How big is mac in the media/music/etc. industry?

[nick9191]

So I know macs are used a lot in the said area's, but I was just wondering if PC's are used at all? And I heard that some of the computers they use have over 100gb of RAM, but the Mac Pro only supports 64? Pixar for example, I'm sure they'd need way more than 64gb of RAM for some of the stuff they do, do they have specially made macs? And other stuff like 3ds max, thats Windows only.

 

[Killyp]

In the music industry, Macs are used pretty much exclusively. I've seen a few smaller studios, and very very very rarely larger studios using PCs, but it's never seemed to work very well IMO.

Macs in the arts/creativity world are far, far more common than PCs.

And RE the RAM thing, it's possible, but that'll be reserved for large 'hidden in a room where they only get used to crunch numbers' jobs.

 

[Lunja]

I use dual core PC's running XP and Premiere Pro at work, however I've been to a couple of high-end post-production facilities in Manchester, and both ran Linux I believe... I've seen old Macs being used to run Avid servers, and laptops being used to take notes on a film set, but otherwise haven't seen them in the industry.

Are there any actual figures on this?

 

[thegoldenmackid]

Linux is starting to be used more in these industries, but Apple still dominates them in large part. But a lot of studies have used specialized machines, as they our safer and faster.

 

[Shannighan]

most studios use macs


also on the pixar note
they probably don't have computers with 64gb of memory. i think what your thinking is a server farm and in their case, the servers would have probably about 8gb of memory, a really fast processor and a top of the line graphics card.
ps a server farm is a large group of servers
in pixars case its a room thats probably around 2000 sqft and has probably a couple thousand rack mounted servers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetwilitekid/85940485/in/photostream/

 

[IlluminatedSage]

Linux is starting to be used more in these industries, but Apple still dominates them in large part. But a lot of studies have used specialized machines, as they our safer and faster.

umm, no way. mac's are expanding their usage from being just creative into more business areas.

linux, maybe on a web server. but not to edit music, mix music or many other creative output processes.

 

[thegoldenmackid]

umm, no way. mac's are expanding their usage from being just creative into more business areas.

linux, maybe on a web server. but not to edit music, mix music or many other creative output processes.

My bad,

More was meaning their presence was increasing, not that they are close to overtaking OSX

 

[Ken345]

Intel Trumps Mac for Rendering

Just so you know, when Pixar was working on The Incredibles they had an Intel based render farm running Linux. The Render Farm consisted of 1,024 Intel Xeon 2.8GHz processors inside eight RackSaver BladeRack supercomputing clusters running Pixar's RenderMan software. The Render Farm featured two terabytes of memory (RAM) and 60 terabytes of disk space. This works out to about 2 Gigs of RAM per machine which is plenty since they only work on rendering one frame at a time. Keep in mind that at 24 frames per second a 90 minute film would have around 129,600 individual frames to be rendered and rendering times for individual frames average about 5 hours but have exceeded 90 hours on occasion. For Cars they used more than three thousand, 64-bit Intel Nocona-based processors and the average render times for some scenes were about 20 hours per frame.

Industrial Light and Magic, Dreamworks, and Sony Pictures’ Imageworks have made the same switch around the same time to Intel based machines. Previously they pretty much all were using SGI or Sun computers and MAC has never been the choice for the top studios for rendering. For those of you who don’t understand rendering, a rendering computer does not need to have a fast video card. All the rendering is done in the CPU and the results are sent out to a storage farm. The work stations the artists and animators use to create the artwork for a film need to have a fast CPU, 2 to 4 Gigs RAM and a fast video card, but it doesn’t have to be a super machine.

 

[Jak3]

Just so you know, when Pixar was working on The Incredibles they had an Intel based render farm running Linux. The Render Farm consisted of 1,024 Intel Xeon 2.8GHz processors inside eight RackSaver BladeRack supercomputing clusters running Pixar's RenderMan software. The Render Farm featured two terabytes of memory (RAM) and 60 terabytes of disk space. This works out to about 2 Gigs of RAM per machine which is plenty since they only work on rendering one frame at a time. Keep in mind that at 24 frames per second a 90 minute film would have around 129,600 individual frames to be rendered and rendering times for individual frames average about 5 hours but have exceeded 90 hours on occasion. For Cars they used more than three thousand, 64-bit Intel Nocona-based processors and the average render times for some scenes were about 20 hours per frame.

Industrial Light and Magic, Dreamworks, and Sony Pictures’ Imageworks have made the same switch around the same time to Intel based machines. Previously they pretty much all were using SGI or Sun computers and MAC has never been the choice for the top studios for rendering. For those of you who don’t understand rendering, a rendering computer does not need to have a fast video card. All the rendering is done in the CPU and the results are sent out to a storage farm. The work stations the artists and animators use to create the artwork for a film need to have a fast CPU, 2 to 4 Gigs RAM and a fast video card, but it doesn’t have to be a super machine.

Wow...that is far beyond anything I would have imagined them needing to be used...but then again, not being an expert in these things I had no idea what to expect!

That's insane!! I'm just thinking about all the gaming possibilities with servers like that....hehehe...