Final Cut and the 27inc iMac

[Joseph Sierchio]

What did you use to connect the client monitor to the fire wire port? Were you able to view your time line in both SD and HD ?

Thanks

[Pepijn Klijs]

I used a little box from data-video that only supports sd.

Avid/FCP Editor, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.pepijnklijs.nl

[David Roth weiss]

[Pepijn Klijs] “my work consists of listening, watching, building. I don’t need to broadcastsafe all the time when I’m creating my stories. I just need to relaxed and focussed.”

I completely understand why that works for you in your particular situation Pepijn, but there are loads of professionals on this forum who can’t get by without delivering a properly engineered work product. Jerry and I would be remiss if we didn’t point out to them the numerous shortcomings of the iMac, which make it impractical for many.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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EPK Colorist – UP IN THE AIR – nominated for six academy awards

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Pepijn Klijs]

I understand very well, but it still depends on what you want to use your equipment for. You shouldn’t advice someone to buy a sportscar to drive his children to school.

I’m working for various dutch television networks and never had a single complaint for the quality of my work.

It works for me so it might work for others as well, and save them a lot of money.

Greetings.

Avid/FCP Editor, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.pepijnklijs.nl

[Robb Harriss]

Back up for just a second: what kind of work are you planning on doing? What’s the source (camera/format)? And what’s the output/purpose?

Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.

[Joseph Sierchio]

All of my footage is delivered via fire wire or USB drives. I output to the same drives. Formats vary.

Thanks

[Robb Harriss]

it’s the formats we need to know. How you carry it around doesn’t matter. If you’re doing consumer level stuff you don’t need top of the line anything.

Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.

[Walter Biscardi]

Joseph,

Jerry has given you some very good information on the limits of the 27″ iMac and the use of an MXO to drive an SD / HD video monitor.

In our new facility, we are planning to install 4 of the 27″ iMacs to compliment our 4 Mac Pro AJA Kona 3 systems. The iMacs will tie into our 32TB Shared media storage via Ethernet. If you go with Ethernet Storage, you can then attach almost unlimited storage and still use the Firewire port to ingest from a camera or deck.

But, as I have reported previously on this forum and in my blog, the i5 and i7 27″ iMacs do not currently work with the ethernet based storage systems. We had the i7 model which had to be returned and are currently waiting on the Core Duo 2 3.33ghz model to get here.

As for just pure editing, the iMac is a fantastic editing machine. We’ve been using a 2 year old model for my edit assist to work on 3 feature documentaries and the machine has no issues keeping up with well over 200 hours of material. The biggest limitations are the lack of ability to upgrade the cards, the limits on the amount of RAM, and of course the processing speed for rendering. The iMacs will never render as fast as the towers, but as for just a great editing machine, our iMac cuts 720p and 1080i ProRes all day, every day.

When we have the four set up, we will be editing a combination of episodic television series and feature documentaries on them for the day to day editing. When we have picture lock on each show, we’ll simply open the projects on the Mac Pros for color enhancement, graphics and final mastering. But if we were only delivering digital files we really would not need the Mac Pros as much.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” featuring Sigourney Weaver coming soon.

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[Ronda Birtha]

I stumbled upon this thread and late in the discussion but I thought FCP did not work on new iMacs because, according to Apple: ATI or NVIDIA graphics processor (integrated Intel graphics processors not supported)

I found this out after trying to load in on my i7 and the install failed. If someone has figured out how to make this work, please tell me. I got this one because my G5 Tower is dying a slow death. Either way I’ll start pinching pennies again to replace it with a tower, but that may be some time.

[Carlo Ferraro]

Mr Biscardi is right, I switched from Macbook Pro (sata drives) to Imac 27 Quad 2.93, 8GB ram, FW800 external plus raid drives and the editing is far more faster with the FW800 drives than with sata on MBP, no need for rendering when applying corrections and effects on two video lines and the rendering is around six times faster, playing back AppleProRes files of around 14MB/s. The drive of the unit writes and reads at 80MB/s, the FW800 raid at 60, the external single FW800 at 40. Definitively much much better that my previous MBP and cheaper, not talking about a screen that lets me see now everythong I need (at 66). So far monitoring on a led TV via HDMI, not the best but thinking to switch to Matrox.