The ultimate FCP editing suite for P2HD editing?

E

Ed Waters

Active member
Would love to have some feedback on the best system configuration for editing P2 Hi DEF material on Final Cut Pro Studio 2.

Thanks
 
What's your budget?

Because we've been running DVCProHD editing in FCS2 on a 2.66 GHz quad core Mac with 6 GBs of RAM and an ATI 3870 for three years. The GPU added this year.

We use Seagate 720.11 500 GB internals and have a 30-inch ACD.
 
Ultimate would be an 8-core Mac Pro with 8 GB RAM, Fibrechannel RAID and Kona 3 feeding a 20" production monitor. And would cost $30-40K.:) Work it backwards a little. How much you're willing to spend would determine the level of ultimate-ness.

-Noah
 
Uh...a little less. Fibrechannel is overkill for a single system. Really only beneficial for a multi-station setup with shared storage. Get a MacPro, CalDigit Raid Card and Raid three internal drives, then add the HD element for external storage off the same card. OR...just have the drives in the macpro as single drives, they are plenty fast WITHOUT the Raid card, then if you need external raided storage (for protection), you can get the HD One from Caldigit or the EVO HD from Maxx DIgital. Mini SAS connection, 5 times faster than fibre and easily half the cost.

Then yes, you need a cpature card and HD monitor for proper monitoring. Kona 3 is the top of the line...but there are alternatives from Decklink and Matrox. HD monitors from eCinema to JVC to Panasonic.
 
When someone says Ultimate, I go for it.

1a4d9dd0.gif
 
David S. said:
What's your budget?

Because we've been running DVCProHD editing in FCS2 on a 2.66 GHz quad core Mac with 6 GBs of RAM and an ATI 3870 for three years. The GPU added this year.

We use Seagate 720.11 500 GB internals and have a 30-inch ACD.
Click to expand...

I use virtually the exact same system, except 3GHz quad, also added the 3870 GPU recently. I use a cheap intensity pro, via analog component to a monitor for grading and has HDMI for output to the Bravia.

I have the OS HDD

And two Seagate ST3750330AS 700gb (sold as 750gb - but read as about 698) drives on a software raid (read speed on x bench around 190mbps) as my edit drives. I back up to an external 1.5tb raid on fw800 and then archive to another external that has swappable HDDS.

Its big gap from the ULTIMATE to my system, but it handles DVCProHD masterfully.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions! My budget is up to 28000.

I also need an archive solution. Any suggestions. Are the tape storage drives a good idea for P2 HD?

Thanks
 
yes! we use a Tandberg AutoLoader w/ LTO3 tapes. Each tape holds 400GB uncompressed. There's nothing like tangibility!

cheers

Z
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top