Uninformed Speculation about Mac Pros

[Craig Seeman]

[Walter Soyka] “The Mac Pro needs more expansion slots, not fewer. HP’s Z800 workstation has 7 slots. The current Mac Pro has 4. I could really use an extra slot or two.”

Thunderbolt is PCIe and can be daisy chained. The Sonnet Echo Express may be an example of where things are headed. A streamlined case with four TB ports might do more than you think

[Oliver Peters]

[Ben Holmes] “Whilst you can run AVID on Mac Pros, almost no one does in my experience – also I’ve spoken to a number of shared storage vendors who do not support AVID filesystems on Mac, although I’m sure there are some”

Generally Avid has stated their sales as 50% Mac, 50% PC. Most of the Avids I run across in creative post shops are on Macs. A lot of PCs in broadcast.

My own machine (an 8-core Mac Pro) has FCP7/FCS, Adobe CS 5.5 and Avid MC 5.5.2 on it. Media Composer is giving me the best performance, unless I want sequences bigger than 1920×1080. Then it’s Premiere Pro (for real-time editing) or After Effects (for compositing).

As far as shared storage with Avid file systems and Macs – Facilis Technology, EditShare and Avid, for starters.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Chris Kenny]

You’d still need to keep a couple of internal slots for GPUs — Thunderbolt is only 4X PCIe.

But yeah, video I/O cards, RAID controllers, and practically everything else can easily be moved out of the box with Thunderbolt.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Ben Holmes]

Then I stand corrected – in the UK I never see them, but a lot of the AVIDs I see are hire machines, or in use by broadcasters – all of whom use PCs. Glad to hear its more common in the US, but it’s just not the case over this side of the pond. I’m sure someone can give me some examples though.

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

[Oliver Peters] ” Facilis Technology, EditShare and Avid, for starters.”

Actually, I think you just about named all of the ones I know. And they’re all high-vale vendors…

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757