• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Looking at a new MacPro-A few questions

  Posted by Tom Matthies on July 6, 2007 at 1:58 pm

  I’m looking to upgrade my home FCP machine. I’m running a G5 2.33DP and FCP 5 right now. I already have the Studio Pro2 upgrade but haven’t installed it yet.

  I’m looking at a MacPro Quad 2.66. I don’t need anything more than this machine just for at home. I have a few questions however.

  -I’m looking at adding the ATI Radeon 1900XT card rather than the stock card. Is this really necessary or does the stock video card do well enough to run Motion with reasonable performance?

  -Since I have the Studio 2 upgrade, can I do a fresh install of Studio 2 on the new MacPro without first installing my old Studio 1 and then upgrading it? Or does one do the enter the old serial number/new serial number thing on a new installation?

  -I’ll be running with 5GbRAM at first. Trying to keep this within a budget. It’ll be the4 1Gb that comes with the machine with an additional 4Gb RAM from Crucial. Is this enough realistically keeping in mind that this isn’t a time constrained situation? If it takes a little longer to render, there is no client sitting there to keep looking at his watch, so it’s not a problem. Usually just solo editing…late into the night…sigh.

  -I’ll be adding three 750Gb drives internally and striping two of them. I will also like to run the SATA card from my old G5 in the new MacPro. I have it attached to a 2-drive SATA enclosure with a fair amount of media on them. It’ a SeriTek (FirmTek) 4-port SATA PCI-X card. Will this work in the new machine? Are the MacPro machines PCI-e?
  For that matter, will the two Firewire 400 & 800 PCI-X cards in have installed in the G5 work as well?

  -Will programs such as Photoshop CS2 play well on the new machine and run reasonably well?

  Any/all feedback from you guys pertaining to SMALLER home-type systems is welcome. Any other issues to be concerned about?

  I’m also running an AJA IO-LA for video, monitoring on a JVC 15″ professional monitor. 2-20″ DVI LCD monitors. Capture from DVC or BetaSP component. Output to another BetaSP via AJA IO-LA. Behringer 1604 mixer, Behringer powered studio monitors. Various Firewire 400&800 drives for archive. Lots of terminal & support stuff, scopes, ETC. as well.

  Thanks in advance for any tips & advice,
  Tom

  David Roth weiss replied 19 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  David Roth weiss

  July 6, 2007 at 2:32 pm

  [Tom Matthies] “It’ a SeriTek (FirmTek) 4-port SATA PCI-X card. Will this work in the new machine? Are the MacPro machines PCI-e?
  For that matter, will the two Firewire 400 & 800 PCI-X cards in have installed in the G5 work as well?”

  None of your PCI-x cards will work. I spoke with Kim from Firmtek three days ago to ask if they had a PCI-e solution for their 4-bay enclousures, and she said one is coming from thme as soon as they can write the drivers. According to her, the Sonnet cards have issues with their firmware, so they are not recommending going that route.

  David

  “No job is worth doing more than once…”

  David Roth Weiss
  Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
  David Weiss Productions, Inc.
  Los Angeles

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