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Apple Snow Leopard for Video Producers, Part 1

Sep 24, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

Apple's new Snow Leopard (or OS X 10.6) is the type of release that delivers incremental advancements on the surface, but exponential enhancements below the waterline—though many will take months, if not years, to truly start bearing fruit. It's an operating system that's perhaps more important to developers, including Apple's internal developers, than to most users.

That's because Apple added several new technologies such as true 64-bit kernel support and Grand Central Dispatch that will enable software developers to create faster programs that work more efficiently on multicore systems. The flip side of this statement, however, is that these benefits won't be realized until new applications supporting these technologies are released. That said, in my tests, Snow Leopard delivered speed improvements of up to about 30 percent in some tasks and proved stable in operation.

In this issue of Final Cut Pro Insider, I'll detail the technologies that Apple added to Snow Leopard. Next time, I'll share the results of benchmark testing comparing performance in Leopard (OS X 10.5) against Snow Leopard. Beyond pricing and compatibility basics, I'll stick pretty much to performance-related features and tests—I'm not going to do a grand tour of new features. My goal is to answer two questions for video producers: Should you upgrade, and if so, should you run the OS in 32-bit or 64-bit mode?

Related Links

Apple Snow Leopard for Video Producers, Part 2 In this issue, I share some benchmark tests with a Mac Pro and Mac Book Pro comparing Leopard (OS X 10.5) to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) in 32-bit and 64-bit modes... Apple Mac Pro vs. MacBook Pro Test Drive, Part 1 Month after month, one of the most widely researched topics on the millimeter site is the performance difference between an Apple Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro. Given that I have brand-new models of both computers in my office, it felt like it was time to revisit the issue... CS4 and 64-bit Systems, Part 1 So there I was, testing Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4)’s AVCHD compatibility. I created a simple project, about 4 minutes long, two picture-in-picture overlays with simple rotation and color correction...

The Basics

First, some basics. If you have Leopard, you can upgrade a single Mac for $29, or up to five Macs in a single household for $49. If you own an Intel-based Mac and never upgraded to Leopard, you have to purchase the Mac Box Set, which includes Snow Leopard, iLife '09, and iWork '09, for $169.

If you still have a PowerPC-based Mac, you're out of luck, since Snow Leopard is Intel-only. Snow Leopard also doesn't automatically install Rosetta, a program that enables PowerPC binaries to run on Intel-based Macs, though if you end up needing the binaries to run a program, Snow Leopard will download them from Apple's website automatically.

Note that Snow Leopard isn't compatible with all Intel-based Macs; you need at least 1GB of RAM, 5GB of disc space, and a hard disk drive, as well as some other factors that enable booting in 64-bit mode and accessing Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL, two new features discussed below. (For more information on compatibility, check out this article on EveryMac.com. )

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