building a Mac Pro

[Nigel Beaumont]

Well you’re kinda correct – but when you want to actually read from or write to a hard drive there is the mechanical motion of the read/write head to the correct place on the spinning disk. It happens very quickly but those fractions of a second do add up during the day.
I doubt many people are scrapping their traditional HDs for SSDs (cost difference is still very big) but I think when you’re buying new it’s worth considering, especially just for the one OS/application drive which can be smaller than your media drives.

For video editing you want to be thinking about the whole package, not just the computer. Having good audio monitoring, and a decent video monitor is going to help you get the best quality results. Oh, and you’ll want a really comfortable chair too…..

Nigel Beaumont

Mac Pro Quad 3.0Ghz 10GB FCS 3 OSX 10.6.6, Aja IO, some black cables, shiny firewire drives

“Ofcourse it’ll be finished in time for tx”

[Frank Black]

Thanks a lot Nigel. If you don’t mind another follow-up —

by audio/video monitoring, do you mean the sound and video cards?

PS I hear you on the chair “)

[Nigel Beaumont]

Depends – initially a very good set of speakers to connect to the computer – something in the $200-400 range.
If you’re doing just material for the web you can get away with a computer monitor to check video but for serious work you need a proper TV monitor, connected either through a Video record deck of some sort or a card/box from AJA, Blackmagic or Matrox. (check the adverts on the Cow)

But you can pace yourself – don’t need everything at once.

Nigel Beaumont

Mac Pro Quad 3.0Ghz 10GB FCS 3 OSX 10.6.6, Aja IO, some black cables, shiny firewire drives

“Ofcourse it’ll be finished in time for tx”

[Frank Black]

This is so exciting Nigel 🙂

Thanks a lot.