Computer Goodness

Shanti418 · Post by **Shanti418** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 5:01 am

Just upgraded from a horribly old iMac to a fancy dancy Macbook Pro. I got it for only $1300 through a friend who works at an Apple Store.

Although don't consider me part of the Mac cult. I just got that iMac because it too was cheap, but prior to that, I'd only used PCs. This time, I'm planning on making an independant film, so I needed FinalCut Pro.

So what does everyone else have/use? I'm sure some of you *raises eyebrows at Denyer* have some seriously sick stuff.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 9:34 am

I use a PC with dual CPU [composite word including 'f*ck'] loads of Ram fast Hard drives and a fat GPU.

Is it performs well in 3D it has enough grunt to do anything else.
Final Cut Pro is great but some may argue that AVID has the edge now.
To be honest if you have ever done video editing, unless your working in the industry I wouldnt worry to much, FCP,Avid,Vegas, even P Pro are all good enough.
The PC or mac u connect to is almost un-important nowadays - both platforms are totaly stable and to get the most from the software you require special hardware. by the time u add that hardware the OS isnt important.

The main reason I use a PC is that I have access to all the software unlike any other platform and instant support. PCs are faster now aswell thanks to intel

My PC never crashs and never generally annoys me .

Predabot · Post by **Predabot** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 11:05 am

I use a PC with Gates lousy OS because I'm addicted to gaming...

Or well, used to be. Now I'm more addicted to the web and to Photoshop, wich you can really get on other plattforms.

Legion · Post by **Legion** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 12:42 pm

Nothing too fancy for me, pretty midrange (because of budget!).
AMD64 3800, 1gig ram, 400Gb HD, 256Mb FX6600, 17" CRT, 2 speakers, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse, DVD burner, DVD-ROM, firewire, usb2, analogue video capture, video output... yadda yadda.

Been (trying) to get into video editting myself with the likes of Premiere, Virtualdub etc, nothing fancy (mainly trying to digitize old home movies), but getting to grips with it slowly...

Actually, without diverting the thread too much, anyone got any ideas why i burn avi/divx to dvd the transcoding process introduces a second or two audio delay? it's pissing me off!!

Post by **Kaylee** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 12:52 pm

Mines Athlonx64 X2 Dualcore (2x 2.2GHz), 2Gig RAM, 400GB disk, nVidia GeForce 7800GTX graphics card, all watercooled and with teh l33t haxx0rzzz UV lights. Running the ever loveable Gentoo linux, which means I basically downloaded, tweaked and compiled my own custom operating system :3 runs like greased lightning because of it, and very heavily hardened against attacks (I fear the Internet) and my documents all encrypted. Also running World of Warcraft

Post by **Denyer** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 2:28 pm

Shanti418 wrote: I'm sure some of you *raises eyebrows at Denyer* have some seriously sick stuff.

Sub-GHz personally (though other components are two or three years more recent than you'd expect to match that) -- it's not like a system has to work hard to run a text editor, even one written in Java. As long as it's got over half a gig of RAM, writes DVDs, isn't running XP and has a decently sharp screen / ergonomic peripherals, I'm not fussy... the next build will undoubtedly be for small form factor and quietness rather than beefing up.

Bear in mind my background is coding for hardware that didn't use harddrives and I don't use PCs to play games, so I tend to find specs from about a year ago obscene. There comes a point at which the available processing power and resources just encourage sloppy programming. My software install is just a fraction over two gig, and about half of that is Windows...

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 6:30 pm

Just for argument sake - i use even more software now im at Uni and im yet to find an OS outside of XP that can run it all?

I still dont ever crash, never get hacked, so im yet to be convinced of any other kind of OS.

I have it all - thanks bill.

Pissin' Poonani · Post by **Pissin' Poonani** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 7:11 pm

I'm running a 5 year old Compaq Presario 1200 laptop with:

About 31k of memory.

A duff battery.

A habit of occassionally refusing to display anything on the screen for days at at a time.

A mysterious thumb-print style mark on the screen that won't come off.

Assorted food-stuff crumbs inside the case.

Porn.

A read only CD drive, so I can't even save stuff* to disc to free up some memory.

AOL installed, meaning that if my computer were a person, it would be schizophrenic and would fire backwards and forwards between behaving like Charles Manson on a bad acid trip, and Charles Manson coming down off of a bad acid trip ,with a knife, in a room full of estate agents.

