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Whats a good camera for Green Screening in Adobe?
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When you say a dual quad core power mac….I assume you mean an intel mac. Yes, it will be plenty of horsepower but I would recommend setting up a second and third HD as a RAID 0 for holding your footage. Motion comes in combo with Final Cut Pro in Final Cut Studio. The Primatte RT keyer is within Motion. Final Cut converts the AVCHD to an Apple Pro res format. From there, Final Cut exports to Motion for the keying. Save it in Motion and the keyed footage is magically back in Final Cut. You can output it any way you like at this point. So I no longer use Premiere Pro as a result. Certainly, if you wanted to edit the footage in PPro, you could export it from FCP and do that. PPro will eventually support AVCHD but I got tired of waiting.
As for purchasing Final Cut Studio, the only way to catch a significant break on the high cost is to purchase the educational version. This “educational” version is identical to the usual version but you cannot use it for commercial use.
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Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
4GB (4x1GB)
2 x ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB
1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/sok so if i wanted a raid what would i have to do? i mean i am building this through apple.com. would it be cheaper to buy stock mac pro with the 1 TB hard drive and add the RAID capabilitie. i mean i have no idea what RAID 0 is so i dont know how to do it. i am familar with SATA but this raid stuff is too new and i have no idea what it is or how to accomplish getting it and why i would need it. please enlighten me so i accomplish this. also btw andrew what do you use?
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RAID 0, at its most basic state is a card with a minimum of 2 SATA connectors. The system uses the drives together to provide higher read and write speed. The more drives, the faster, but the more chances one will fail, causing all data to be lost. So you need daily backups, or even 2, 3 times a day if you are like me. (which you need either way really).
Cards range from 20 bucks to $1000.00 and up, and you get what you pay for. You can also buy a prebuilt array box, that you can connect to a single sata port (more expensive of course)
Vince
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So is the info split onto all drives? and thats what speeds it up? and how do you backup your data? if one drive fails does the whole system come down because the data is split? and if that is the case should i have a RAID setup to hold all my data and stuff and have a seperate SATA to put my OS on and all my programs?
Is the Mac Pro RAID Card any good? Its 800$. also would 2 x 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s be best or would 4 x 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s be best. Also is there a noticable difference with a 300GB 15,000-rpm SAS that i should consider them at all for their INSANE Price.
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or should i get the four sata drives and do a RAID 0+1. lol i have been doing some research. and when you say harddrive failure does that mean i have to replace the entire harddrive or can i just reformat it or what i am lost? and how often does this happen?
The Mac Pro RAID Card brings data protection with improved performance to your Mac Pro system — up to 250MB/s of sequential read performance in RAID 5. Ideal for video and creative professionals with demanding storage needs, as well as for tower server applications, this hardware RAID option supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and Enhanced JBOD. It has 256MB of cache and an integrated 72-hour battery for protecting the RAID cache. The card occupies the top PCI Express slot (slot 4) and connects to the four internal drive bays.
To enable your Mac Pro for hardware RAID, select the Mac Pro RAID Card option and two or more hard drives in bays 1 through 4. Each RAID level has minimum requirements for the number of hard drives:
RAID Level Drive Requirements Benefit
Enhanced JBOD One to four drives A non-RAID configuration with the ability to migrate to a RAID set at any time
RAID 0 (striping) Two to four hard drives Maximum performance and capacity for the most demanding I/O requirements
RAID 1 (mirroring) Two hard drives Maximum protection for critical data
RAID 5 Three or four hard drives Data protection, up to 250MB/s of sequential read performance, and efficient capacity utilization
RAID 0+1 Four hard drives A mirror of striped drive pairs providing performance and data protection
The Mac Pro RAID Card supports the creation of multiple RAID sets in a system and multiple volumes per RAID set. For optimal disk utilization in a RAID set, all hard drives should be the same size. Your Mac Pro system ships with each hard drive individually configured in the Enhanced JBOD level with Mac OS X installed on the drive in bay 1. Using Apple’s RAID Utility software, you can migrate the drives into a RAID set without reinstalling Mac OS X or reformatting the drives, or you can customize your RAID volumes to meet your exact requirements.
The Mac Pro RAID card occupies one of the available PCI Express expansion slots.
Please note:
The Mac Pro RAID Card occupies one of the available PCI Express expansion slots.
The Mac Pro RAID Card is required when selecting 15,000-rpm SAS drives.
