We graphics artists and designers, like to work on equipment that doesn’t break down too often, that offers good support for industry standards that are of interest to us, and which basically “just works”. We like to let our creative juices run, not be busy with the technology by itself. That’s one of the main reasons why in general we like to work with whatever Apple cooks up for us. A Mac ‘just works’, it supports all the latest versions and implementations of OpenGL, HTML, XML, CSS, ICC colour standards, and more.
You might conclude from this that we never have to deal with the sort of problems Windows users are regularly confronted with. Admittedly, on a Mac you will find native support for ICC colour profiles version 4. You will find that you can record video footage in High Definition only weeks after some industry consortium has decided this is the path to go for the future. But too often we are still running up against stupid technical troubles. And because Macintosh computers have that aura of “no technical support required”, we then lose a lot of time trying to fix whatever went wrong.
It proves even Macs are not as fool proof as we would like them to be. I’ve just had a good example of this when I tried recording a video using Final Cut Pro from a video deck through a Miglia DV Converter. Although this has always worked flawlessly in the past, this past Monday the Mac suddenly decided to be stubborn and let me lose half a day breaking my head over this problem.
What happened was that Final Cut Pro would start recording just fine, but appeared to be losing its connection to the Director’s Cut Take II when the video had been recorded for about a quarter of its total length. The remedy when this occasionally would happen in the past, was easy: I would check the limits on the disk being recorded to, then check the cables. I would sometimes have to restart the Director’s Cut Take II because of a problem with the FireWire bus not recognizing the device as a DV Converter.
Losing Time Over System Error
But on Monday, all these checks resulted in no errors. The DV Converter was recognized as such; I could tell by going to System Profiler and reading the report on FireWire. The disk was fine too. It is an eSATA disk, so speed is not at issue. The fact that Final Cut Pro is fussy about using one FireWire bus to record from and write to was not at issue either. The DV Converter being recognized by the system itself, I decided it had to be Final Cut Pro itself.
I flushed the Preferences, setting up the whole thing again. The problem persisted. I changed cables, including the analogue cables from the deck to the Miglia. No success. We were now one and a half hours later, and I still hadn’t recorded anything decent.
I read the Apple forums and MacFixit and saw there could be an issue with QuickTime. I decided to re-install QuickTime 7.1.5, following the instructions given there. The result was a complete disaster. The Mac started up, but when the Finder appeared, I noticed the Spotlight icon in the menu bar flashing like crazy. I opened the Console and saw that SystemUIServer crashed with every re-launch.
We were now 3 hours later, it was late afternoon, and I decided to give it a rest. On Tuesday morning, I couldn’t keep Safari open anymore. SystemUIServer kept crashing, taking all kinds of applications down with it. Luckily, I still have an old Power Mac G4 that I use as a firewall server (it has Mac OS X Server with its excellent firewall on it). I used Safari to download the Combo updater to Mac OS X 10.4.9.
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Strangely enough I could still connect from the broken Mac to the G4 using AFP. I downloaded the combo updater from the G4 to the G5, and ran it. After yet another quarter of an hour, I had a working Mac again.
The scenario above would be “business as usual” with a Windows machine. However, I expect more from a Mac. I don’t want to spend half a day fighting with a system that is not properly working anymore. Why did SystemUIServer crash with every re-launch (which happens automatically, by the way)? Why did the QuickTime re-install fail? I did everything according to the book, but the results were less than satisfactory. I have no explanation for this series of problems, other than that somewhere in the chain of events, something must have gone wrong. Perhaps some component did not get installed.
What I do know is that I needed all my skills and experience from working with a Mac to get it right again. I haven’t tried running Final Cut Pro with the Miglia yet. It perhaps still doesn’t work. I do know that Power Macs have what I consider to be a faulty FireWire setup. It shouldn’t matter that you connect more than one device to record and play a video stream. FireWire was designed for this purpose.
I should also not have to wait at least 2 to 3 minutes after having disconnected one FireWire device before I can connect the next and have the system recognize that as a different type of equipment. I don’t know how Intel Macs behave in this area—I do hope to find out later this year, when I upgrade my production system—and if there are people who can shed some light on it, I would love to hear about it.
No Support Needed on a Mac?
There are those who say that I could repair it because it’s a Mac and a Mac is intuitive enough to let you find out by yourself. I must admit I don’t see it that way. The only reason why I managed to get the system back on its feet without a complete re-format and installation from scratch, was that I knew I could try installing a combo updater from regularly visiting MacFixit. Without this web site I would have been lost, just as much so as I would have been if this would have happened with a Windows box.
The only problem with that observation is that, as a designer, artist, photographer, or a writer even, I have a very limited choice of systems. I can use Windows or Mac. Linux on the desktop is a failure as far as I am concerned. I know it exists, I know it works well for some people, but I don’t read or hear from people actually using it to perform paid work. Perhaps I’m not looking in the right places, but I just don’t come across much Linux on the desktop.
The choice therefore is between Windows and Mac OS X. Windows is still worse than Mac OS X. Take for example the way it handles security in the brand new Vista version: you’ll have to put up with interruptions of your work every 5 minutes or so. That’s not the worse: when the system alerts you that it’s time to re-authenticate, it will dim the display, ruining your calibration settings. This is simply not workable for any creative occupied with colours and a colour workflow.
So, the truth is that we are stuck with Macs, even if we would hate them. Luckily for us, Apple does its best to deliver a good user experience. It would be nice though, if we could have a system that explicitly tells us what’s wrong, instead of just reporting a crash or a problem. Perhaps Apple should take over the entire MacFixit team, and let them handle all of their support.
