Xserve as Edit Station?

Prairieboy

Prairieboy

Veteran
Well what ya think?

Now that the xserve has dual processors it sound tempting. I know you pay a bit more upfront, but with HD being more and more common, as it will be in the near future, the option of storage is apealing.
Has anybody else given this a thought?
I have been putting off a new system for a while, ramping up to make the purchase, and just tossing around some ideas.
 
Re: Xserve as Edit Station?

actually the price difference is not that much. But what it alows in storage transfer woold even out the costs if I decide to get an external ATA array of drives.
 
Re: Xserve as Edit Station?

That would be a pretty slick set-up, less space to take up. But it has less room for expansion. 2 PCI-X slots would be taken up by a Audio Card and Video Card then that's it. I didn't find anything saying that you could hook up HD monitors to it in its standard config unless you got a videocard. But in order to have both video and audio card hooked up you'd have to take the Ethernet card out, then how would you network more xserves to harness more processing power? You can always add more drive space via firewire.

This is just my first impressions just by reading tech specs and looking at the ports for expansion. I could be wrong in how expandable it can be. Personally I'd go with a G5 desktop, more expansion, probably better cooling, better resale value?, DVI connection standard (dual monitor), Optical audio I/O starting at $1600 where as the Xserve starts at $3000 and you can't even hook-up a Studio Display to it out of the box.

But if you got money to burn and are going to be running some serious rendering times, hell buy a rack full of them.
 
Re: Xserve as Edit Station?

Have you seen one of these in person? They're huge!
It would be pretty dang slick in a rack mount though :)

Guy Cochran
DVcreators.net
 
Re: Xserve as Edit Station?

The PcI slots do scare me. Sound, for some reason I forgot about that. I knew I would loose one to video, but was not thinking sound. The ethernet is seperate from the other two slots. Its really is not much more expensive if you figure into geting an ATA tower after. Just trying to think ahead a bit for memory. I know you can max out a G5 with four drives. Like I said I was just tossing up ideas and seeing where they landed.
 
Re: Xserve as Edit Station?

I'm not very well informed about servers and I may be way off, but... it seems a bit stupid to buy a server without a computer to serve.

I'd say : get a Power Mac G5, then, if you still have money (or WHEN you get more money) buy a X Serve as a second rendering unit. I think there are easy software solutions now to send rendering operations to the X Serve while continuing to work on your Mac.
 
Re: Xserve as Edit Station?

Unless you are a large shop with SAN needs or independently wealthy, go with the PowerMac G5. My 2.5 GHz dualie has faster processors, a 1 TB internal RAID (could have been 1.6 TB if storage was a bigger deal to me), and dual monitors at a cost of around $5000 (including 4 GB RAM).

I was thinking as you are and realized that unless I could get FCP to task more than two processors, it would be pointless.
 
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