iMovie and iDVD vs Pinnacle Studio
A little while back I decided to pull my PC back into my video production flow since I didn’t have good tools on the Mac to convert video to Real Media or Windows Media formats. My best solution for the few times when I would need that capability was to use Pinnacle Studio 8 to perform the task. I also wanted to ensure I had DVD+R capability and I felt I had better support on my Windows PC than my PowerMac, so I upgraded the PC’s DVD burner from a Pioneer DVR-104 to a Sony DRU-510A drive. The last tweak to prepare the machine for the kind of work I wanted it ready to do was to upgrade the CPU to an AMD AthlonXP 2800+. That’s all done now, so last week I decided to give it a test.
Using my camcorder, I recorded a two hour TV show and dumped its footage into iMovie on my dual 1.25Ghz G4 PowerMac and into Pinnacle Studio 8.5.10 on my Windows XP PC. On the Mac using iMovie 3.03, I edited out the commercials, inserted chapter markers at each cut, exported the footage to iDVD3, and then timed how long it took iDVD to encode and burn the footage to DVD-R. On the PC using Pinnacle Studio, I edited out the commercials (Pinnacle Studio 8 has only basic DVD construction capabilities—it cannot build menus or set chapter markers) and then told it to render and burn the project to DVD+RW. On the Mac, the entire project was rendered and burned in 1 hour and 45 minutes. On the PC, the project took about six hours.
I rendered the footage to an mpeg2 file using Pinnacle Studio, and that was another half day or so gone. I still want to take the Pinnacle Studio rendered file (mpeg) and see how it long it takes to simply burn a DVD using Ulead’s Movie Factory 2. Hopefully, the PC will do much better.
The relative difference between the platforms performing this task is also validated by tests run by Macworld magazine in their December 2003 issue. Even using Athlon64FX CPU’s and Adobe Premiere, the PC’s trailed far behind a PowerMac dual 2.0GHZ G5 in encoding video. So, you can see why if you’re working video, you might want to consider switching to a Mac if you’re not using one already. Not only are the tools at both the consumer and professional level awesome, but the time you’ll save…even with a pokey dual G4…will be your own.
Using my camcorder, I recorded a two hour TV show and dumped its footage into iMovie on my dual 1.25Ghz G4 PowerMac and into Pinnacle Studio 8.5.10 on my Windows XP PC. On the Mac using iMovie 3.03, I edited out the commercials, inserted chapter markers at each cut, exported the footage to iDVD3, and then timed how long it took iDVD to encode and burn the footage to DVD-R. On the PC using Pinnacle Studio, I edited out the commercials (Pinnacle Studio 8 has only basic DVD construction capabilities—it cannot build menus or set chapter markers) and then told it to render and burn the project to DVD+RW. On the Mac, the entire project was rendered and burned in 1 hour and 45 minutes. On the PC, the project took about six hours.
I rendered the footage to an mpeg2 file using Pinnacle Studio, and that was another half day or so gone. I still want to take the Pinnacle Studio rendered file (mpeg) and see how it long it takes to simply burn a DVD using Ulead’s Movie Factory 2. Hopefully, the PC will do much better.
The relative difference between the platforms performing this task is also validated by tests run by Macworld magazine in their December 2003 issue. Even using Athlon64FX CPU’s and Adobe Premiere, the PC’s trailed far behind a PowerMac dual 2.0GHZ G5 in encoding video. So, you can see why if you’re working video, you might want to consider switching to a Mac if you’re not using one already. Not only are the tools at both the consumer and professional level awesome, but the time you’ll save…even with a pokey dual G4…will be your own.
posted by Andy Foster at
9:09 AM
2 Comments:
Andy, I saw your comments on pinnacle vs. mac. I'm a studio 12 user and good at it. everyone tells me to switch to Final cut. help
By
bren, at 9:18 PM
If you're good using whatever application and platform you're using and you don't need to switch, DON'T! There is a learning curve with everything, and that's time lost editing. If you're looking for a change, then that's the time to examine a move. But the only one who knows whether you need to change is you.
By
Andy Foster, at 8:13 PM
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