New Mac Pro for After Effects…

[Ridley Walker]

[John Cuevas] ” I might be keeping up with the Jones, but I’m behind the Soyka’s
“

They’re always ahead of the curve!

[Walter Soyka]

[Ridley Walker] “I’m geting awfully close to that on a aging 2010 12 core MacPro with 32GB of RAM.”

Yes. Like I said, the Z800 I have is old now — nearly ready for replacement. It’s from 2011 and uses a speed-bumped version of the Xeon in your 2010 Mac Pro. The most notable thing I do with that aging Z800 that I cannot do with my Mac Pro is drive 10-bit displays.

It’s the CPU options available on PCs starting in 2012 that started showing the performance gap. Tom Daigon would shame us all with his 16-core Z820.

But even here, we are talking about relatively small differences. Imagine how wide this gulf will become next year when the Mac Pro Tube could pull around 15 on CINEBENCH with its 12-core CPU, and a Z-series could pull around 30 with two of those same 12-core CPUs. Ouch.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[John Cuevas] “I only scored a 13 on cinebench. I might be keeping up with the Jones, but I’m behind the Soyka’s”

https://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=rimshot&play=true

Those 2 CINEBENCH points can be overcome very easily by being better at lighting than I am. The bar is not that high…

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Michael Miller]

[Walter Soyka] “Imagine how wide this gulf will become next year when the Mac Pro Tube could pull around 15 on CINEBENCH with its 12-core CPU, and a Z-series could pull around 30 with two of those same 12-core CPUs. Ouch.”

I just recently bought a new low end HP Z820 off EBay that I plan to upgrade to the 12-core Intel Xeon E5v2 when they come out. I am still going to keep my Z800 as it still a very capable workstation and will be for some years to come.

[Darby Edelen]

Here’s a result from my Z820. This machine is pretty well equipped, although you can see that I didn’t go for the fastest CPUs available. I wanted to stick with air cooling and I was trying to keep the price tag around $10k (I already had the GPU).

Darby Edelen

[Paul Roper]

Always interesting to compare bang-for-your-buck specs. I’m working on a Mac Pro which costs around $8500 excluding the 2x Quadro 4000 cards, which push the price north of $10K. Compared to Darby’s Z820 Cinebench results, my Mac’s running at tortoisesque speeds:

– Paul

[Darby Edelen]

[Paul Roper] ” Always interesting to compare bang-for-your-buck specs. I’m working on a Mac Pro which costs around $8500 excluding the 2x Quadro 4000 cards, which push the price north of $10K. Compared to Darby’s Z820 Cinebench results, my Mac’s running at tortoisesque speeds:”

Well, in all honesty I went back and re-configured my Z820 and it’s more like $12K without the GPU 🙂

That’s with 128GB of RAM, 1x 256GB SSD for OS, 1x 128GB SSD for Cache and 3x 3TB HD in Raid 5 configuration.

Normally I buy RAM separately at a better cost (Apple is particularly ridiculous with their pre-installed RAM prices) but when my company is buying I don’t sweat it 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Steven Mullins]

I watched the announcement live from my AppleTV, my heart sank, I checked in with Promax and BOXX one last time for best value, and sent my CC info to Promax within 24 hours. I need to get to work (after working off my MBP while I waited months for this announcement) and an equipped z820 will be seriously fast for quite a while.

Thanks, but no thanks, Apple. Maybe some other time!

Steven Mullins
Motion Designer
EchoOut Motion Design
https://www.echoout.com

[James Huenergardt]

Walter,

I’m am VERY interested in your cross-platform workflow.

I’m needing to upgrade my 2008 Mac Pro and have looked long and hard at the new Mac Pro tube computer. Very sexy, but not sure if it will be the best fit.

Because a lot of my clients require Mac platform stuff and I work with other editors on a Mac, I’m trying to find a cross-platform workflow that’s seamless.

What are you doing with it?

Thanks,

Jim

Reel Inspirations – http://www.reelinspirations.com
Commercials, Dramas, Image Pieces, Documentaries, Motion Graphics

[Walter Soyka]

[James Huenergardt] “I’m am VERY interested in your cross-platform workflow.”

Happy to answer questions — fire away.

[James Huenergardt] “I’m needing to upgrade my 2008 Mac Pro”

This was a screaming machine at the time, but it’ll be seriously outperformed by just about anything today.

[James Huenergardt] “and have looked long and hard at the new Mac Pro tube computer. Very sexy, but not sure if it will be the best fit.”

I think the Mac Pro tube will be a fine computer, but it will be somewhat limited in comparison with PC options.

What are you worried about not being a good fit? Can you talk about your work now, what you want to do going forward, and maybe a price range?

[James Huenergardt] “Because a lot of my clients require Mac platform stuff and I work with other editors on a Mac, I’m trying to find a cross-platform workflow that’s seamless.”

My work is mainly large-format motion graphics. I spend a lot of time in the Adobe apps and C4D. The biggest challenge with these apps when switching platforms is trying to remember whether to use my thumb on Cmd or my pinky on Ctrl for a hotkey. Once you’re in the apps, the computer kind of disappears.

I work every day on an HP PC workstation, and take work home on either an HP EliteBook or my MacBook Pro. Creative Cloud allows two activations, and they can be split platforms. It’s easy to shuffle around to other systems by deactivating on one and reactivating on another.

I did have to buy new licenses of all my plugins. I maintain licenses for all the major plugin packages and this was a significant expense, perhaps in part because I didn’t want to transfer my Mac licenses, but rather buy new ones to allow me to use it on both systems. The only exception here was GenArts; the Sapphire license is cross-platform and portable like CC with unlimited deactivation/reactivation.

I use MacDrive on my PCs, and I use Tuxera NTFS on my Macs. This way, I don’t have to care what kind of drive I’m plugging into what computer — any computer in my little shop can read any disk that comes through the door.

Networking mostly just works. Snow Leopard was brilliant; I skipped Lion altogether, but I had a few networking pains with Mountain Lion due to Apple dropping SAMBA and writing their own SMB handler for file sharing with PCs. I installed SMBUp and haven’t looked back. Mavericks should support SMB 2 and I am hopeful it will do file sharing better out of the box than ML did.

I use Google Apps for business for my email, contacts, and calendar, so it doesn’t matter what computer I’m on. To me, this was one of the things that made it easy for me to switch away from Apple full-time: I wasn’t tied into their application stack for the everyday stuff.

I use Dropbox for syncing projects of reasonable size, though larger projects live on local RAIDs which are periodically synced.

I use CineForm or image sequences as my ProRes replacement intermediates on my PCs because I have some specific resolution requirements, but DNxHD in MXF is working nicely with Pr CC for HD-resolution projects and may be a viable candidate. It’s possible to encode ProRes on Windows systems with ffmbc or ffmpeg, but I generally do this on Macs.

I could go on, if you care to point me in any specific direction.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events