Bad time to upgrade

[Bob Zelin]

why do so many people think that the current Mac Pro is going in the garbage can ? What makes people assume that all the Adobe CC software will work perfectly with the new Mac Pro, Mavericks, and the AMD Open CL card, instead of NVidia. Why does everyone think that the day of release of the new Mac Pro, AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, ATTO, Areca, G-Tech, etc. will all announce “hey everyone, here is our new Thunderbolt 2 products”. Are you dreaming ? It’s not going to happen.

I think that upgrading your current investment is a VERY WISE IDEA.
I think that if your business is based on Adobe CC, Autodesk Smoke, AVID Media Composer (and dare I say it FCP 7) that your CURRENT HARDWARE and upgrading it is a VERY WISE investment.
And if in 2 years, (2016) all these companies have caught up (which I am sure that they will) – you will have made A LOT OF MONEY in the mean time.

It troubles me that so many people think that these products are decorations for their living room. I dont’ give a flying f#$% about
the hobbyist. A professional needs his gear now, and if it costs XXX, then he is going to buy it because he needs to stay in business and MAKE A LOT OF MONEY. And in 2 years time, you will have plenty of money to buy the new stuff. If you spend $3000 per computer to upgrade it, and make lots of money, and don’t generate $30,000 per computer in a 2 year period, then please GET THE HELL OFF OF THIS FORUM AND ALL OF THESE FORUMS, as (unless I am thrown off creative Cow) this is a forum for professionals that make their living doing this, and for students that want to get into the business, and if you (not you personally, but other readers) like having fun with expensive equipment, and bought a Mac Pro with a K5000 card, so they can make videos of their bowling league for fun, well I have no interest in appealing to this audience.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Rick Sebeck]

Thanks Bob! That’s the response I was hoping for. You are right, I know I will make my money back on these upgrades before I even write them off on my taxes next April. It’s just no one wants to be the guy who invests in technology that is obsolete in two weeks. But I agree – it will take time for the “latest and greatest” to be stable enough to actually make all the money!

While I have your attention…. we still aren’t ready (or really have a need) for a SAN – but I do think I am pushing the limit of the Mercury Pro enclosures. We’ve been filling them with 3 TB drives – getting 9 TB RAID 5. We are starting to go beyond ProRes into longer form uncompressed projects and dare I say 2k. But right now – its a pain to not be able to color correct with any real time playback. Hence the K5000 cards. SO my question…. since i’ll be sticking to eSata – whats the next bump up from our 4 bay enclosures. Are there 8 bay enclosures that are just as flexible as the OWC Mercury Pro. I’m sure a bunch of people (including yourself) are going to shudder when I say that our current workflow is having raid sets for each client, and we pop the drives out and put them in a file cabinet between projects. The OWC inclosure is great because you don’t need sleds for the drives – you just slide the bare drives in power the enclosure up and off to work. Plus all 4 edit bays have them so you can take the project from room to room. Do we have drive failures…. occasionally – but we slide in a new drive and rebuild the RAID. Have we lost entire RAID set – not yet (knock on wood) but I do want to find another redundant backup system (DLT, drobo, ?) But I think my first priority is speed. I’ve used Fusion enclosures with 5 discs in RAID 0 to do uncompressed HD – but again – looking for something with some redundancy. Obviosly the PCIe SSD will be super fast – but I see that as the AE cache and occasional render scratch for short form commercial spots. Any recommendations? And que the retailers!

Editor

[Rick Sebeck]

Actually on second thought – save your breath Bob… I just read some of your other posts about this very topic. You’ve got better things to do than to regurgitate your typical rant!

Editor

[Chris Murphy]

I don’t have anything significant to add to what Bob said, but agree. A major reason for buying a MacPro is the ability to upgrade it. Take advantage of that. The things you’re upgrading are the major bottleneck in any system. The thing you’re not upgrading, the core system itself, makes it familiar and thus easier to expand further, support, and troubleshoot should the need arise. If you’re so busy that it’s actually the older Xeons slowing you down, then it should be no problem money wise to get a new MacPro when the time comes.