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Starting the process of selecting components for my new Vegas editing workstation
Hi;
I’ve decided to bite the bullet and build a new workstation. It’s going to have Ivy Bridge, probably a Xeon E5-1660 ( trying to not break the bank). I insist on ECC RDIMMs for various reasons.
Rather than try to soup up my old but sturdy T7500, I’m going to turn it into a file server. It has tons of drive bays and full hardware RAID support. I plan to stuff it with economical drives and use RAID5.
I can get an AMD FirePro V4900 pretty cheap. With all the problems with Kepler, no way I am going to shell out for a K5000 that might not be supported, and I am tired of waiting for NVIDIA, Sony and MainConcept to get it together.
https://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati-firepro-3d/v4900/Pages/v4900.aspxAny input on this proposed design, and in particular if the AMD V4900 will play nice with Vegas, would be greatly appreciated!
Steve
Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T7500, MultiTB SATA, 12GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 2000, Vegas 12, 11, 10, 9 DVDA 6.0 & 5.2(build 135) Sony HDR-CX550V, Panasonic GH3 with LUMIX G X VARIO 12-35mm / F2.8 ASPH, LUMIX G X VARIO 35-100mm / F2.8
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5 Replies
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[Stephen Crye] “It’s going to have Ivy Bridge, probably a Xeon E5-1660 ( trying to not break the bank). I insist on ECC RDIMMs for various reasons… I can get an AMD FirePro V4900 pretty cheap.”
You just pretty much described the components in the new Mac Pro (Xeon E5, ECC Memory, AMD FirePro GPU, etc.). Why not get one of them and be ready if Sony releases Vegas Pro for Mac just like they did with Sound Forge for Mac? This has the added advantage of being able to collaborate with FCP and other Mac editors and post houses the have standardized around ProRes.
I know your fist reaction is “too expensive” but it’s actually a great deal. For $3000 you get two $800 GPU’s which means the rest of the computer is only $1400. You will easily spend that much for a Xeon motherboard, CPU and ECC memory, and SSD. Just something to consider since Sony is now developing for the Mac.
As for recommendations for a PC build, I have never gone wrong following VideoGuys DIY builds. Let them figure out what components work well together and then just build one of those.
BTW, I picked up and old 2.8GHz 8-core Mac Pro on eBay with 16GB ECC memory, 2x SSD RAID 0 boot drive, 2TB RAID 0 video drive, ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU (which is just as fast as my Quadro 4000) for only $740! That’s right, I got a used 8-core Mac Pro for less than the price of my Quadro 4000 video card alone and it had a $450 video card in it!!! lol.
Old Mac Pro’s are selling on eBay like “hot cakes”. You can get an 8-core, 4GB men for $645 buy it now all day long from several vendors. Granted these are old 2008 technology but I bought it for my audio recording studio because it was twice as fast as the computer I had which was 2006 technology. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “You just pretty much described the components in the new Mac Pro (Xeon E5, ECC Memory, AMD FirePro GPU, etc.). Why not get one of them and be ready if Sony releases Vegas Pro for Mac just like they did with Sound Forge for Mac?”
Thanks for taking the time to reply, John. I’ll check out the VideoGuys!
Right now I’m mostly wondering if the FirePro V4900 has the Vegas/MainConcept compatible hardware to take advantage of GPU accelleration.
The Mac is a beautiful machine, but I’m just not an Apple fan. For me, it’s not just the “Apple tax.” What follows is a rant, yes, my apologies in advance, and attention Apple Fanboys and Girls: I want you to be happy with your Apple stuff – I mean that sincerely.
I work with Apple products a lot; in my job we have to support over 10,000 iPads and thousands of Macs. I bought my daughter a MacBook Pro for college and an iPad mini. I deal with the the suits from Apple every few weeks. Sadly, they, and the company, are arrogant. They have a “take it or leave it” attitude that rubs me the wrong way. Every time we raise an objection about iOS and the way Apple ignores WiFi standards, or refuses to support Active Directory authentication (making it nearly impossible to apply granular content filtering i.e. student/staff) or even something simple like lock the name of the iPad via MDM, their reply is always the same: “we don’t want to interfere with the User Experience.” They make Microsoft, the former Evil Empire of the IT world, seem warm and fuzzy by comparison. Heck, it took them years to just support 3-button wheel mice!
Besides, even though the underlying guts of a Mac is Darwin, a beautifully fine Unix variant, I just plain dislike the look and feel of the OS. It would be torture for me to sit in front of one, when eventually Sony releases Vegas for Mac. Yes I know I can run Windows on the Mac hardware, and that is what I would do, even after Vegas For Mac is out.
Buying a Mac for my kid is way different than buying one for me. She really wanted it, she is not an IT geek, and I live to keep her happy – she is hard-working and I love her dearly.
Ok, done ranting… sorry.
