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Mac Mini??
Hi there,
probably a stupid question that someone answered years ago, but can’t find the thread….
Does fcp run on the mac mini? If so, are there any extra peripherals that I would need to purchase in order to use this config?
Many thanks in advance for your help.
Neil.
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8 Replies
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Yes it will, but…
First off the hard drive is very slow, just about too slow for DV. You’ll need to use an external FW 400 drive. Next up is the graphics card is slow and will cause taring of video frames. You’ll get about 2 streams of dv running in real time if you put 1GB of ram in, and use the external HD. With the ram and external HD your looking at over $1100. The baseline imac G5 17″ for $1300, is Much MUCH better. I’d go for the 20″ imac G5 as a baseline introductory Mac for video editing. It is a far better investment. Even the emac, with its faster HD and better Graphics would be a better computer for video.
VM
HD and SD On-lines
FCP 5, OS 10.4.2
G5 dual 2.7, 8GB ram, x800xt
Kona 2, aja io full
Medea SCSI 320 5TB Raids -
Thanks for the info Video Man, looks like the G5 is for me!!
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While I won’t deny that the iMac G5 is a much better choice for budget editing than a mac mini, the statement that the hard drive on the mac mini is almost too slow to capture DV is ridiculous. In fact, there is more than enough bandwidth to easily capture three simultaneous streams of DV at the same time if it were possible. DV’s datarate comes no where near the max throughput of the mac mini’s hard drive. And anyway, lets face it, no matter what machine you are going to buy, you will need some extra storage. Including with an iMac, because it too can only hold one hard drive (although its hard drive can be much larger), and we all know how much video can eat up disk space.
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[Charles Simonson] “While I won’t deny that the iMac G5 is a much better choice for budget editing than a mac mini, the statement that the hard drive on the mac mini is almost too slow to capture DV is ridiculous. In fact, there is more than enough bandwidth to easily capture three simultaneous streams of DV at the same time if it were possible. DV’s datarate comes no where near the max throughput of the mac mini’s hard drive.”
Not necessarily a correct statement. You cannot go merely on drive speed and bandwith to determine whether or not a drive will work with certain media and work with it reliably. As I have shown in several reviews. the latest of which is the LaCie F800 review, drive speed alone does not equate to performance.
According to my drive speed tests of the F800 it should be able to handle 10bit Uncompressed video no problem. In reality, it could not even capture 10bit footage and worked ok for 8bit. The only way to really know how a drive is going to perform is to test it out using FCP funcationality and use it over a period of at least several days.
the point is moot anyway because you never want to capture media to your system drive, that will equate to reduced performance in a hurry. With the Mac Mini you want to use a FW 400 external drive to ensure the best performance.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Walter, I agree that benchmarks alone don’t necessarily guarantee anything, but are you telling me that you really don’t believe that the mac mini can handle a 11MB/s (3xDV) datarate? My iBook G3 600 could handle that rate. Again though, you do make a good point of not getting into the habit of capturing to your system disk, be it a mac mini or an iMac G5. And don’t get me started on FW800. What a disappointment it has been in real-world performance and reliabilty.
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[Charles Simonson] “And don’t get me started on FW800. What a disappointment it has been in real-world performance and reliabilty.”
Really? I’ve been cutting on LaCie’s Big Disk Extreme and G-RAID’s for well over 6 months now and haven’t had any issues. Rock solid and very fast. We’ve probably cut over 20 8bit and 10bit projects on the things. 8bit gives me a lot of performance while 10bit does require a lot of rendering. The 10bit projects are now only done on the Fibrechannel array.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Yeah, we bought six of the LaCie Bigger Disk 1TB Extremes and having 50% of them fail for what appears to be no real reason is what I call disappointing. Now, they didn’t just die on us, as we could re-initialize the data, but obviously the original data was lost. Shortly after losing the first drive, they were then retired to only backing up other backups and as emergency sneaker net devices, so they weren’t able to create total havoc on us. But since then, two others have failed as well. And its not like these drives are getting strenuous use. I have also owned two other single disk FW800 drives from firewiredirect, and even on a completely different system there were similar errors.
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Took my Mac Mini with me on vacation and was able to do editing with FCP, and couldn’t have been happier. Didn’t need to bring my full rig. So it can be done. I was using an external Firewire drive for my media. Even captured DV material with this system with no glitches. Now I only did about 3 streams (layers) of edits, but still, I was happy. So if you don’t need to push the system really hard, it certainly is capable of doing DV editing.
Steve
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