"MacPro and HMC150 sittin' in a tree..."

[RMJones]

So...
I am about to take the plunge and need a little advise. I am a semi-professional (semi-pro meaning i do get paid to shoot, edit, animate and design, i just don't own the equipment i do it on).

I am about to purchase a new computer-

Software I will start out with is Premier Pro CS4 (i know) then in couple of month or so I will purchase FCP for the new machine. I have to purchase the adobe software first for a few projects otherwise I would start out with FCP.

Questions:

*Does anybody think I will have problems with AVCHD (HMC150) footage on a MacPro with two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon and 4GB (1xGB) of ram, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB.

*Do I need to spend the extra $700 on the 2x 3.0GHz Quad-Core?

*Also would the GeForce8800 GT 512MB be more efficient than two(one for each display) ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB? I don’t really do much 3-D animation stuff yet, but I do push the limits of After Effect quite a bit.

Any help would be much appreciated

Thanks,
Rory

[Nathyn]

I'm trying to find the answer to this for a guy in my Divinity thread too.

-Nate

[edy4eva]

I have a single quad processor, with 4gb of ram, and a 9600GT. It's all fine.
Save your cash on the processors, that 200MHz extra won't bring more than 2% overall performance improvement.

What I suggest is to invest more inRAM (double to 8GB) and perhaps an extra storage drive (perhaps a RAID0 or 5 setup) before considering a CPU upgrade.

If the motherboard supports it,get another 8800GT (you could find them for cheap nowadays used).

Hope this helps.

[Nathyn]

Cool.

-Nate

[RMJones]

Awesome. thanks.

[Justyn]

You'll pretty much never go over 2 gigs of ram in FCP and other apps... unless you are running multiple programs at the same time.. If you do buy RAM, don't buy it from apple.

[Ming]

....unless you are running multiple programs at the same time..

:grin: Neverrrr! FCP, DVDSP, Motion, LR, PS, Firefox, iTunes, Toast, Compressor, Discus, Audio Hijack...

[santafeliving]

HMC150 sounds like a dream for my circumstances, financial and otherwise - mostly solo documentary. Computing power is my only consideration at this point. I have a more basic model MBP: Intel core 2 duo 2.2 with 4 GB RAM and big fast drives (including external eSATA), running latest version of FCS. Would really appreciate any thoughts on what the computing performance would be (time, editing ease, output), or whether I should go SD and a DVX100B.

[edy4eva]

If you could replace the Duo with a Quad you're in good hands (you could pick one up for couple hundred dollars).
The quad helped a lot in conversion, as well as in editing; by how much, that I can't tell :)

[santafeliving]

Wouldn't made the upgrade cost, but I read somewhere that the processor is soldered into the MacBook Pro, and it's basically there to stay. Thanks for the advice. I'll check with Apple.

[edy4eva]

I didn't catch you had a macbook, i thought you were just referring to mac pro. my bad :)

[santafeliving]

No problem at all - still looking for thoughts if anyone has had some experience with this. Thanks

[manglerBMX]

i run a macbook pro 2.16 w/3gb ram and i transcode to a lacie rugged drive(5400rpm) via fw800. my transcode times are a little better than real time. maybe 1.2x to 1.4x.

i just got an express esata card so i'll be trying that out on my next time ingesting footage. i'll be ingesting to a seagate 1tb drive, 7200rpm.

[santafeliving]

i run a macbook pro 2.16 w/3gb ram and i transcode to a lacie rugged drive(5400rpm) via fw800. my transcode times are a little better than real time. maybe 1.2x to 1.4x.

i just got an express esata card so i'll be trying that out on my next time ingesting footage. i'll be ingesting to a seagate 1tb drive, 7200rpm.

Excellent - really good to hear. Please update on how the seagate goes!

[manglerBMX]

i don't think its going to be much of a difference. the speed bump that transcoding has with avchd is with the processor. thats the only real speed factor there is. drive write speed probably doesn't change much. but i'm still gonna give it a go.

[JonathanS]

I'm cutting 1080p25 from an HMC151, on a MacBook Pro 2.2GHz/4Gb RAM/Final Cut Studio 2 (FPC6.0.5). Media drives are 1Tb LaCie FW800 RAIDs - cheap and cheerful, but they work.

The whole setup is OK. Only OK, I'd say: there are times when I'd love more processing horsepower, notably big renders and when compressing H.264 deliverables. Ingest to ProRes is a slightly longer-than-realtime process, annoyingly; editing ProRes is smooth and mostly real-time. It helps to set the playback quality to 'Medium,' this does some sort of optimisation that's extremely beneficial, it seems. Orange segments (supposedly real-time preview) sometimes require render to play smoothly, but render times are mostly reasonable, unless you're doing something like Magic Bullet effects. At which point they balloon massively, and you're looking at a progress bar for hours on end.

Final output is reasonable; I suspect it's limited to drive performance more than anything, since the eventual files are rather large. eSATA RAID is likely the way to go here, but it's expensive compared to FW800 boxes, and less straightforward to drop in a bag and carry around the country.

For batch compression I use Episode Desktop, which I mostly love. Their latest 720p H.264 presets produce superb results, but render times are loooong on this system; about 9x real-time in my testing. Shorts compress overnight; feature-length work would mean a weekend running the fan. At least Episode backgrounds nicely.

So: it's all workable on a MacBook Pro, perhaps more workable than I'd expected. However, I will be buying a Mac Pro soon. About as soon as the new models arrive, in fact; the current ones are a year old already, and new i7-based models must be just around the corner. Surely. Any day now. Please? Pretty please?

[edy4eva]

I know this may be OT; I installed Windows 7 (64-bit) yesterday to test it out. It supports H.264/AVCHD playback natively in the new media player.

The big surprise was playback: CPU usage was around 5% (whereas in XP, using VLC it hovers around 45%)

Second, I installed Edius to see if handling of files was any faster. Edius launched at least twice as fast; scrolling on the timeline was much faster. The only hiccup was audio: it kept on skipping.

Has anyone compared the performance of Edius between 32 and 64 bit operating systems? I know Edius is only 32, but from my trial it ran much faster.