Mac aficionado turned PC enthusiast: profile of The Orphanage. (Special Advertising Section).(Advertisement)

As a loyal Macintosh[R] aficionado, the last thing visual effects creator Stu Maschwitz thought he'd ever do was to replace his sexy Mac dual-800 G4 computer with a Microsoft[R] Windows[R]-based workstation. After all, he'd been on a Mac since his days as an effects supervisor in the Rebel Mac Unit at top movie effects factory Industrial Light + Magic.

Now at The Orphanage, a San Francisco-based high-end visual effects and film production company he co-founded with fellow ILM alumni Jonathan Rothbart and Scott Stewart, Maschwitz says he was astounded to discover that the workstation was running Adobe[R] After Effects[R], his facility's visual effects compositing software of choice--faster and better than even the hottest Mac. Now he says there's just no going back.

"The PC wasn't just a little bit faster. It was significantly faster. And that fact was just too compelling to ignore, even for the staunchest Mac fan," says Maschwitz. Among its recent credits, The Orphanage has produced visual effects for such movies as "Vanilla Sky," "Jackass: the Movie," "Jeepers Creepers 2," and "Hero" (China's 2002 Oscar nominee for best foreign film); a music video for Cher, and many national commercials, including a spot for Playstation2[R].

PRODUCTIVITY

This revelation about the speed of working in Windows came to him one day last year when he happened to move his work over to a workstation temporarily because his facility's predominantly Mac infrastructure was consumed by a big project.

But, soon after he opened his After Effects project there, Maschwitz was struck by just how much faster it was running. The very next day, he had a brand new Dell Precision[TM] dual Intel[R] Xeon[TM] processor 2.8GHz workstation sitting in place of his Mac, and has since used it for all his "hard core" effects and compositing-intensive work, with minimal platform transition issues.

"If increased processing power doubles your productivity, but costs you twice as much, that isn't cost-effective. What makes our move to Windows a no-brainer is that PCs are less expensive than Macs, so we can have more of them in-house," says Maschwitz. "When you take the time saved at one PC, and multiply that by 10 or 20 or 30 workstations in the shop, it adds up to significant productivity gains that enable us to produce more processor-intensive effects shots, with higher quality results than before."