Mac hater! (spoken in Dutch accent) (1 Viewer)

[Scott L]

Yes and if the job is dealing with grainy, interlaced material that needs multiple filters to look decent then have a blast. However for real jobs such as making amateur home-made movies (or even casual home movies) all you have to do is capture in Premiere, edit and export. And from what I hear the process is even nicer and more streamlined on Macs.

In the end the people who gain the most use out of AVISynth is for making low resolution movies (that need to be cleaned up) made for the internet who are having incompatibility problems. If you are constantly producing your own material there shouldn't be any quality or incompatibilty issues. Maybe I just don't have a sense of what you're trying to do Rob.. what is it exactly?

 

[Rob Gardiner]

I work for a private investigator. We get VHS tapes from cameras mounted in the front of police cars. I assume this material is shot on a VHS camcorder (maybe VHS-C? I have no idea what VHS-C should look like). Our tape is an unknown number of generations away from the original, but probably 1 or 2. It is very grainy and crappy looking. I get rid of the chroma noise, I use a spatial-temporal smoother to get rid of regular noise, I deinterlace, I resize to DivX or VCD resolution, and I burn onto CD for the boss and one or more attorneys. Sometimes the boss himself shoots video with his Sony Digital 8 (don't remember the model number) and I can assure you AviSynth works quite well with clean source video as well. For simple, perfunctory editing, and consistent titling, which is what I do in the office most of the time, AviSynth and VirtualDub work very efficiently. I agree, a creative project such as a feature film or even a home movie would require the kind of GUI that Final Cut provides. AviSynth is in no way user-friendly for the newbie. Like I said earlier, the DV filmmaker's best tool for the job may very well be the G4, but that is not necessarily the case for all video work.

AviSynth has many more uses than simply cleaning up crappy sources. Video transcoding will be a much-sought after skill in the future, partially because our civilization's entire archive of broadcast material is all interlaced, while there are tons of new progressive-scan devices to watch video on. This material must be properly deinterlaced, otherwise annoying combing artifacts will appear on any progressive display. Those watching TNG discs or anime discs (both of which are nightmarish film/video hybrids) on progressive displays know what I mean. And interlaced source material is not going away, as several of the most popular HDTV resolutions are still to this day interlaced.

Also PAL vs. NTSC differences have never gone away, and this is another task AviSynth is excellent at. My roommate was given a gift of PAL Beat Club episodes for his birthday. Being unable to play them, I format-shifted them into NTSC for him. There is a concept called Universal Media Access that works like this: source video is stored on a central server, in "maximum" quality. It can be accessed by any device, from an HDTV, to a PC monitor, to a cellphone or PDA. The video is transcoded on the fly into whatever format (resolution, framerate, colorspace) the display device requires. I'm not suggesting that AviSynth can do this today. My point is that it is good for much more than cleaning up crappy VHS and the skills I use by learning AviSynth could potentially go a long way elsewhere. It is a general purpose transcoding tool, and a very powerful one as well. I also have projects at home that I won't go into in detail about but I will say it is nice to watch TNG episodes that are completely deinterlaced, and since it is soft to begin with, a reasonable bitrate MPEG-4 stream will look about 99% as good as the original, despite the smaller filesize, even when upscaled to HDTV resolution.

And we do this with cheap Athlons! The office is going to be investing in a video workstation where each part has been researched for stability. But even with our cheapo AMD box I have had few stability problems. (Windows 2000, properly patched with all current drivers.)

My point in bringing up AviSynth was to let others know about my experience transcoding video on a low-cost PC. I had always believed that Macintoshes were inherently superior to PCs when it came to multimedia and video applications. We went with a PC in the office only to save money and ensure compatibility with the rest of the network. I discovered that some particular areas of video work are actually served quite well by a PC, and that may be good news to the many folks who already have them at home or at work.

 

[NickSo]

Is anybody else having problems with the sound? I cant get the sound to play... This is on WMP9 on WinXP Pro.

 

[David Lawson]

No problems using Windows Media Player 7 under Classic in Mac OS X.

 

[Scott L]

Excellent points Rob! But about the de-interlacing, from a purist's POV it would be necessary to preserve the source material and allow a video processor to do the de-interlacing. I also work with Vdub, codecs, filters, etc... since 1998, but just for hobby though.

This material must be properly deinterlaced, otherwise annoying combing artifacts will appear on any progressive display.

