Quote - While that may work great, the only problem with option two IMHO is that it takes your Mac offline and that's not an option me. It sucks that Vue won't run via Parallels as that would be an ok interim fix. Aside from my hobby art and illustration work, I use my Mac to make a living, so at any given time it might be rendering video in FInal Cut and After Effects, have one of a dozen publications I'm designing in InDesign, be dealing with massive Photoshop files in various states of completion and of course running my business, answering emails, listening to iTunes, etc. Booting in Windows would take all of those simultaneous activities offline unless of course I duplicated/setup their PC equivalents and that just seems like a lot of extra work.

All that aside, I simply like working on a Mac as it does it all, does it adeptly and doesn't require me to play IT guy to keep it working. Hell, that's why I got a Mac to begin with ;)

I can feel what you are saying because I too use my Mac Pro for business and as a hobby for my 3D work. Right now I work with Final Cut Express and Dreamweaver a lot for developing web sites. I use the other tools as you, like the iLife programs and such. For me, I can wait until I have time to play with my 3D art so that way it doesn't matter if I have to boot into Windows. Also, my USB key solution works great for dumping the files and working on the project in the evening or when time permits. I find Photoshop just fine in the Mac as well so no worries there.

One thing I do want to point out to you is you keep referring to VM machines like "Parallels" and "Fusion". However, you should know that is is a technical fact that VM machines are NOT meant to run anything close to a labor intensive application, especially something like Vue, ZBrush, Modo, etc. That goes for games as well. All they are really meant for is for something like Word or a program that is simple like a Windows program for programming a remote control and other minor applications. Attempting to run a complex program in a VM would be like asking a 1 ton elephant to run 100MPH.

Hope things work out for you, there is no easy solution right now except for that native dedicated option for duel-booting.

Jeff

Development on: Mac Pro 2008, Duel-Boot OS - Snow Leopard 10.6.6 & Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon , 10GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.