Mac Pro for FCP Studio

[David Roth weiss]

1) Get a machine with either the stock ATI card or the ATI 4870, which is even better. ATI cards simply work better with Apple Color. Period end of story.

2) Either install the Barracudas internally striped as Raid 0, or get an external Raid 5. Avoid the Apple Raid card, it’s overly expensive and its ROI is just lousy.

3) The AJA LHi offers excellent output for display to broadcast monitors and HDTVs via SDI, Component, and Deep color HDMI. What would make you doubt it?

4) MXO 2 is just another entry into the video I/O market. It’s a contender, but AJA is the company favored my most because of its superior history of customer support, and its long history as the leader of Mac supported video I/O products.

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

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

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

[User Requested post notices bouncing]

Hello, David;
Thank you for the rapid and, as usual, thoughtful response. I have a AJA IO for our present (aging) G5 dual 2 gHz FCP system and love it. The telephone and driver support from AJA has also been outstanding. I was mainly asking if you can get away with using the LHi without the “calibration” feature of the MX02, and still use a HDTV, or sans the MX02, need a more professional (read that expensive) monitor such as a offering from FSI. I am not totally aware (yet) of the technical requirements of my intended clients, but I know I need to deliver quality grading or I will be staying in the SD production world forever! Thanks again for your insight!
Terry

[Scott Sheriff]

My 2 cents on drives and RAM.
I wouldn’t go anywhere near those Barracuda HD’s. Google “Barracuda 1.5TB Problems”. Don’t know who is recommending these to you. Yeah, they are supposedly fixed, but why take a chance when there are so many other great choices. Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm 32MB cache, fast, solid, quiet, low heat. WD Blacks, are also good. Both have great independent web reviews. I have a couple of each, and I actually think the Hitachi is a bit faster and quieter, even if it’s not a ‘name dropper’ brand. You can get these in an OEM package from OWC for around a hundred(ish) bucks. Spend the extra 20 bucks and get a 1TB system drive. With prices what they are why go with a 650? There are also some 2TB drives out, but I would stick with the tried and true 1TB’s for mission critical stuff until the 2TB’s have been out for a while.
Get the fastest processor, not the slowest, how could you go wrong there?. Even if you have to cut back on RAM to afford it. Besides FCP doesn’t use all that RAM, but the processor makes a dif. And you can always get more RAM later, again OWC has great prices on RAM sticks, but you can’t just go buy a faster processor later like you can RAM.

[David Roth weiss]

[Scott Sheriff] “Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm 32MB cache, fast, solid, quiet, low heat.”

I too prefer Hitachi drives for these exact reasons. However, I do not agree with Scott on everything he’s written above.

[Scott Sheriff] “Spend the extra 20 bucks and get a 1TB system drive.”

While $20 isn’t much, most of a 1Tb system drive will sit there looking good and it won’t ever be used. So, spend the $20 on a lunch for your client and you’ll make that back in spades.

[Scott Sheriff] “Get the fastest processor, not the slowest, how could you go wrong there?”

Frankly, if you do a side by side speed test you will find that the difference between the slowest and fastest Nahalem procs is negligible, however the premium you will pay for the fastest procs is high, in fact, very high. So, an evaluation of ROI would point out that paying for the hot procs is not in fact worth the extra dough.

Om the other hand, one could argue that the possibility of greater resale value makes the faster procs a better value in the long run, but in todays’ market, I’d have to say that money in your pocket now is more valuable than potential money that may or may not ever come your way.

[Scott Sheriff] “Get the fastest processor, not the slowest, how could you go wrong there?. Even if you have to cut back on RAM to afford it.”

I disagree wholeheartedly. The RAM is quite a bit cheaper than the premium for the fast procs, and while FCP doesn’t use all the available RAM, Compressor, After Effects, Motion, PhotoShop Extended, and most likely the next version of FCP, do.

However, Scott’s idea of buying the RAM from OWC and not from Apple is sound. Although, you will be probably end up throwing away two sticks of RAM, because mixing RAM from different vendors is not a good idea in MacPros and it has been known to cause big issues for lots of users.

