HVX200 and Macusers...

HVX200 and Macusers...

  • Power Mac G5

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Power Mac (Intelbased)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • iMac G5

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • iMac (Intelbased)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • PowerBook

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • PowerBook (Intelbased)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • iBook/Mac Mini/Other

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    0
  • Poll closed .
proximity

proximity

Well-known member
Appleinsider claims Apple is planning to release new intelbased Macs already in January!
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1368

How does this affect us HVX dreamers?

Mac-conundrum
When buying the new HVX200, a powerfull machine is needed to the post work. I'm looking into which mac to buy. Buying a new setup today dont make that much sence when you think about that Apple is moving over to Intel CPU's next year. But after waiting a while, and then some more... It should be quite easy to choose a mac, because there arent that many choose from. The Power mac G5, Powerbook, iMac, iBook and just to mention it, the Mac mini.

Which Mac?
First of, ruling out the Mac mini and iBook makes sence because non of them have any good expansion-slots, a great videocard, or the little things like multiple firewire connectors... You might say this rules out the powerbook and iMac also, but that not entirely true.

PowerBook
The powerbook dont have any great expansion-slots, but its does have a decent videocard, and the little extras. It has firefire 800 which makes for a fairly good setup with external Hard disks. Although this is not optimal, it would still be a fairly good way to go if you only can afford one machine, and you want it to be a portable setup. But if money is an issue, you should allready have an external display to use a dual display setup (which makes sence when working with HD)

iMac
The iMac dont have the little extras aimed towards professionals, but it's ground setup is quite good, at a fair price. It doesn't have any firewire 800 connectors, only two regular firewire connectors sharing 8 watts of energy. But built to-order from the apple store, you could buy it shipping with up to 2,5 GB ram and a 500GB Hard disk. This is fairly good for some prodject, and if you want to use this machine in your everyday life, it seems to be a acceptable way to go.

Power Mac G5
Lets face it, the Power Mac is a both strong and versatile machine. If you can afford it, and buying the monitors to show your HD content, you're set for years to come :) But I cant afford this setup (A powermac, and two apple displays) especially after I buy a HVX200. That's why buying an iMac would make my economics soooo much easier. But is that a realistic sensible choice?

There are a lot of macusers here at dvxuser.com, what are you guys doing about this?
 
I have ha Dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac that I bought 2 years ago. It's still a great machine, and has been a powerhouse with DV. When I get an HVX, I'm going to spend money on hard disk storage, raid setups, and more RAM, but I'm not planning on upgrading the CPU anytime soon. Walter Murch just edited Jarhead using current G5s in 720p DVCProHD. If it's good enough for him, well, you know!

I think getting a good RAID setup with lots of space (3.5TB or more) is much more useful than a processor upgrade. But that's only because I already have my PowerMac that works well. If I had to buy from scratch, I'd still go with a PowerMac. Maybe a low-end Dual-Core 2GHz for $2K, or a used one for less. Get a couple of cheap 17" LCDs to use in a dual-monitor setup, and get a lot more than 500GB of storage.
 
I am buying a Quad, i have a dual 2ghz, but i need the power to render 3D.

My thoughts... Stick with PPC. All the apps out are optimized for G5, who knows when they will get optimized for Intel, and from what I have seen, the G5 has a much better floating point engine than intel. So unless Intel pulls a rabbit out of their hat, I think the G5 is going to be the better platform for heavy lifting.

The Intel's have better integer performance, so day to day stuff will go faster, but at the price of the Floating point ops.. i.e. Render time and Compression.

One of the Major advantages of a non-intel mac, is that Apple is in control of the hardware. In the G5, things work or they don't.. Very rarely is their a grey space, unlike PC's where God knows what is causing flakiness.

One of the Major things that Makes a Mac a Mac is called "Open Firmware" This allows the user all the cool stuff like using Firewire Target Mode and other cool boot up tricks. We lose all that when we Go Intel and I am not looking forward to that.

One thing most PC buyers or builders don't contemplate is how much "work" the will need to do to keep the computer up and running. I have a friend that built a fast AMD rig about a year ago. He said mac's were too expensive and it was about $1200 for him to build the system of his dreams. All I hear from him is how this app crashes that app, and his audio is flakey with pro audio apps and his sound hardware... etc... While Im just humming along on my G5, getting everything I need done with no software/hardare/dirver issues.

So in other words, we KNOW that the G5's work and are stabile. We know nothing about the Mactels.

I am sure there is a Mactel in my future, but you will have to take my G5 from my cold dead hand.

Lastly I am pretty sure that the Power Macs will be the last Mac to get converted to Intel, and it could be 2 years from now for that to happen.

I would suspect we might see a Quad G5 2.8-3.0 by next summer.

Ben... Your mac Guru
 
What makes Wintel system "flaky" is not necessarily the processor, but aggregation of all the components. What makes Macs so stable (for the most part), is that the OS builder is also the hardware maker. Things have a tendency to work better that way.

