Buying a new Mac to edit Red footage

S

squire87

Member
First off, just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Rob and I'm an editor and indie filmmaker from Baltimore, MD. I just found out about this site a few days ago from a colleague, and I'm looking forward to many discussions here. Speaking of which, here's my pickle...

So, we shot a feature on Red. I'm one of two editors on the film. The other editor is already up and running and gave me all the specs of his system. He suggested a 1TB internal media drive to go along with the 500GB drive being used for the OS and software. I went to the online mac store and built my system. However, they want to charge me $425 for the 1TB internal. That's just ludicrous. So, I'm looking for another internal 1TB i can buy online (or wherever) and install myself. It's not a big deal, I did the same thing with my last system. The thing is I'm never sure if a drive will work with Mac or not. They don't always say on the spec sheets. Any suggestions?

Also, I found this one:

http://softbuyweb.stores.yahoo.net/wd10000lsrtl.html

Think it'll work okay?
 
I just bought a Seagate 1TB SATA 3.5" internal Hard drive for my Mac G5 PowerPC at Best Buys for unfer $200.00. Took all of 5 minutes to drop it in and partition!
Couldn't be any easier.
 
ZazaCast said:
Yes... that is the exact model! ...and a better price by $10.00 (but I had to have it a.s.a.p.):beer:
Click to expand...

Perfect. Thanks a lot! By the way, I also need to get a couple external backups. Any suggestions? The other editor is using the G-Tech G-Raid 2:

http://www.jr.com/90720701-graid2-1tb-sata-ii-hard-drive-w-triple-interface/pe/GTC_90720701/

Of course, I'm once again trying to save some cash. I've seen/heard a lot about the "Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac" drive:

http://www.jr.com/seagate/pe/SAG_15DESKMAC/

It's less expensive and bigger (1.5TB), but I keep seeing A LOT of mixed reviews. Any ideas?
 
I'll offer an alternate view- buy the most high performance and fast storage you can possibly afford. Red requires way more throughput than standard DV or HDV, especially once you go into transcodes, multi-stream editing and effects work. I'd go for the G-Raids and up and avoid drives like the Seagate. Those are ok for once in a while backup but for day in day out performance you'll be hurting bigtime. For best performance get a Firewire 800 or eSATA based RAID. G-Tech has good stuff also Dulce Systems and CalDigit. When it comes to RED more is more.

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-SPEED-eS.cfm

http://www.caldigit.com/FASTA-2e.asp

http://www.dulcesystems.com/html/pr20070716.html

-Noah
 
i have a related question, just bought a new mac pro with 2 quad-cores and 2 internal tb hard drives. however, im not too pleased with the performance and render times using FCP. i tested it with xbench and the only low scores it seemed were with the hard drive access times. anyone recommend some resources for setting up a new mac for performance and some good benchmarking programs?
 
Noah is right. With the massive (proxy!) file sizes from the RED, you're gonna need the highest throughput you can get - external RAID is the best way to go. Check out macgurus.com for a decent home user selection (they also sell Caldigit products) and some tutorials on building a RAID.
 
longshanks: make sure that, in the "Energy Saver" preference, the checkbox for allowing the hard disks to sleep is NOT checked.
 
NoahK said:
I'll offer an alternate view- buy the most high performance and fast storage you can possibly afford. Red requires way more throughput than standard DV or HDV, especially once you go into transcodes, multi-stream editing and effects work. I'd go for the G-Raids and up and avoid drives like the Seagate. Those are ok for once in a while backup but for day in day out performance you'll be hurting bigtime. For best performance get a Firewire 800 or eSATA based RAID. G-Tech has good stuff also Dulce Systems and CalDigit. When it comes to RED more is more.

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-SPEED-eS.cfm

http://www.caldigit.com/FASTA-2e.asp

http://www.dulcesystems.com/html/pr20070716.html

-Noah
Click to expand...

Thanks for the input Noah. Yeah, I'll probably wind up going with the G-Raid too. The other editor I'm working with picked up a couple of those and has been pretty satisfied so far. As for the internal, do you think the Seagate 1TB SATA
I mentioned in my first post is sufficient?
 
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