EMac kick in pants

Hans Moleman

Hans Moleman

Carbonite Member
Howdy.

I was just put in charge of the video editting at my school, and they set me up with a shiny (almost) new EMac. (Ewww)

Anyway, it looks like theyre letting me screw around in the editting suite all semester instead of doing actual class work, the only catch was that I'd have to turn the joint into a cohesive unit. With Macs. or I won't graduate.

Just wondering if anyone with more experience with Macs can tell me any particular way or technique they have tried of converting a multi-use piece of crap into an editting-only computer? Any kind of soft ware, hardware that would make it better? Anything you can think of right off the bat that I could easily remove from it to make it run better? I've already done away with the grotesque apple mouse and jacked a kensington from another lab. (Steve Jobs must hate the idea of a right-click button)

thanks
 
I would say first off, get a new computer. Just kidding....Anyhow, can you get more RAM? Maybe install FCP or FCP express? We got some Imacs at my school last year, and I made due pretty well, even edited a sweet intro for our morning news.
 
I'm kidding...

What are the specs on the emac?

Then get most recent FCP version for the processor speed. Same for Photoshop and After Effects.

Good luck
 
I use an eMac for all my editing, from little shorts to entire film ideas 40+ minutes in lenth.

From the money I saved from getting a G5, I could afford to get a DVX100A. Would you rather have a crappy camera or a nice editing setup? I'd take the camera.

I don't have the money to get a nice editing system. I'm using FCP 4.5 and it's more than enough. True, it hasn't got the fastest render times on the block but it's perfectly OK for basic editing. If I want to, I can use CC just fine and use transitions with perfectly acceptable render times. I'm not even on the latest eMac, mine has a 1 Ghz G4.

$800 consumer computers such as an eMac or even a Mac mini can outdo $100,000 Avid systems 10 years ago.

Now that I'm done with my schpiel, here's my advice: you'll want at least 512MB's of ram. I've got 768. A second monitor is nice too. I've got a total of about 450GB of space, too, with external firewire drives.
 
alrighty. I MADE them purchase FCE for it, and I'm seeing what i can do about a second monitor. Thanks for the replies, guys
 
Yeah I use 15" powerbook with 1.67GHz and 1.5 GB DDR SDRAM and it purs like a kitten. If you use magic bullet with it however, you will want to shoot yourself in the head. But this is because Magic Bullet plugins have the same archetecture as After Effects plugins so they are not mac native so

#1 is don't use magic bullet -- get graeme natress's G Film effects instead. They are much cheaper than MB ($100 for base set, $30 for set 2 and $75 dollars for set three). They are just as powerful as MB and render in a fratcion of the time and you get free updates FOR LIFE! A five minute short I did in MB took 5 hours to render. My five minute short for zombie fest took 10 minutes after globally adjusting all the filters and doing a complete re-render. Plus anyone that uses a regular consumer camera will be able to get 24p motion that is comparible to the DVX100 (not 24pa like the 100A, but 24p).

#2 Do a clean system install as was mentioned then just don't put anu unecessary apps. A G4 with enough ram should be fast enough to render most basic effects in FCP realtime even while checking your email and listening to itunes and having photoshop open. Just 6 years ago I was banging my head against the wall with low powered editing systems both mac and PC. A G4 while not lightning fast -- will do the job sans head banging,

#3 leave your Mac on and connected to the internet almost all the time. OSX is designed to be self cleaning / self maintianing and one of the ways is does this is by dumping uncessesary and incompatible system prefs and other thingies at like 2 in the morning (I think that's about the time) Why? Well suppposedly this is a throw back to the OS's Doss origins, (Something I know nothing about). But basically leave it on with internet access and it is a dog that will walk itself, evacuate its bowels, and clean up its own poop. Now I say leave it on most of the time because it is good for your system to restart every so often. The thing you want to avoid is shutting it off EVERY night.

you can also download a shareware app called Mac Janitor that will allow you to force the mac to do whatever it i supposed to do in the middle of the night.

#4 everytime you install something "Repair Disk Permissions" with the disk utilitty tool

That's all I can think of right now.
 
Officially only video mirroring is supported on the eMac, but a terrific utility called Screen Spanning Doctor will allow you to enable dual displays, with windows draggable between them and such. http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html

It worked for me. Best of luck.

#3 leave your Mac on and connected to the internet almost all the time. OSX is designed to be self cleaning / self maintianing and one of the ways is does this is by dumping uncessesary and incompatible system prefs and other thingies at like 2 in the morning (I think that's about the time) Why? Well suppposedly this is a throw back to the OS's Doss origins, (Something I know nothing about). But basically leave it on with internet access and it is a dog that will walk itself, evacuate its bowels, and clean up its own poop. Now I say leave it on most of the time because it is good for your system to restart every so often. The thing you want to avoid is shutting it off EVERY night.
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Here's something I would disagree with, it is not only inefficient for power consumption but also bad for hardware components to be left on all the time. OS X runs maintence scripts daily, weekly, and monthly, which clear caches and check for errors and such. You can force-run these scripts within the terminal, but probably the easiest way is with a great freeware utility called Onyx. ( http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20070 )

Apple also reccomends you repair the disk permissions in Disk Utiliy (located in Applications>Utilities) every time you install a new piece of software. I don't do this that often, and my apps run fine.
 
