Starcraft II on Mac, vs Windows – performance
O Starcraft II, the brainchild of Blizzard Entertainment, why doest thou suffer so under Mac OSX? I tried cajoling, I tried upgrades, and I tried updates, all to no avail.
Mac fanatics and die-hards at Mac oriented forums will castigate me for this, but it is true, Mac OSX is simply not conducive to gaming, even for games written FOR the platform. Case in point Starcraft II. The latest and the best in strategy games from Blizzard. Eagerly awaited, I was amongst the first to rejoice when I found out that it would play natively on OSX – sans Steam, and sans emulators. What I didn’t account for, was the performance. And man does it suffer under OSX.
Here are the specs of my rig:
Core i7 860 @ Stock speeds – 2.8GHz
8 GB of matched DDR3 XMS3 RAM @ 1600 MHz
Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200RPM 1TB HDD
XFX 9800GT 512MB VRAM
Running Snow Leopard 10.6.4 with all updates (including the GFX update & CUDA from nVIDIA)
Not the best of systems, but certainly no slouch. The graphics card is a bit old – about a year, and it is well over the minimum specifications for Mac OSX from Blizzard.
So I purchased a license and fired up the game on my Mac, and to my chagrin, all the default recommendations were at “Medium” or “Low”. I tried overriding the same, and set them to “High” to painfully watch the frame-rate drop to 2-5 FPS. UGLY. I tolerated the game at “Medium” and a couple of “Low”, though the game is still gorgeous at these settings.
I was curious though, how the game would play on a Windows install, so I decided to compare the performance by installing Windows 7 on another HDD on my system (specs above). I went through the motions, updated the game, and booted it up. I stood bewildered: the recommendations for all graphics options were “Ultra”, and the game rarely drops a frame, with everything set to “Ultra”. Boasting of smooth transitions, breathtaking videos, perfect gameplay, Windows version of SC2, just simply blows the Mac version out of reckoning. Why ever would anyone choose to play any game on OSX?
iPhone 4 ordered
The guests are met, the feast is set, mayst hear the merry din!
So spake the ancient Mariner. But here we are, about five hours into the iPhone 4 pre-order mania, and though the process has been painful at best, our orders are in. Though not with Apple.com, we did manage to get the order through with AT&T. They are confirmed and scheduled for delivery on June 24th.
It is a shame though, how woefully unprepared Apple was for the overwhelming demand for the iPhone 4. No sooner had the pre-orders begun at 4:00AM EST, the servers were deluged by the masses and were sent into a tizzy.
I tried for the better part of an hour – having woken up at 4:15AM – but to no avail. Disgusted, I ordered via ATT.com and it went through immediately.
Now begins the wait till June 24th!
Back again, for real.
It has been a while since I last updated this blog. Rest assured I have been working quite hard, updating myself, as well as my gadget collection in the meantime. First things first. Yours truly won an iPad, mid-April, in an awesome giveaway sponsored by a leading gadget site. Needless to say I am thrilled by the booty, and am enjoying my iPad to the hilt. The last month also saw Kindle pass through the family, but, it was a fleeting visit, and I had to return it, for reasons I will expound upon, some other time.
The reason for no updates in a month (or so) is a borked WordPress install. Due to rather complicated htaccess rules on my server, my remote publishing app (Blogo) could not see the XMLRPC file. I tried a number of tricks from my repertoire, but it broke something or the other. I have finally simplified the htaccess file, and all is back to normal. I am using a new theme, and have added a number of new plugins. It may not work per spec, so do let me know if you notice something amiss.
AVCHD Lite vs Motion JPEG – editing ease on the Mac
UPDATE: 11/05/10 – Thanks to your insightful comments, I have written a new article on AVCHD editing on OSX.
With the new camera come a whole slew of editing questions – which format is better, which format lends to easy editing, which format produces the best audio/video… To better educate myself on this topic, I have been trawling the web, finding resources, reviews, experiences of ZS3 users, as well as shooting sample videos using my ZS3 and editing the same on my Mac. It turns out that Motion JPEG is better overall, in terms of quality of audio/video and ease of editing – the two most important benchmarks in my opinion. Intrigued? Read on. Word of caution – this is aimed solely at the hobbyists – people who shoot videos for personal or family leisure. Professionals, well you are just way off base here.
