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Tim Robinson is the Corporate Video Editor for Pride Mobility Products Corp.
Makers of the Jazzy Powerchair, Scooters, Lift Chairs and other mobility products!





At our company we’ve been strictly a PC world. When the new head of IT asked us, “Why don’t you guys run macs? My daughter’s graphic design school runs nothing but macs!” We had to explain his predecessor strictly prohibited using macs because his IT staff could not “support” them. Before he even finished the sentence “What if we bought you guys…” we excitedly shouted ‘YES!’

The transition was not easy for both IT and later us. The company purchased a new Mac Pro quad core with 16 gigs of ram. The first mac this international company of over a 1,000 employees actually owned. They “tested” it for months, expecting some sort of network issues and of course nothing happened. After the corporate red tape lifted, the machine was delivered.





My co-worker and I have three machines in our office. Until now they were all PC’s. One for each of us to edit. The third dedicated to using & abusing the Bravo XR disc copier. When we needed an upgrade for our oldest PC, the mac was a welcome visitor! After it arrived, we of course took a few hours to brag and sing “WE HAVE A MAC” around the workplace. But soon after we started using it, we realized we had opened a small can of workflow worms!





A little background before I get into our issues...

We use Adobe Production suite. When the new mac came in we upgraded all the machines to CS4.

Now these problems are a mix of mac and CS4 problems for us, some are interchangeable depending on your platform. My background is strictly on the PC. My co-worker uses a Mac at home. However neither us or IT had any clue in how to setup our Mac to fit into our "windows network." We hope this blog will help any video editor who plans to run both a PC and a MAC together on their network in harmony!


Problem #1 – Mac OS 10.5 Finder Won’t Search Network Drives!

While the Internet will give you instructions to turn on indexing in Mac OS’s finder, it WON’T WORK in Leopard. For now we’re stuck using a slow search program (a free download of Easy Find works for us) instead a faster one that indexes. Even Google desktop obeys apple finder’s command to NOT index networked drives! Often we turn to the PC and use Windows Search to find the file we need faster! (1 Point for Windows!) Hopefully Snow Leopard will fix this glaring oversight.

Problem #2 – Connecting Network Drives & Printers

Apple saves passwords in what it calls “keychains”. We work on a windows based network so when we need to get "verified" the network needs to know not only our username, but what "domain" were on. So when typing in a username & password combo, the username should read " domainnameusername ". No problem, except when it came to networked printers. The Mac tried to use the computers personal login information. Just “Jeff Grant” instead of “ domainnamejgrant ” to gain access to the printers. So we had manually update the mac's stored keychains for the printer access.

On a mac keychains are stored in /Library/Keychains/
Clicking on "system.keychain" openes "Keychain Access" that allows you to edit and add keychains.





Connecting networked drives is easy. Follow these steps for Mac OS X 10.1 or later.

1. Click the Finder icon in the Dock.
2. Choose Connect to Server from the Go menu.



3. In the address field of the Connect to Server dialog, type the URL using this syntax: smb://ServerName/ShareName/
The server address starts as “SMB” for us because SMB is the native sharing protocol for Windows. Some networks may be different for you!

4. Click Connect.

You will be prompted for the workgroup, user name, and password. In addition to connecting to actual Microsoft Windows computers, you may also use the Connect to Server dialog to connect to a Macintosh that is offering Windows File Sharing.

If you don’t know your “computer name” on the windows network you can type in the IP address.
Now when you restart a mac, your networked drives are disconnected. To connect them at start up follow these VERY simple steps.

1. Mount the drive (like above)
2. Open "Accounts" in system preferences



3. Drag the mounted drive's icon from the desktop to the login items.
When you restart your drives will reconnect.

We still can’t get firefox to save our network password. It keeps reverting the to "/" forward slash on our domainnameusername login with BACK slash! Luckily for us it’s only once a day we have to make this change. This is because...

Problem #3 – Mac file structure is not the same as the PC file structure

WELL DUH! But when your project is looking for files in many nested folders the difference of a directional slash matters! (Geek Cheat Sheet: PC's backwards, MAC's fowards! Wink-wink-nudge-nudge know what I mean?) In our job we share a lot of files across the network. Logos and layouts that change almost daily with small tweaks (“TODAY THE BRAND COLOR IS RED!”) That goes for video files as well. We have two massive networked hard drives (windows native) that we share for all our animations and stock video footage. Since these files get used multiple times in multiple projects, its unpractical to make copies of the files we need and place them into one folder.

