This Video May Surprise You
Which is Faster OS X or Windows?
There’s more to the story than simply the speed of the operating system for video editing, rendering and more, but this test did a good job of equalizing the variables to make it a valid test comparing just the operating systems using the same hardware and editing application. Another factor to compare is which system you know the best and especially what system are the freelancers you want to work with using.
Operating system doesn’t necessarily have to be a deal killer as far as who you work with because many of the files created in one system can be easily read and edited in another. This works best if you use the same cross-platform program. If, for instance, you use CS6 (Adobe Cloud) and format a hard drive as eXFat, then both WIN and MAC systems can read it just fine. The drive does, however, have to be formatted by a Windows machine.
There are also drives that are cross platform out of the box such as the Seagate Seven 500GB Hard Drive
But before choosing an operating system and computer hardware, choose the editing software. Final Cut Pro X, for instance, only runs on Mac. Sony Vegas is only for Windows.
Compare carefully the cost of the system and hardware upgrades. Computers become obsolete, no matter which system you choose. To learn more see the article Choosing An Editing System.
This kind of question is at the core of misconceptions about Windows vs Mac operating systems or Mac vs Windows, which ever way you want to phrase it. The guy in the video says he doesn’t know where this kind of question originated. Most of these misconceptions, such as the one posed by the video and in particular that Mac computers cannot be infected are rampant among Mac aficionados and is perpetuated on the general public. (I can send anyone that requests it a list of security breaches and alerts regarding Mac operating systems that proves the point that Macs are not invulnerable.) Most of these myths have developed during the early years of Apple computers as a result of them touting that their computers were more “artistically” focused and easier to use. Nonsense. Apple’s marketing was slick and effective in making it appear that Windows was a crude race car only good for one thing, and that Apple computers were more sophisticated and could do “artistic” things that Windows computers could not. To the point of the video and the question it poses, we have to define what is “better” for video editing? In terms of video editing neither a mac or a PC is categorically “better”, unless we’ve defined what better really is. The video ran a few tests and compared a Windows PC to a Mac but didn’t indicate the specifics of the hardware such as processor speed, amount of RAM memory, speed and type of hard drives, etc, for either the Windows PC or the Mac computer. Hardware has an effect on general speed and how quickly a particular video operation is completed. For example, you can equip a Windows computer, with the right motherboard, to support dual XEON Processors, each with 8 to 16 cores for a total of 32 cores. Similarly, you can equip a Mac Pro with Xeon processors. Even running a video test on a Windows machine with a single Xeon 6 core or 8 core process will likely blow away most other Windows machines if and ONLY if the video editing software can take advantage of multiple processors. Similarly, the same machine might perform remarkably poorly because the editing software will only use one or two cores or may only be designed to use a single core. Assuming you’re running an editor program that recognizes multiple processor cores (and graphics card cores) then it becomes a question of what hardware configuration is it being run on and that generally boils down to processor speed, number of cores, and the amount of memory/memory speed in system. Also, doing video transcoding is very processor and memory intensive so if you’re transcoding a single HD video on a machine with dual cores as opposed to a machine with quad cores or more than 4 cores – regardless of whether it is a Windows or Mac – you’ll likely see faster performance on the machine with more cores. But does that translate and mean the operating system, which ever it is, Windows or Mac, on the machine with more cores that completed faster than the machine with less than 4 cores is a better operating system for video editing? Absolutely not. All it means is that the machine that finished faster had faster hardware.