The Mac Pro RAID Card supports Mac OS X only. -
>>So is the info split onto all drives? and thats what speeds it up?
Yes
>>and how do you backup your data?
I like backup4all, another was suggested in a recent thread.
>>if one drive fails does the whole system come down because the data is split? and if that is the case should i have a RAID setup to hold all my data and stuff and have a seperate SATA to put my OS on and all my programs?
Yes, and yes.
>>Is the Mac Pro RAID Card any good? Its 800$. also would 2 x 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s be best or would 4 x 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s be best. Also is there a noticable difference with a 300GB 15,000-rpm SAS that i should consider them at all for their INSANE Price.
Not sure as I don’t own one, but I would assume it to be both fast and reliable at that price. I am not too familiar with the new SAS system yet either.
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>> or should i get the four sata drives and do a RAID 0+1. lol i have been doing some research. and when you say harddrive failure does that mean i have to replace the entire harddrive or can i just reformat it or what i am lost? and how often does this happen?
0+1 or RAID 10 are all good options, but you will always need that backup. Failures come in different flavors. It not always the drive. It can be the RAID card, or even the power supply, or the motherboards and in most cases it’s the same result, your data is lost. If a drive fails it will usually need to be replaced.
>>The Mac Pro RAID Card brings data …
Out of those options, RAID 0 is the cheapest, requires the least drives, and is the easiest to configure, but it has no redundancy.
Again, it just depends on your budget.
Vince
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Actually, a 3CCD chip is something I consider to be essential for good keying. The difference in greens between a single-CCD and 3CCD chip is quite remarkable, and will have a correspondingly remarkable difference in the quality of keying.
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Here you have a number of limitations of using a restricted architecture like Mac. There are only a few limited options at premium prices. In the PC world, you would have a lot of Raid controllers with expandable cache memory and BBU to choose from, supporting Raid 0, 1, 3, 5 , 6, etc. various SAS/SATA backplanes with SGPIO support and hot swappable bays that take a significant part of the pain of a failed drive out of the equation. All at more attractive prices than in the Mac world.
Harm Millaard
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This thread, while filled with good advice, has become very cluttered with jargon and even some misinformation.
Based on your original question, and subsequent additions (and the need to keep costs low) here’s what I would do in your shoes:
Get a low-end HDV camera with true uncompressed HDMI output. The Canon HV20 is a perfect example. This will give you native uncompressed 1920×1080 output from the HDMI port, which is the BEST way to achieve quality keying.
https://www.hdvinfo.net/articles/canon/hv20overview.php
Get a MacPro. Buy the best model you can afford – the top of the line is usually way more expensive. Middle and even lower-end models will still manage the work exceptionally well. If you are watching the budget, don’t buy extra RAM or hard drives from Apple, get them from a third party vendor.
You should have a bare minimum of 4GB RAM, but get 8GB or more if you can afford it.
Buy three standard-off-the-shelf 1TB 7200RPM SATA drives. I prefer Seagate drives, but others have their own opinions. These 3 drives in a RAID will have adequate performance to capture uncompressed 1920×1080 video.
Now a choice:
CHEAP choice: No Apple RAID card. Just install the three new drives and stripe them as RAID 0. Con: No data protection if one of the drives fails.
LESS CHEAP CHOICE: Apple RAID card – stripe drives with RAID 5 for protected DATA. Con: Expense.
There are all sorts of reasons why RAIDs can fail. It doesn’t happen THAT often, and sometimes data protection still won’t save the data. There are no guarantees.
Personally, I run all my Mac systems with the project files (like the Final Cut/Premiere/After Effects/graphics files) on their own drive, and the captured media on standard (Cheap option) RAIDs. Apple Time Machine is configured to back up the Project drive but not the Media RAID drives. If the Project drive dies, I have a Time Machine backup no more than an hour old. If the RAID drives, I replace the dead cheap drive and recapture the lost footage off tape. (I have only lost 5 drives in the last 5 years, 4 of them in RAIDs. And I have 4 systems.)
Finally, get a Blackmagic Intensity card for the Mac, to capture HDMI. (US$249 retail)
https://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/
That’s it. Biggest drawback is having to have a desktop machine on-site, but if it’s a fixed studio setting, odds are you can have a permanent installation anyway.
This is the CHEAPEST way I recommend to record quality HD green screen footage.
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