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OT – is the “new” Mac Pro a failure
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[Tom Sefton] “However, we don’t just edit with FCPX and have great performance from all other media programs – adobe, resolve, fusion and redcine x.”
Good to know. On my cheese grater machine (the old school variety) Resolve seems to be erratic. Of course my machine might not have the right stuff in it.
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ooh – time for me to throw my useless 2 cents in !
Is the “new” Mac Pro a failure – OF COURSE NOT. It’s a great (and expensive) machine that is not “expandable”, unless you do it externally.
I still LOVE the old Mac Pro’s (a 12 core with 32 Gig of RAM, and an NVidia Graphics card, and 10G card is amazing) – is it cheaper than a “new” Mac Pro – YES it is. But is the new Mac Pro excellent – YES IT IS.
Not only is it fast, and not only is Yosemite and El Capitan nice and stable, but in addition to running the usual Adobe/Apple/Blackmagic software on it, there is a myriad of wonderful hardware from AJA/Blackmagic that is inexpensive and works wonderfully. As for adaptors for your legacy stuff, companies like Sonnet, Highpoint, Lacie, CalDigit, ATTO, Promise, OWC, etc. have wonderful Inexpensive products that let you hook up all your old junk to it. As for drive arrays, between Promise, Maxx Digital, G-Tech, Highpoint, and Netstor, there are wonderful amazing drive arrays that just plug right in, and give you enormous capacity and performance. Expander rack chassis’ from Sonnet and JMR make the new Mac Pro extra wonderful.
But you can get a killer “old” Mac Pro on ebay for $2000 bucks. You can’t find a new 6,1 Mac Pro for that kind of money.
What DON’T I like about the 2013 6,1 Mac Pro ? The threat that in 2017, Thunderbolt 3 will be on these machines, making these expensive boxes (obsolete) (remember that all “old” Mac Pro’s are now obsolete).
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
I’ve had my Mac Pro 6 core, 32 GB ram, D 700’s since Jan 2014 and it’s been a great editorial station. I’ve edited many commercials, marketing videos, and an very extensive feature documentary in HD and it has been ultra fast, quiet and expandable via external drives. I had 2 older MAC Pro towers which were great, but this machine is far better. And paying only $4,500. for an edit station is a bargin.
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of course, what kills me, is that very few (these damn young kids) seem to forget that a basic AVID in “the stone age” of the 90’s cost $80,000. If most people had to pay $80,000 for anything, they would rather kill themselves. But that was the normal price “back then” (which was a lot cheaper than $250,000 to $500,000 for a small linear editing system).
“OOH – $4500 for a computer that I can make my entire living from – I can’t spend that kind of money – it would take me 3 years to pay that off !!!!”.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
This cost factor is a major “problem” in the film/video business today. As you mentioned, I remember it cost over 100K for a D2 recorder in the 90’s, let alone a CMX suite. Because now, just about anyone can afford equipment that is reasonably good for web, social and even regional/local broadcast video. I cannot even begin to count the “hacks” which have flooded the Bay Area with video companies which you have to wade through to get to the client to see your work.
Yes, I agree that quality eventually stands out, but a potential client has to to swim through a lot of muck to see your stuff.
Give me those days of an ARRi BL, a Steenbeck and 5247!
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[Bob Zelin] “But you can get a killer “old” Mac Pro on ebay for $2000 bucks. You can’t find a new 6,1 Mac Pro for that kind of money. “
I resemble that remark! 😉
Late last year I decided to upgrade my 2008 Mac Pro 8-Core and my choices were a new Mac Pro 8-Core, a 27″ iMac Retina 5K, or an old 2010 Mac Pro 12-Core on eBay…
I picked up a Mid 2010 Mac Pro 12-Core (Dual 6-Core Xeon 2.93GHz), 24GB memory, ATI Radeon HD 5870 w/1GB, Apple RAID Card with 3x 2TB RAID 5 & 1x 1TB boot HDD for $2,275 USD on eBay. I add a an OWC Mercury Accelsior E2 PCI Express SSD (650/580MB/s Read/Write) and USB 3.0 card and I’m really impressed with the performance so far. My 32-bit Geekbench score is 24,946 which is just below the 12-Core nMP and 2,000 points above the 8-Core nMP. Considering it was 1/2 the price of an 8-Core nMP I’m happy with my purchase. I didn’t get dual GPU’s but I did save a LOT of money.
That doesn’t mean that the new Mac Pro was a failure to me. I think it’s a brilliant design and I don’t see expandability as being an issue. It didn’t buy it because it simply cost too much for my budget. I would have loved to have been able to afford one though.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Part of the deal with the nMP is its industrial design, which is both a blessing and a limitation. Someone linked a review of a big Boxx station. However, far more interesting and more in direct competition to the nMP is this Boxx:
https://www.boxxtech.com/products/apexx-1
No Thunderbolt, but a ton of USB3.0.
What actually bothers me far more than the hardware is the continual issues Apple has with RAM leaks on their software, including FCPX and LPX. Clearly there a problem in the OS and these apps.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Herb Sevush] “… If you don’t mind living in a morass of cables and external boxes”
Any more than we already have? I’m not sure why that would be. I have 2010 Mac Pro tower with an external RAID 5 with a eSATA cable connecting it, and a Firewire cable connecting my M-Audio Firewire 410 audio device, and a FW800 cable connecting my Time Machine backup drive. If I bought a new Mac Pro, I’d have a much smaller Mac with a Thunderbolt cable connecting an external RAID 5, and a Thunderbolt cable connecting my audio device, and a Thunderbolt cable connecting my Time Machine backup drive. I don’t see why there would be more cables than I already have? Just because it has less storage space internally? Not a big deal when you already have external storage.
