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[preproman]

Has anyone done this with sucess?  Are there any issues to be aware of?  Are there any tips / tricks that can be shared?

Thanks..

[glynor]

I do this.  I have a Mac Pro at the office that runs Boot Camp and I use MC with it regularly, and I used to have a Macbook until I smashed it which booted Windows by default.

It works fine.  Boot Camp IS Windows, running on an Intel x86/64 based PC, so there is nothing really to know.  One issue that you COULD run into is with the video card drivers.  The ones Apple provides for Windows aren't always the most advanced Windows drivers available.  But if it doesn't work for you as-is, you can get the third-party modified desktop drivers to add back any missing functionality (Mobility Modder for AMD/ATI based GPUs, and LaptopVideo2Go for Nvidia).  WASAPI works fine on both my laptop and my Mac Pro, and everything else is great.  Just like running it on one of my custom-built PCs.

I've also used MC a bit with both VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels Desktop 6, booting the Boot Camp partition as a VM.  The newest version of Parallels actually runs MC pretty well, except for maybe Theater View (and you won't be able to use Red October HQ mode no matter what machine you have).  But Parallels handled video playback fine (getting it to run truly fullscreen without showing the Dock is a bit of a pain), and Theater View works, but doesn't perform exceedingly well.  I didn't mess with it much... You might be able to get Theater View to run well if you go into MC's options and tweak the quality settings manually.

VMWare Fusion didn't work acceptably for video or Theater View use, but audio-only use was fine.  The current version of Fusion is getting pretty old, though.  Fusion 4 is in closed beta right now and should bring it back up to feature parity with Parallels.  Generally I like the Fusion application better (it is less fiddly and "beta-feeling" than Parallels), but they tend to be more conservative with adding features and releasing new versions before they are fully vetted.

[preproman]

Great,

Thanks Glynor.  So which do you perfer VM or Boot camp?  One bit of clarification. Are you saying that RO does not work all that great with boot camp or just with Parallels?

[glynor]

So which do you perfer VM or Boot camp?

It depends.  Like I said, before I smashed it, I had my Macbook set to boot to Windows 7 by default.  That worked well.  It was a great Windows laptop, and it could also boot to OSX and load Final Cut Pro when I needed it (or whatever OSX app I happened to need).  Most of the time it just ran Windows.

My Mac Pro is my main video editing workstation, and it boots OSX by default.  But, it is awfully handy to have access to Windows on the system should I ever need it.  Since I'm already booted to OSX on this machine all the time, if I just need to go in and use a Windows-specific application, I'll just load up Parallels.  This works perfectly fine for almost all applications that don't make heavy use of 3D graphics.  Maybe a bit slower than running it natively (though some things, like IE, you can't even tell really), but perfectly acceptable performance for most regular applications.  If I need to do something that actually uses heavy system resources (meaning: games, basically), I'll reboot it to Windows.  Even some games will work just fine under Parallels, though if I'm going to game, I usually want it to look/act its best, so I reboot.

If you have the hard drive space and the money for Parallels/Fusion then definitely do both.  Install Windows to boot camp, so you can actually boot to it and get full performance.  But, then install Parallels or Fusion and set that boot camp partition up as a VM.  Best of both worlds.  You can reboot to Windows when you need to, but the VM will handle most simple apps and needs.

One bit of clarification. Are you saying that RO does not work all that great with boot camp or just with Parallels?

No.  I just meant under the VM.  And, Red October Standard works fine (of course, since I killed my laptop, my only test machine is a 16-core monster with 16GB of RAM).  Red October HQ doesn't work well under the VM.  To be clear, Boot Camp literally IS a Windows machine.  It is really indistinguishable from any other machine running Windows on similar hardware, unless you look at the keyboard, need something in the BIOS (which you can't access like on a standard Wintel box, but this usually isn't necessary), or mess with the Boot Camp control panel widget.