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ideal Mac Pro specs for home DVD burnning??

D

driphone

macrumors regular
Original poster
Hi,

I intend to burn close to 30 hours of home HD videos on hopefully HD disks like Blu-ray. I tried the Toast 9 and successfully burned a 15 minute HD on a regular DVD however on my MacBook 2.16 GHz with 2 GB RAM it took few hours for encoding.

Question #1: can any hardware piece ie: elgato's Turbo.264 will make a siginificant difference in encoding time

OR...

question#2: I need to shell out money for a powerful Mac Pro with an internal 3rd party BR burner (about $500), and if so, then what are ideal specs, dual core, quad core...RAM size, video card speed...etc...

And...
question#3: are there commercial services for converting HD videos to BR?

many thanks and appologies in advance if this is a simple question.
DriPhone
 
driphone said:
thanks, I am not so tech savvy to make a multi-OS boot system and possibly will stay with Macs, let's assume we want to configure a Mac Pro for the mentioned task, what will it be?
Click to expand...

Ok so here's what you'll need:

2.8 GHZ Intel Xeon octocore Mac Pro
NVIDIA 8800GT 512MB VRAM
2GB RAM ( Get 4more GB from OWC)
One superdrive
Order an MCE BLURAY drive fromhttp://www.mcetech.com/
Get the regular HD and buy a Velociraptor 10000RPM drive from macsales.com
Get a HDMI display or get a Apple cinema display along with a HDTV!
Get toast 9 and you're set
*** Just remember Apple will be releasing new Mac Pros soon so I'd wait
 
Depending on what your budget calls for and if this all you'd be utilizing it for at the present, id recommend;

CPU:
2.8Ghz Quad-core (you can do a BTO, to remove one of the CPUs by $500~)
8-core will be efficient and definitely improve speeds, but even the 4-core will be sufficient to get the job done well.

Memory:
2GB Stock then upgrade 3rd party
(plus you can get a great deal on 2x2GB for 112$ @ OWC - which will be recommended for doing any sort of extensive tasks like this, you want to be able to have headroom from bouncing from CPU processing to dumping into the memory buckets; so to speak..)

Graphics: ATI 2600 will do you fine, (you can always upgrade to the 3870 for cheaper or 200$ fo rthe 8800 if you really need to)

Optical Drives - i havent done alot of burning/importing via optical lately, but if the program allows to do multi imports or exports, you may benefit from having multiple Optical drives. One to import and one to export etc etc

and the rest like Wifi is optional, but might be worth it for an extra $50~ (i think it is)
 
Catch Them said:
Depending on what your budget calls for and if this all you'd be utilizing it for at the present, id recommend;

CPU:
2.8Ghz Quad-core (you can do a BTO, to remove one of the CPUs by $500~)
8-core will be efficient and definitely improve speeds, but even the 4-core will be sufficient to get the job done well.

Memory:
2GB Stock then upgrade 3rd party
(plus you can get a great deal on 2x2GB for 112$ @ OWC - which will be recommended for doing any sort of extensive tasks like this, you want to be able to have headroom from bouncing from CPU processing to dumping into the memory buckets; so to speak..)

Graphics: ATI 2600 will do you fine, (you can always upgrade to the 3870 for cheaper or 200$ fo rthe 8800 if you really need to)

Optical Drives - i havent done alot of burning/importing via optical lately, but if the program allows to do multi imports or exports, you may benefit from having multiple Optical drives. One to import and one to export etc etc

and the rest like Wifi is optional, but might be worth it for an extra $50~ (i think it is)
Click to expand...

The ATI 2600 isn't good enough so get the 8800GT without hesitating.
 
ildondeigiocchi said:
Ok so here's what you'll need:

2.8 GHZ Intel Xeon octocore Mac Pro
NVIDIA 8800GT 512MB VRAM
2GB RAM ( Get 4more GB from OWC)
One superdrive
Order an MCE BLURAY drive fromhttp://www.mcetech.com/
Get the regular HD and buy a Velociraptor 10000RPM drive from macsales.com
Get a HDMI display or get a Apple cinema display along with a HDTV!
Get toast 9 and you're set
*** Just remember Apple will be releasing new Mac Pros soon so I'd wait
Click to expand...

wow! this looks like an awesome set up. When is the new Mac pro coming out?
question: what will be the real speed encoding difference between a 4 core vs an 8 core?

also are there any commercial services for HD (BR) disk burning?
 
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