Starting from Mac scratch

[russc]

Okay

I right on the verge of purchasing a new Mac and moving my old to second system status.

So what are some of your dream specs suggestions to run the fastest most efficient Edit system for this latest Final cut studio.

Memory, processor, graphic card, etc. If you were building your fastest FCP editing mac. What would be your staple/must have numbers/combinations???



RJC

[David Saraceno]

What footage will you be working with?

[Cools]

Dream machine? The latest and greatest Mac Pro. :P

[russc]

I'm going to be cutting everything from mini DV, to P2 to DVCAM. Just looking for dream specs of a mac machine and i can scale down from there.

[russc]

Latest greatest mac pro for latest greatest Final cut studio...HD editing and output

Any thoughts on Specs? Obviously the most memory... but any specific kind? Ceratin slot arrangement?
More processor better? 8 caore as opposed to quad ? Or is it overkill?

Any thoughts are valuable on your dream spec as I look to upgrade my suite. Most of you mac guys must know better than me.

thanks

[Warthog]

The more cores the better, but do not expect a linear performance grow. Also some operations will be affected more than others. I am happy with 2x 2.66GHz Xeon (mostly SD work, sometimes HD using the Apple codecs - only FCE ), but I know people, who consider this overkill that is not worth the money.

16GB RAM is the max you can get for a reasonable price from Apple and should be enough. I see no reason to go to 32GB for 32GB. RAM arrangement is irrelevant unless you plan to upgrade (and I would say 16GB should be enough for a few years)

A better graphics card might be nice if/when Apple releases a new version of FC with support for GPGPU computing, but is not necessary right now. You can upgrade later anyway.

Standard hard disks are quite OK, if you want a better performance, get either faster drives, the RAID card or an FC card plus an external HDD array.

[russc]

At last! Thanks Warthog!

[RyanBellaCine]

I've worked on a CloverTown 3.0GHZ 8 Core that had 32GB RAM, and let me tell you, Final Cut Pro 6, DVD Studio 4, Compressor 3, Photoshop CS3, Lightroom 2, FireFox, Safari, Color, all open and they managed to use up all 32GB of RAM with 8GB active & the rest being used for page filing.

I don't think you can ever have too much RAM, But true cost does get in the way. My current rig has 12GB, and I do wish I could stuff more in here. But that cost of 4GB chips is getting in the way... ( non Apple )

This is on a Nehalem Mac Pro, which makes the best speed of it's RAM when installed in set's of 3s ( Quad Core ) or 6 ( 8 Core ). That's despite the fact that you get 4 RAM slots per processor, you have to keep it in 3s to keep DDR3 speeds. Otherwise it kicks back to DDR2 speeds.

[Michael T]

I'm ready to buy but I'm waiting for the price to drop which should happen very soon.

Mac pro - Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" 8 processors

Ram - 32gig form OWC is $1239.00 you need of have multi programs open which can use all of your ram very quickly

I always run two drives at raid zero for my main system drive which gives me about 15 to 20% bump in speed and will be using 10,000 rpm segates which will bump it a little more than the 7200rpms.

I haven't made my mind up on the video card yet but will get the one with the biggest bang for the buck when I order. I hope a better card will be out by then.

This set up can be quite fast and much cheaper than buying the faster machines. I think this is a better buy to get the 2.26 and load it with ram and fast drives for the os. I have had very good and stable machines doing this so far.

[Warthog]

I've worked on a CloverTown 3.0GHZ 8 Core that had 32GB RAM, and let me tell you, Final Cut Pro 6, DVD Studio 4, Compressor 3, Photoshop CS3, Lightroom 2, FireFox, Safari, Color, all open and they managed to use up all 32GB of RAM with 8GB active & the rest being used for page filing.


Are you using all of these simultaneously? Really? Or are most of them mostly sitting idly in the background, while you are working with one or two apps?

The progress bar screenshot is nice, but I guess everyone knows that the estimated times are joke, because they grow and fall during the encoding process and the progress bar is everything but linear and realistic :-)

[Kellar42]

We just asked this question about two months ago, and picked up a the maximum processor, 8 core Mac Pro with best graphics card and 16 gigs of Ram.

Awesome computer, no doubt. Only thing is, don't expect toooo much of a performance improvement...I mean the thing handles every sort of HD video, but it's not somehow magically blazingly faster than everything you've ever touched before. (Then again, after a month of working on it and being a little annoyed with 5-6 hour renders on one project, I had to render the same thing on my Macbook pro and it took more than 30 hours...) I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I expected my first experience with a $10,000 computer to be a little different. That doesn't mean anything else would be better, though!

[RyanBellaCine]

We just asked this question about two months ago, and picked up a the maximum processor, 8 core Mac Pro with best graphics card and 16 gigs of Ram.

Awesome computer, no doubt. Only thing is, don't expect toooo much of a performance improvement...I mean the thing handles every sort of HD video, but it's not somehow magically blazingly faster than everything you've ever touched before. (Then again, after a month of working on it and being a little annoyed with 5-6 hour renders on one project, I had to render the same thing on my Macbook pro and it took more than 30 hours...) I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I expected my first experience with a $10,000 computer to be a little different. That doesn't mean anything else would be better, though!

The biggest problem right now is poorly written programs on a CPU resource perspective. FCP is still only a 32bit app and doesn't fully use all your cores 98% of the time. As of now your doing good if FCP hits about 50% of your total available CPU power. But there is so much untapped power in these Mac Pros the software doesn't know what to do with yet.

Compressor is really the only FCS app I can get to use all 8 cores fully. And that's only because I use Virtual Clusters. I can process a 3 hour Pro Res video exports into 5 different sized h.264 movies in about 30min ballpark. heck it might even be less then that.

Things get even more beautiful when you can network two or more Mac Pro's together with Compressor & Qmaster. Just about cut render times in half for every additional Mac Pro you can link up. ( This is with a fiber cable video RAID network )

I can't wait to finally see a fully fleshed out QuickTime X and 64bit Final Cut Studio.