Anyone using a Mac (Parallels/Boot Camp) w/Retro-8/Universal

[LG]

Hi there - I own multiple Retro-8's and now multiple Universal's, but I've not had *ANY* success with the Retroscan software on any of my Mac's running Parallels or Bootcamp (all are i7 iMacs or MacBook Pros). I've talked to Roger and I realize he's not using Mac's, but he did mention that there are people using the software on Mac's with success. Ultimately, the issue is that when the software is capturing...the lower portion of the screen periodically scrambles. It may do this every 5 to 10 seconds. I've seen this back on the Retro-8's and this weekend I installed and saw the exact same thing with my Universals. On my normal PC laptops...no issue at all...just on the Macs. I even tried externally powered USB connections to see if that made a difference, but it didn't. Any thoughts or is anyone using a Mac with their machines? Thanks in advance for any insight!

[canvisnous]

I use a mac pro and Retro Universal. I have the same issue but it's not consistent. It apears off and on and I usually just rescan the film... But I have no idea why. I use windows 10

[LG]

I'm using Windows 7 (Pro and Ultimate) - but I can't even get through a full reel without the issue...so re-scanning doesn't help on my end. Just seems odd that even in a Boot Camped environment it still functions the same way, but only on Macs running Windows. I guess I'll just stick to real PC...I just like the clarity of my Mac screens.

[milesandjules]

Sad to hear this, i was going to try it with the universal on an imac 2011.

Has anyone tried it with virtual machines on the mac?

[Davideo]

I'm a hardcore Mac user and use mostly Mac's in my company. When we switched to the Retro machines, I grudgingly bought a PC to run it. I was able to get a decent PC that meets Roger's specs for a little under $500 and is a dedicated machine just for Retro transfers and nothing else, not even the Internet. Using this as an "engine", transfers go well and I take the captured files and put them on a thumb drive and move them to our Mac's for final post production. This workflow works well for us. No fiddling with anything. So, look at using the PC as the engine for the Retro machines and do your editing on the Mac.

[milesandjules]

Yep the macs are delicious and keep their value......yep pc and dump to mac for edit ...thats what we been doing with the retro8 to. I think everyone has at least one pc in action.

[MovieStuff]

Yes, we occasionally get potential buyers that complain about a lack of Mac compatibility. Some are pretty abrasive,"How can you seriously offer a professional scanner if it doesn't work with a Mac?" Of course, we have no control over this because the camera manufacturer doesn't provide Mac drivers. Also, supporting two different software builds would hardly be worth it. The thing I find is that, with rare exception, most people have one really high powered, nice Mac. So, if you are a company dealing with a lot of film, or a private individual that wants to maximize a spare time home movie project, then that means you are doing a lot of post on that one Mac. Why bottle neck the process or tie up your big Mac doing transfers when PCs are practically free? Even if the customer had a really high powered, nice PC they used for editing, I would still suggest they use a separate PC for capture and processing and save their big PC for post. So, in practical terms, it really doesn't matter if it works on a Mac or not for most people except the purists that insist capturing on Mac would somehow be "better". Sheesh...

The other thing that is a little maddening is how the gamma on Macs looks so much different that the rest of the real world. It seems that everything from photos to movies always look a bit darker on a Mac. I have a friend in LA that is a retired special effects guy and he has a Mac and every time I send him a photo of a painting I finished, he always complains that it's missing shadow detail. When I went to visit him and looked at my various paintings on his Mac, they looked dreadful. But on every PC they looked fine. They also look fine on my iPad and iPhone. So I'm not sure what's up with that. Anyway, we went to a lot of trouble making the Retro units work with cheap, off the shelf PCs. It always amazes me when people spend tons of money on custom built PCs or Macs to use with our units. It makes no sense, especially considering that most any lap top will do the trick. Go figure....

Roger

[milesandjules]

Hi Roger ...its just that pcs are shit.... ha ha just kidding.

I think its the 100 bucks for windows that mac users cant stand ha ha.

Na our dvd printer only works on a pc so i think mac uses are use to having to submit if they want non mac stuff to work.

[owenh10]

I'm using a Retro-8 very successfully with BootCamp on an i7 Mac Mini. Not the latest Mac Mini, but the model previous (they kind of crippled the current model). I'm using Windows 8.1. All I have on the Bootcamp partition is the Retro software - don't want anything else running while I'm capturing. Using the built in Mac file sharing, I'm able to easily transfer the finished frames to the Mac side to import into FCP X.

-Owen

[S8 Booster]

......The other thing that is a little maddening is how the gamma on Macs looks so much different that the rest of the real world. It seems that everything from photos to movies always look a bit darker on a Mac. I have a friend in LA that is a retired special effects guy and he has a Mac and every time I send him a photo of a painting I finished, he always complains that it's missing shadow detail. When I went to visit him and looked at my various paintings on his Mac, they looked dreadful. But on every PC they looked fine. They also look fine on my iPad and iPhone. So I'm not sure what's up with that.....

Roger

In the "old" days you could set the MAC (tube) screens to the same gamma as PCs. I often used to set the MAC to PC gamma when working with images to be sent to PC users. It seemed to work well. Nowadays there is a lot of different settings under the system/settings/screen menu/icon which shows the (many) different settings real time. Check that out next time - you will likely find a MAC setting which match the PC colour balance and brightness for the images you captured with the PC.

shoot....