As a long time system adminstrator before I got into visual FX (Mac, Windows, and UNIX/Linux) I have touched it all. I do have to say from a graphics perspective you are wrong though.
Thanks for calling me wrong. Appreciate that. But not everything fits into the mac world. I'll get a little more into that in a second.
Shake was dying and needed a full re-write to be competitve. It was at the top of the gammut when Apple killed it and they were toying around with replacing it, but Shake was always a loss product for them. They never made any money off of it. I know a lot of the people from the Santa Monica Pro Apps group, I almost even worked for them. The whole team under Ron Brinkman went to go work for The Foundry to revamp Nuke from a Digital Domain in-house tool that was very hard to sell, DD Software had been failing for years with it, into Nuke 5 which looked and worked anough like Shake that everyone went to it. Nuke had/has a MUCH better color pipeline than Shake ever did and infinitely better 3D compositing support. Plus it is just way faster. Apple still sells Shake, as a studio you can license the source code from them if you so desire. A lot of good optical flow Shake tools (actually taken from Chalice) found their way into Final Cut Pro and Motion. Roto is better in Motion, Shake was terrible for roto. Motion is much faster and has better 3D than Motion. If Motion was node based instead of layers I might actually try it out on a feature for fun.
I'm sorry I don't have your insiders perspective. I went through school learning shake and got pretty dandy with it. I saw it had great potential, especially in the face of some of the other composting programs. It was my preferred program. It was simple and easy to use, dare I say, even more so than nuke, even though nuke proved to be a more robust program. It didn't seem to get much lovin' after Apple took it over though. It just seemed like they let it fizzle out. I switched to Nuke after shake tumbled out of existence.
That's great that you can still license shake's sourcecode from apple. I'm not a visual effects studio though, neither am I developer. I'm just a small time fry looking for a well made composting package. I favored shake for a long time. Now, Nuke is my composting package of choice. There was something I found very intuitive about shake though that I don't quite get as much with other packages.
Maya runs fine on Macs, we are on 2012. It used to be flaky years ago when it first came out but now it is just as good as the Windows version. Also you can deliver FBX to your client Max, Softimage, and Maya (we use all three). Autodesk makes them all and it is pretty easy to move data between them. Photoshop is the same on both, really any of the Adobe products. Once you are in the app it makes no difference what platform you are on, although for professional printing I still prefer Macs.
My experience with Maya on Mac has been tainted. Granted, I haven't used Maya 2012 on mac yet, but in an environment that is predominantly PCs, that's not really an option I get to try out. Besides that fact though, I'm not entirely hip on OS X's interface, especially when it comes into doing production work. I prefer Windows for that. I like their interface, I like how everything fits together, and how I can move around the operating system.
Delivering FBX to a client isn't an option. Throwing stuff back and forth through stuff like FBX isn't the godsend that you might make it out to be. The bulk of the work I do is for video games. Right there, that's one of the biggest reasons you don't find me on a mac for my job and one of the biggest reasons that the mac isn't a suitable platform for the work that I do. That isn't changing anytime soon either.
I use a heavy amount of tools that just aren't available on OS X. I have clients that want files submitted in a specific format, setup a specific way. In a lot of cases I have to use their tools during production. I can't send them FBX files and tell them to deal with it on their end. I think that's an asinine approach to working with a client. Besides that, there's other problems that crop up when dealing with low poly models + normal maps. Sending an FBX file is like sending the model without reviewing it first... I like FBX and I think it's a great way to get files back and forth, but it's not error proof.
Of course not everything we do is video game related. One major project had us handling a lot of rendering using 3D Studio Max and Vray. We had to sync source files with our clients and played a big part in the pipeline. This whole setup, it worked great for us and it was a PC predominant setup.
Do I think it would have been better if we were on mac, using say, Maya? Not at all. Considering most of our talent is 3dsmax based, our client was 3dsmax based, and we were pulling guys in from the 3d visualization field, which were mostly 3dsmax/vray guys. At this point things come down to personal preference though. I really liked working with vray and with 3dsmax, so do a lot of the guys I worked with on said project. There was no advantage to going mac, and in this case, if we had tried, it would have hindered us a lot.
