What Mac Post Pros Need To Know About Building A Custom PC

Gear Heads Interview: What Mac Post-Production Professionals Need To Know About Building a Custom PC

Part 1: Custom PC Builder Eric Bowen Talks About The State of Windows in 2017

If you’ve been listening to our ‘From the Mailbag’ podcast episodes, you may be aware that I’m making the move off the Mac OS  platform and onto Windows for my professional color grading workstation. I can go over the reasons for my move in another Insight but really, Robbie’s Insights on why Mac users shouldn’t fear Windows was instrumental in my thinking. Especially, his dealing with the objection about the lack of ProRes rendering on Premiere Pro and Resolve.

In this Insight, we’re talking with Eric Bowden, a custom PC builder out of Kentucky

Eric works full time at Northern Kentucky University in the Fine Arts department, dealing with their IT and managing several computer labs. He also works for ADK Media Group, who design and build custom PCs directly targeting audio and video post-production.

Our full conversation was 90 minutes long, so I’m splitting it into Parts 1 and 2. After Part 2 is released I’ll pull together all your questions for him and we will record Part 3 as a Q & A.

Topics Discussed in this Insight:

• In Kentucky’s media community, is there a move to PC?
• When did he start building PCs?
• Mac vs PC – Relative performance over the years
• How Intel’s Tick Tock model & Apple’s purchasing cycle keep Pro Mac Towers lagging behind PCs
• Common misconceptions about GPU processing and the CPU / RAM pipeline
• Why RAM is much more important than you think
• Moving off the Good / Better / Best mentality of Apple pros
• Impact of the ‘cloud’ model on the post-production business
• Impact of 4K, GPUs and VR on image processing
• A deep discussion on the 2013 Mac Pro and its DDR3 architecture
• The advantage of CUDA over OpenCL
• 10-bit monitoring on Windows UI
• Why you want to use dedicated video Input / Output devices
• Is Windows 10 stable?
• The problem with Virus Protection Software & post-production software
• Recommended virus software: eSet.com
• BIOS and EFI in Windows 10
• Overclocking and its impact on post-production software
• Why you want to ‘clock’ your CPU and Memory to match your GPU

Coming Up in Part 2 with Eric Bowen

In the next installment of this series Eric and I get very specific about CPUs, GPUs and specific configurations. We also talk about how builds change depending on your primary software. And as I mentioned up top, at the end of Part 2 will be a call for questions. A week later I’ll dial Eric up again and we’ll do a Q&A based on what you’ve asked!

Leave questions and comments down below.

Enjoy!

-pi

Audio Interview with Custom PC Builder Eric Bowen, ADKVideoEditing.com