New Mac Pro Purchasing Questions

[philb7777]

I am purchasing a new Mac Pro and ACD to replace my G5. I record a ton of HDV video in 1080i of my kids sporting events and burn them to disc using iMovie 06. I want to start using Final Cut Express and get a little more advanced. With HD video in 1080i using over 15 Gig per hour, I need a system with a ton of memory. Here are my questions:

1. How much RAM would you recommend? I had planned on 4 GB

2. If I have all four hard drive bays with 500-750 GB, would I need a RAID card? Why would someone need a RAID card?

3. If I only use 1080i video for personal use (only video shot of my kids) and no commercial blu-ray movies, can the current ACD display a home movie burned to blu-ray disc using third party blu-ray drives and burning software?

4.For hi-def video, does anyone have a recommendation on th ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT vs. the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT?

I realize that this might not be the best forum for all three questions, but I really need some advice from the forum before I spend a chunk of hard- earned money. Thanks in advance for any recommendations/information.

 

[jrlcopy]

I am purchasing a new Mac Pro and ACD to replace my G5. I record a ton of HDV video in 1080i of my kids sporting events and burn them to disc using iMovie 06. I want to start using Final Cut Express and get a little more advanced. With HD video in 1080i using over 15 Gig per hour, I need a system with a ton of memory. Here are my questions:

1. How much RAM would you recommend? I had planned on 4 GB

2. If I have all four hard drive bays with 500-750 GB, would I need a RAID card? Why would someone need a RAID card?

3. If I only use 1080i video for personal use (only video shot of my kids) and no commercial blu-ray movies, can the current ACD display a home movie burned to blu-ray disc using third party blu-ray drives and burning software?

4.For hi-def video, does anyone have a recommendation on th ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT vs. the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT?

I realize that this might not be the best forum for all three questions, but I really need some advice from the forum before I spend a chunk of hard- earned money. Thanks in advance for any recommendations/information.

4gb of plenty,

having 2tb+ of hard drive space is a little excessive for HDV, but it works, you can never have too much. , I would balance it out, get 2 500gb drives, one for the osx and then one only for media, and then some external drives to archive to. Nothing that you will ever do with hdv will ever need the RAID card. The raid card is for when you are doing real Uncompressed HD, with 10m-bit streams. I think you could do 25 video tracks of hdv before you would even need to think about the raid card.

Yes, but those discs that you burn will only be playable on the ps3, 90% of the other players reject the disc because they think it is a pirated disc.

The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is fine, however you couldn't go wrong with upgrading to 8800

 

[ivid]

daisy-chaining external FW drives

is it ok to daisy-chain external FW400 drives for video/audio editing?
or does each one have to be connected directly in order to be stable?

 

[philb7777]

4gb of plenty,

having 2tb+ of hard drive space is a little excessive for HDV, but it works, you can never have too much. , I would balance it out, get 2 500gb drives, one for the osx and then one only for media, and then some external drives to archive to. Nothing that you will ever do with hdv will ever need the RAID card. The raid card is for when you are doing real Uncompressed HD, with 10m-bit streams. I think you could do 25 video tracks of hdv before you would even need to think about the raid card.

Yes, but those discs that you burn will only be playable on the ps3, 90% of the other players reject the disc because they think it is a pirated disc.

The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is fine, however you couldn't go wrong with upgrading to 8800

Thanks for the feedback. Just to clarify - I could play back a home made blu-ray disc on my mac pro and ACD as long as I had a blu-ray player/burner attached?

 

[Toups]

At this time Blue-Ray support on the mac is limited at best.