I would concur. You can record high quality encoded audio on your iPhone, audio design on your iPad with your other samples, and add the mixed soundscape into your film on iMac.
I literally know someone in the media industry who’s whole effortless workflow is what makes him a go-to guy for quick and flexible turnaround for audio mastery for films. He works exclusively on apple devices for this exact reason.
I’m not saying it’s impossible another way, but he really likes the ecosystem.
I would entirely agree with this, having watch BBC, NatGeo, History Channel, and more media people who love GDrives, only use Macs, filmed deliverables on iPhone, want Mac Pros for editing etc.
At this point I’d call it more of a legacy approach - they definitely still control the space, but the workflow is quite easily accomplished on other systems.
I’d also add many (SO MANY) of the pro audio and video systems out there are also running Linux, so even with sa mac-focused workflow, many of the pros out there are using Linux (often without any clue that they are).
So to me its similar to Windows on the desktop - its not necessarily the best option in all cases, but its often the path of least resistance. As a result, pretty much all of them buy into an Apple ecosystem from the get-go.
Doesn’t change the reality of production though when it comes to audio and video though. Final Cut started getting… Problematic in flow some years back, Adobe started to make moves before they, you know, did what Adobe does, and BlackMagic bought DaVinci about 15 years ago actually.
At this point, the only places I know of that are using final cut or premiere in their workflow do so for legacy reasons. Many have shifted to resolve, which works quite beautifully on Linux. In the smaller shop realm for audio, reaper is king (which also works beautifully on Linux).
The “need” for a Mac there is pure fabrication.
For modeling, pros are probably using Houdini, though I’d say blender just behind that. Both of which - again, Linux.
About the only thing I can think of where pros are consistently using something not Linux friendly in the creative world is photo editing (Photoshop of course).
Now I will say that pretty much anything a pro shop will use will work on a Mac, and that is to me the main reason they are still at the top. Plus the weird Apple fanboy/elitism that developed around it.
Apple has some locked down codecs that you can not use without a Mac. Depending on if you can turn away work , you’ll need a Mac for those prorez workflows.
Houdini is mostly used for simulations and procedural modeling. For manual modeling Z-Brush and Maya are still king, especially at the big game studios. Blender is mostly used by indies and students. You couldn’t buy support until recent years so big studios have steered away from using Blender.
There are some animation houses that use their own proprietary software on Linux. Like Pixar has Presto. Though Disney’s own studio uses Maya.
Wasn’t thinking in terms of gaming, but yeah that’s true. Plus you’ll see Rhino and the like especially with architectural renders, I’m painting with a broad brush here.
FWIW, Final Cut has gotten a lot better in the last few years. They have walked back pretty much everything from X at this point. I still have not switched back from Premiere and Resolve though. I don’t trust them.
But like it or not, Macs are industry standard and people expect you to use them. Them’s the breaks.
I still have not switched back from Premiere and Resolve though. I don’t trust them.
That is what a lot of folks are still saying (from my purely anecdotal experience).
I don’t think macs are going away FWIW, just saying that its not at all necessary for the overwhelming majority of workflows I’ve come across. Especially with so many internal corp studios being happy with a blackmagic body in their kit.
I was in art school around then and a good portion of us were pirating windows 98 or windows NT. And we were running pirated Photoshop and pirated Illustrator on it…a lot of us pirated everything.
No one in art school cares at all about computers you use. At least that was true when I went. They would just get real confused when the buttons were different
But it would be a stretch to say that support is the result of current macOS. The Mac has always been popular with creatives, since way before it was UNIX-based.
I’d argue the popularity with creatives is largely from being marketed to creatives since its earliest days.
I don’t think it’s just marketing, the early Macs got a lot of performance out of their graphics routines, and then Mac OS had tight integrations with postscript which made it good for graphical design.
I think these days yes a powerful graphics card will get you very far, but overall macOS feels much less hostile to me than windows. I think Linux is kind of a mess for graphics stuff, there are a few good open source tools, but the major design suites aren’t well supported.
but overall macOS feels much less hostile to me than windows.
Sure, but this is a purely subjective measure. Same with Linux.
And the fact is, the Mac has been consistently marketed to creatives since its inception. It is, at the very least, difficult to see how it would have fared without that approach.
The lack of non proprietary art tools is a big reason I didn’t go into digital art / graphic design. GIMP just cannot keep pace and I did not want to shell out $500 a year or more in subscriptions just to be able to do a job with no security that pays pennies.
Its also a big part of why I’m “pro” AI art (I’m actually pretty neutral, I’m not liking that they’re burning down the Amazon to make shitty ads with). I think it’s gonna be a decent tool for artists to automate repetitive tasks like cutting backgrounds out of photos for collages, upscaling / enlarging images, adding background textures to landscapes, touching up acne in portraits, and animating repetitive shots like walking. but right now we’re unethically sourcing the training data and shoving it into anything and everything with 0 regard for how many resources it’s costing to make content that’s shitty anyway.
