Mac Mini For Pro Tools

Loki

Loki

Veteran
Has anyone used the Mac Mini for pro tools work?

I just went through a horrid ADR session (came out ok.. but the journey was painful) with Pro-Tools and a windows XP laptop..

my sound designer is seriously contemplating switching to a Mac (an idea I concur with) and was asking me if Pro-Tools would run well on a mac mini.

I assume that it would run fine if there was at least 1.5GB of Ram in there.. but I have never run it on one so I can only guess..

anyone have any experience doing this? it would help me out a lot..

peas.
 
I wouldn't use a Mac Mini for anything work related. You can't add more internal drives to it. If you are using a machine for post work, you will need at least 3 internal drives on your machine. One system drive that has the OS and all your programs. One drive for picture, and one drive for audio. If you try and run a large pro tools session with picture off of one drive, it's going to lag. If you have your sessions on your main drive, and you have a crash, and don't have your stuff backed up, you are screwed like a french whore.

I'd go with a G5. Whatever the most powerful one is. When it comes to computers, I am of the opinion that you should get whatever the fastest and most powerful machine is available. It will have more staying power that way.

-Dave
 
dave, you don't need the drives to be internal.. you can easily have 2 external drives, one FW and one USB2, no problem. and partition your C drive to have one working internal D drive, for emergencies only, like.

and you dont need 1.5 Gb ram, I had 2Gb ram in mine, and was troublshooting my protools recently and took one out, and it didn't make the blindest bit of difference. its still sitting on my shelf.

As for the mini mac itself, sorry, no clue.. don't know nuffin bout em. you do need processor speed though, I think they say 1.7GHz is enough, but i reckon to go smooth on anything, 3GHz is enough. thats running at 3, not advertised at 3. my computers running at 2.6, and it STILL stutters only a wee bit, my directors Dell is running at 3GHz and is sweet as a nut. Of course there are probably other factors involved on why mine stutters, but i've optimised mine etc, and the Dell is standard.


I'm having pro tools nightmare at the moment.. getting freeze up when It plays. I won't go into it here, but if anyone reckons they can help me, say here, and i'll start a thread. Digidesign don't know what it is, after i've completed ALL the optimisations necessary. and I mean all. :)
 
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Loki I wouldn't hesitate to use a mac Mini for protools. I have a G5 dual 2.0 and lots of ram that I run an mbox on which is way overkill for protools. My partner and I set up Minis for newpapers all the time with photoshop cs2 and that pulls alot more horsepower than protools. The new Intel Mini's are as fast as some G5's. Load it with ram and use external firewire drives. I use a set of sata160gigs in my G5 as a raid so I have to use external drives for protools. Some company makes a firewire box for drives that is the same size as the mini. They fit together one on top of the other, looks cool. With the Mini you will have to use a mbox 1 or 2. If you plan on going alot over 24tracks than a G5 will fill your needs better. I have 5.5 gigs of ram and have never had a problem with protools. I have this much so I can have a ton of apps open at the same time, fcp,livetype, motion, photoshop ect. If your doing heavy layering in an app then shut the rest down. FCP and Motion and other apps can take advantage of all the ram you have so load it up. Good luck.
 
I think a mini would make an excellent Protools LE machine. Your best bet would be to hit the digidesign forums, as there are probably hundreds of people there who are using a mac mini and digidesign hardware. One thing you should find out is the availability of a UB version of Protools. I haven't checked the site in awhile.
 
While I would not be as extreme as Dave he is still mostly correct if your doing a bunch of sound post. Scooby, your talking PC with the D drive... Mac's don't have no stinkin letter drives ;~) If your doing ADR it's probably fine. Though it's not recommended you can run video off the internal drive and use FW for your audio. Does the mini even have USB2? Mac was resisting it. The problem you might have is I don't think PT is approved for the Imtel Mac's yet? I run an HD system off a 1.25DP G4 with around 800 megs and have no problems so I wouldn't worry the memory too much. However you might consider Boom Recorder for ADR, though you would have to figure out the video. BR is getting a fair amount of use as a location multitrack recorder and it runs very smooth on a mini.
 
Scooby,

I have found Firewire drives not fast enough to run large sessions. It's not the rotational speed of the drive itself, it's the bandwidth and throughput. USB defiinitely won't cut the mustard. I've tried both.
 
You can run 32 tracks with out a problem usually. THe feature DUMA did all of it's temp mixes from a PT session run off a FW drive. It really depends on your system and session. To be fair it was USB2 that was mentioned and the bandwidth of USB2 is bigger than FW400 so it probably would work as well as FW??? For USB1 your right, not even worth thinking about.
 
On paper USB2 is faster than FW400, but in practice, it's actually slower. One thing I haven't tried is using an external SATA or FW800 drive. I bet you could use an external SATA drive no problem. Those things are lightning fast. I doubt the mac mini has a SATA port on it though, and you can't put cards in it....That's actually one reason I don't like things like the Mac Mini and the iMac. You can't add anything to them internally, or get into the guts of the machine. They are cool for day to day stuff, but I really don't like them as work machines.
 
OK, having yet to have a machine with USB2 I was just going off the paper. I agree with not using a mini for a "work" machine. I thought the question was if you could use one to do ADR tracking. That I think would be fine on a mini. Trying to do sound post on it would be a problem. We thought about using one for a separate edit station and decided there were too many limitations, the biggest being no extra internal drives. To try and do post with one would require running your sound drives and your video and your interface (Digi 002) through the FW port at the same time and running vid off the internal drive. and that sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. Now if you go with an Mbox and have limited tracks and are syncing to an external video deck I think it could work.
 
Dave_Fisk said:
Scooby,

I have found Firewire drives not fast enough to run large sessions. It's not the rotational speed of the drive itself, it's the bandwidth and throughput. USB defiinitely won't cut the mustard. I've tried both.
Click to expand...

It works fine with mine.. I have a FW external and a usb2.0 external for the A+V and very very large hour long pro stools sessions, all characters, atmos, foley, aux tracks etc etc with plugs and slices and all the rest of that stuff, and all is usually smooth. the only time the video jumps is when i export it from avid wrongly.

maybe its something else slowing it down on yours dave.
 
Dave_Fisk said:
On paper USB2 is faster than FW400, but in practice, it's actually slower. One thing I haven't tried is using an external SATA or FW800 drive. I bet you could use an external SATA drive no problem. Those things are lightning fast. I doubt the mac mini has a SATA port on it though, and you can't put cards in it....That's actually one reason I don't like things like the Mac Mini and the iMac. You can't add anything to them internally, or get into the guts of the machine. They are cool for day to day stuff, but I really don't like them as work machines.
Click to expand...

I've seen some tests with FW800 FW and USB2 and what you're saying is right, but for some reason USB2 seemed to work considerably better on PC's. Doing much better than regular FW. But on Mac's regular FW just killed usb2, like it didn't even get close. Maybe I just saw some weird benchmarks though, you never know.
 
THe PC VS Mac makes a certain amount of sense. Mac embraced FW early on and its been tuned a lot over the years. PC's were very late adopters and I still don't think its standard. On the flip side PC's went to USB2 early as the high speed port of choice and Mac avoided it till the last generation. FW800 will probably never catch on. It wasn't widely supported and had some problems. Plus SATA has the advantage for HDrives and that's just about the only FW800 devices that came out.
 
USB 2.0 is a poor choice for any work that requires a constant reliable data stream. USB 2.0 works in burst mode all the time.. meaning it doesn't have a constant data stream all the time..

FW 400 & 800 on the other hand have sustained data transfers of (34MB/s & 70MB/s). very good for video.
 
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