G-5 for film use... am buying, need advice!

[IntrovertedFilm]

I've had the classes and now I'm ready to get my dual G5 for use with FCP. I'm wondering what would be the best way to find a good deal. Mainly, I'm wondering if the everyday G5 is fine or do I need to order one with certain add ons. I can get the FCP software seperate. Is a $2800 Ebay G-5 fine? I don't need the modem or even any other software installed. This is ONLY for use with film projects so maybe I should do something different? I'm lost now.

 

[HiRez]

I've had the classes and now I'm ready to get my dual G5 for use with FCP. I'm wondering what would be the best way to find a good deal. Mainly, I'm wondering if the everyday G5 is fine or do I need to order one with certain add ons. I can get the FCP software seperate. Is a $2800 Ebay G-5 fine? I don't need the modem or even any other software installed. This is ONLY for use with film projects so maybe I should do something different? I'm lost now.

Depends on which G5 that is for $2,800 and what extras it has. The stock top-end G5 is $3,000 brand-new. You should know that the 1.6 GHz G5 models are not dual-processor and have some older system components; I would avoid them. Dual 1.8 or 2.0 are good. If using FCP, the important things are to buy as much RAM as you can afford (you can buy and install this yourself separately -- check ramseeker.com) and have fast hard disks. You might want to look into an internal or external FireWire RAID array for your media drives. You can try barefeats.com for some test results of those and comparisons of the different G5 models.

 

[wordmunger]

With student discount, the top of the line G5 is $2700, and you can get a dual 1.8 for $2300--a much better deal. Spend your savings on upgrading the RAM for the dual 1.8 (from Crucial, not Apple), and you'll have a much better computer for $2800, even after paying sales tax.

 

[supatekmedia88]

Really depends at what resolution you will be working with.


DV is fine with ATA 7200rpm drives

HD needs fibrechannel drives.

Oh, and get at least 1 gig of RAM for sure!

 

[Penman]

Really depends at what resolution you will be working with.


DV is fine with ATA 7200rpm drives

HD needs fibrechannel drives.

Oh, and get at least 1 gig of RAM for sure!

This isn't quite right. HD will run fine over FW800 (my LaCie Extreme does it without breaking a sweat). Fibrechannel's not necessary for 99% of applications. Talk to specialists before you overspend. The LaCie site has video of HD running on a TiBook off Extremes. They're fast.

And forget the drive in the machine. For video you'll need externals so don't pay extra for more inbuilt storage. You only need it to book from.

 

[jonnyblobby]

Fibre Channel is best

Hiya,

I work at a Television Production Company,
we are currently building a G5 edit suite (Pro One),
I have already bought 2 G5's for this company,
a Dual 1.8 for graphic design and DVD authoring,
and a Dual 2.0 last week for the edit suite.
We have already done an edit for broadcast with the Dual 1.8,
our capture device is an AJA IO, this is a firewire 400 capture device.
It uses the WHOLE firewire bandwidth so you can't use any firewire HD's with it, and we have been forced to look for another solution.

The thing is though, for SD, you can go upto DVCPRO50 using internal SATA drives, and you only start to drop frames when the edit gets BIG. But, even with an external drive, you can still get dropped frames, as you are accessing all this data from several places on a single device.

To do ANY uncompressed 8bit or 10bit editing you HAVE to have at least 4 drives in a raid array, otherwise you will get dropped frames constantly.

Im sure you can get firewire raid arrays, but your pushing the limits of firewire, and it means that you could be limited on your capture devices.

You can also get SCSI raid arrays, but I think there just too expensive, and SCSI versions are constantly being superseded. + the cable distance is short, and you have to worry about terminating etc..

In terms of fibre channel, the Xserve raid does seem expesive, but compared to any other fibre channel raid, its the cheapest by far.