Windows is not as much competition for visual FX as Linux is. Nuke runs best on Linux, followed by OS X, and actually kind of sucks under Windows. A lot of The Foundry's tools run best under Linux. Maya is pretty much the same too. We have been testing Mountain Lion (fixes a lot of crap from Lion) and Windows 8 (horrible horrible horrible). MS finally started to get their act together with Windows 7 and 8 screws it all up.
Can't say I have to many problems with Nuke on Windows. Guess this comes down to the argument about Maya earlier, huh? I'd almost prefer Nuke on Windows or Mac more than Linux, even though it would run best on Linux. But considering the software packages I use, Windows kind of wins out there.
I wont comment to much on Windows8 since it's still an unreleased product. I see a place for it in this world, although I think it would be foolish of Microsoft if they think it'll replace Windows7 in the state it's in now. I wonder if this will become another WinXP/Vista situation?
As far as Graphics cards you can get a Quadro 4000 card so you can runs sims very quickly and Viewport 2.0 in Maya, but honestly the much cheaper ATI cards work just fine since Apple actually writes the drivers and OpenGL support, there is no having to tweak card settings for various applications.
So, since I'm in the video game industry graphics cards actually matter a lot to me. When I looked into a Mac Pro, years ago, the prospects were just dismal. In an industry dominated by Nvidia, ATI doesn't make sense. In an industry that is video games, the Quadro doesn't make sense. Never mind that my PC counterparts come in at a lower cost with more options to better fit my budget and specific needs.
Why we are all Mac at our studio is the pipeline is way more stable than when we were Windows and Linux, the Macs can run OSX, Linux, and Windows on one box natively, and most of the artists prefer working on Macs, even if they come from Windows or Linux houses. We actually save significant money being all Mac based.
We are a PC dominated studio. Haven't had any issues with the plethora of pipelines we have to integrate into for our clients. We wouldn't save money by going with Macintosh computers. The MacPro doesn't quite fit the needs we have and falls short in a couple of key areas. The iMac isn't well suited either. It's all-in-one design prevents us from making the upgrades we sometimes need to make to stay on top of our client's latest and greatest tech.
All our computers are built in house. Our IT guy is awesome. He's one of the best guys I've worked with in IT and he keeps our network purring smoothly. In an environment where we don't know what the next client will bring, he knows how to keep us ahead of the game. Fact of the matter though is, for us, if we used macs, we would be a lot worse off.
You can disagree all you want with that statement, but all we've proved here is that everyone has different needs. Just because mac works great for you and your company's pipeline, doesn't mean it would be a godsend to us. Which was my main point in the first place. I don't feel that Mac dominates or provides any distinct advantage over the PC, neither does the PC necessarily provide any big advantage over the Mac.
I get people a lot that make it out like Mac is god's gift to graphic design. It's just not true. The playing field is pretty even. A lot of it comes down to personal taste.
We have used HP Z series workstations and they would be the only other system, well maybe Boxx, that I would consider if Apple killed the Mac Pro, but they would be a much less flexible replacement, and having to run Windows 8 in the future would be too painful so we would go all Linux based, except for Solidworks and Rhino. It has been proven over and over again Macs have lower TCO than Wintel boxes and way lower than Linux boxes.
I don't think Microsoft will cut support for Windows7 as soon as Windows8 drops. You're assuming things about the future that we have yet to see. Afterall, Winxp ran the length of Vista's existence. Although we have a good idea of where Windows8 is headed, at this point it's still a lot of speculation.Like everything in this world, until it happens, it's hard to predict exactly what the future will bring. When I first heard about Windows7 I wasn't to jazzed about it. Turns out, I loved it.
About the comment of it being proven to have a lower TCO than Wintel boxes. Can't say I've seen that proof or agree with that statement. That's not to say I think a Wintel setup would be cheaper per say.
At home I have a Mac Mini and a PC Workstation. My mac mini is cheaper/better than anything I could find in the wintel side of things, and my PC Workstation was cheaper than the MacPro and has proved over it's lifespan to have been the better choice. When it comes to my workstation, I wouldn't have been able to get the computer I wanted if I had purchased a mac.
So, I guess the world isn't so black and white.
