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I've been working cross-platform for about a little over a year now. Once you work through a couple issues, it can be very doable. that "other than a few codecs" is a HUGE problem for me. not being able to write prores is a real show stopper. I've messed with DNxHD and its not been terribly happy because the codec has 2 color spaces and its a bag of hurt when apps don't write / read the color space correctly. basically part of my normal workflow is completely broken. TGA or TIFF sequences or uncompressed QT's via AJA or BMD codecs are just not workable for work beyond spots. I like CineForm for my own cross-platform intermediates (when I don't use image sequences, though these are usually an important part of my workflow for other reasons). Grass Valley HQX is another alternative. Though most of my deliverables now are H.264 MP4s or MPEG-2 for playout, I do also continue to deliver ProRes from my Macs. I've also tried delivering ProRes from my PC via ffmpeg/ffmbc, both of which have more user-friendly front-ends available, and it does work.
then there are the win7 networking problems. not sure if they are fixed in win8 or not... but not having network discovery work is a big deal. basically win7 refuses to see any linux or OS X SMB shares. probably having to do with homegroup vs workgroup and MS deciding to "correctly" implement some part of the spec they hadn't of before breaking everything... typical MS. while AFP works on linux and its free I don't know of anything on win to do the same. kind of suprised that the coders who wrote AFP for linux didn't port it to Win. Actually, I think that Apple is pretty guilty of playing fast and loose with SMB at the moment... While Win7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) should play really nicely together out of the box, on higher versions of OS X (10.7 and above), Apple replaced samba (the open-source SMB protocol implementation) with their own implementation -- and I've found it pretty unreliable.
I highly recommend SMBUp (http://eduo.info/apps/smbup) to restore samba on OS X 10.7 and higher so that everyone can play nicely together again.
On previous versions of OS X, I seem to recall you may need to use a lower encryption level on the Windows side. On Win7, hit the Start button and type "Manage advanced sharing settings" (it will search as you type, you don't need to complete the whole text string). Open this. Under File Sharing Connections, choose Enable file sharing for devices that use 40- or 56-bit encryption.
I'm not seeing any issues with network discovery here, but I manage all my IPs and hostnames on my router -- maybe that makes a difference? Walter Soyka |
