What Specs needed for Mac

[Britt Pitre]

I am about to shoot my second feature on the HVX and I want to buy a macintosh for the purposes of editing. I used a mac on my first feature - we shot on a Sony SDX900, so the footage was SD in the DVCPro50 format. For a long time I didn't have problems but late in post I had lots of problems with file corruptions which people have told me occured because the computer had a data overload and because the hard drives were too full. I really want to avoid having this happen again because it really caused problems and I had to resort to a quicktime backup of the film.

So my question is, what specs do I need on a mac for it to be able to handle a feature's worth of HVX footage without any crippling hiccups? I already have a way to offload the P2 cards onto external hardrives so I don't need a P2 offloading device as part of the specs.

Thanks.

[THoff]

Someone gave you a very lame excuse, computers don't have "data overload" -- the data either fits, or it doesn't. Any gray area in between can be chalked up to poorly written software and pilot error. The latter is surely to blame where the "hard drives too full" explanation was offered. Data backup policies can't get you back the time you've lost, but they can get you your data back in the event of a crash or corrupted file.

I don't know how many hours of material you are talking about, and whether you will stick with DVCPro50 or use DVCProHD, but you want LOTS of disk space (preferably RAID1 or better), and LOTS of RAM (2GB or more). Also think about an archiving solution, you don't want a repeat of what happened last time.

[David Saraceno]

A 2.66 Ghz MacPro with 4 Gbs of RAM, and four SATA internal drives with the nvidia 7200 GT should do it.

[ozduc]

Someone gave you a very lame excuse, computers don't have "data overload" -- the data either fits, or it doesn't.

Not quite true. As hard drives fill up, they slow down and if they get too full, (usually more than 85-90% capaicity) especially in the case of video files, they can cause all sorts of problems with your NLE. Also the data may have "fit" on the drive at the beginning of the project but as you proceed with an edit there are more and more files accumulating in the project. i.e. render files etc. Rule of thumb is to not let ANY drive hooked up to the computer, even the system drive, get beyond 90% full.

[THoff]

Yes, the system will slow down due to drive fragmentation. But your NLE shouldn't choke until it runs out of disk space, and even then it should be handled gracefully if the software is written properly. The NLE has no idea what the fragmentation level of the drive is, and it certainly should never corrupt any of the assets in your project because those should be open for read-only access -- if it does corrupt the assets, let's rightfully blame the software developers of the NLE.

[Justyn]

If you buy a macbook or macbook pro then you'd have a great field/location editing system.. one that you can use to offload the cards, check the footage and even run DVrack. Then you can use it to cut your footage when it's all done. The pro version would be preferred for the firewire 800 port and additional 2nd bus... and such. However, I've been cutting and capturing HVX footage to my lovely macbook and it was cheap....

I think anything above a 1.5 ghz single processor G4 laptop ... G5 tower or Macbook would do the trick....

[Britt Pitre]

hmmm, well now I'm starting to wonder if shouldn't try using the G5 that we used on the last film, but with much more disk space. We had about 18 hours of footage on the last film and with the render files and everything, our external drives were like 98% full towards the end of the process.

The specs for the G5 that I already have are as follows:

Machine Model - Power Mac G5
CPU Type - PowerPC G5 (3.0)
Number of CPUs - 2
Processor - Dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5
Memory - 1.25 GB DDR SDRAM
L2 Cache (per CPU) - 512 KB
Bus Speed - 900 MHz
Boot ROM Version - 5.1.8f7
FireWire Bus - 800 Mb/sec Speed
Modem Model - MicroDash
DVD Read/Write

We edited using two external firewire 800 drives - never had any problems viewing footage real time - of course it was SD. Would that also be true of HD is the question. We would be recording the HVX footage at the lowest compression possible on the P2 cards in the 720P native mode.

I'm just thinking it might be a lot cheaper to upgrade the mac we have than to buy a totally new one, I just want to make sure it would probably work.

[ozduc]

Well Thoff, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this. You keep saying "should" and shouldn't but that doesn't change the fact that it does and doesn't when it comes to how computers work. What should and shouldn't happen isn't always the case. Files get corrupted and systems crash. Having any drive at 98% capacity on an editing system is a disaster waiting to happen.
Britt, your cmputer you have now will work fine. I would suggest adding a couple more gigs of RAM. Then spend a few dollars on a decent externl drive set up. G-Technologies makes a very reliable SATA Raid and also a FW800 G-Raid.

[Niels Neeskens]

I agree with Ozduc, and I experienced it yesterday again. The external hard drive was almost full and I couldn't do anything with it anymore. FCP wouldn't start up the project etc. I emptied the drive a bit, like the 10% Ozduc is talking about and it worked fine again!

Niels

[Britt Pitre]

Whats the difference between the G-Raid and the SATA drives?

[David Saraceno]

G-Raid is SATA II.

They also make FW400/800 and USB2.

A raid runs faster than individual drives.

[ozduc]

Whats the difference between the G-Raid and the SATA drives?

The drives inside the cases are probably the same, i.e. sata drives. It is how they connect to tthe computer that is different. The G-Raid set up has 2 drives inside a case with a hardware controlled raid 0, that is plugged into the computer via FW800 or FW400. The 2 drives show up on the desktop as one large drive. The G-Sata raid is a similar set up but is hooked up to the computer via a sata cable, so you need the sata card in a slot in the computer to hook it to. The advantage that this has over the G-Raid is faster transfer speeds and that also frees up the FW bus so you can hook the camera in or any other FW devices you may be using.