So when linking files in premiere or after effects, it looks at the directory trees as “EVERYTHING’S MISSING” when it’s a windows CS4 saved project being opened on the mac in CS4.

Now me and my co-worker Jeff often work independently on projects, unless it's major enough for us to divide the work. But when we need to open or import each other's projects, we are stuck doing one of two things...

1. Wasting time collecting the project files, videos (high quality, uncut, long HD quality ones), graphics and animations

OR

2. PAINFULLY linking one file at a time. Which only brings me back to problem #1!

Problem #4 – "Uncompressed AVI” via Adobe CS suite PC is NOT Uncompressed!

So when you import “Uncompressed AVI” into Premiere on the Mac, it will tell you the codec is not found! It actually has “RV24 RGB compression” (or WRAW). While the simple answer is to just export the files to .MOV files or convert them, the fact is after effects on PC sets itself to default render que export in “Uncompressed AVI” and we followed suit, exporting HUNDREDS of animations in this format! Also when you “CONVERT” it then you’re stuck re-linking files! Strangely enough, while premiere on the mac won’t open it, after effects on the mac will! So you can drag all your footage into an untitled project, drag them all into the render que and export them as mov files. And speaking of things that don’t work right…

Problem #5 - The lack of updates for CS4

We can all rant and rave how Adobe releases “NEW & IMPROVED” products for boatloads of $$$$ that tend to not work at all for us who have, you know, JOBS to do with this software (“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOUR SOFTWARE WON’T LET YOU RENDER THE DVD??? WE NEED IT NOW!”)
Many quirks were not worked out (like media encoder dealing with temp files on the mac or stuttering issues on the PC with the video card). After a few HUNDRED small updates from the adobe updater, an upgrade to Premiere CS4.1.0 and some OpenGL/video card trouble shooting most of our issues were solved.

We also use Blackmagic Intensity Pro cards for getting some footage from our HDV deck and also for dubbing commercials and stock tape requests to a beta deck. However right now (June 2009), blackmagic has spotty support for CS4 on the PC and only AfterFX is supported on the mac platform!

Also we had issues with Encore on the mac trying to load plugins installed for after effects from adobe’s media core or “commons” folder. Rendering a DVD would fail giving us the error “Could not read from the source. Please check if it has moved or been deleted.” A little help from the cow forums told us to try moving the plug-ins from the commons folder to after effects plug-ins folder and TADA fixed!

Problem #6 – Fonts on Windows are different than Fonts on the Mac

While this isn’t a big issue for many, it is in a company that has strict style guidelines. Getting fonts converted and installed is a tedious task.

WORKFLOW MAC vs PC

Our biggest challenge now is how to adjust our workflow. The easiest thing we can do in the long run is to upgrade our second computer to a mac as well so were on the same platform. But in the meantime we’re stuck doing a few things to help us work, none are the perfect solution.

#1 Keep Projects On The Platform They Were Created

While this is easy to do for simple projects, it’s impractical in our environment.

#2 Collect Project Files in 1 Folder

This solves issues with linking, but when you’re dealing with a lot of reused media it can eat up disk space rather quickly!

#3 Re-Link Media

This may be tedious, but is often the only way to stay universal. Hopefully Snow Lepoard allows finder to index network drives!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE FIX THIS!!!

#4 Copy Projects for Both Mac & PC

This works for projects that don’t change, but this isn’t practical if you’re making updates to one platforms copy and not the other. Plus you’re often still doing #3 anyway!

IN SUMMARY...
I hope this blog is of help to anyone pondering adding a “new shiny mac” to they’re office. My suggestion to anyone thinking of crossing over is to go all in and don't go HALFSIES!

The improvements in graphic speed are amazing. Already we notice rendering is lighting quick on the mac and previews are almost instant. However these platforms do have a love-hate relationship like the mac image ads depict. Yet so far our new mac is running circles around the PC in terms of performance!

So as my college alumni facebook friend Mike Cohen would say... THANKS FOR READING!