Need Advice: is this a good system upgrade or just a sidestep?

[Doug Beal]

I’m running an 8 core clovertown day in day out with everything from dv to uncompressed 10 bit HD with a Kona3 card. we also have an 8 core harpertown, and some older boxes. even your old one will be good for something, offline or digitize station etc

One would hope snow leopard and a 64 bit version of FCP will take advantage of all cores in FCP.

Compressor on the other hand in combination with Qmaster can leverage all 8 cores and significantly improve those times. search for setting up compressor or maybe someone here will send you a link to that info.
so the rub becomes, how much more throughput can I achieve? and do I really want to work with said director?
If you’ve been on a G5 for this long you’ll love the 8 core.
I would research the forums on the decklink extreme regarding OS/FCP/ Quicktime/GFX card updates to find the most stable system and what issues people are having. All our stuff here is AJA, so I can’t comment

Doug Beal
Editor / Engineer
Rock Creative Images
Nashville TN

[Bryan Roberts]

Hmmm, thanks Doug. So it sounds like you’ve been enjoying your Clovertown, good to hear. My plan was to actually sell the Decklink HD Extreme and buy a Blackmagic Intensity just for monitoring since I really don’t need the extra features the Decklink Extreme offers. As for the director, yeah I’ve known him for a couple years now, we get along well and he’s very easy to work with so it’s not really an issue of that, it’s more of if I’d rather get paid $$$ for those extra few days I’d be in debt to him (plus the forgone trailer I cut for him – turning that into $$$ or days for the Clovertown, again it would total $3k for everything in work days terms).

So the Clovertowns aren’t necessarily terribly slow by Nehalem standards, just somewhat slower do you think? How’s your RT performance with the Clovertown in FCP cutting 1080 HD (either DVCPRO or XDCAM etc.?).

Thanks…

FCP / AVID EDITOR
Features : Television
http://www.DefiningFilms.com

[Doug Beal]

Storage is the key to speed. Raid5 also gives the edge of protection.

DVCProHD cuts real easy, XDCam we don’t do that much, and we’re kinda old school so as much as file based material is preferred by many, most projects get bumped to tape and new code created. project files will link footage back to original shots if necessary as the shots are laid out on a timeline used to create the new code. typically this means bring in footage, lay out timeline, print to HDCam at the appropriate frame rate, that becomes the new source and all references are made to that.
this gets all footage to a common standard before cutting and leverages the use of multiple systems since we have DS and FCP stations. Of course all this is based on workflow per project. some things are so immediate and short shelf life and those may not go that route.

RT is helped tremendously by the Konas. for most projects multiple layers maybe 10 or so and 12 audio are not a problem. renders are fast because we get stuff to frame based formats, not GOP or intra. A lot of our clients will offline their own stuff and email the project where we’ll media manage then recapture full rez from tape. others we’ll just sit down and cut full in SD, DNXHD or DVCProHD for HD offline, uncompressed for conform

$3K for a system is cheap!

A non shared storage system is at least $4K. put that with a stressed out box, konas, and monitoring ($10-12K for non critical with scopes) and you hit $50K pretty easily. add shared storage, real monitors, tape machines and you’ve got to run a lot of product to make a living.

I think your prospective box would benefit from another 2 gig of ram to get a number divisible by 4.
seems to be magic math, ram times by 4 per app expected to run.

Doug Beal
Editor / Engineer
Rock Creative Images
Nashville TN

[Bryan Roberts]

Thanks Doug, it sounds like you have quite an operation there and a great workflow worked out. I sort of have my own little niche market in that there’s a ton of high end post houses (and have friends that work at them) who don’t do any “offline” editing. So I work with them for great rates on deck rentals or getting material captured there and know a few solid colorists who I send my clients to at beautiful post houses where you have to check in with security guards and they escort you to rooms, it’s crazy. That way, I’m not trying to spread myself too thin. Here I do “offline” editing, some audio commentary and some sound design. I leave all the expensive stuff (equipment wise) to the big shops so I don’t have to invest nearly as much $$$ and then have equipment become obsolete or worry about maintaining etc. This way I can also offer slightly more competitive rates because I have much less overhead.

Also, my main goal is to be a feature film editor, it’s why I moved out here. Every seminar, book and talk I’ve ever attended with established film editors have said that they are always independent contractors who never work for post houses or production companies and usually don’t even have their own edit bays but just tell the production what to set up and rent for them (and what I experienced when I lost a big film to the editor from Three Kings and Rush Hour 2 at the last minute before signing a contract several months back – he had the production rent him a fully furnished edit bay for he and his assistant in Hollywood, the total weekly cost was HUGE). So, I’m trying to fall in between this, offer a good edit bay, comfortable and in a safe and nice neighborhood so a film production can save on rental fees but a place where the director and producers would rather come to work than a cold rented out edit bay somewhere deep in Hollywood (I’ve worked at those, they’re ok but very cold and not fun to sit in for extended periods of time). So far, the past 3-4 years it’s been working out well. It really doesn’t take much equipment to edit a feature (a few years back in 05′ when most indie films up to 5 mil or so were almost always doing 35mm offlines on DVCAM, I worked on my old souped up mac mini without a hiccup, it’s only big downside was the appearance) but most rental houses when they hear “feature” jack up the rates and convince productions they need more than they do just for the offline. Also, times have changed as more and more features use Final Cut Pro and FCP’s workflow for film gets better and better so productions aren’t forced to edit with astronomically expensive Avid edit bays.

Anyways, interesting about the Kona card and RT performance. Do you know if the Blackmagic HD Extreme helps with RT performance as well? Otherwise, I might want to look into selling the HD Extreme if I go that route and get a Kona.

Thanks again for your insight Doug…

Bryan

FCP / AVID EDITOR
Features : Television
http://www.DefiningFilms.com

[Bryan Roberts]

Ouch, just realized the price of a Kona 3 – is there a card out there that will allow monitoring in FCP out to a plasma AND do hardware acceleration without all the bells and whistles the Kona 3 card offers which I don’t need?

FCP / AVID EDITOR
Features : Television
http://www.DefiningFilms.com

[Doug Beal]

AJA makes several cards. I’d look at the LHi just released being it has HDMI and it does cross conversions 720P>1080Psf 23.98 and back a lot cheaper than a Kona3. Go to AJA.com talk with someone there. they have great tech support. Perhaps there is a VAR in your area with a good rep can help you out. surely one of your post house buddies can as well.
I would expect the same level of RT enhancement but I can’t say for sure. Storage did I mention fast storage? you’ll want that.
the high end places with security offer a different kind of security as well. That of support if something goes wrong, and that non of the babies will be mistreated or go missing before they debut their little shiny faces.

Doug Beal
Editor / Engineer
Rock Creative Images
Nashville TN

[Bryan Roberts]

UPDATE: just found out that the mac I’d be getting is a WOODCREST 3.0 ghz quad or rather 2 dual core 3.0 ghz intel processors. Now this is getting interesting, would you still recommend this setup or is this now getting a little too slow and perhaps dated for an “upgrade”?

I checked out the LHi card and am pretty much sold on it. How much RT performance does your Kona add? If it’s substantial, then running an older woodcrest processor with an LHi card should still yield great RT performance?

I hear ya on storage. I have a Sonnet Tempo e4p card that I run to a PM external 5 drive SATA box that I’ve run in software raids but usually just do single drive mode – it’ll obviously make the move over to the new machine since my dual core g5 was PCIe thank god…

FCP / AVID EDITOR
Features : Television
http://www.DefiningFilms.com