Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Going Pro

D

DetroitRockCity

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 23, 2009
71
0
Detroit, Michigan
Hello everyone, long time Macrumors lurker. I am a video production student, and I love video editing.
This fall I am going to use the student discount to buy the 2.66GHz quad core Mac Pro. I am looking at editing HD video (AVCHD), on Final Cut Studio 2. Will this Mac Pro handle it?

I am going to take the money I save from the student discount, and choose the ATi 4870 upgrade option. Is it known yet how much the 4870 will be used by OS X 10.6? Down the road I will eventually upgrade to 8GB of RAM.

This will be my first "pro" product. I probably sell my 20" aluminum iMac and use as funding for an HD camcorder (as I have only been using Standard Def equipment).
 
I have another big question to add: I see people are buying the PC version of the 4870 and flashing the BIOS. Does this cripple it in any way? My friend said that with the PC version of the 4870 card, that the monitor will not show any picture until OS X has fully loaded.
 
DetroitRockCity said:
I have another big question to add: I see people are buying the PC version of the 4870 and flashing the BIOS. Does this cripple it in any way? My friend said that with the PC version of the 4870 card, that the monitor will not show any picture until OS X has fully loaded.
Click to expand...

Your friend is WRONG, when you FLASH the card it acts just as though it was the Mac version of the 4870, you will see the boot screen and everything, the only time that you wouldn't see those things, is if you used the Netkas injectors, because those load when OS X loads.
 
Is there a guide on how to do this the right way, without the Netkas injectors?

Also, if I flash it, will it have problems with further OS X updates?

From what I have gathered on the forums here, is that the XFX 4870 1GB is the way to go. And, it is much cheaper. the upgrade w/ student discount is $180 for a 4870 512GB. I would love to pay $150 for a 4870 1GB.
 
DetroitRockCity said:
Is there a guide on how to do this the right way, without the Netkas injectors?

Also, if I flash it, will it have problems with further OS X updates?

From what I have gathered on the forums here, is that the XFX 4870 1GB is the way to go. And, it is much cheaper. the upgrade w/ student discount is $180 for a 4870 512GB. I would love to pay $150 for a 4870 1GB.
Click to expand...

You probably saw that in my post, on eBay you can grab the exact card for 149.99, the sellers name is techtreasures, also you need to buy 2 of the ATI power cords because the ones that come with it don't work, and those are 12 each, still way cheaper than getting it from apple plus the card you get from Apple is crippled and has half the ram. Here's a link that tells you exactly how to do it:

http://web.me.com/jacobcroft/4870Flash/4870Flash.html

and no you won't have any issues with the updates because the card is supported by Apple, for all intents and purposes OS X sees it as an Apple 4870.
 
jleffell said:
Why is it crippled? Are there issues with the ATI upgrade?
Click to expand...

Apple underclocks it, so it's not as fast, plus it only has 1 x DVI port and 1 x DisplayPort, and the adapter is expensive and a lot of people are having trouble with the adapter. Plus it only has 512mb, when you could have a faster clocked card with 1gb memory and is less than half the price.
 
not that i got anything to add or anything,
but ya i do find it lame that apple under clocks everything.
 
DetroitRockCity said:
Hello everyone, long time Macrumors lurker. I am a video production student, and I love video editing.
This fall I am going to use the student discount to buy the 2.66GHz quad core Mac Pro. I am looking at editing HD video (AVCHD), on Final Cut Studio 2. Will this Mac Pro handle it?

I am going to take the money I save from the student discount, and choose the ATi 4870 upgrade option. Is it known yet how much the 4870 will be used by OS X 10.6? Down the road I will eventually upgrade to 8GB of RAM.

This will be my first "pro" product. I probably sell my 20" aluminum iMac and use as funding for an HD camcorder (as I have only been using Standard Def equipment).
Click to expand...

FCP is a performance dog and a half. I think there is no mac pro currently made that handles FCP well. Maybe with 5-drive SSD RAID0 and 16GB RAM it's different. If I were you I would look and try different video editing suites! I also do a lot of video for work and FCP made it into my dust-bin rather quickly! Motion is kinda OK but most of the rest is lacking. :D

Also while I'll admit that it's difficult to know and understand every subsystem's roll in overall system performance for every given task, I'm pretty sure that 8GB of RAM will be generally far more useful than the 4870. If it were me I would go for 12GB. You'll have adequate space and triple channel access - which roughly means 3x speed over single channel. With 8GB you'll be in dual-channel and upgrading to more when you find out that 8GB isn't enough after 64-bit apps start happening, will be a pain. With 12GB it's just a simple matter of plopping in another DIMM to make 16GB in total.
 