Ner0 said:
Here's something I would disagree with, it is not only inefficient for power consumption but also bad for hardware components to be left on all the time. OS X runs maintence scripts daily, weekly, and monthly, which clear caches and check for errors and such. You can force-run these scripts within the terminal, but probably the easiest way is with a great freeware utility called Onyx. ( http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20070 )

Apple also reccomends you repair the disk permissions in Disk Utiliy (located in Applications>Utilities) every time you install a new piece of software. I don't do this that often, and my apps run fine.
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if apple recommends it why not do it?

As for the on/off issue it's just better for your OS AND your hardware to leave it on:

"The Unix subsystems on Mac OS X were originally written for machines that weretypically never shut off. Mac OS X inherits this assumption in version 1.x, and has many system maintenance tasks that are scheduled to run between 3 am and 5 am. In addition, there are scripts designed to run weekly on weekends, and once a month in the middle of the night."
http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html

"Every time you turn on your PC, its parts are subjected to power surges. Its hard drive has to crank into action. All that could shorten the lives of various components, though, to be fair, you are likely to get rid of the PC before that happens.

Some experts try to straddle the leave-on turn-off question by advocating the use of power management to spin down the drives and turn off the monitor when the computer is off duty.

The power management utility, though, is temperamental and can interfere in nasty ways with use of the computer. My approach is to keep my computer on for two or three days, then give it either a daylong or nightlong rest. However, I do turn off my monitor at night, even if I leave the rest of the system running. The monitor is responsible for most of the power the PC consumes."
http://inquirer.philly.com/newsroom/faq/pages/fdb7df9-56.html

Using an average of $.10 @ KWH it would cost about $100 to keep the computer on all year. You could cut this drastically by just setting the monitor to sleep as the cpu uses negligible power comparitively.
 
the screen spanning doctor didnt work for my eMac. damn
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What exactly is it doing? You do have to go to the sys prefs and configure it.

"Every time you turn on your PC, its parts are subjected to power surges. Its hard drive has to crank into action. All that could shorten the lives of various components, though, to be fair, you are likely to get rid of the PC before that happens.

Some experts try to straddle the leave-on turn-off question by advocating the use of power management to spin down the drives and turn off the monitor when the computer is off duty.
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Don't these two paragraphs condradict each other? To my understanding, leaving the components on for extended periods of time (especially external hard disks, as I understand the IEEE1394/USB 2.0 Oxford chipsets are prone to melting under extended periods of heat) can actually decrease the life of the components.

apparantly there is no way to make an emac do that with native hardware.
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I used this tool, the Screen Spanning Doctor, and I was able to get my eMac to display multiple monitors. It's just an Apple script, I believe. All I did was run the script, then plug in my second display, and went to the system preferences and selected the extended desktop (I believe it's called) option.

Aah, and to the question of repairing permissions after installs of apps - I was just saying that although Apple reccomends you do so, I rarely follow those instructions but my applications run smoothly. But if you wanted to really follow everything you could possibly do to keep your computer free of dust, I was just mentioning that Apple *does* recommend this.
 
Ner0 said:
Don't these two paragraphs condradict each other?
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not since the jolt has to do with the power surge -- so spinning down the drive and the monitor leaves them powered -- although I am suggesting not to spin down the hard drive, on a Mac at least, so that it can do its Unix stuff between 3 and 5 AM.

this nusiance is supposed to be fixed on upcoming OSes, BTW

If there is a heat prob then you are absolutely correct that would screw things up. So if your fan in broken in your mac tower -- turn it off.

I have a laptop that I leave plugged into a cool pad as the power books in their compact metal casings are known for overheating.

It just seems to me that as there are no MECHANICAL parts in motion when your computer is on that wear and tear is minimal compared to the jolt of electricity that goes through it when you turn it on.

So I leave my laptop on and then ALWAYS turn it off to transport it to the coffee shop which is 2 or 3 times a week usually. So i get the things reboooted that need to happen on a restart and the daily and weekly tasks are taken care of too.
 
not since the jolt has to do with the power surge -- so spinning down the drive and the monitor leaves them powered -- although I am suggesting not to spin down the hard drive, on a Mac at least, so that it can do its Unix stuff between 3 and 5 AM.
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Hard disks in particular are prone to damage from extended periods of use. Even if you selected the option to spin down the disks when idle option, the mac could still run its sceduled maintence scripst because it spins down selectively. Regardless, I think it's a far less drastic option to simply force run the scripts and turn it off every night.

It just seems to me that as there are no MECHANICAL parts in motion when your computer is on that wear and tear is minimal compared to the jolt of electricity that goes through it when you turn it on.
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The jolt of electricity that goes through it when you turn it on? The original article states that

Every time you turn on your PC, its parts are subjected to power surges. Its hard drive has to crank into action. All that could shorten the lives of various components, though, to be fair, you are likely to get rid of the PC before that happens.
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True, the parts are *subjected* to power surges, but this is irrelevant if you have a surge protector, which most people do.

Wha???
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The G5 is a professional level computer made by Apple, great for video editing. They cost about $2,500 for a decent setup. I was just saying that the money I saved from not getting a G5 and getting an eMac (about $1,000) I could afford to get a DVX100A.
 
Ner0 said:
True, the parts are *subjected* to power surges, but this is irrelevant if you have a surge protector, which most people do.
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A surge protector has nothing to do with it. A surge protector keeps an unregulated surge of electricity from going from the wall into your computer.

The advantage of not turning the computer off and on is refering to the regulated but wear inducing necessary surge inside the computer that is necessary to start it, like starting an enging cold.

This whole leave it on/turn it off debate would still be valid even if you never plugged your computer into a wall and always ran it of an battery that was charged outside copmuter, like with your DVX.
 
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