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Justifying an upgrade? a couple of questions
I want to convince the boss to shell out for some hardware upgrades, but i kinda need some reassurances that the improvements in performance will be justifiable. We have only had the current kit for 14 months so i know there will be some brow wrinkling involved!
Currently i use a Quad G5 with 4gb ram, Geforce 7800gt, an Xserve raid, etc. I want to go for the big guns and get an Octo MacPro with16gb ram and the XT1900 gfx card.
I cut 99% broadcast commercials, so it s all short form work, but can be quite fx heavy.
My main problems currently are waiting for Renders (thank heavens for my new “air drumsticks” – best 10 quid i ever spent), and the increasing frequency of General Errors, and Out Of Memory errors that prevent sequences from being opened ever again.
One further question – i’m not very up on drive technology – If i want to increase my hard drive capacity should i add a second raid and then have two separate raids attached or is it better to combine both chassis’ into one extra large raid? And do you have to by a second chassis that matches the first (ie…another xserve, or can i add a different brand into the mix)?
tia
Adam
Editor/Mixer
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK -
5 Replies
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As I currently own both machines I can say that the 8core is not that much faster at rendering, certainly not double. It might be twice as fast at encoding with multiple compressor instances running though. Also having 16GB RAM is most certainly overkill and would not speed up FCP if that were all that was running. FCP probably would stop seeing gains at 6GB or so (being that some of that RAM is going to system. With AE, PS, the rest of the FCS suite running you would still be hard pressed to max out 16GB. When Jaguar rolls around though – who knows.
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https://www.barefeats.com is a great place to judge the speed differences you’d experience. It will vary depending on the actual workflow you’re using. I noticed a HUGE difference in performance, but use more than one app at the same time, and do a lot of compressing for DVD’s and the web so your milage may vary However if you’re running Color and Motion 3 you’ll see a big speed jump just using that newer/faster card.
I’d suggest that 16 gigs of RAM is probably overkill. I’ve not seen any disk caching at all with 8 gigs in my 8-core. And work in longer form than you do sounds like.
You can mix and match raids all you want… I’ve a system using 4Gig fibre, SCSI, and FireWire all at the same time for example. I’m probably going to move to eSATA with the 8-core though. Fibre’s extra speed (if any, actually) isn’t worth the extra dough don’t think in my case. ProRes is my future, so just don’t need all that much speed doing what I do in general.
Jerry
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[Jerry Hofmann] “I’d suggest that 16 gigs of RAM is probably overkill.”
For now I think you’re right Jerry, but that may very well change when the 64-bit version of FCP hits a computer near you, whenever that may be.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY
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I”m pining for the day man…
Jerry
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i had based the 16 gigs on something i had read that said when using AE on an 8 core, you need to have an equal amount of ram available for each core, and i figured if the company is buying you caan never have too much ram!
I do tend to have multiple apps running FCP,AE, Shake, etc. I want to use Color but find the bugs introduced in the1.01 patch have made it unusable if you work in Pal.
thanks for the thoughts.
adam
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