Hmmm.. *thinking* I'm not sure this is true. All HDTVs have internal line doublers preventing combing artifacts. VHS is very interlaced but I'm sure people can still watch their tapes on their HD sets without seeing excessive combing. The same goes for DVD players that are not progressive.

The quality still sucks because most internal line doublers are crap, thus the use for an external video processor like the DVDO. In the PC world there's FFDshow that de-interlaces interlaced AVIs or even live input video from a capture card. I capture 480i cable to my HTPC and it is very interlaced on playback, all I have to do is open FFDshow and check de-interlace & which method to use, and *poof* it's gone.

I'm gonna go with experience and say de-interlacing should be done during playback and not in post-production. I've tried many de-interlacing methods (even during capturing) and each output file never looked as sharp as the original. I get much better results de-interlacing on playback.

PS- Silly we're still discssing this... ain't it the 21st century already!! I'll be glad when I won't have to fool with interlaced material ever again (including 1080i).

 

[Christ Reynolds]

They didn't. They bought stock and resold it all for much more than the 150mil

i didnt know that. but when it was on the news, i recall that the feel of the story was that apple was in the dumps, and ms was helping to bail them out of some trouble. steve jobs was on stage thanking bill gates i believe. in other words, why would a stock purchase be handled in that fashion?

CJ

 

[Joseph S]

in other words, why would a stock purchase be handled in that fashion?

Apple agreed to drop their lawsuit against MS for pirating Quicktime code for the stock purchase and Office versions for 5 years. The bonus was another Bill Gates Macworld claim that the Mac is the best platform for the Quicktime archives. Jobs was just coming back to Apple at that time and they needed all the fluff for OS X/Rhapsody support to continue.

 

[felix_suwarno]

how does the mac computer do for alias wavefront's maya? can it render faster than the fastest pentium currently available?

 

[Jeff Kleist]

No

 

[Scott H]

No

No what?

No information to give context or credibility to that comment.


Felix,

I know of no benchmarks or professional commentary on the performance of Maya on G5 workstations, so unless Jeff knows something that no else does, that response is meaningless with no context.

Maya on Pentium in what hardware configuration with what OS? What Maya release? I don't have stats on Maya distribution and implementation but a typical high-end Maya setup is likely to be a SGI IRIX workstations powered by MIPS processors (which are in the same processor family as those used in Macs, and are running at comparatively low MHz as such).

That said, I suspect that some Maya incarnations running on more accessible Pentium systems likely can outgun G4 workstations based on a more mature release, and raw horsepower if nothing else. One should note, however, that if that's the case today it holds little to no relevance for the market six months to a year from now. 64-bit processing is the immediate future, and with programs optimized for it tasks like rendering will see new performance levels soon. And in this area Intel is currently screwed.

The current buzz is definitely about Maya on multi-processor Unix workstations (OS X and Linux), with the latest discussions focusing on the new 64-bit procs of course. Maya recently certified an AMD Opteron Boxx Technologies workstation. And to quote Richard Kerris, Director of Maya, "If a studio has custom Unix-based tools, with their own ways of doing things, their own pipeline, they’re going to want to be able to customize a Mac with Mac OS X the same way they’ve done with Maya... They may not want to have to go through the interface... In the past they wouldn’t have been able to do that. Not to the extent that Mac OS X will give them." That's a basic UNIX advantage.

So, I think the answer to your question is complex if it pertains to productivity, maybe more straightforward if it pertains to the horses currently on the track at a specific price point, but looking to the near future I wouldn't be favoring Intel as a logical processing platform for Maya based on currently available information.

 

[felix_suwarno]

lets see. i have maya 4.5.

win xp home.
p4 3.06 gig, fsb 533.
2 gig of pc2700 sdram.
my mobo is asus p4g8x deluxe.
geforce4 ti4600.

how does that compare to the higher end g5?

 

[Joseph S]

lets see. i have maya 4.5.

win xp home.
p4 3.06 gig, fsb 533.
2 gig of pc2700 sdram.
my mobo is asus p4g8x deluxe.
geforce4 ti4600.

how does that compare to the higher end g5?

I don't have a G5 or Maya, so I finished in exactly 0.000000 seconds. I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, the G5s ship in August.

