Nonetheless, post-houses are switching in droves to OS X for compositing.
Why?
The licence for Shake under OS X is HALF the price of the linux/pc licence and the OS X rendering licences are FREE.
I'm sorry, this just isn't true about medium to large post houses (like us - any place that has a need for 10+ licenses). If you're paying full price for a Linux Shake license you're getting ripped off. At RFX in Hollywood Linux licenses are the same price as the OS X license if you buy at least 10. You don't have to buy 10 GUI licenses, either. You can buy any combination of GUI and command-line licenses for Shake. If you're buying 10 licenses or more, chances are you already have a renderfarm of some sort, and statistically it isn't a bunch of Xserves. You aren't going to replace your entire renderfarm with Xserves, because all of your software doesn't run on the Mac. Sure, you could buy Xserves with the money you save and have it be a dedicated Shake render cluster, but then you can only render on the small number of Xserves that you could actually afford with the little money you saved on your OS X render licenses. Linux Shake licenses work for both Linux and OS X, which is not true of the OS X licenses, so you're actually getting more for your money when you purchase Linux Shake licenses. So the fact that render licenses for OS X are free is a moot point.
its the Overall experience of working with a modern operating system and having a piece of hardware that can be tailored to your needs and not just a box that can be found in any garbage bin anywhere.
Fair enough, the whole Apple "thing" is much different than being a Linux user and having a "gray box". I enjoy the G5 from a usability and aesthetic standpoint more than any computer I have used to date. However, our clients aren't going to care how much we love our computers if we just can't get the job done as quickly as someone else and for less money.
You claim holds weak on the account that you needed to have educated yourself before buying any of these machines.
We bought the G5 with the Apple Pro card, giving us a 30-day test drive and the ability to return it with no penalty, so under those circumstances it made much more sense for us to actually get the G5 ourselves and run it through several tests and actually use it in our workflow, instead of relying on benchmarks posted on the web. I'm not bitter about this. I don't feel "duped". I'm merely reporting our analysis of the G5 for our pipeline, and it's not as fast in general purpose use as our Linux and NT machines. I just thought it was going to be faster. I WANTED it to be faster. So maybe I am bitter, in a way, that it isn't.
2-Pass VBR with a high level of motion response. That's why it took so long You pay for MPEG encoding quality with time and lots of it on EITHER platform.
Touche.
The final result is that we are going to reevalute the G5 for our production pipeline in Spring and see how the apps are coming along. Until then, since we want and prefer a Mac for video editing and DVD authoring, we are going to get a much more cost-effective Dual G4 to serve that purpose.
