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Mac Pro configuration for HDV project-1000 hrs footage-4-5 camera shoots
Hello
We are upgrading from a dual g4 running Studio 1 (FCP 5.1.14) to a Mac Pro in the next few months. We have about 1000hrs total HDV footage. We expect the first cuts of this series may be something like 15hrs total, so the projects will be big and complex. Many of the shoots require multi-clips with four cameras with sequences of up to 9 hours long (the whole day’s shoot). A test edit of a scene with simple 2-camera multiclips has challenged our current desktop. The footage is also all in a foreign language and so real-time processing of draft subtitles is very helpful. We work with some H.264 footage as we have encoded the raw footage into an H.264 database which we can hold on our laptops or a single drive. I know we can’t cut this, but we use it for making markers and selects in the first instance.
Financially, we are trying to raise completion money for the series (which we may cut as 2 feature documentaries). We have some money now but are trying to save as much as we can until we know how much more we will have for the rest of the project. The 2.66 quad is roughly 25% cheaper than the 2.26 8-core Mac Pro. We’re buying in the UK with an educational discount, so this would be roughly about $868 cheaper to go with a quad 2.66/6GB RAM/2T HD/ATI Radeon/2 optical drives versus the 8-core 2.26/12GB RAM/2T/ATI Radeon/2 optical drives. The big difference is the processor number and the memory.
Questions:
8 core or 4 core?
Does the 8 core machine warrant the extra expense just by having a longer life as we will likely move on to HDcam or higher for projects in another year or so? or will the computers keep getting so much better that we save the money and upgrade again when we actually switch to another format?How much RAM?
What size hard drive? How much space does Studio 2 need to operate well? How much space does the latest OS take? (we’re getting an extra drive to mirror as backup). Is 650GB enough?
Any other advice?
We have a lot of storage, so don’t really need more. An editor we were interviewing to work on the project said she wasnt sure FCP will work smoothly with large projects. That made me a bit nervous. We’ve been using FCP since 1.0 and have never had a problem, but this project is MASSIVE and bigger than anything we’ve attempted before.
Many thanks
Christine -
2 Replies
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Hi
I am having the 8core system with 4GB RAM. this runs very best… recently we did something which you are trying to do… we made a server and had 3 nodes of i-MAC.. that did for us..
this gives freedom to edit on any node and the footage remains on one system..
ask your hardware manager to so something like that..
and if you are planing to do on single system go for 8 core with 4 gb of ram
you can may be try intensity from black magic for low cost capture and edit card
all the best
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I would suggest 4 GB ram at a minimum. Processor speed will have more effect on your rendering times, I do agree with the shared work system idea, essentially you want to have an additional system to work off of while you compress, render, etc. I don’t see how FCP will have issues for a larger project.
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