Editing footage from red Camera

D

dm_weekes

New member
Hi,

I'm new to this stuff and want to buy a Mac to be used to edit footage shot from the Red Camera in 4K (to be brought down to 2K). I went to the Mac Store and speced out a Mac Pro with the following specs. I want to know if this machine would be more than adequate to edit a feature length film.
o One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem”
o 8GB (4x2GB)
o 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive
o ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB
 
Get 16 GB ram.
Get an Nvidia card
Get a fast external Raid 5 array.
Get the upcoming Adobe CS6 and edit the footage natively.
 
Ok - Thanks; so the 2.8 Quad Core is fine; how critical is the # cores i.e. does performance really significantly improve from 4-core to 8-core to 12-core? Or is Ram a more critical component.
 
Ok...I was told that uping the # of cores does not increase performance that much. Thanks for the enlightenment. My editor will be working on a full length movie and I don't want to invest in a machine that will frustrate him.
Is there a major difference with the 1G Ndivia card vs. a 1G ATI card (that come with the machine from Apple). Do I really need the added expense? If so which Ndivia card do you recommend that will not burst my wallet.
 
I actually edited a feature film shot in Red 4k with a Sony VAIO F series laptop sporting an i7 2.8GHz chip with 8 gigs of RAM, an NVIDIA 330M graphics chip, and the files were streaming down from a FireWire 800 connected hard drive via an ExpressCard adapter. I had to run playback in lower resolution, but it was full speed and still looked great on my external monitor. I even managed to get away with multiple layers of sound and even the Colorista II filter on occasion. The final film weighed in at 110 minutes and could be watched from beginning to end under Adobe Premiere CS5.

Rendering was another story, though. I calculated it would take three days to render out, even to a SD QuickTime file.
 
Ok - THanks; so to sum up what you guys are advising, I should be good to go with the following; I have uped the # Cores to 8-Core and uped the RAM to 16G and am at the end of my budget. My only concern is whether I can go with the ATI 1G video card which comes with the machine or must I look for more cash for the Ndivia 1.5G card. If so, what is the least expensive Ndivia card that will do the job (until I can upgrade later).
Will Apple swap out the ATI card and and drop in a Ndivia and ship the machine...I'm thinking I can replace the cost of the ATI and in that way save a some bucks...if I need to.
 
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