The other half of my argument “in favor” is that the only thing worse than AI existing is AI only existing in the hands of the bourgeoisie and is plebs not even knowing how it works in addition to them using it to gain an unfair advantage over us. I think we have an opportunity to make sure that the open source tools are decent to begin with instead of letting them have complete control over even more of the creative world.
Designer here. This is true, but they are also have a seriously good trackpad and good energy use (finally). They work well for design, video and audio, but they are also really nice to operate. It’s a bit like driving a very nice car (which I can’t afford, but have borrowed from a client). Once you get accustomed to it, every other computer—especially laptops—feel like 1980s GM econoboxes.
as someone who switched from a macbook to a g14 with fedora, the trackpad experience is actually surprisingly close on some laptops, I had few issues moving over.
energy efficiency is more something you notice to be better on macs (in most cases) like you pointed out.
for me efficiency is not bad, but macs are clearly ahead
And a lot of rich people are art dilletants or are able to afford putting their children through expensive art programs with no need to have it pay off. And of course they all buy the “top of the line” (which of course is obviously the most expensive right?) brands.
Don’t get me wrong, Apple plays into it so the cycle is recursive.
Everything that is professionally rendered is offloaded to purpose built hardware. This part of the workflow would not be any different no matter what the creative is using for their workstation.
Sure, in a big 3d animation team, I’m basically a solo animator working with the tools I have immediately on hand. If I had a 5000 GPU Render Farm, then yeah, a Mac as a work station might work, but I’d still rather have a beefier customizable workstation than a Mac.
As someone in the video and audio production sphere professionally, you are 100% correct. I have a Mac desktop that I use for any work I do, but I run Mint on a notebook for my own purposes.
I would argue macOS owns the creative space (Design, Art and Music)
I would concur. You can record high quality encoded audio on your iPhone, audio design on your iPad with your other samples, and add the mixed soundscape into your film on iMac.
I literally know someone in the media industry who’s whole effortless workflow is what makes him a go-to guy for quick and flexible turnaround for audio mastery for films. He works exclusively on apple devices for this exact reason.
I’m not saying it’s impossible another way, but he really likes the ecosystem.
I would entirely agree with this, having watch BBC, NatGeo, History Channel, and more media people who love GDrives, only use Macs, filmed deliverables on iPhone, want Mac Pros for editing etc.
At this point I’d call it more of a legacy approach - they definitely still control the space, but the workflow is quite easily accomplished on other systems.
I’d also add many (SO MANY) of the pro audio and video systems out there are also running Linux, so even with sa mac-focused workflow, many of the pros out there are using Linux (often without any clue that they are).
So to me its similar to Windows on the desktop - its not necessarily the best option in all cases, but its often the path of least resistance. As a result, pretty much all of them buy into an Apple ecosystem from the get-go.
15 years ago you would get laughed out of art school if you didn’t have a Mac. At least that’s the gist I get from my artistic friends.
Probably still the same today.
Doesn’t change the reality of production though when it comes to audio and video though. Final Cut started getting… Problematic in flow some years back, Adobe started to make moves before they, you know, did what Adobe does, and BlackMagic bought DaVinci about 15 years ago actually.
At this point, the only places I know of that are using final cut or premiere in their workflow do so for legacy reasons. Many have shifted to resolve, which works quite beautifully on Linux. In the smaller shop realm for audio, reaper is king (which also works beautifully on Linux).
The “need” for a Mac there is pure fabrication.
For modeling, pros are probably using Houdini, though I’d say blender just behind that. Both of which - again, Linux.
About the only thing I can think of where pros are consistently using something not Linux friendly in the creative world is photo editing (Photoshop of course).
Now I will say that pretty much anything a pro shop will use will work on a Mac, and that is to me the main reason they are still at the top. Plus the weird Apple fanboy/elitism that developed around it.
Apple has some locked down codecs that you can not use without a Mac. Depending on if you can turn away work , you’ll need a Mac for those prorez workflows.
Houdini is mostly used for simulations and procedural modeling. For manual modeling Z-Brush and Maya are still king, especially at the big game studios. Blender is mostly used by indies and students. You couldn’t buy support until recent years so big studios have steered away from using Blender.
There are some animation houses that use their own proprietary software on Linux. Like Pixar has Presto. Though Disney’s own studio uses Maya.
Wasn’t thinking in terms of gaming, but yeah that’s true. Plus you’ll see Rhino and the like especially with architectural renders, I’m painting with a broad brush here.
FWIW, Final Cut has gotten a lot better in the last few years. They have walked back pretty much everything from X at this point. I still have not switched back from Premiere and Resolve though. I don’t trust them.
But like it or not, Macs are industry standard and people expect you to use them. Them’s the breaks.
That is what a lot of folks are still saying (from my purely anecdotal experience).
I don’t think macs are going away FWIW, just saying that its not at all necessary for the overwhelming majority of workflows I’ve come across. Especially with so many internal corp studios being happy with a blackmagic body in their kit.
