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FCP suite 2 - MacPro questions

matteusclement

matteusclement

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 26, 2008
1,144
0
victoria
So I have maxed out the ol' iMac with all the tricks you can teach a pony.
In other words, it's too slow now with HD footage and esp. since i have taken the jump into COLOR and will be with SHAKE and AE.

I am a one man user of the whole suite and would like some advice from someone in the same boat. I will be buying a macpro this summer and am trying to decide if the $2600 upgrade to the 2.9ghz cpu's will be cost effective for me. It seems as though I waste the most time rendering (COLOR and FCP but no clue in shake). PLus it seems with the HD footage I am eating a ridiculous amount of hard drive space with the apple intermediate codec, does this mean that I have to load up on 4 x terrabyte drives?
 
Well, HD media does take up an arsetonne of space; however, this also depends on the codec. How much HD media will you be going through? Even if you put 4 1.5GB HDDs in the MacPro, that may not "seal the deal" for storage and backup needs. And don't buy drives from Apple, get them yourself. Save some money. At anyrate, for expandability, you may want to look into external enclosures and connectors for the MacPro; another thing to look into is RAID for faster data-tranfer rates that may or may not come into play for how you capture media.

And all I can say about the $2600 upgrade... Is it your job?
 
It will be.
I am going to school for applied communications, which is all computer based.

I feel that with being a photographer, videographer and recording engineer that at first a $10,000 macpro (basic shell + personal upgrades) may seem insane, but i think that will keep me going for the next 5-8 years. Yes / no?
 
it's probably not going to last that long...

I would get the basic octo 2.26 with the upgraded ATi GPU. Then buy RAM and hard drives from macsales/newegg/etc.

What format of HD do you edit mostly? FCP doesn't transcode to AIC for a lot of things. You can edit stuff like DVCProHD natively (which would take up a lot less space). It all depends on how you're shooting the video.
 
+1. The money for .67 GHz, although having a great computational difference, is better spent on upgrading other portions of the MacPro; even though it might be here to stay, Nehalem will go the way of Power at one point in time or another. When you need to spend the extra money for extra productivity (when you graduate, or what have you), then get the latest-and-greatest. Plus, even though school is serious business (when isn't something serious business), the 2.93 I would imagine is overkill. I think I would be far better off with a 2.26 octo and a redundant speedy RAID then the 2.93 octo and software RAID on four discs and the boot drive out of Firewire (if you can still do that).
 
I do not have a Mac Pro. But, like the other people here, I would say go with the base 8 core chips model. In probably a little over a year Mac Pro with two Gulftown processors will be out, for a total of 12 cores, 24 threads. These chips are also said to be 30% faster per core than then the Gainstown now shipping, if I remember correctly. If you find you need the extra power next year, I would bet you could sell your Mac Pro and buy one of these for a loss of less than $2600.
Good luck,
Chris
 
I use a canon HV30.
Both iMovie and FCP export it as 36Gigs/hr. Maybe I am doing something wrong?

Sounds like the basic Octo it is.
Is the RAID card offered by apple the only RAID card for the pro?
And why the upgraded ATI card?
 
The Apple RAID card is specific to the MacPro - unfortunately, Apple decided to screw over third parties and route their internal RAID right through the motherboard. No third-party internal RAID unless you want some DIY magic (which involves reversing the HDD tray, I havn't tried it and do not recommend it since it is ONLY A THEORY). You could buy an external RAID card and an external enclosure for SAS/SATA RAID, or you could go ATA over Ethernet or iSCSI... It doesn't mean that you shouldn't do internal RAID, but I didn't like the last iteration of Apple RAID card.

I also don't know the technical reason why the ATI card would be better, I'm curious on that as well. It should be, it makes sense, but I don't know the reason behind it.
 
36GB/hr is normal for iMovie (it transcodes to AIC), but your settings are incorrect for FCP. FCP can capture/edit HDV natively. So it'll only be 13GB/hr.

as for the ATi cards, they've always had drivers that benefited the pro apps more than the nvidia cards.
 
hey bigboss, mind sharing with me how I would go about getting it so that my footage was 13gig/hr? I looked all over the net looking for a way to get a smaller file but in the end it seems that the HV30 was having issues with the codecs in HDV. or perhaps, I am slow...

as far as RAID, I guess it's internal raid. I work on my computer too much to be waiting anymore. If I have to wait anymore for rendering, I might go insane.
 
Use the HDV 1080i60 Easy Setup to capture HDV natively. I don't think an internal RAID is a good idea (the Apple hardware card is expensive and the software RAID is toast if you ever have problems w/your OS). SATA drives are more than fast enough for HDV but if you really want a RAID go eSATA or FW800.


Lethal
 
I don't like the internal RAID because the Apple hardware RAID card is expensive, the software RAID lives and dies w/the OS, RAID 0 for HDV is complete overkill and RAID 1 is an inferior back-up solution to storing a copy of everything on a FW HDD.


Lethal
 
OVERKILL:
I do run multiple apps such as photoshop, bridge, compressor, color, FCP, and LOGIC. When I have to render a project in FC or Color, it makes my computer a brick. If internal RAID makes things way faster, then I have to take it.

And while I have your attention, I will be trying the other FC preset to lower the GIGS that my HDD takes but now I can't get color to run so it uses the orginal codec from the FCP sequence. This results in 10gigs / minute kind of rendered files. Suggestions?
 
matteusclement said:
OVERKILL:
I do run multiple apps such as photoshop, bridge, compressor, color, FCP, and LOGIC. When I have to render a project in FC or Color, it makes my computer a brick. If internal RAID makes things way faster, then I have to take it.
Click to expand...
It won't. Everything you listed is RAM and CPU dependent. Taking a moped (HDV) from a two lane road onto a 8 lane freeway isn't going to make it go any faster. ;)

And while I have your attention, I will be trying the other FC preset to lower the GIGS that my HDD takes but now I can't get color to run so it uses the orginal codec from the FCP sequence. This results in 10gigs / minute kind of rendered files. Suggestions?
Click to expand...
Color will only render out using ProRes or Uncompressed. The only exception to this is if you are editing in DVCPro HD then Color will render out DVCPro HD. Color also has a lot of hang ups so I would suggest reading the manual and all the release notes so you know what problems to avoid.


Lethal
 
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