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OS X Digital Video Benchmarking
By Steve Manke As a loyal Mac user, I have waited with great anticipation for the software I use day-to-day to make its way to OS X. The first milestone, surprisingly enough, came in the form of Microsoft Office for OS X. Since that time, a slew of professional level products have made there way to the new platform. Most recently we have welcomed Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and Golive 6.0. At much the same time that Microsoft was hard at work on Office for X and Adobe was working away at Photoshop, Apple was laboring on its tools for professional business. This business was desktop based video editing those tools where Final Cut Pro 3 and DVD Studio Pro 1.5. I had read for months how porting Final Cut Pro to OS X was no small task. The video editing package had its roots so far into the classic Mac OS core technologies that it would require a great deal of under the hood work to make the conversion. When Apple released Final Cut Pro 3, the product was more that just an OS X version of the 2.0 product, but contained a treasure trove of powerful new features that users had previously only wished for. Following close on the heels of Final Cut's release came DVD Studio Pro 1.5. This product failed to bring a host of new features with when it made its jump to OS X, but everything the product did in OS 9, in now did in X. The version number was bumped from 1.2 to 1.5 on the merits of a few small features that will make workflow slightly more efficient than it previous release. These features may seem minimal at first glance, but if you have worked with previous versions, they will be a welcome sight. Excited that I finally had all of the tools I would need to capture and edit video, design my DVD interface, and burn my DVD's, I finally got down to business. What I noticed right away was that, while the features of the OS 9 release and those of OS X were the same, their performance was not. When I set to work benchmarking their performance I was a little surprised by the results. OS X is still in its infancy. OS 9 is the operating system that it is today only as the result of over a decades worth of work. OS X, on the other hand, has only recently been released and while it is the next generation operating system, it has a lot of maturing to do. With nearly every version release of OS 8 through OS 9.2.2 we have seen some sort of performance increase. This is the type of thing that happens when portions of the OS are optimized. And, just as it has been with OS 9, we can expect it too with OS X. Given what I would expect to see as a lack of optimization in X, I decided to directly compare the OS 9 and OS X versions of Final Cut Pro 3 and DVD Studio Pro 1.5. I started by exporting a 42 minute movie from Final Cut in MPEG2 format. The video was standard DV resolution (720x480) and encoded at 5.5Mbs. The following graph shows the results. Much to my surprise, the test was unbelievably close. In fact, OSX actually edged out OS 9 by 2 seconds! This was a welcome sight for me as I had actually expected OSX to be notably slower. When I watched the video preview while previous videos were encoding, the preview seemed to be running slower on OS X. For the record, Apple claims there will be approximately a 20% performance loss if you keep the preview window open when ripping MPEG2 files out of Final Cut. For this reason, the preview window was never opened while conducting these time tests. Very impressed by the test results for Final Cut Pro, I was about ready to discontinue performance testing. A few days later, I again picked up the testing with DVD Studio Pro. I was hoping to find the same type of test results I saw with Final Cut. That was not the case. Building a DVD interface in DVD Studio Pro is no small task. It requires a working knowledge of Photoshop at the very least. I typically use both Photoshop and Illustrator so finally having OS X native versions of these killer applications first called for a quick solute to the gods of Carbon. Assembling the DVD's user interface is just as efficient in X as it was in 9. In fact, if it weren't for the Aqua interface, the products are identical. In order to really test the speed of one OS against the other I went to where the software does it most processor intensive work. In this case, that meant multiplexing the final DVD. This is typically done just before the project is written to the DVD. The following graph shows how one operating system stacked up against the other. In this test, OS 9 finished just over 7 minutes faster than OS X when multiplexing the same file. From here I moved on to A.PACK 1.5. A.PACK is a program that comes with DVD Studio Pro that allows creates AC3 audio from the AIF format that Final Cut generates when generating MPEG2 video files. The following graph shows the comparison. In this case, once again, OS 9 out performed OS X. This time OS 9 finished over 4 minutes faster than OS X when generating the same AC3 audio file. Based on the results of these tests, while I think there is a lot of room for the optimization of OS X, it seems that there may be just as much room for improvement in some of its Applications. Right now it is a welcome sight to see the OS X native versions of our professional level products released into the market place. I am sure that we will see impressive speed increases from the operating system as well as its applications with each version released. Apple leads in the digital video marketplace. It does this with quality hardware, cutting edge software, and the ease of use we have come to expect from the Macintosh. OS X brings power and stability, but it will take time for the operating system to become as refined as OS 9. Each of these tests was done on at dual processor 800MHz G4 with 1.1GB of RAM. |