Attention: Geeks

[Walter Biscardi]

[Will Edit for Food] “- 512 meg ram (A JOKE!) What’s the minimum I need – 2GB?”

Why a joke? How many PC’s out there that offer more than 512 as stock? 2GB minimum for FCP, 4GB or more recommended.

[Will Edit for Food] “- Is there a better harddrive config than 2x400GB Serial ATA 7200rpm?”

Yep, 10 drive Fibre Channel array.

[Will Edit for Food] “- Graphics card – Probably should get top-of-the-line. ATI Radeon or NVidia?”

Depends on what you’re doing.

[Will Edit for Food] “** Will I need a separate capture card for DV?”

Nope.

[Will Edit for Food] “- Anything funky about runing FCP with DUAL displays?”

Nope.

[Will Edit for Food] “- The big FCP question: Internal or external storage? RAID? What companies?”

External FCR2X Fibre Channel array from Medea.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Alan Lacey]

Having done something similar recently myself, what exactly are you trying to leave behind.

I can say from experience, not all bad btw, that it won’t be all your problems!

Alan (PAL land)

[Shane Ross]

Just FYI, MAYA renders much faster on a PC. I hear it is also more stable. This from my graphics guy, and a few visual effects houses…

[Toby Angwin]

3d IS still better on a PC but if you are a one man band, maya will be fine on the mac.

What kind of footage are you working with? A 2,4 or 8 drive SATA raid will do anything up to HD cheaply. A single FW800 drive can do DV and DVCProHD. My mates swear by the medea G-Raid which is a 2 drive FW800 raid which is pretty good for SD work, and matches the G5. I use 2 Seritec external sata housings (2 drives each) which for day to day work is as fast as Fibre, especially if you are only doing short form stuff.

I’d go the NVidia card as it is as close to the pro PC cards as you can get on a mac, unless you need 3 slots.

I guess you are only working with DV going back over your post so I’d get yourself a G-Raid.

And 4 gig of ram. Until the programs are 64bit there’s not much point having more. And all you guys who use 8 gig to have 25 programs open at once are just messy, or greedy, or both.

Cheers,

Toby

[Bret Williams]

I’m still trying to figure out how he’s going to spend 6 grand without buying monitors. Is he including the price of the software?

Get some good off brand RAM, don’t pay Apple for it. In fact, I’d probably get it all at Mac Mall or one of those places where they throw in double Ram and other goodies. No sales tax either. Free shipping sometimes too. Update the card. Maybe get another SATA internal and raid them together. What are we up to, $4000? $4500?

[Shane Ross]

I have a budget of $5000 to upgrade my system to handle DVCPRO HD. Here’ what I did:

REFIRB Dual 2G G5 – $1650
Applecare – $300
FCP Studio Upgrade from FCP -$800
Dell 24″ 2405 Wide aspect Monitor – $900 (on sale)
G-Raid 500GB – $550
G-SATA – $550
+2GB RAM – $200

Squeaked in just under $5000. It was the cheap G5, the FCP Upgrade, Dell on sale, and good prices at B&H Photo (and NO SALES TAX) that allowed me to do it.

[Tony]

Shane,

So major items missing- CRT monitor to view your HD or SD which or course will require a video capture card such as AJA Kona 2.

Audio mixer such as a mackie, speakers, editing console, video and audio cables.

Tony Salgado

[Shane Ross]

Already in possession of video cables, SD CRT monitor for non-HD color correction, Studio Speakers. If your budget is $6000, you can get the cables and speakers and, if you wanted, a small mixing board. Oh, plus maybe a film look plugin by nattress.com or Magic Bullet.

About the mixing board…would be nice but unnecesssary. All it would be with footage captured without a capture card is audio control. I use my speaker controls for that.

HD Monitor. Yes, that is a big missing item, but one of the reasons I have the Dell 2405 HD monitor. I have my old CRT Computer monitor that, when the CC phase comes along, I can use to view my workspace as I then view my timeline on the Dell via Cinema Desktop Preview. But, I cannot use the cor color correction. Unless I get another $8000 for an HD capture card (Kona 2 or Decklink 4:4:4), HD Link (SDI TO DVI) and Fibrechannel drive array, I will not be doing the final color correction. I will either hand my drives to a post facility that will then drop it into a 10-bit 4:4:4 HD timeline, CC, render and output. Or output to tape and have them CC from the main tape. Since the preliminary plan is to CC on a DaVinci, I am thinking that we well be going to a post facility to uprez to 10-bit, output to tape, then CC.

You can read about my process here:

https://homepage.mac.com/comeback/iblog/Work/B787268209/index.html

[Andy Edwards]

One question about your G5 refurb:

Are you sure it actually has the PCI-X slots on the mother board to run any of the HD cards that require PCI-X? If you have a refurb with only PCI slots, you’ll be hurting later on when you want to ad a Kona2 card for HD. It won’t run in a plain jane PCI slot.

The quick way to tell if you have PCI or PCI-X, how many ram slots do you have. 4 only, then it is PCI, 8 only, then it is PCI-X.

Good luck with your system

Andy

[Shane Ross]

Yes Andy, I made DARN sure I got the PCI-X dual 2G. Thanks for your concern. That was one of my things to look out for when I got it. Yes, it has 4 pairs of slots.