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

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

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

[Walter Biscardi]

[Terry A. Davis] “1) He quoted adding (3) 1.5 TB Barracudas with or without the internal RAID card. What is the best way to go, JBOD with religious backup, Raid 5, with protection, but cuts available storage from 4 TB about 20% to 3.2 TB, or an external RAID, such as G-Tech?”

Not a fan of internal RAIDs. Get yourself a good, high quality external RAID 5 array. 4TB minimum, 8TB would be even better. Remember the more overhead you have, the better performance you get from your system. I have 40TB available in our shop now and with three documentaries and three series all in production at the same time, it’s amazing how quickly we can start to fill those up. Better to get as much storage space as you can right up front, don’t want to fill anything up or you run into issues.

[Terry A. Davis] “2) Is there an advantage to going with the ATI Radeon 4870, over the NVidia? (Software: FCP Studio, Photoshop, AE Pro, Maya).”

Absolutely, especially if you plan to use Color. The 4870 is what we install in all our machines now.

[Terry A. Davis] “3) He quoted the AJA LHi, which some of you think is a great board with HD-SDI and HDMI in and out, but can I do a decent job of delivering quality projects to the aforementioned market by monitoring on a HDTV from that board, or do I need a better actual monitor? Mr. Biscardi lately has really seemed to like the FSI 17″ and 24″ LCD monitors.”

LHi is an outstanding value for the price. 1/2 the cost of the AJA Kona 3 boards which we run here, though I’ll put some LHi’s in our new facility. We’ve delivered all manner of HD programming to networks and now feature documentaries with the Konas.

Can’t recommend the FSI monitors enough for accurate color viewing for HD. The 1770W is incredible for the price. We use the 2450W and 1760W’s here though we’ll put a few of the 1770W’s in the new shop.

As for the Mac Pro itself, purchase the absolute fastest Mac you can afford and load it with a minimum of 8GB RAM. Do NOT put 10GB of RAM in there. It needs to be divisions of 8. So either 8 or 16.

I always purchase the absolute fastest Mac available because I expect that it will run fine for three years. If you go with something slower, you might regret it as the software advances. I don’t see any reason to get a slower machine if you want to keep it for a long time. If you only need a machine for one year, then go with a slower machine. If it’s something you want to run for three years, like I do here, go with the fastest machine available at the time of purchase.

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

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.

Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital.

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[User Requested post notices bouncing]

Thanks, David and Scott;
David, I have not noticed a problem with my 2 gigs of ram for FCP, however the ram preview on AE Pro is limited to about 17 seconds. With my average AE clip at 30-50 seconds, that is a lot of effort to preview the whole thing. I have heard that Mac likes at least 1 gig of ram per processor, but I am no expert.
I will probably get AJA LHi board and HDTV to start, per your advice. My concern is that in the SD world that I am familiar with, my Sony 800 line Trinitron is self-calibrating via blue screen/SMPTE bars, etc., but in the HD world, there are so many display options that there is a concern that FCP output will look great to me in grading, and like crap to my client’s quality engineers, or to final viewers. Do the waveform displays in FCP have any usefulness? Boulder Digital Arts has already given us training in using those screens in FCP.
Thanks again to you both for your advice.

[User Requested post notices bouncing]

Walter, thanks for your input. You guys are awesome! Where else can a person get the best advice available so quickly? I need the investment to last 3-5 years. Our present G5 is 5 years old, still going strong , but not up to much HD (Canon HV30 30P works, beautiful cinema display picture, but strobes significantly with pans, reason maybye codec busting or graphics card? Static shots with limited motion beautiful!). I will feed my experience back to the Cow as I can; maybe it will help someone else.
Regards and thank you all!
Terry

[Scott Sheriff]

David,
I totally bow to your superior knowledge of all things NLE.
But, here’s some food for thought:

While $20 isn’t much, most of a 1Tb system drive will sit there looking good and it won’t ever be used. So, spend the $20 on a lunch for your client and you’ll make that back in spades.