 

[Scott H]

Actually the only two practical considerations, in my opinion, are "what can it do" and "what does it cost"

It's a lot more complex than that for me. Make that an analogy with cars and the complexities are more obvious. There's getting from a to b, and then there's the experience, the performance, the efficiency, the quality, the aesthetics, the cost of use - the benefits of different technologies.

What may be interesting or controversial is a primary reason why I use Macs. It's not about Apple necessarily. It's about processors.

For example, I've never been able to rationalize any offering from Intel as particularly impressive technology. Horsepower, sure. But my Chevelle had lot's of horsepower - day in and day out I'd rather drive an M3. While both camps have adopted the plusses from the other to a degree, I've long been underwhelmed with CISC developments. Conversely, there's a reason why RISC processors own the embedded market. There's a reason why PowerPC processors are in Formula race cars, the Mars Pathfinder rover, military hardware, your PVR's and game consoles. Not to mention being the processor of choice for supercomputer development, with four of the world's five top supercomputers running RISC processors, none running over 1.25MHz. All five running UNIX variants. And, if your looking for another far reaching contribution which Apple made to the technological world, consider the results of the PowerPC consortium made up of Apple, Motorola, and IBM and the history of the Somerset Design Facility in Austin, TX.

Basically, PowerPC processors continue to offer a balance of performance, size, and energy efficiency unmatched in the CISC world. Interestingly, AMD has really excelled, with superior offerings to Intel in my opinion, and developments that are in no small part a result of their partnership with Motorola.

As I said previously, I don't do Windows. In my experience OS X, which is young and improving, just brought a world class OS to my processor platform of choice. So, with Linux distros or OS X as the only viable 64-bit OS options for me, it's just a bonus that Apple produces high quality and well designed hardware to run them on.

 

[Scott H]

lets see. i have maya 4.5.

win xp home.
p4 3.06 gig, fsb 533.
2 gig of pc2700 sdram.
my mobo is asus p4g8x deluxe.
geforce4 ti4600.

how does that compare to the higher end g5?

Honestly, while you have a very good mobo, I don't think that setup compares favorably to a G5 DP at all, and I would expect the introductory 2GHz DP G5 running either OS X or Linux and a current release of Maya to outperform your machine handily. Now, of course, that's my assumption, but I'm very comfortable saying it.

I'm wondering if you are making these inquiries with consideration of choosing new hardware? I ask because you can be directed to resources far more suitable than this particular forum to learn more about Maya on other hardware and platforms and make the best decision for you.

Btw, I run a GeForce4 Ti 4600 card as well, in my G4 1GHz DP workstation. Our cards already seem old.

 

[Scott H]

I agree, a creative project such as a feature film or even a home movie would require the kind of GUI that Final Cut provides.

Just thought that I would mention that most people I know express a preference for Avid DV over Final Cut Pro.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Unfortunately, since Maya is created as a Windows app and then ported, you are not getting a platform specific package, so any speed gain you get is usually eaten up by the fact that the hooks for extra speed just aren't present, or are tossed in in a much later patch. This happens with Adobe programs now as well, which used to be ported to Windows, and now it's the other way round.

Just because the raw speed is there doesn't mean the program will use it

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

That 2GHz G5 costs $3000.

 

[Scott H]

That 2GHz G5 costs $3000.

As much as sticker price is what you pay for a car, yes.

Are you just re-stating this or are you trying to tell us that you think that is expensive? Or inexpensive?

 

[Scott H]

Unfortunately, since Maya is created as a Windows app and then ported, you are not getting a platform specific package, so any speed gain you get is usually eaten up by the fact that the hooks for extra speed just aren't present, or are tossed in in a much later patch

Can you explain? This doesn't make sense to me and seems to contradict Maya, ILM, and other sources who tout the advantages to running Maya Unlimited on Unix workstations. Not to mention the fact that it is run on very expensive SGI IRIX workstations, essentially as an OS (which you can do on the G4 and G5 as well). And Pixar just selected Linux to run their Maya workstations.

And it contradicts my quote above from Richard Kerris. Seems that running Maya on Windows would be a disadvantage to running it on Unix. Quoting him again, "With Mac OS X now, you have the ability to cut right into the core and do something with it."

 

[Jeff Kleist]

The hooks to take advantage of the PowerPC's chip features are not present. AKA the program is optimized for CISC not RISC so the inherent benefits of RISC are not taken advantage of

And you still can't do anything with OS X until they remove the 70,000 roadblocks in your way and kill the cute