Fresh Start Tube Mac Pro

[John Davidson]

I’m budgeting about 8k per fully loaded mac pro with 64 gigs of RAM.
Cinema Display 27″- just 1. We’ve been using a single monitor with great effect for about 18 months. With 2 x 27″ displays we needed wheels to slide from one screen to the other – it felt weird. 1k each.

Storage – $2500 for Promise Pegasus R6 I believe.

Audio monitoring. Drop $500 for some Bose Companions and you’ll be happy. We have Adam’s in one system, Mackie’s in another, and another brand of speakers in a third – the Bose one’s are what we like the most. No mixer, because there’s less a point to them these days unless you need deck monitoring or want to play out from a DVD player, in which case studio speakers are preferred.

Ability to connect – the tube mac has GigE – which works fine for most HD formats. The server switch is up to you though – Server storage is a whoooooole other beast. Talk to Bob Zelin or Small Tree or David Roth Weiss at Promax.

Mavericks still runs FCP7, but Mavericks is still a little new and has some glitches here and there. Should be better by December (my guess).

Throw in a Blackmagic Mini-monitor to HDMI out to a Vizio Razor 37″ monitor (your preference). $700 for mini-monitor and TV.

That help? In my opinion less clutter is more. Dumping the the mixers was a big deal for us. We have one left for sale if you really want one:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/171163620276?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

Nobody really knows what the mac pro will cost fully loaded, so this might all change in December.

Good luck!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

+1 for the Pegasus R6. At that point I would buy the now announced Thunderbolt 2 Pegasus, which even will have up to an 8-bay version.

The Promise Pegasus Raids are still the fastest Thunderbolt Raids on the market and they are user friendly. They are not cheap, but they are not priced crazy expensive either, considering their performance and their market.

We use them for over a year and they have been wicked fast.

[Don Walker]

John,

Do you do any multi cam projects? If so, is the gigabit ethernet storage fast enough to handle a 4 or 5 stream 1080i ProRes clip?

don walker
texarkana, texas

John 3:16

[Warren Eig]

John,

GigaE is fast enough. There is a bug in multi-cam that would keep reporting dropped frames after every edit. If you checked, “don’t warn again” or what ever the dialogue box said when it came up about dropped frames, the problem went away. Bob Zelin recently set up my 10 GigE and it is blazing fast and more bang for the buck!

Warren Eig
O 310-470-0905

email: warren@babyboompictures.com
website: https://www.babyboompictures.com

REEL: https://www.babyboompictures.com/BabyBoomPictures/Reels.html

[Tim Maloney]

Thanks for those notes.

All seems quite reasonable to me

When I first tooled up with FCP/Cinewave the whole suite was 60 odd K.

And that investment came after I nearly sprang for an Avid Symphony at 200K plus!!!

I’ll seriously look at the new Mac Pro – after its done the rounds on Creative Cow!!

Cheers

Tim Maloney
Managing Director
Axis Films Melbourne Australia
tim@axisfilms.com.au