That was partially because older PCs had rectangular pixels vs a Mac’s square pixels. Square pixels translated better to other mediums.
Edit: I just realized that was more like 25 years ago. God I’m old.
I was in art school around then and a good portion of us were pirating windows 98 or windows NT. And we were running pirated Photoshop and pirated Illustrator on it…a lot of us pirated everything.
Pirating Windows 98/NT in 2010? Seems a little late for that, no?
I think you mean 25-26 years ago.
In 2009 art workflows were absolutely dominated by Apple devices and when the memes about pretentious mac users in cafes started popping up.
No one in art school cares at all about computers you use. At least that was true when I went. They would just get real confused when the buttons were different
That’s contrary to what my people have said.
So you’re saying only cheap profit driven productions use Mac?
Only partially true. VFX for example uses Linux quite a bit, and a lot of web devs use Linux too, or even Windows with WSL.
But it would be a stretch to say that support is the result of current macOS. The Mac has always been popular with creatives, since way before it was UNIX-based.
I’d argue the popularity with creatives is largely from being marketed to creatives since its earliest days.
For sure the commenter was just asking what space MacOS owns
I don’t think it’s just marketing, the early Macs got a lot of performance out of their graphics routines, and then Mac OS had tight integrations with postscript which made it good for graphical design.
I think these days yes a powerful graphics card will get you very far, but overall macOS feels much less hostile to me than windows. I think Linux is kind of a mess for graphics stuff, there are a few good open source tools, but the major design suites aren’t well supported.
Ecosystem capture and youth indoctrination into the walled garden. Mac is great as long as you never push on Tim Cook’s boundaries.
Sure, but this is a purely subjective measure. Same with Linux.
And the fact is, the Mac has been consistently marketed to creatives since its inception. It is, at the very least, difficult to see how it would have fared without that approach.
The lack of non proprietary art tools is a big reason I didn’t go into digital art / graphic design. GIMP just cannot keep pace and I did not want to shell out $500 a year or more in subscriptions just to be able to do a job with no security that pays pennies.
Its also a big part of why I’m “pro” AI art (I’m actually pretty neutral, I’m not liking that they’re burning down the Amazon to make shitty ads with). I think it’s gonna be a decent tool for artists to automate repetitive tasks like cutting backgrounds out of photos for collages, upscaling / enlarging images, adding background textures to landscapes, touching up acne in portraits, and animating repetitive shots like walking. but right now we’re unethically sourcing the training data and shoving it into anything and everything with 0 regard for how many resources it’s costing to make content that’s shitty anyway.
The other half of my argument “in favor” is that the only thing worse than AI existing is AI only existing in the hands of the bourgeoisie and is plebs not even knowing how it works in addition to them using it to gain an unfair advantage over us. I think we have an opportunity to make sure that the open source tools are decent to begin with instead of letting them have complete control over even more of the creative world.
AI art won’t do shit except boot people out of jobs that would require a real artist but won’t have too many people complaining if it is obvious goo.
As for open-source art tools, krita is fantastic and gets used by a lot of professionals.
Designer here. This is true, but they are also have a seriously good trackpad and good energy use (finally). They work well for design, video and audio, but they are also really nice to operate. It’s a bit like driving a very nice car (which I can’t afford, but have borrowed from a client). Once you get accustomed to it, every other computer—especially laptops—feel like 1980s GM econoboxes.
as someone who switched from a macbook to a g14 with fedora, the trackpad experience is actually surprisingly close on some laptops, I had few issues moving over.
energy efficiency is more something you notice to be better on macs (in most cases) like you pointed out.
for me efficiency is not bad, but macs are clearly ahead
MacOS owns the rich space*
And a lot of rich people are art dilletants or are able to afford putting their children through expensive art programs with no need to have it pay off. And of course they all buy the “top of the line” (which of course is obviously the most expensive right?) brands.
Don’t get me wrong, Apple plays into it so the cycle is recursive.
The problem is that the hardware is fairly underpowered to effectively use for any kind of demanding visuals.
Like if I were rendering out a big 3d scene, I’d want something with a fairly beefy GPU to crunch through the renders relatively quickly.
Everything that is professionally rendered is offloaded to purpose built hardware. This part of the workflow would not be any different no matter what the creative is using for their workstation.
Sure, in a big 3d animation team, I’m basically a solo animator working with the tools I have immediately on hand. If I had a 5000 GPU Render Farm, then yeah, a Mac as a work station might work, but I’d still rather have a beefier customizable workstation than a Mac.
No, you wouldn’t.
Writing and game development are creative too
From the mid to late 1990s, definitely. Not so convinced after that.
MacOS vs Windows 11 is an easy choice. Recall alone makes Windows 11 radioactive.
As someone in the video and audio production sphere professionally, you are 100% correct. I have a Mac desktop that I use for any work I do, but I run Mint on a notebook for my own purposes.