FCP and MacPro Feedback?

[Zak Mussig]

Ric,
We’ve had our Mac Pro since just after they were announced. It’s a Quad 3 with 5GB of RAM running the universal version of FCS. I also have Shake 4.1 and Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 running on the machine. Since all comparisons here are relative, the machine I upgraded from was a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with 8GB of RAM. Both machines have 256 MB graphics cards. I’m hazy on the model of each card, but the Mac Pro is the standard card. The new machine has 4 SATA hard disks in it, 2 of them are matching 500s which are striped. Most of what we do is DV and HDV, so most projects live on Firewire 800 drives (yeah, I know) for portability.

The system has been doing pretty well so far… FCP feels very fast and responsive, and I’m struggling to remember a time when I had to wait on the machine that wasn’t the fault of a disk. Rendering is noticeably faster on the new system, and Motion feels much more responsive. I know it unloads a lot of work on the GPU, and since I don’t know a ton about graphics cards, and the differences between / advantages of PCIe vs AGP I’m willing to admit that may be a me thing.

I was worried about Photoshop, but while it may not run faster than it would on a Quad G5, it feels as fast or faster than my dual 2.5. The only slow down there is running actions on large batches of files, which we do pretty often here. Making something else the frontmost application seems to speed that up a bit since it stops trying to show me everything, and just does the job.

My guess is that any issues you run across will be from 3rd party hardware, and drivers for it. My old system had an SD only Blackmagic card that I used for video and audio output. Because of costs that aren’t mine to pay, changing needs that isn’t being replaced with a PCIe version. We got an M-Audio Firewire Solo to send audio out to monitors, but it doesn’t work with the current version of the OS 10.4.7.

Hope that helps,
Zak