one way or another.

Sorry for the rant but kinda frustrated that I have to switch, in the long term though I think I am making the right decision. On the bright side of things I am kinda excited to get a new Windows system ;-)

@Chaos123x +1

Azo

@CFreak

Thank you for your suggestion to run OSX on the PC hardware. It was pretty easy actually to install OSX on the PC hardware. I now have a 2015 Mac Pro that is upgradeable LOL ;-) I had to make some sacrifices in terms of the hardware that I originally intended to purchase but the computer still runs better then the my other Mac Pro that I sold.

I purchased the Samsung SM951 PCIe SSD for the Windows install and the Samsung 850 for OSX. On Windows 10 the computer is really fast everything works great so far. Ditto on OSX Yosemite. I was a bit concerned about running OSX on regular PC hardware but surprisingly no beachballs or anything really stable running OSX Yosemite.

Thanks again @Ralph_B and CFreak for the suggestions and links very much appreciated. Very happy with my new computer ;-)

manila57

I have built several hackintoshes in the past, the most recent being an X79 Gigabyte board based (Tonymac shopping list) with a pair of R9280X gpu's. The build instructions on RampageDev are excellent and all the kexts required are on the site. The machine is rock solid and does update from the app store as per real mac. I have not upgraded to El Capitan yet but 10.10.5 is rock solid. The only issue on upgrades was losing audio and having to re-run a script to re-instate it. Putting a third party audio card in (Maya) solved the issue. It benchmarks 20% faster than the 6 core trashcan for a fraction of the price. I use Angelbird SSD drives as these are seen as native drives with trim support. I may update the gpu's to 980's simply because of Hdmi 2.0 out which gives 4K@60Hz instead of relying upon display ports which can be fickle on cable choice( no issues with Lenovo branded cables).

inqb8tr

@Azo

So, did you go with x99 or what? Which processor? Would you please share the list of parts of your build?

DrDave

I think the 780 ti is maybe a better choice than the Titan if you are running CUDA cores.

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