Graphics Card and Capture Card Question

R

Richard J

Active member
I have a Mac Pro Octo Core 2.8 and am trying to take my editing up a notch. I have been making graphics in motion and even with 12 gigs of ram my system is almost coming to a stop slowing down once I have a particle emitter, live fonts, music, graphics, etc... My computer is using an ATI Radeon HD 2600XT graphics card. Would updating a graphics card help this issue?

I have a very computer savvy co-worker that would trade me a pc version Radeon 4870 with 1 gig ram for my old macbook pro with a fried logic board. Would a flashed 4870 be a good upgrade or should I go with the actual mac version? I'm not particularly destitute and could afford to buy a legit one or possibly a GTX 285 but my broken laptop's not doing me any good in my closet so I thought it might be a good trade.

Also, If I went the 4870 route could I keep my HD 2600XT and have two graphics cards? I'm under the impression the 4870 uses two power sources.

On a side note, could I hook up a blackmagic design decklink sd/sdi capture card and use a television as a monitor? I could pick up the card for about 100 bucks on ebay. I feel like a quality crt television even if not a "broadcast monitor" would give me a better idea for color correction & resolution than my computer screens.

I'm editing standard definition footage from my dvx-100. Thanks --Richard
 
The 4870 is an excellent card, I have a variation of that on my PC. But I can't tell you if putting it in flashed has any performance hits or not. With that particular system you are on the extreme low end of graphics cards. The other thing I'd look at would be hard drive access speeds. Run some benchmarks to find your weaknesses. Outside of that, you can't really expect miracles from the computer. Prerendering makes everything better. Especially with particle effects, those are pretty massive.
 
I don't know what, if any, downsides there are to using a flashed card but if you have the money to buy one retail I would just do that so if things go wrong you don't have a flashed video card as another variable to trouble shoot. Two GFX cards is a no-no because Motion, Color and some FCP plugins won't work right, if at all, w/two GFX cards installed. A TV won't help you a whole lot in terms of color accuracy, but it will show you a more accurate image overall than your computer monitor. Make sure the capture card is compatible w/your computer though (many older Mac capture cards use PCI or PCIx technology but todays Macs use PCIe) and you'll need to budget for a converter box to get the SDI into s-video or component so you can hook it up to your TV.


-A
 
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