[coldtea]

>Or you can buy an HP Z820. OSX is pretty much moot for workstation grade machines. The software is all cross platform.

Depends on the software you use. For scientific computing, maybe.

For other tasks a Mac Pro would be used, no. Logic Pro, for example, is not cross platform. Neither is Final Cut Pro. And even if I depend on something like Adobe CC, most multimedia pros prefer to use it on the Mac, because of other benefits of using OS X.

>And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.

Or just a cable and a NAS.

But that's the outside, which is a given that you'd need multiple disks. Ever seen a video pro using just the internal HDs on his Desktop machine? Each project usally takes a whole disk by itself. Nobody uses the internal disks for 4K work.

>And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - last MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.

Sure it was, as were several other units from the 1-2 million sold of the same MBP production run.

Now lets see how many unreliables you'd get from 1-2 million different self-built PCs.

That's the comparison that matters.

[csmuk]

Pro Tools. I've used Logic Pro: it's horridly unreliable. I no longer have a DAW in favour of a Triton as it's all I need personally but my experience with Logic was awful.

Adobe After Effects + Adobe Premiere Pro. The guys I know who use it do it on Windows because OSX is a moving target from hell. You get reliable iSCSI support on Windows and better SAN performance. Plus it's easier to get 10Gbit ethernet cards to your SAN when you have some real PCI express slots available.

They don't use internal disks but some of us do for storing virtual machines in my case.

See my other comments about how my Mac experience has gone. Also look at Apple forums. Nothing but bitching from people about endless stupid problems.

Microsoft get a bad rep for beta testing their products on the customers but if you've used iWork on an iPad recently you'll see what I mean.

Not pleased. People need to look at these problems pragmatically and stop defending something which has descended into the same hell as everything else.

[modfodder]

Post Production Engineer/Technical Director here, built several million dollar facilities in NYC, worked lots of commercials and a few docs here and there (latest one airing on ESPN 30for30).

Very few high end pros use Adobe Premiere Pro as it's all the worst parts of Avid and FCP without the good sh!t, although the tiny one man shops seem to love it.

Any shop that is busy uses tons of firewire drives and big ass SANs, internal drives are mostly for the OS and occasionally often used assets.

Apple isn't perfect, their QC has definitely faltered as they've grown, but in Post it's a shit ton better than Windows, even facilities that aren't using FCP prefer Avid and After Effects/Photoshop for Mac. Windows is bigger in the 3D world, Linux is popular for color grading and compositing software.

Hell is a Post Facility relying on Windows. I used to know a few, never liked working for them, always seemed to cut corners if it saved a few bucks. That's fine if you're cutting web videos or local spots, but not when you're cutting Fortune 500 national brand campaigns.

As far as looking at these problems pragmatically, you can't rely on an OS that's going to crap the bed because the editors spent their down time trolling shady websites.