AVCHD Lite is the 720p cousin of the more famed AVCHD format pushed by Sony and Panasonic. Recording at 30fps, at a variety of Mbps (9-17), it is a newer format being implemented by many Point and Shoot cameras. The main pro of shooting in this format is the smaller file size on the card. Everything else touted as a pro, is actually a con. AVCHD uses frame blending (the main reason why the file sizes are smaller) to capture video. It encodes one full frame every X second, the rest being all deltas, which is GREAT for file sizes, but is horrid for editing when converted to another format.
MJPEG or Motion JPEG was the first generation of video compression available to the users back in the day, and arguably is the least efficient way to compress video, but it is on the flip side, the fastest to decode and edit. This is due to the fact that each frame is encoded separately using JPEG compression. It takes the least amount of processing power to encode, edit or playback. It is indeed very wasteful in terms of space consumption. An eight minute sample will take 2GB of space in 720p setting.
Before we start, editing an AVCHD Lite video is NOT natively supported with any of the OS X based video editors. Some have pointed that Final Cut Pro (FCP) can edit the AVCHD files, but I can confirm that it actually converts the MTS video to ProRes 422.
Test Setup
I shot three sequences of videos in low light, out in the snow, and indoors – well lit. All shot in AVCHD Lite format, SuperHigh settings (17Mbps) with Dolby Digital stereo audio, with auto focus in manual settings. I used iMovie ’09 and Final Cut Pro. The former imported the MTS files as AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) and the latter as ProRes 422 (HD) files. The time taken to convert the MTS files to AIC and ProRes 422 were nearly 80% of the length of the clip. For instance, a clip of a minute took 40 seconds to import to iMovie and FCP.
I repeated the same set of videos with MJPEG, auto-focus and manual settings. There was no conversion necessary and all clips were natively imported in iMovie ’09 and FCP.
The movies were then spliced together, and output as an HD MOV file with bitrate of 9100kbps and two pass encoding. I can post the other setup variables as well. The encoding took the same amount of time, since working with AIC and ProRes 422 is the same as working with MJPEG (native).
Initial Reaction
Video
The time taken for video conversion notwithstanding, the MJPEG format seemed to be a clear winner of the two. Not only was the video sharper, featuring more vibrant and true-life colors, and much less noise (especially compared to the AVCHD videos converted to ProRes and AIC), but also, the quality of the output encoded video was clearly much superior. I could already notice artifacts and loss of quality on the ProRes and AIC encoded videos but this got trebled (nearly) in the final product. The end result seemed to be shot with a normal non-HD camera.
Audio
There was no appreciable difference in terms of audio quality. Even though the AVCHD Lite format supports Dolby Digital audio input, after encoding and compression, there is no discernible difference between the AAC encoded audio from AVCHD Lite and the stereo 2-channel audio recorded with MJPEG.
Preliminary Conclusion
Clearly from an editing standpoint, on the Mac, MJPEG is the clear winner. The editing ease and persistence of quality and low level noise in day-to-day videos makes the benefits of AVCHD (eg. longer recording times) moot. Even though with MJPEG videos are limited to 8 minutes per recording, and translate to roughly 2 GB file (per 8 minutes of video) on the SD card, it more than offsets this lack of compression, with the ease and ability to edit and encode the video on one’s tools of choice be it basic trimming with Quicktime, or Timeline based editing on iMovie and FCP.
My recommendation is a resounding yes for MJPEG. Keep a couple of 16GB SDHC Class 6 cards handy though.
Movie Collector 3 Pro is out – please stay away!
Scathing review alert. I just got an email from Collectorz.com proclaiming “benefits and features” available to the Windows users of Movie Collector have now been released for the Mac platform in the latest version of this Movie catalog software. One phrase comes to mind – STAY away.
The biggest reason? They have stripped away all credible sources for Movie information lookup. IMDB, Amazon, you name it, it’s gone. Instead we have their Collectorz.com database which has spotty information at best, and is in no way complete, or even close to it. That added to the confused layout and “new” features make this an upgrade one can well afford to miss.
For me, personally, the omission of IMDB lookup is unforgivable. The company claims that it was done to improve information available to the users, or some random excuse, but the reasons are clear. They want to maximize their profits, by making us users submit movie/film information to their servers. In short, we pay to use our own movie/film metadata.
No thanks, I love the previous versions of this software and will give this version 3.0 pro a miss and two thumbs down. End scathing review.
