Friday Apple Quickies 78
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs' $78 million Apple income tops Fortune magazine's list of CEOs whose companies lagged behind the S&P 500 performance last year. The number 'reflects the value of five million restricted shares Jobs got this year in exchange for 27.5 million underwater options.'"
markomarko writes "Well, despite Charlie White making all us Mac users eat crow over his comparison of render times between a dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac and a Dell 3.06 GHz P4, it seems that that Dave Nagel has given us a reason to take another look at the Mac. His article shows how After Effects render speeds can be doubled with the Mac, by using both CPUs."
Re:After effects (Score:5, Informative)
After Effects is actually what the name implies a program to add Effects after it's been edited (or even while). Final Cut is a linear editor, while After Effects is a visual effects program. The do wastly different things.
Shake on the other hand is not unsimilar to AE, but the price tag on it ($5,000) just prices it out of the competition. That's also why they marked it as a digital composition tool, aimed at filmproducers rather than the average joe just wanting to put some flashy-text in his average home-video.
Re:After effects (Score:3, Informative)
Great post, you're right about the difference between FCP and AE. However, FCP is a non-linear editor.
Frustrating (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, perhaps it's time to send a nicely worded e-mail to Mr. Charlie White. A real benchmark may be impressive, considering a 3.06Ghz Dell system was only 2 times faster than the 1.25Ghz G4 in the best case - a Mhz/Mhz comparison should put it closer to 2.4 times faster.
By doing a little analysis of their data, we get the following table:
Test Name (Mac Time in Seconds/Dell Time in Seconds) = Time Ratio
1. After Effects: Simple Animation (14/7) = 2.0
2. After Effects: Video Composite (85/54) = 1.57
3. After Effects: Data Project (227/125) = 1.82
4. After Effects: Gambler (43/29) = 1.48
5. After Effects: Source Shapes (426/254) = 1.68
6. After Effects: Virtual Set (495/264) = 1.88
1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation (7.1/4.5) = 1.58
2. Photoshop: Filter Effects (62/35.1) = 1.77
3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments (4.5/3.4) = 1.32
Average Time Ratio: 1.68
That means that On Average The Mac, running at 1.25Ghz only took 1.68 times longer to do the same task.
The "How to Double your After Effects Performance" article averages almost exactly a 2x speed increase, taking on average 49.2% of the time on the "long tests". Taking this into account, we can look at the two longest tests, factor in the speed increase, and look at the "final" performance:
5. After Effects: Source Shapes (209.65/254) = 0.83
6. After Effects: Virtual Set (243.61/264) = 0.92
If we go through the same calculation for _all_ of the calculations, we get the Mac BEATING the Dell, taking only 83% of the time that the Dell took. If we take the Photoshop calculations out of the average, it is still at only 86% of the time the Dell took.
Note that these are all calculated values, and as such may vary significantly from actual values, also that I used the improvement on the "long" test for everything, and did not use the improvement on the short test at all - I imagine that the two systems would end up nearly even in a real test.
Apparently all of my tables were lame when I had them formatted, thanks lameness filter!
iMovie 3 (Score:4, Informative)
That being said, iMovie 3 is free and better than any other free editor I have ever seen.
I also should say that, in my limited working with it, I have not had any problems.
For those who are doing more than making home movies, Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express are reasonably priced.
Re:Frustrating (Score:5, Informative)
1) If the mac was only using one processor, then while a dual system is still faster (OS tasks can be sent to the other processor, other apps have more of a pipeline to be scheduled in, &c) it is nowhere near the point of using all of its processors.
2) Two single processors have advantages and disadvantages when compared to one faster processor. Some of the advantages include that it will feel more responsive and will actually be faster when performing lots of smaller or a mixed group of CPU based tasks. When performing a single large tasks (such as what AE tends to do without this hack), each one independently, the dual processor system suffers greatly.
Dual processor machines are just completely different beasts--adding their MHz and comparing them that way is a very poor way of scaling them per MHz against a single processor system, since it is completely and totally nonrepresentative of how the systems work.
Re:So in other words.... (Score:4, Informative)
It is simple enough to check and several of the libraries that are commonly used (as opposed to directly using the altivec commands) do exactly this.
" Adobe could have rewritten some key functions to be altivec optimized. "
The vast majority of designers who use Adobe on the Mac have at least one G4.
". Furthermore, Apple has been adding free/lowcost software that competes with Adobe and other manufacturors."
Last I checked, half of Adobe's profit came from the Macintosh--at the least on certain product lines.
Sorry Charlie, Dave, my fault (Score:4, Informative)
please... It's not a "HACK" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So in other words.... (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually 30% according overall, according to Adobe's latest report. Excluding consumer products like Acrobat and Photoshop Album, the figure may well be over 50% for their professional lines.