I'm loving the techmernology.

*Porn, obviously.

Legion · Post by **Legion** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 7:17 pm

Karl Lynch wrote:UV lights

oh yeah, forgot about my cool inner lights... now if only i could figure out how to connect up the front control panel of this bastard case to the mobo, it'll look even more funky with it's LCD screen and shnitz...

Impactor returns 2.0 wrote: I still dont ever crash, never get hacked, so im yet to be convinced of any other kind of OS.

I have it all - thanks bill.

Hmmm, although it does pain me to admit it, i'm with the Impmeister on this. XP has never caused me any grief (apart from when my new mobo's SATA drivers caused it to crash every 45 secs - but that might be Nvidia's fault rather than M$'s for a change). Mind you, i didn't upgrade until SP2 came out so most of it's bugs had been worked out by then...

Post by **Kaylee** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 8:49 pm

XP tends to irritate me due to its heavy insulation in keeping me away from the actual workings of the OS- I'm very heavily into customisation on quite a low level and tend to find the various barriers and idiot-proof walkthroughs just time consuming.

I also use my system a huge amount for experimentation- new interfaces (like Project Looking Glass, a fully 3D desktop written in Java), browsers, window managers, programming tools and a billion and one other things- so again the customisability is important to me, especially on a system where chopping and changing things round doesn't slow the system up (yeah you can install Firefox on XP for example but it will never go as fast or be as pervasive as IE).

My system's very chameleonic, being used for very different and often extreme purposes depending on what I happen to need at that point in time, but I've never found an application or function which can't be duplicated. I can play World of Warcraft (the only game I care about on the PC tbh), play all my music and videos, burn DVDs etc. Naturally being Linux it's lacking in the idiot-proof walkthroughs and wizards but I find them inconvenient and clumsy most of the time anyway. In short I'm used to the power over the system being able to directly edit configuration and Make files gives me that I miss it when it's not there.

Furthermore I can put in place many tools to help convince me my system is reasonably secure- a firewall with accurate and concise log keeping, tripwire to monitor system file changes, port scan detection utilities, antivirus utilities and the ability to shut down every open port on my system, the ability to choose my encryption level and algorithm for passwords and files etc. It's not so much Windows can't do these things because obviously it can, it's the extent to which I as a programmer can get inside these things and tweak and analyse them to my satisfaction rather than clicking a menu and just putting it on faith that these things work.

That said I've always maintained it's possible to put together an idiot-proof Linux, but it depends how far the person using it is going to just accept it as-is or want to start changing things, because when you start wanting to change things it's very different to and not as simple as working with MS solutions. That may change with the $100 laptop project however as I understand one of it's goals is a simple to use interface.

Of course the other trick is, rightly or wrongly, the Windows interface is the de-facto standard most users are comfortable with and expect so anything else will always be starting from a loss (I for example have never got on with OSX).

Bouncelot · Post by **Bouncelot** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 9:36 pm

Hardware-wise, I have a several year old 1.8 GHz Celeron. Software-wise, I run the current stable distribution of Debian GNU/Linux, though I'll eventually get round to using the testing version. Not sure if that puts me in the PC camp or the Whatever camp.

Post by **Denyer** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 9:57 pm

Impactor returns 2.0 wrote:im yet to find an OS outside of XP that can run it all?

With few exceptions, anything requiring NT5.1 rather than NT5 is the result of a glans/tonsils relationship or incompetence on the part of the developers.

Though why you're trying to compare setups is a bit beyond me... I don't run a large assortment of illicit bleeding edge commercial media production software with complex interdependencies, and there's likely to be even less keeping me on Windows in a few years' time.

Legion wrote:anyone got any ideas why i burn avi/divx to dvd the transcoding process introduces a second or two audio delay?

Is the delay from the beginning or increasing towards the end? Whole range of possible causes, including the basic one of DivX in AVI containers being a huge hack.

Post by **Kaylee** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 10:22 pm

Denyer wrote:
Legion wrote:anyone got any ideas why i burn avi/divx to dvd the transcoding process introduces a second or two audio delay?
Is the delay from the beginning or increasing towards the end? Whole range of possible causes, including the basic one of DivX in AVI containers being a huge hack.

