DV editing: G5 over P4?

[LethalWolfe]

Originally posted by Mr. Peach
I agree that FCP is a great editing program, and will be a force to reckoned with. I still stand by an avid anyday. For the money, especially the AVID DV EXpress. (which has the color correction power from the AVID symphony). I've directed or produced over 25 television shows in Hollywood and have never seen any professional editor use FCP to cut the show. (ever). I agree and have seen editors in the indie world cut beautiful movies with ease using FCP, but it's rare & growing. If you want to be a professional editor, learn the AVID. If you want to keep up with the changing times, learn the avid & FCP. Eventualy they will be even. Good luck to you.

Just off the top of my head "Scrubs" is cut w/FCP, Walter Murch is cutting "Cold Mountain" on FCP, and I know more than one trailer house that is switching/has switched to FCP, at least for their off-line NLE's.

If you want to edit for a living learn to be a storyteller. Learning the tools of the trade is the easy part.

Mr. Peach, I'm curious as well to know what you've worked on.

Andrew

 

[AppleManEric]

I am also curious to which shows you have worked on?

 

[legion]

I agree with both Mr. Peach and LethalWolfe (especially Mr. Wolfe about what's important now verses later. (BTW, I'm starting to feel trapped in a Tarantino flick)).

However, to address one of your points, a Pentium 4 will encode much faster than a G4 dual. I have yet to see what a G5 can do with encoding, but the difference in encoding speed is phenominal between pretty much any Pentium 4 and a top o'line dual G4 (we're looking at a Pentium 4 2.4 needing about 1/3 to 1/5 the time to encode the same video as a dual G4; it's just that fast) At the studio that I work at, and it's primarily Macs (close to 90% and Steve Jobs drops by to give us more any chance he gets because he's hankering to use my boss in an Apple commercial as an endorsement), we keep Penitums around just for the encoding process. I can't imagine that a G5 will be able to beat a Pentium at encoding; the reason is very simple, the encoding process has been heavily optimized to take advantage of all parts of the Pentium 4 chip whereas, the G4 chip didn't have the right extensions (this may change in the future if new codecs are written to take advantage of G5/970 on chip units.. but you're still looking at quite a bit of time before that's ready)

As for software, FCP 4 is good. I, personally, favour Avid DV. Avid DV Pro + Mojo is not only more expensive than FCP 4 but it is quite a bit more powerful than FCP4 on a G5 in speed (You might as well start comparing the Nitrus system which is way more expensive); they aren't competing in any marketplace at the moment (especially since Mojo isn't even available yet).

FCP 4 is the new kid on the block that's making some headway into the video editing world (especially since it has a much lower price) but AVID is the king and much like it's audio counterpart (Digidesign and its ProTools, which is also part of Avid the company), I don't see them loosing much marketshare to the new kids, even if the new kids are more innovative. The work flow between the two systems are similar (Apple did learn from the marketleader, Avid, when developing FCP4 which is appropriate if you're trying to break into a dominated market), but Avid still has a modularity akin to older linear editing that seems more complimentary to film editing. I don't think it's a fear of moving to a new software platform that keeps FCP4 from taking a stronghold but that those used to Avid will find some features lacking in FCP4 that they have grown accustomed to. LeathalWolfe and others who are proponets of FCP4 will probably disagree with me, but that's just my take on the situation .

I, also, believe Avid has education pricing and you can get Avid for both Mac and Intel (FCP 4, is Mac only, of course.) A turnkey (hardware plus software package) solution for either software may be your best bet for pricing (and at least you guarantee that it will be tuned for the purpose of video editing.) Contact either Apple or Avid (if either ends up the direction your choice and ask them about good turnkey solutions for the education market; they'll both be glad to help because they "want" tomorrow's video editors working on their systems and they should be able to provide you with third-party groups to customize within your price-range (plus they know their products best; just don't ask for any comparisons between the two because obviously anything you hear will need to be taken with huge heaping spoonfuls of salt.)

 

[LethalWolfe]

If money was no object I'd probably pick a hi-end Avid MC/FC setup over FCP 4 any day of the week. The non-DV Avid products are much more mature and refined systems (which they should be sense Avid has been in this game longer than Apple has). I'm not a huge fan of XDV just because all the XDV boxes I've cut on have felt very rough (maybe that's because they were all PC based?). But getting back to my point... but money usually is an object and 9 times outta 10 the things that an M/FC give you that FCP doesn't aren't worth the grand canyon sized price gap, IMO. I mean for 'round $15k you can get a basic FCP NLE that can handle HD. I don't think $15k can even get you an Avid that can handle SD can you? IIRC the MC adreline<sp?> will start around $25k.

Now, does FCP comapre to a DS or a Symphony? No, but it's not supposed to. The DS and Symphony are compositers/finishers where as FCP is an editor (like the MC and FC). And altough I think FCP gives the M/FC a run for their money I still think Avid comes out on top. But in a couple of years who knows.


Lethal

 

[G5orbust]

Originally posted by LethalWolfe


G5orbust,
I fail to see the advantage of holding a small amount of DV video in RAM? Current 7200PRM P-ATA HDDs are more than fast enough handle the data rate of DV. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you point?


Lethal

Yes, I am aware that ATA/150 (SA-ATA, or serial attached ATA) can more than handle DV at maximum output, but unfortunately it would be no match for an 8GB RAM cache that holds a huge chunk of the DV file.

Think about it.

SATA:150MBps (theortical)
RAM: DDR400 (400MHz) running off of an 800, 900 or 1000MHz bus. Thats a fill rate that reaches into the thousands of megabytes per second.

While I see where you are coming from and the fact that any 7200RPM SATA hard drive put into a G5 would work just fine, you must always look for the edge in all of this- and I definitely see a huge RAM cache as an edge over an expoentially slower mechanical hard drive

 

[LethalWolfe]

Originally posted by G5orbust
Yes, I am aware that ATA/150 (SA-ATA, or serial attached ATA) can more than handle DV at maximum output, but unfortunately it would be no match for an 8GB RAM cache that holds a huge chunk of the DV file.

Think about it.

SATA:150MBps (theortical)
RAM: DDR400 (400MHz) running off of an 800, 900 or 1000MHz bus. Thats a fill rate that reaches into the thousands of megabytes per second.

While I see where you are coming from and the fact that any 7200RPM SATA hard drive put into a G5 would work just fine, you must always look for the edge in all of this- and I definitely see a huge RAM cache as an edge over an expoentially slower mechanical hard drive

Here is where I'm confused. When I'm editing DV video in FCP I need that video to be played at a rate of 3.6MB/s. No faster, no slower. How is storing video in RAM better than storing it on a HDD when the HDD can play back the video at the 3.6MB/s rate that is required? Editing video is done in real time. It can't be edited any faster than real time. A large amount of RAM might help speed up rendering of FX but I'm not sure how much real world bennifit you'd see from it. FCP might feel snappier, but I don't know if the FX would render significantly faster.

Now, for something like After Effects 8 gigs of RAM would be great because you could do longer/better quality when using the RAM preview function.

There's another piont I wanted to make but I can't remember what it was 'cause it's like 2 am here... oh well...


Lethal

 

[dannyp]

for DV editing a ram drive has 0 benefits unless you are on a powerbook. a ram drive would save power since the HD could spin down (as long as nothing else has to access the HD as well)
you would however have to load all the footage you were working on into ram.
there isnt any practical reason to go thru this to work on DV footage with its low data rate.

for aftereffects, hey the more ram the happier i am