Yeah - as far as I know, FCS2 doesn't have much overhead on the graphics card. Like Tesselator said, FCS2 will like fast RAM and fast scratch drives better. Current recommendations for a speedy array on-the-cheap is a couple of drives set to software RAID-0*; there's no noticeable performance hit (according to some) and you get about 2 times the read/write speed as compared to the original.

*; DISCLAIMER; I am officially obligated to recommend for RAID-0 that, since if one drive fails the entire array is lost, that you keep an extra hard drive floating around to back up your data on the RAID. Furthermore, if you can afford it, Enterprise drives are better then consumer drives due to a unrecoverable bit(?) error a magnitude of order smaller then the consumer drives.
 
Just posted this in another thread, but if you are looking to save money why not do this? You don't have to pay tax or shipping which is a significant add on. You don't get the iPod, but they really don't cost that much now.

$2299 - 8% Bing cashback on eBay (if you want to buy from ebay but this was the cheapest option when I was shopping around....I didn't buy from eBay though as I had some gift cards at Amazon)

Applecare $71.95 - 8% Bing cashback (ebay seller: macman812) I was very skeptical of this, but it works and it is not a scam if bought from that user as I have bought two now.

4890: I thought about flashing 4870, but I wanted something faster ($150)
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...4870

8GB ram from OWC:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other.../85MP3E2M08GK/
I have always bought memory for Macs on OWC as I have shopped around and saw all the posts and always end up at OWC for Mac RAM.
I only bought 8GB.
 
Tesselator said:
FCP is a performance dog and a half. I think there is no mac pro currently made that handles FCP well. Maybe with 5-drive SSD RAID0 and 16GB RAM it's different.
Click to expand...

Expect this to change with the next version of FCS and Snow Leopard. Which, by the way, you may want to wait for if at all possible. I have every reason to believe  will be deploying all the fixes and enhancements to FCS to make it much faster; it'll probably be 64-bit, use GPGPU, and more. I expect people with Mac Pros to see speed double on the next version or better.
 
Dr.Pants said:
*; DISCLAIMER; I am officially obligated to recommend for RAID-0 that, since if one drive fails the entire array is lost, that you keep an extra hard drive floating around to back up your data on the RAID. Furthermore, if you can afford it, Enterprise drives are better then consumer drives due to a unrecoverable bit(?) error a magnitude of order smaller then the consumer drives.
Click to expand...
Yup. :D

RAID, no matter the array type used, or single HDD/SSD = Backups are necessary

DATA recovery is just too expensive to risk it. :eek: Far more $$$ than a backup drive(s). :p
 
TheStrudel said:
Expect this to change with the next version of FCS and Snow Leopard.
Click to expand...

I hope so. But something to keep in mind is that Apple has said this same thing about every FCP release. :p Not to mention that other apps will be taking advantage of SL and 64-bit too so it may just all be relative and still FCP will suck nuggets. :D
 
I'd stick with Final Cut Pro. As someone who works in a Post Production facility (I'm actually a Senior Editor and the Personnel Manager), I can tell you that if you have any desire at all to make this your career path...learning FCP is essential as it's an industry standard.
 
I am currently using FCE and loving it, I hope FC3 will include native avchd support! Even though hard drives are cheap, it is still a lot of space required when transcoded to aic.

thank you for your thoughts!
 
chiefroastbeef said:
I am currently using FCE and loving it, I hope FC3 will include native avchd support! Even though hard drives are cheap, it is still a lot of space required when transcoded to aic.

thank you for your thoughts!
Click to expand...

Mmmm.... Processor overhead! I like it!

AVCHD will probably be native, but it should take a large portion of the machine's crunching power instead of working with uncompressed or ProRes, IMO.
 
chiefroastbeef said:
tesellator, what video editing program do you use?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Depends entirely on what I'm doing. If it's a paying job like the TV commercials or music videos I've done in the past then it's a combination of a lot of various apps. LightWave3D, MotionBuilder, Houdini, Digital Fusion, VideoToaster. Speed Edit is the breakout version of the VideoToaster's Editor. If it's something for family, friends, youtube, or something like that then I usually find QuickTime Pro to be more than adequate. QT Pro has a buttload of features no one seems to know about yet everyone has it. Weird!

Anyway SpeedEdit is the software only version of the video editor I use most for larger "jobs". Until we move to SGI or some proprietary system it's simply the best/fastest editor going. No teanscoding needed - it's all real-time and resolution independent. Which also makes it the most fun to use. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back