[Herb Sevush] “… If you don’t mind having a system with absolutely zero upgrade capability”
There are only 3 things a customer can upgrade on any computer (1) Memory, (2) Storage, (3) GPU (I don’t consider CPU upgrades a “customer replaceable part” and I understand you can swap out the CPU on a new Mac Pro just like any other computer anyway… all you need is a steady hand and some thermal paste)
The new Mac Pro can upgrade (1) Memory and (2) Storage. You just can’t upgrade the GPU. So it has 2/3 the upgrade options of other computers. That’s hardly “zero”. If you’re talking about PCIe cards then what PCIe cards would you be adding? It has an incredible amount of I/O on the back panel already.
[Herb Sevush] “… If you never have to edit with software other than FCPX”
Not sure why you think that you can only run FCP X on it. Adobe CC should run just fine as should Avid. I really don’t understand what makes you say this.
[Herb Sevush] “For everyone else it is not quite so impressive, which is why Steve is thinking about buying a 6 year old used MacPro off of eBay. The fact that he’s even considering this option speaks volumes.”
Late last year I bought a 5 year old 2010 Mac Pro 12-Core for $2,275 from eBay because it was 1/2 the price of a new Mac Pro 8-core. It had nothing to do with the number of cables… It had nothing to do with expandability… it had nothing to do with running FCP X… it all came down to affordability. Getting almost the same power for 1/2 the price was my deciding factor. If I could afford it, I’d buy a new Mac Pro in a heartbeat. I love the smaller form factor a lot.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Shawn Miller] “I imagine running the same hardware will yield similar performance.”
My personal experience has been different. In fact, that’s how I got my first Mac. I had a Lenovo Core 2 Duo laptop with 8GB memory but Windows was having a really hard time running multiple VMware virtual machines. I couldn’t get more than 2 working before the whole system grinded to a halt. Someone left work who had a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and they ask me if I wanted it. I looked up the specs and the processor was the same and the memory was the same as my Lenovo laptop. So I popped the 8GB of memory out of the Lenovo and into the MacBook Pro, installed VMware Fusion and I could get 4 or 5 virtual machines running without OS X breaking a sweat. I was amazed that with an exactly matched PC and Mac the Mac performed so much better.
That has nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with how efficient Mac OS X is and how tuned it is to using the hardware. That’s really the problem with Windows. It’s bloated with drivers to support an infinite combination of parts where no two PC’s are exactly alike which reduces the chances that everything will work, while on a Mac, the developer who is writing the software, in comparison, has a small number of configurations to support so the chances for optimization increase dramatically.
After receiving that MacBook Pro at work and experiencing first hand how much better it was than an equivalent Windows PC, I sold all of my PC’s and bought Mac’s and never looked back.
Having said that… the Mac does occasionally have better hardware for a short period of time while the PC catches up. When the new Mac Pro came out, there were no SSD’s for PC’s that could come close to the performance of the ones Apple was using in the Mac Pro. Same is true for Thunderbolt. It simply didn’t exist on PC’s until they caught up. I’m reminded of the Extreme Tech article: Apple’s new ‘overpriced’ $10,000 Mac Pro is $2,000 cheaper than the equivalent Windows PC where if you bought the same quality parts that Apple uses, PC’s really aren’t cheaper. This is especially true for the new Mac Pro where the equivalent GPU’s are very expensive if you were to buy them as external cards instead of built in.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I am dragging this thing out, because what I see on forums like Creative Cow (and what I see in real life) is that as young users get into our industry – everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is just too expensive. Why ? Because they are willing to work for free, and the clients (who are really the only guilty ones) will say “I don’t care if you work for free, will you paint my house and clean my toilet, in addition to shooting this video for free). And the sad part is, there are kids that say “well, if I shoot this video for free, and edit it for free, and paint his house, this will look great on my reel, and maybe he will hire me next time for 50 bucks”.
Look – I am equally guilty of this now, at the age of 59 (but in a different field). I recently learned how to play guitar, and me and my little band of OLD GUYS plays for free (we get our drinks for free) at the local bar, and we think that is COOL. I am sure that any professional musician that walks in wants to kill us and say “these guys are not only idiots, but they are ruining it for all of us that are trying to make a living doing it”. And so, when we see kids doing what we do for free, or almost free, we get mad.
And when I see someone on creative cow saying “I can get this 2005 SCSI RAID array for free, can I use this with FCP-X or Blackmagic Davinci Resolve 12” – well, that is an assault on what I do for my living, so I start my rant on this poor kid. But it’s the same thing. When we see the thread “I just got my iPhone to shoot my new feature, but Verizon charges SO MUCH MONEY for my monthly fee for the iPhone, isn’t there a cheaper way to get this phone, so I can post my movie on iTunes” – well, I want to kill. But I guess I am just as guilty. But I have fun playing music. I am not trying to pay my health insurance from doing it.Go out and buy a new Mac Pro for $4500. If this is not a good investment to you, then you are in the wrong industry. As I have ranted in the past, if you are a UBER cab driver, and can’t afford a nice clean Prius, and can only afford the old rust bucket that your parents got you for graduation, then you CAN’T be a professional UBER cab driver.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com
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