My thoughts are to have some breathing room for things like music libraries (these seem to be OK on the system drive IME), other production software etc.
Also, larger drives tend to have a higher MTBF. Probably because there is less background reshuffling of data.

Frankly, if you do a side by side speed test you will find that the difference between the slowest and fastest Nahalem procs is negligible, however the premium you will pay for the fastest procs is high, in fact, very high. So, an evaluation of ROI would point out that paying for the hot procs is not in fact worth the extra dough.

OK, I don’t have hard facts on the speed difference between the current fastest and slowest MP’s, as far as real world differences on rendering, or compressor.
But, the cost difference is $2,600. There are 250 business days per year. Assuming 8 hour days (stop laughing) even at my puny day rate, the faster machine only has to save me 8 minutes per biz day for two years to make that $2,600 back. Of course it takes even less time if your rate is higher, or you work with a second editor that can put more hours on the machine.

However, Scott’s idea of buying the RAM from OWC and not from Apple is sound. Although, you will be probably end up throwing away two sticks of RAM, because mixing RAM from different vendors is not a good idea in MacPros and it has been known to cause big issues for lots of users.

Mix them all you want. The odds are that most of the OEM and aftermarket chipsets are from the same vendor anyway, and are just re-branded. Mine are, if you peel the stickers off and look. Also the screen print on the board is identical. As long as they meet the spec, the machine doesn’t know where they were born. It’s a lot more important that they are used in the proper slots if your not filling up the machine, and that the they are numerically identical (all 2g, or all 1g). It also seems like I’ve seen some benchmarks that shows multiples of 4G work best. I have built 3 systems since 2008 (intel 5400 series)using mix and match memory and they all seem to work fine. I admit it might be a different story with the X58 processor machines on size combos that work best, but I think mix and match vendors is still going to work OK.

[David Roth weiss]

[Scott Sheriff] “David, I totally bow to your superior knowledge of all things NLE. “

Is that kind of crap always necessary when someone disagrees with you Scott?

[Scott Sheriff] “My thoughts are to have some breathing room for things like music libraries (these seem to be OK on the system drive IME), other production software etc. “

I’ll concede that one Scott, because no one could ever convince me that arguing over $20 or 350Gb is worth our combined time and effort.

[Scott Sheriff] “the cost difference is $2,600. There are 250 business days per year. Assuming 8 hour days (stop laughing) even at my puny day rate, the faster machine only has to save me 8 minutes per biz day for two years to make that $2,600 back. Of course it takes even less time if your rate is higher, or you work with a second editor that can put more hours on the machine.”

I admire your mathematical prowess and persistence Scott, it’s your conclusions I disagree with. If you have 2600 large sitting around send it my way for two years, I think I can put it to better work for you than the ROI you imagine you’ll get on those hot procs.

If you look around the Web you probably won’t find a single article that compares the fastest 8-core machines with the slowest 8-core machines, so it would seem that I’m the only one who cares enough to have actually made the comparison. So you know, the fastest machine was approximately only 2% faster than the slowest machine in a side by side unofficial ProRes render test using Compressor that I ran at the Santa Monica Apple Store shortly after the 8-core machines with Nehalem procs were released. So please, do some additional math if you will that shows me exactly how a 78.78 percent cost premium makes sense when you achieve only 2% faster renders.

I’d honestly love to be proven wrong on this, so please do your best to show me why it makes sense to spend that extra $2600. So far you and Walter haven’t exactly overwhelmed me with facts and figures. So come on, I challenge you both, please overwhelm me with some numbers and I’ll happily acknowledge that you’ve both enlightened me.

David

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

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

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

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Roth Weiss] “So come on, I challenge you both, please overwhelm me with some numbers and I’ll happily acknowledge that you’ve both enlightened me.”

What I reported in my post is what works for me and my company. Has worked for 8 years. Started with one room / one edit suite in 2001 and will have 9 edit suites by the end of next year. The program seems to be working well for us.

What works for you or anyone else might be different.

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

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.

Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital.

Blog!

Twitter!