Editing a feature doc shot on HVX

R

rob@headland

Member
Hello one and all.

I'm shooting a feature doc on the HVX. Budget is relatively low, around $350k. (€240k actually - we're in Ireland.)

My question is about hardware. We're thinking about cutting it on FCP, and buying a rig to do that - as long as it comes in at around the same price as it would to rent.

The footage will be 1080i25p, and my questions are as follows;

1. What are we talking about in terms of RAM we'll need? 8GB? 16? 32?
2. What's my best solution in terms of HDD space? 3 external G-Raids? some sort of RAID solution? (I know very, very little about this particular area.)

Actually that's it. If anybody has any advice I'd love to hear it.

Thanks,

rob.
 
Look at getting a Mac Pro desktop. That'll be your best bet for a stable work environment. 4 GB's of RAM minimum and from there the sky is the limit. The more intensive you predict your renders to be (filters, color correction, VFX), the more RAM you'll need. Having a good Graphics card is essential as well.

The Mac Pro's have four internal hard-drive bays (hot-swappable, so very easy to install), so I would suggest getting two more 1 TB internal hard drives and configuring them to run as a RAID 1. What this essentially does is use one drive to backup the other drive in case of failure. It isn't as fast as a RAID 0 configuration, but in that setup if one of your drives fail you are screwed.

I recommend the internal drives because they will run faster then the external drives. In my setup, you have a total of 1 TB of disk space to work with, which I think should be plenty for a feature shot in HD, but you might need more, in which case you have another internal hard drive bay available which you could backup using an external harddrive.

I personally recommend the Seagate Barracudas. They are great!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148278

I do not recommend Maxtors.
 
Also take a look at the CalDigit SV2R HD esata external drives. I have two 3.75 terabyte raids mirroring each other and am getting great performance and reliability.
Jim
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top