Re: Newbie (Mac Addict) interesed in SGI.?.?

From: Jonathan (jonny_morrisuk_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 10/10/04 

Date: 10 Oct 2004 06:18:23 -0700

Michael Defi <deefii@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<BD815396.326C%deefii@hotmail.com>...
> How much different is the IRIX 6.3 ..whichever? SGI-OS
> from a Mac desktop -- point & click -- etc.,.etc..??.
>
> Seeing some pretty beautiful systems Octane,,O2, etc. going
> for what appears to be low-low prices lately --and like to explore*.
>
> Any advise - links - help, will be greatly appreciated.
> Thx
> Deefii

My original answer covered all these points, a few others elaborated
slightly to further clarify what I already said. I would like to
point out the small but incredibly useful utilities that come with
IRIX (avoiding all references to the command line, bar this one), they
are:

Media Recorder - a tool for capturing sound, images, or video

Movie Maker - a tool for editing or composing movies with video,
sound, and/or still images, similar in functionality but not as
featured as Adobe Premiere

Media Player - a tool for playback of sound samples, images, and
movies

Sound Editor - a tool for editing sound samples

Sound Track - a multi-track sound editor (like a mixing desk)

Image Works - a tool for filtering and composition of still images

And there are others such as Midikeys and SynthEditor, which enable
you to compose and edit midi music using midi instruments or a virtual
keyboard, and many other small tools with very specific uses. As
already stated elsewhere, these tools are stuck a few years out of
date - they do not support anything after, say, the advent of digital
video (DV Cams etc), and although you will find support for DV format
video, the hardware is generally not available (or very very difficult
to find) in the second hand market and does not come as standard in
Octane or O2; so there is no *native* support for MPEG4, divX (or
XVid), DVD format, or Quicktime 6 (or whatever the latest version is).

All these small utilities are in the GUI, and come as standard with
IRIX, they are not as intuitive as the newer video applications you
may find on Macs (although they themselves can be quite mind-boggling
and complex), and there is no printed manual (full manuals are in the
online GUI help, and are generally very good and easy to follow),
however if you can persevere (sp?) then you will find that they are
very powerful and can accomplish most tasks, HOWEVER they will not do
nearly as much as their newer Mac counterparts and do contain bugs
(but then, what software doesn't these days?). The emphasis is on
what you yourself can do with the basic tools given, not what the
tools can do automatically for you as you go make your coffee. For
serious commercial video work, however, forget it - stick with a
current Mac, unless (as has already been stated in another thread) you
have very deep pockets, buy a rack or deskside system, and have a
small team of IRIX gurus at hand to administrate it efficiently.

I think there is nothing more you can learn from this thread. In my
opinion you would only really use a single SGI Octane as a hobby
machine these days, as far as video or image manipulation is
concerned. In this post I have pointed out the media tools that come
with IRIX as part of the OS (in the same way as iTunes and iPhoto come
with OS X) - but that does not include the many freeware media tools
which are available from the internet... examples of which are The
GIMP (a pretty good Photoshop-like package) and XV (fast image viewer
with colour editing and image resize etc, but not as many features as
The GIMP). Professional/commercial software availability has already
been covered elsewhere, but I would like to add that you probably will
not find these packages in the second hand market, unless you are
lucky enough to find a complete setup with it all installed (quite
unlikely as they usually rely on a networked server for the software
or licenses required to make it run).