My company has give me 4,000 for a video edit machine, please advice

[Sweetfeld28]

thank you Sweetfeld28,

you mention to get the best video card apple sells, how does it help me to get the best one versus the one that comes with it ? Is the video going to be imported in higher quality? is FCP going to be able to render faster or more complex projects.

if final cut pro only uses 4GB memory, then why is that some suggest to get 8GB or even more ? how does it help my video editing experience.

thank you once again for your assistance

1. Compare cards. More Cores on a Video card, is kinda like more Cores on a processor. This will help if FCP, will use the power of the graphics cards to help with the Rendering of video, and Transitions in your video.

I only suggested this, because from personal experience i wish i would of gone that route.

2. More RAM is always better. I only suggest to get whatever come with the tower, because Apple over charges for RAM. You can a save your company some money, and use the said money elsewhere.



This links might explain the benefits of off loading processing to the GPU, better than i can:

nVidia Cuda, What is it? and an even better showcase of its power...

Adobe's use of Cuda processing in nVidia's GPUs. Link


I might be wrong, but i thought FCP Studio, could use this processing power; or hopefully they are going to incorporate in the next major update. [yes i'm talking to You, Apple]


Hope that somewhat helps, or gives a better understanding...

 

[MacAddict1978]

call a mac business specialist

Make an appointment with a Mac Business specialist. (call the local apple store or the toll free number) Going through your company and not personal sales channels, you might be able to get a discount going this route. (Just make sure you spin this purchase could lead to more hardware purchases down the line.)

Discounts are small, but for instance I can get Final Cut Studio for $829 and my base configs on the mac pros:
quad: 2299
8 core 3219
12 core 4599
And all custom options are discounted too. Most "companies" big or small can get this pricing just by asking. Those extra few hundred dollars can make or break a budget.

Hard to recommend a configuration without knowing how much power you really need.

 

[CaptainChunk]

thank you Sweetfeld28,

you mention to get the best video card apple sells, how does it help me to get the best one versus the one that comes with it ? Is the video going to be imported in higher quality? is FCP going to be able to render faster or more complex projects.

if final cut pro only uses 4GB memory, then why is that some suggest to get 8GB or even more ? how does it help my video editing experience.

thank you once again for your assistance

If you're looking at the 2010 machines, there would be no appreciable difference between a 5770 and 5870 card, rendering-wise, in FCP. Why? FCP itself is all CPU. Only Motion and Color actually benefit from faster GPUs. If your exposure to those two applications will be limited, there's really no reason to upgrade to a 5870.

Final Cut has a 4GB memory limitation, being a 32-bit application. But this doesn't necessarily mean that upgrading to say, 8GB is pointless, either. You can't always assume that Final Cut is going be the only application open on the machine. Perhaps you'd be running a web browser and a couple of Adobe apps (like Photoshop or After Effects) simultaneously. All of that would need RAM. A render job in Compressor utilizing multiple cores benefits from additional RAM, too...sometimes up to 1GB of RAM per core during the render. My point here is that someone telling you having more than 4GB of RAM on a FCP workstation is pointless is grossly misinformed.

And I've noticed that there are a lot of FCP naysayers in this thread. Here's the thing - everyone knows FCP is getting long in the tooth, but if you look at the majority of the professional editing crowd, they're either editing on FCP or Avid. At the end of the day, standardization will always win over bleeding edge features.

This links might explain the benefits of off loading processing to the GPU, better than i can:

nVidia Cuda, What is it? and an even better showcase of its power...

Adobe's use of Cuda processing in nVidia's GPUs. Link


I might be wrong, but i thought FCP Studio, could use this processing power; or hopefully they are going to incorporate in the next major update. [yes i'm talking to You, Apple]

Preaching to choir. We're ALL patiently waiting for Apple to do SOMETHING with FCS. But also note that PPro's biggest selling point is the Mercury Playback Engine, which really only flexes its muscles with a handful of CUDA cards (3 on the Mac, in fact - and one of them is discontinued). Adobe's decision to use proprietary APIs as opposed to standardized ones like OpenCL is puzzling. If they supported OpenCL in Mercury, Apple would really have something to worry about.