Yar, burning DVDs is just a damn headache. Our Performing Arts society like to make all performances available to members on DVD, and getting them burnt is horrifically hit-and-miss. Sound distortion, buzzing, jarring sound/vision, sound delay it's all there and with very little rhyme or reason to it. The only thing to do seems to be to try it again and eventually it'll work although it normally takes at least 2 attempts. Sawwy

Bouncelot wrote:Hardware-wise, I have a several year old 1.8 GHz Celeron. Software-wise, I run the current stable distribution of Debian GNU/Linux, though I'll eventually get round to using the testing version. Not sure if that puts me in the PC camp or the Whatever camp.

Ah Debian, I used to use that

Always speak highly of it, it doesn't suffer from half the flaws Fedora {shudder} does- mainly to do with trying to keep everything bleeding-edge which usually involves half the bundled applications not working/interoperating. Debian is very solid, although it's out-of-date nature always irked me (particularly some of the hardware support lacking in the 2.4 kernel).

sprunkner · Post by **sprunkner** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 11:42 pm

Chrissy is a designer, so we use Macs (though it's a bit of a holdover for her from the days when Macs were leagues ahead in design; they're pretty much equal now).

I have the smallest, cheapest Mac laptop, mainly for writing. I had a Powerbook that committed suicide after being subjected to the intense electrical currents of Europe.

Legion · Post by **Legion** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 11:34 am

Karl Lynch wrote:
Denyer wrote:
Legion wrote:anyone got any ideas why i burn avi/divx to dvd the transcoding process introduces a second or two audio delay?
Is the delay from the beginning or increasing towards the end? Whole range of possible causes, including the basic one of DivX in AVI containers being a huge hack.
Yar, burning DVDs is just a damn headache. Our Performing Arts society like to make all performances available to members on DVD, and getting them burnt is horrifically hit-and-miss. Sound distortion, buzzing, jarring sound/vision, sound delay it's all there and with very little rhyme or reason to it. The only thing to do seems to be to try it again and eventually it'll work although it normally takes at least 2 attempts. Sawwy

*me sobs*

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 11:38 am

encoding of video and sound can be a very hit and miss thing with some software - what are you using Karl?

Encoders for DVDs are supposedly very complex things, im lucky I normally just burn straight out of Adobe Prem Pro now and make copys of that disc via Nero which does a very good job aswell.

Post by **Kaylee** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 7:41 pm

It's Adobe Premiere on XP SP2. Probably due to the specs of the laptop (2.8+ GHz Intel proc but only 512MByte ram) not helping.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 10:36 am

strange im using Adobe Premier Pro and its very stable when it comes to burning DVD's

Ive come to the conclusion that my PC is somehow different to all other windows based PC in that it actually works 100% at everything it does...

Legion · Post by **Legion** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 10:40 am

i'm thinking my "extended-evaluation" copy of nero digital might be to blame for my woes...

but if using premiere, can you create menus and stuff?

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 1:03 pm

To create your DVD menus you export your premm file (comlete with pre-placed bookmarks) into adobe Encore - which also allows you to smart drop in Photoshop and illustrator files.

the interface navigation code is created by dragging and dropping commands onto your PS parts.

I think PS with premm and encore is a great lil setup as its all so intergrated its very easy to use.

Post by **Kaylee** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 6:06 pm

I think the DVD faults we get in PA are the physical hardware- since AP deals with vast files there is probably some massive performance and quality degredation in having to swap 5 gigabyte (plus) files in and out of RAM for burning. The system probably needs more RAM to work better

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 7:42 pm

Karl Lynch wrote:I think the DVD faults we get in PA are the physical hardware- since AP deals with vast files there is probably some massive performance and quality degredation in having to swap 5 gigabyte (plus) files in and out of RAM for burning. The system probably needs more RAM to work better

Might it be an idea to work with images, in that case?

I found that when trying to burn to DVD on my old 500MHz machine (yes, ancient tech nowadays, but I still use my 40MHz 386

), I had to burn to image then do image to disc. Using HD as an interim is bound to improve things, as its much closer to chip in terms of access times.

Also, not trying to burn as fast as possible helps. Not that anyone really needed that saying.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 9:13 pm

I can relate to your problem Karl, im making a video at the moment that has 40GB of video attached to the save file - but I do have 2GB of ram to play with...

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Computer Goodness

What do YOU use?