Imac & Mac Pro questions & recommendations

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lesliewrg

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I'm getting more and more into video editing (mostly GH2 @1080p sometimes 5D or 7D editing with FCP) right now I'm on a MBP 2.4Ghz intel core2duo 4GB ram. Editing footage off a FW400 drive.


I'm looking for something more powerful for editing video, but don't have the money and dont think i need a 12-core super duper set up.


I'm shooting mostly interviews and short features, everything mostly 6-10 minutes long so I don't have super insane renders to process.

I can't add any more ram or upgrade the video card on this system, so I'm looking for recommendations on what system to get in terms of bang for buck.
 
I thought you could daisy-chain the FW800s, am I wrong?

I'd be more upset about the lack of eSATA, but OWC can add that, does it have the same speeds as eSATA or is it downgraded to FW800 or USB2?


I'm really looking for an answer as to if i need such a big boy system for these small projects. There are a lot of them so renders are an issue, but im not editing full length films. Would you still recommend the MacPro? Is the extra $1200 worth it?
 
lesliewrg said:
I thought you could daisy-chain the FW800s, am I wrong?

I'd be more upset about the lack of eSATA, but OWC can add that, does it have the same speeds as eSATA or is it downgraded to FW800 or USB2?


I'm really looking for an answer as to if i need such a big boy system for these small projects. There are a lot of them so renders are an issue, but im not editing full length films. Would you still recommend the MacPro? Is the extra $1200 worth it?
Click to expand...

I use a 24" iMac and can daisy-chain several FW800 G-Tech G-raids together.
Not ideal to manage your resources but it can be done.
Many times clients will bring in their own drives and I have not had any issues.
I like the iMac because it can take it anywhere and do remote editing if need be.
I have edited 5D, 7D and GH2 footage with no issues.
I have also edited with MacPros and full-blown systems.
The iMac seems snappier and rendering times have not been an issue.
 
Your MBP should have an express35 slot (I'm thinking MBP 3,1) There is a USB3 express card that will give you 2 USB3 ports, I've seen some USB 3 drives even at BestBuy of all places for about $15 more, small ish drives, 250/500 megs. The ability to read from your local drive and output to a faster drive would help, but only some. Most of what your probably doing is encoding not rendering. Rendering will cost you cores. More cores help with effects, up and down scaling. However you can actually look at your machine to see where most of your load is coming from.

Take a look in the Activity monitor while encoding:
CPU will probably be close to 200% with FCP listed as the process using it. If this is less than 100% usage look for another process using the CPU as well (could be a render plug inif you use them, Twixor etc) If your CPU is pegged this will be your bottleneck and not a whole lot can be done about it aside from killing anything that might be using the processor.

You can also look at your disk activity:
Avg read/ write and peak read/write speeds should be in the 50mg or higher range.
If your still on the HD that came with your MBP it's probably the 5400 rpm 200ish gig drive which the hardest I've run that drive gave me about 38mb a sec peak with about 30 mbps avg read writes. The FW 400 drives I've messed with vary way more. I've seen some flop out at about 20mbps and some go as high as 40. a FW800 is quicker than the USB2 exts that I've run as well. Few exts rake in the speeds that my MP does with the drives directly in the case.

I replaced the drive in my 3,1 MBP with a 7200rpm 16meg cache Seagate and get about 52mbps on the drive in and out on avg. (this is just straight file copy tests but the speed over the OG drive was 'seat of the pants feeling, twice as fast) A quick test here for the drive is just copy a file to and from the FW400 drive, watch the disk activity. if it's higher than the disk activity during encoding than you upgrading the drive won't help much. Most likely you will run in to the CPU as the bottleneck here. Let me know what you find. I have built encoding machines for the last 10 years, however laptops are usually not an encoding platform I suggest, but it can be done and funny enough a dual core iMac would give you almost the same results with the same speed CPU and amount of ram.

A daisychained FW set up won't help you if you only have a FW400 port. or if the CPU is the bottleneck.
 
lesliewrg said:
@HVXguy

can you tell me the specs on your 24" iMac?

processor
video
ram
HD

sounds like what I need
Click to expand...

I have had it a few years now with zero issues.
The specs:
3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Internal drive is One terabyte.

If you do any After Effects work you might want more RAM.
 
@AZ erik Yes it has a express/34 slot so that's a possibility.

I've also upgraded to the 7200rpm seagate 16mb so that's also at its limit.

I'm running the tests on the activity monitor now to see what results that yields.
 
External monitor doesn't cause render slowdowns.

A multithread/multicore MacPro would speed encoding in Compressor when using a QuickCluster
 
@AZ erik

running the tests, the CPU numbers average around 130, maxing at 180 and consistantly around 27 threads

does that give any insight?
 
HVXguy said:
I use a 24" iMac and can daisy-chain several FW800 G-Tech G-raids together.
Not ideal to manage your resources but it can be done.
Many times clients will bring in their own drives and I have not had any issues.
I like the iMac because it can take it anywhere and do remote editing if need be.
I have edited 5D, 7D and GH2 footage with no issues.
I have also edited with MacPros and full-blown systems.
The iMac seems snappier and rendering times have not been an issue.
Click to expand...
How do you carry around 24" imac?
 
Did you see what the read /write speeds are on the disks?

Also FCP has a way to set the number of cores to use (this comes in more on MP's or multicore boxes, believe it or not 24 cores on FCP is less effective than 16 cores)
Interesting but probably more than you wanted to know info: http://www.barefeats.com/wst10c.html
And insight as to just how far you have to upgrade to get a significant boost in speed: http://www.barefeats.com/mbpp20.html
For Compressor note that it takes a 3.06 MBP Core 2 a tad longer to encode a 2 minute clip, so think of your MBP as ever being able to really do 'real time encoding'. However long the clip is how long the encode time *usually. This is why I use my 8 core MP or my I7 15inch MBP (which gives about the same perf as my MP using only 4 cores in FCP)
The MBP will never be a beast, but if you can hand the bottle neck off, or up the power FCP can use (look at your power management BTW, on cord power make sure everything except dimming the screen is turned off, sleep mode etc)

It doesn't look like your whole CPU is being used if it is peaking only 1 core. Quite possible FCP is using only one core. If you look in the Activity list at the processes you should see Final Cut listed, does it go over 100%?
 
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