Question for John Rofrano on system

[John Rofrano]

[Ron Whitaker] “I learned this afternoon that Red Giant makes Colorista III now for FCPX,”

I use Color Finale. It’s very good and reasonably priced. You should check it out.

[Ron Whitaker] “I learned, is that there’s a plugin called Slice X, which is a motion tracking plugin that you can use in conjunction with Colorista, so you can, for example, create a mask (like a power window in Resolve), track a person’s face and have the color grading apply only to that! Love it!”

Slice X and Track X both rock! I use them too. Lock & Load is an incredible stabilizer. I use that too. 😉 It’s all based on Mocha.

[Ron Whitaker] “Lots of way cool/awesome plugins for FCPX as well.”

Yea, The other thing is that you can create Templates in Motion and export them to FCP X so you have all of the power of Motion but in an easily digestible template. This is an extremely power concept that I’ve taken advantage on several occasions.

[Ron Whitaker] “Would a Mac Pro from 2010 be okay? I’ve seen some that have 32GB RAM, 8-core for reasonable prices. What is the minimum GHz you would recommend?”

Yea, that should be plenty. These are Xeon workstation class processors with ECC error correcting memory, not gamer PC’s. They still perform very well given their age. I wouldn’t get anything older than a 2010. If you can find a 2012 even better. Just keep your eye on the price because if you go too high you might be able to afford a new Mac Pro which is using much newer processors and dual GPU’s which perform at a much higher level than the old hardware.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Scott Francis]

Also, know that USB3 and Thunderbolt are not native to these Mac Pros. You will need a PCI-E card to have USB3.

Xavier (Scott) Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Ron Whitaker]

I have a somewhat dumb question. I notice so many, if not everyone, saying that you need an external storage device. I take it that means a Thunderbolt RAID system? What is the purpose of that? Just to save your bacon if you internal HD goes down?

Also, do most of the Mac Pros (older ones) come with PCI-E cards? It looks like that is needed for Thunderbolt and USB3.

[Scott Francis]

Any external storage would need to be via Firewire 800 and/or USB2. There are 4 internal slots for 3.5″ HDDs. They are NOT SATA 3 speed but SATA 2.
SATA 2 is still VERY fast however, if you want ESATA or SATA 3 you will need to get a PCI-e card for those as they are NOT part of the native Mac Pro.
Also, with the SATA slots are 3.5 if you want to use an SSD drive you will need a specific adapter that you can get at OWC.
I am unsure of how to setup an internal RAID for Mac OS so I am not sure how to do that, if you use an external raid, than you will just need to determine if you would need to get a PCIe card to match it’s interface (as I said above). I am not aware of ANY Thunderbolt PCIe cards bring manufactured (because of the speed), and the older Mac Pros don’t have Thunderbolt.

I purchased a USB3 PCIe card and it is pretty fast, I use all 4 SATA slots, running both OSX and Windows on a partitioned SSD drive in slot 1, and 3 other drives that are for either Windows storage (formatted in NTFS) or exFAT if you want both OS’s to see the info.

Hope this helps and good luck!!

Xavier (Scott) Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[John Rofrano]

[Ron Whitaker] “I have a somewhat dumb question. I notice so many, if not everyone, saying that you need an external storage device. I take it that means a Thunderbolt RAID system? What is the purpose of that? Just to save your bacon if you internal HD goes down?”

There’s an old saying: If you don’t have your data backed up twice on two separate devices… it’s not really backed up! I have an internal Apple RAID card with 4 x 2TB disks in a 8TB RAID 5 with 6TB of usable storage that can withstand a single disk failure. I also have external drives that I backup the RAID 5 to just in case including another 12TB RAID 5 (you can never had too much storage).

[Ron Whitaker] “Also, do most of the Mac Pros (older ones) come with PCI-E cards? It looks like that is needed for Thunderbolt and USB3.”

Yea, there are 4 PCI-e slots that can’t exceed 300w of power combined.

My 2010 Mac Pro slots contain (from top to bottom where slot 1 is on the bottom):

Slot 4: Apple Mac Pro RAID Card [link]
Slot 3: Inateck 4 Ports PCI-E to USB 3.0 Expansion Card for Mac Pro [link]
Slot 2: OWC Mercury Accelsior E2 480GB PCI Express SSD with 2 external eSATA III ports. [link]
Slot 1: Saphire Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition [link]

This gives me internal and external SATA III ports and USB 3.0 ports. The internal SSD is blazing fast because it’s on the PCI-e buss not the SATA II bus. I’m getting 650 MB/s Read and 582 MB/s write performance. To appreciate this you need to know that a regular SSD attached to the internal SATA II bus gets 270 MB/s read and 257 MB/s write so that’s double the performance of a normal SSD.

OWC Mercury Accelsior E2 480GB PCI Express SSD performance:

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

[Scott Francis] “I am unsure of how to setup an internal RAID for Mac OS so I am not sure how to do that”

You can set up an software RAID with Apple’s Disk Utility that’s built into OS X but I would only use that for RAID 0 or 1. If you want to use RAID 5 you really should get a dedicated RAID card like the Apple Mac Pro RAID Card that I have which comes with it’s own RAID utility and battery backup.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com