It's after lunch, and we are getting talks from various corporate sponsors and users. For instance, we heard from Framestore, the firm that did all the computer simulations and animations for the movie Gravity. It took four years to produce all the effects, which consume about 80% of the movie.
Now were are hearing from four firms who switched from Apple to Dell workstations. The primary reason, I would say, is because Apple abandoned the workstation market.
Reasons given by panelists:
- bang for buck
- power on a mobile computer
- Apple gave up on pros with Final Cut X, which did not align with the reality of professionals; for example, X did not support output to tapes, which the industry still uses.
- Adobe Premier Pro is better than Final Cut
- Apple computers cannot be customized for the needs of media houses
- all of Adobe software works on Macs and PCs, so if you are used to running them on Macs, then it is easy to switch to PCs
- Dell workstations are significantly faster than currently available Apple computers (laptops)
- Apple's Final Cut pro needs to convert files to its own format; Adobe's Premier works with native files
- What used to take ten hours now takes 20 minutes. This means more movies can be processed in a day
- Apple's laptops are not powerful enough, and cannot be customized sufficiently for video production
- Apple computers don't have touch screens, and are not as high resolution as Dell's laptops and monitors
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