My First Editing Suite! Should I buy this?

M

markyf

Well-known member
I shot my first short on a DVX100B and it's so frustrating not being able to at least do some editing work at home. Next project, this fall hopefully, I'm going to have a home suite (Final Cut Studio). But what to buy?

I originally thought a Dual G5 1.6, which can be had for about $700 on Craigslist. With two 19" monitors, I thought this made more sense than a 24" Imac, which would run about $2500+ with the tax.

Now I see this on Craigslist:

-Two 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
-2GB (4 x 512MB)
-250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
-NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT 256 MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI)
-One 16x SuperDrive
-Both Blueport 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme
-Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse -U.S. English
-Mac OS X - U.S. English
-AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro/Power Mac

for $1950.

The next project is SD, but I will eventually work in HD. It looks like this Xeon makes more sense in terms of being able to use it down the round for HD, versus the slow Dual G5. Does this logic make sense? Anything else I shoudl consider?

Mark
 
Do you mean a new Mac Pro or the Xeon one here I just mentioned? My budget is $2500 tops.
 
check this out. brand new refurb from apple. full warranty and support. same pricehttp://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?nplm=FA356LL/A.

BTW, you can edit HD on a G5. the intel machines are not much faster. i sold my quad 2.5 G5 and bought an 8 core 2.8 xeon Mac Pro. The difference in speed is minimal even with twice as many processors. considering i had to fork out $1800 difference between what i sold the G5 for and what the new machine cost, i wish i could go back....

and damn you apple for switching to intel..... old processors were better.
 
cheezweezl, did you set up a virtual cluster so that compressor can actually use all 8 cores? after I set mine up, compressor exports are about 9-10 times faster than my dual 2.5 G5. I get 5x real-time encoding to MPEG2 (2-pass) for my SD projects on my 2.8ghz 8-core now.
 
cheezweezl said:
check this out. brand new refurb from apple. full warranty and support. same pricehttp://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?nplm=FA356LL/A.

BTW, you can edit HD on a G5. the intel machines are not much faster. i sold my quad 2.5 G5 and bought an 8 core 2.8 xeon Mac Pro. The difference in speed is minimal even with twice as many processors. considering i had to fork out $1800 difference between what i sold the G5 for and what the new machine cost, i wish i could go back....

and damn you apple for switching to intel..... old processors were better.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what's going on w/your setup but in our office the Mac Pros k-i-l-l the G5s when exporting or rendering. The Mac Pros are easily 2-3 times as fast depending on the task.

To the OP, I'd definitely not get a G5 unless someone was giving it to you for free. There are already aspects of FCS that are Intel only or Intel optimized and that trend is just going to continue.


-A
 
i am doing nothing different on this new machine. i have not setup virtual cluster but i don't use compressor much anyway. FCP, AE, Photoshop, Etc. not much faster for me. i have the newest 8 core 2.8 with 6gb ram. My quad 2.5 g5 was almost as fast.

exactly what features in fcp are intel only?
 
ya know there is one big diff between my g5 and my mac pro.... Leopard.

i wonder if that is the problem... leopard definitely slowed down every machine i installed it on. my macbook quickly went back to tiger when i saw the results of leopard. i tried to install tiger on the mac pro but it didn't work. any thoughts on this?
 
Well for one thing, FCP, AE, and Photoshop will only run on 1-2 cores. So yeah, the jump in performance won't be that significant.

AE allows you to set up a virtual cluster when exporting a timeline, but it won't show major improvements while working on something. The big advantages of 8-cores are either running all of those programs at once without processor slow down or setting up a virtual cluster to speed up exporting.

let me guess, you still have the stock drive running your OS. how many hard drives do you have in your mac pro and how is your media/assets distributed among them?
 
cheezweezl said:
i am doing nothing different on this new machine. i have not setup virtual cluster but i don't use compressor much anyway. FCP, AE, Photoshop, Etc. not much faster for me. i have the newest 8 core 2.8 with 6gb ram. My quad 2.5 g5 was almost as fast.
Click to expand...
Just in rendering inside FCP and exporting directly from FCP (we don't have any virtual clusters either) I see a huge difference between our G5s and our Mac Pros.


exactly what features in fcp are intel only?
Click to expand...
IIRC there are limitations regarding Pro Res on G5's and there is only one GFX card available for G5's that is recommended to run Color (and it's expensive and hard to find).

If you already have a G5 then I'd keep it until the wheels fall off (heck, I used a G4 tower until last summer), but I wouldn't recommend buying a G5 now unless it was nearly free.


-A
 
Me again. Got my Dell 2408. Beautiful so far. I don't know from a dead pixel but nothing on the screen looks dead at all.

Next question is Leopard. Should I upgrade now and wipe this chick's machine clean? She has Tiger on it. I feel like it might be a good time to do it before I start using the machine, but what are the pros and cons of upgrading? I'm going to be using Final Cut Studio.
 
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