Keeping the old Mac Pro breathing

[Eric Santiago]

I did that years ago with the Sonnet Tempo.

Placed 2 x 1TB SSDs from Crucial.

Didnt need a ROCKET card on that cMP since 🙂

[Lance Bachelder]

Yeah I’d wanted the Sonnet but it’s double the price but maybe worth it if the performance is better?

It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Herb Sevush]

I’ve been using the 512g version of the OWC Accelsior for more than a year now as my Boot drive to beef up my 2010 MacPro and I love it, especially the additional eSata ports. On a 60% full drive I get around 600 read and 400 write using the BM speed test.

OWC 960GB Mercury Accelsior E2 – $575
PCIe SSD card with 2 eSata ports for external drives.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDPHWE2R960/

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Lance Bachelder]

Another product I’ve lusted after for a long time. I’m pretty happy with the raid my After Effects renders are crazy fast.

It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Bill Davis]

I know you guys are working with are larger RAID systems and this is not a direct comparison at all.

And certainly, if you have a truck sized load – only an idiot shows up to move it with a sports car.

And I further understand speed isn’t the only metric that counts…

That said, whenever I see these speed tests, It reminds me how lucky I am to be able to work on smaller scale projects in a mostly laptop driven environment. The speeds my 2015 rMBp achieves with the stock Apple configuration have been truly amazing!

When I think I can have access to a “laptop” which WAY outperforms systems costing thousands and thousands more it’s hard to conceptualize how far the entire computer industry has come during the modern era.

I suspect that when the industry re-conceptualizes the desktop systems in the same way they have with the “big sales driver” laptops – perhaps with ganged external connected GPUs and bigger pipes – it’s mind boggling to imagine how much performance will be within reach to so many creative workers.

I can certainly imagine a future where the cost of the equipment is negligible – compared to the acquisition of the skills and talent to operate it.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Rich Rubasch]

We also have the PCI SATA startup drives in our MacPros. We also have filled the four drive bays with a four-drive RAID array striped with SoftRaid, which we love.

Finally we aggregated our two ethernet ports on an aggregated HP switch so we have blazing fast Gigabit Ethernet networking between towers.

Oh, and we added USB 3 PCI cards and beefed up all our video cards so we have USB 3 to transfer camera cards etc and the video cards blaze thru encoding tasks in Adobe Media Encoder.

Been working great!

A Thunderbolt/USB3 PCI card option for these old workhorses would be ideal.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Joe Marler]

[Bill Davis] ” It reminds me how lucky I am to be able to work on smaller scale projects in a mostly laptop driven environment. The speeds my 2015 rMBp achieves with the stock Apple configuration have been truly amazing!…I suspect that when the industry re-conceptualizes the desktop systems in the same way they have with the “big sales driver” laptops – perhaps with ganged external connected GPUs and bigger pipes – it’s mind boggling to imagine how much performance will be within reach to so many creative workers. “

In the latest episode of Final Cut Pro X Radio, Mark Spencer said his main editing machine is a 2012 MacBook Pro: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/final-cut-pro-radio/id1061415673?mt=2

That said, editing H264 4k will bog down many systems which seemed very fast on 1080p. I have the highest-spec 2015 iMac 27 available connected to multiple Thunderbolt arrays, and even FCPX can be sluggish on H264 4k, esp. multicam. It’s like the old days where you have to transcode everything before editing.

Unfortunately I/O bandwidth and GPUs offer limited help since many of the code paths are CPU bound. Since 4k is 4x the data, to obtain the same responsiveness as 1080p would generally require 4x the CPU power which is just not available in the i7 family. I/O and GPU can be scaled more and where they benefit that’s great.

An 8-core iMac with a new-generation GPU would help some, or an updated nMP with a 22-core E5-2699 v4 and equally updated GPUs. However that 22-core CPU is $4,000, so any workstation using it won’t be cheap.

[Bill Davis]

[Joe Marler] “That said, editing H264 4k will bog down many systems which seemed very fast on 1080p”

Sure, but that’s the whole point of the “referential metadata system” architecture and transcode capabilities in X.

Unless you’re doing something like an “at the site” super fast event turnaround or breaking news, most workflows let you do the overnight transcode from those “hard to process” formats into ProRes and/or Proxy – and those cut like Butter on a rMBPro.

And if you ARE in that quick turn situation, just originate in ProRes. Problem solved.

That’s the beauty of the X referential system.

Cut on what a laptop processes best, then just point all those decisions to the original media pool – whether that’s hard to parse h-264 files or Red Dragon monster files.

The process remains the same.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Michael Carter]

I still have a 2009 going, but mainly to revive legacy FCP7 projects for 7toX. I think it’s probably run for 60,000 hours with no issues.

The best things I did were SSD boot drive and scratch drive, and 2 disc spinning internal raid for footage. Worked fine until I started dropping 4k footage on a 1080 timeline. I shoot with an NX1 often, and EditReady brought the thing to its damn knees. I swear I could hear it wheezing like a pack-a-day 70 year old. Multicam edits in 1080 were also no-go.

I added a beefy video card for After Effects, which did make a nice difference, render times did improve noticeably.

I like my Mac Pro cylinder OK, but I think it’s a big fail compared to the tower. All those drives (I had 6 going, and 2 or 3 external firewire drives) with fast connections to the motherboard. Everything’s now in enclosures. It looks like an octopus that’s into bondage. FCPX screams on it, AE though? Not the speed bump I’d hoped for. But that’s likely more Adobe’s fault.