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MacBook Pro acting like a tower
Does the Macbook Pro have enough bus and processor speed to handle DVCPROHD real time two layers editing with SATA card and raid (when it comes out) , or firewire 400 ingest off of a HVX200 and DVI to HD Analog componet viewing via Matrox MXO(when it ships), plus a DVI to second LCD monitor, or is this too much to expect from a laptop?
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14 Replies
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Well, you can do two streams of DVCPRO HD on a dual 1 gig G4
Powermac. I’ve done it. So as far as the new laptop, who the heck knows
until we all get um. But All the stuff you mention is doable with fast G4
and G5 Powermacs now, and the Intel stuff is faster not only because
of the chips but the pipeline in and out of them.I wasn’t at NAB this year (had a shoot dang it) but from what I’ve read,
they were demoing 4 streams of HD multicam running on the
17 inch Macbook Pro. Edit layers, well we just don’t know until
people get their hands on them.Dan
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WEll, your sata will be running off of the PCI bus, the firewire off it’s own bus, the matrox off of the graphics card, but you can’t get a second LCD as your DVI port will be sucked up by the matrox. In theory, it should work. The SATA array is kind of vaporware at this point. I have not heard of being able to run a fast array off of a laptop, but one can sure hope. I am just longing for the day when I can hook up my laptop to my fibre array. Oh sweet joy.
JEremy
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If I read correctly, that express card port is way fast enough for fiber.
Someone only needs to make a card. No?Dan
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Yeah, I’m not sure as i don’t know much about it either, just a few web notes here and there. It’s not as fast as PCIe, it’s just based on PCIe architecture as a PCMCIA slot is based on PCI architecture, but not fast enough for anything really exciting. Time will tell, time will tell.
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As far as your specific examples, it should be more than fine. The preliminary test results of the Express 34 sata cards show that they have plenty of room for what you are talking about. The cpu power of the MBP will easily deal with DVCProHD.
Once the sata cards arrive, I expect that the MBP combined with and AJA iO would also make a very solid uncompressed setup. Pretty interesting concept I think.
-gl
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[JeremyG] “The SATA array is kind of vaporware at this point.”
Vaporware? What are you smoking and can I have some? 🙂 Here’s one of the many models you will see shortly:
https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2sm2-e/
Firmtek doesn’t specialize in vaporware. They are surely making them as we speak.As for creating a super-fast array, don’t be surprised if some of the upcoming cards support Port Multipliers, allowing eight drives at once on just two SATA ports. An ExpressCard bus is 300MB/s I believe. So that’s plenty of bandwidth for uncompressed HD.
Sean
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Thank you for the great info. OK, while waiting for Firmtek’s SATA Lets say you go with a mirrored firewire 800 RAID as your external drive and firewire 400 as your live capture source from the HVX200. Is there any bus slow down with this firewire I/O set up?
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Shouldn’t be any slowdown since the f/w bus is seperate from the sata. Should work great although I wonder if a firestore-type device would be easier to use.
-gl
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[Sean ONeil] “What are you smoking and can I have some?”
Certainly. All I’m saying is that I’ll believe it when I see it. And it is vaporware until it is in my grubby little hands. I can’t plan my business around products that are not on the shelves right now. I have a firmtek SATA enclosure for my powerbook and when I try and do any kind of RAID (0 or 1) the drive speed slows down to less than half of the performance of a single drive. RAID 1 is abysmal, my thumb drive is faster. Granted, this is a PCMCIA slot, but my experience and knowledge tell me the an express34 card might get you a little better performance, but not much. It’s a laptop after all. I hope I am proven wrong. I know that Firmtek delivers great products.
Jeremy
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AS long as you have a FW800 card in your express34. The fw400 and 800 share the same bus. If you are trying to mirror two firewire 800 drives (Raid 1) you should do a test and use a free utility such as AJAs system test to test your disk speeds. I bet you’ll find the performance slower than you think it would be.
Jeremy
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