Steve
Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T7500, MultiTB SATA, 12GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 2000, Vegas 12, 11, 10, 9 DVDA 6.0 & 5.2(build 135) Sony HDR-CX550V, Panasonic GH3 with LUMIX G X VARIO 12-35mm / F2.8 ASPH, LUMIX G X VARIO 35-100mm / F2.8
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[Stephen Crye] “their reply is always the same: “we don’t want to interfere with the User Experience.””
You know, I have to agree with them. My company wanted to put all this restrictive junk on my iPad and iPhone to use it at work and I told them, “No Way!” you’ll ruin my user experience. So I don’t use my iPad or iPhone at work and it’s my companies loss not mine because I’m less productive because of their draconian security. So I understand your company’s need to control everything, I just don’t agree with it. I refuse to pay the “security tax”. 😉
[Stephen Crye] “Buying a Mac for my kid is way different than buying one for me. She really wanted it, she is not an IT geek”
That was the biggest thing for me. I was my families’ IT administrator with their Windows laptops. They would always come to me with Windows problems. Then I bought everyone a MacBook Pro/Air and now they never come to me with problems anymore. It’s liberating. The darn things just work. (Note: I know that Mac’s have problems too but for the most part, they’ve been trouble free)
I understand that OS X is not for everybody. It took me a while to unlearn my Windows ways and get use to it but I am far more productive using OS X then I ever was with Windows (YMMV). I have one Windows workstation left for Vegas Pro work and I cringe every time I have to turn it on. No swiping… I hit the space bar to preview a file and nothing happens, then I remember, Duh! I’m on Windows i need to open a program to view this. 🙁
I think you’ll find that VideoGuys has several price points for all of their builds so you are bound to find something that will fit your budget. The comfort of knowing that these guys have built it and it works is what’s really valuable. Don’t deviate! Get the exact memory part numbers, etc, because even within the same manufacturer, one memory will work and another will be unstable. Follow what they recommend to the letter and you should have a very stable Vegas Pro platform.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] ” My company wanted to put all this restrictive junk on my iPad and iPhone to use it at work and I told them, “No Way!” you’ll ruin my user experience.”
Sorry about the delay in getting back to you.
I work for a large school district. We, as are all schools and libraries who accept Federal funds via the eRate program, are forced by the Feds to comply with CIPA (the Children’s Internet Protection Act). This means that the default content restriction policy, the one that has to be in place for all internet access by children, is applied to any device where the identity of the user cannot be determined.
Keep in mind that Apple a few years back chose to abandon the Identity Management/Directory Services market to Microsoft and Novell. Novell put up a brave fight, but they went under and now the only one left is Microsoft – Active Directory (AD). Even Google, vast and pretty evil, supports AD. On iPads, it is impossible for a teacher to authenticate to AD. Mind you, we have no urge to restrict by AD policy – quite the opposite; when a teacher or employee authenticates to AD, they are granted MORE access to the internet. For example, they can access Youtube, certain aspects of Facebook, WordPress, etc.
Apple’s policies result in a worse user experience for iPads, compared to Android, Mac OS, or Windows. They support AD very nicely in Mac OS – why they won’t make that available as an app for iOS is beyond me. But, as long as they keep selling us iPads – 19K of them and counting for us – they don’t need to care.
We will soon be spending over $70K/year on a NGFW that supports Captive Portal, as a work-around for Apple’s stubbornness.
It does not stop with content filtering. Apple does not understand that the way they do Multicast and zero-config is very, very problematic in an enterprise setting. It has nothing to do with us wanting to restrict users – far from it, we want to keep the networks humming along without broadcast storms or every Apple TV device in the network showing up in a pick-list.
https://www.citeworld.com/mobile/20563/apples-bonjourairplay-poses-network-challenges-itAnd don’t get me started on the way they ignore WiFi standards, or RFC 2131 & 2132, or refuse to properly release DHCP leases.
My daughter sure loves her Mac … but I can’t stand to use any touch pad that does not support tap-and-a-half. I’m just whacky that way. At least a few years back they started supporting three-button wheel mice.
Sorry to rant again … one reason I have not been on the Cow for the last week is because supporting iPads is taking up all my spare time and I have not been able to take lunch all week…
Steve
Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T7500, MultiTB SATA, 12GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 2000, Vegas 12, 11, 10, 9 DVDA 6.0 & 5.2(build 135) Sony HDR-CX550V, Panasonic GH3 with LUMIX G X VARIO 12-35mm / F2.8 ASPH, LUMIX G X VARIO 35-100mm / F2.8
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I understand the need for all that stuff, I just don’t like the fact that everything that’s good has been taken away because of everything that’s evil. For example, you can’t even send someone a darn zip file in an email anymore so what’s the point in even having email attachments if you can’t use them. I refuse to let evil win so I don’t compromise my user experience whenever I can control it. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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