On Mar 29, 2005, at 11:06 PM, Ian Smith-Heisters wrote:
For the time being I'm going to try to use a G4 laptop. What you say about the optimization is interesting. I was amazed at how easily the video software Isadora plays with full res DV, despite its rather heavy GUI. Isadora's author basically said he did Altivec optimizations, but I didn't think that that would account for the impressive performance. A Mac pecularity would help to explain it. Does anyone have info on this?
I think you will find that GEM on OSX will perform equal to or most likely better than Isadora on the same hardware. I gave the author of Isadora some tips on Quicktime and OpenGL code, but that software still does a lot of RGB processing. Plus GEM only has a hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics rather than QuickDraw.
There's nothing really peculiar about the Mac and video except that a few people (on the order of a few dozen in the world) have sat down and actually done the required work to make things efficient. Given that number, there should be a few hundred doing the same on Windows, but I'll be damned if I've ever seen their output.
What I find amazing is that you can't actually tell people about how poorly all this commercial software performs. Once you show them the alternative then they realize, but usually resort back to the stuff they (over)paid for. I also really enjoy reading press reviews that laud the latest and greatest software that has the same features Pd/GEM had years ago. I guess someone should hire a PD PR person.