You can't say the same about PCs. The hardware components are made by just about anyone and their mothers, and the OS is Microsoft. Say what you will about Windows, the fact that they can make an OS work on just about any type of hardware combination is a feat onto itself. That being said, it's also its Achilles heel. And I believe that's what makes the PC platform relatively unstable. Not the CPU.

I do agree to wait a tad for the Mactel to see how they perform in general. And I'd really like to know how much of a performance hit you get with Roseta.
 
The new iMacs look awesome. IMO, that is their best overall computer right now. For editing DVCpro HD, it may be pushing it, however. You may be able to do basic editing, but you won't get any expandability with PCI cards (SATA RAIDS and HD cards), RAM, graphics (and displays), and Storage (I'm not sure I'd trust firewire drives @ 100Mbbs throughput), plus you're dealing with slower CPUs and bus speeds so you're getting slower renders and less real time. If it's not in the budget, it's not in the budget. But I think you'll be much more happy with a powermac. I just got a new Quad myself and am super stoked!
 
I am planning similar to above, I have a dual 2Ghz g5 and love it, just planning on adding a raid to do HD, i have dual monitor 19" set up right now, i will probably just add a cinema display or one of those cheap dell lcds that keep popping up for a preview monitor.

I am guessing that the Mactels well be just fine performance wise, they have had the program running for years behind the scenes. But why not save yourself some money and pick up a used g5 powermac somewhere!
 
I have a Dual 2.7 with 8gigs of RAM and a 30" Cinema Display. I think I am going to by a Fiber Channel RAID 3 for DVCPRO HD in the next few weeks. My big question is external monitoring. I am playing with the idea of a HD-SDI out to a Black Magic SDJ-DVI converter in a 23" Cinema Display but Panasonic has a 17" WS monitor that has HD-SDI in and the standard analog in's for all the S-video and component video monitor needs.

I am settling on Fiber to have the horsepower to deal with what ever may come up. But I would stay away from the Mactel machines for a few years or more. It will not be till late 2007 early 2008 before all this shakes out. That said it is my understanding that Intel is producing a new or modified 65-bit chip for the new machines and that only the developer machines are currently 32-bit.
 
meddesigner said:
I have a Dual 2.7 with 8gigs of RAM and a 30" Cinema Display. I think I am going to by a Fiber Channel RAID 3 for DVCPRO HD in the next few weeks. My big question is external monitoring. I am playing with the idea of a HD-SDI out to a Black Magic SDJ-DVI converter in a 23" Cinema Display but Panasonic has a 17" WS monitor that has HD-SDI in and the standard analog in's for all the S-video and component video monitor needs.

I am settling on Fiber to have the horsepower to deal with what ever may come up. But I would stay away from the Mactel machines for a few years or more. It will not be till late 2007 early 2008 before all this shakes out. That said it is my understanding that Intel is producing a new or modified 65-bit chip for the new machines and that only the developer machines are currently 32-bit.
Click to expand...

I have a dual 2.7 ghz also, but with 4ghz of ram. SInce I'm only working with DV material on this machine- I have a canopus hardware acelerated machine for other types of work in my "payjob"- I really don't know how this will work with dvcprohd material. I'm using an internal 7200rpm sata HDD for the scratch disk. It's an ok machine. Still has to render any alpha key or chroma key file, tough.

Anyone tried messing with dvcprohd with a similar setup? SHould I really go for a Fibre Channel raid setup- How about normal RAID?
 
Flintstone said:
Funny! So does that mean that AMD based computers are not PCs? :evil:
Click to expand...

Yeah the term PC has really gotten sort of mutilated over the years.
Technically they are all "personal computers".

I've always preferred to designate by operating system instead of hardware...seemed to make more sense (windows vs. mac vs. linux)
 
"Anyone tried messing with dvcprohd with a similar setup? SHould I really go for a Fibre Channel raid setup- How about normal RAID?"


I am meeting a vendor in Atlanta on Thursday to review options. One option is a FW800 RAID 3 and it would depend on the number of DVCPRO HD streams you want to run at the same time. Over a dedicated FW800 bus I am told 3 streams is realistic and can be had for around $2k for a !TB of space so that is around 700GB with parity. Might be a bit less.

Fiber channel will be around $4k for the same storage but the performace is much higher yeilding more flexibility. I t also allows for the creation of a SAN in a shared resource enviornment and the sustained data rates are much higher.

It all depends on what you can really afford. My department has a pretty good budget so we tend to get nice things. But for the HVX and 3 streams a FW800 RAID 3 with 5 drives and a dedicated contoller in one of the PCI-X or PCI-E slots should work.
 
Meddesigner, 2k sounds reasonable, and 3 streams sounds good enough for me (don't think I need much more for short films :)

Now, how about a graphics card upgrade? Will that bring me any benefits in editing dvcprohd? I have the default video card that came with the dual 2.7. I heard the new powermacs come with an excelent videocard (don't even know if they work with my version of the powermac, too). Can I upgrade to that one? And what will I gain in a Final Cut Studio Workflow?
 
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