Which Mac for a simple 3 camera Edit

[Tom Meegan]

Max,

What you are trying to do is not consistent with a no budget production. Below are my equipment recommendations, but I think paying your friend with the ingest system to do the edit would be smarter, faster, and cheaper – assuming he/she has the experience and equipment to do the job professionally.

To play back three streams of regular ProRes (not HQ) you will need a consistent 54 MB/s. In practice this means you should shoot to have storage that advertises about double that. That means eSATA. Which means a pci-e card for the Mac Pro or a pci express card for the Mac Book Pro.

My rough calculations indicate that you will need about 3.0 usable terabytes to hold 36 hours of ProRes. Regular ProRes is 144 megabits per second. Check my math, and remember to add about 25% to leave 10% free space on the disk and to have room for other project elements.

You will want the storage to be RAID 5 or RAID 6, or you will want to buy a second storage unit with the footage duplicated on it as a back up.

You don’t want to have to spend the time or goodwill going back to your friend to ask him to re-ingest if something sad happens.

So look for 3 usable terabytes of 100+ megabytes per second eSATA storage at RAID 5 or 6. This means between 4 TB and 6 TB raw (depends on how many drive spindles are in your storage appliance and whether you go RAID 5 or 6.)

ProRes works better with fast processors. A newish Mac Book Pro loaded with ram would do, but a Mac Pro would be much better. A used Mac Pro would do the job. I’m not as sure about ram requirements, but I would recommend at least 4 GB of ram, perhaps more.

All of the above assumes you want a smooth editing experience. You can make due with less – it all depends on how valuable your time and sanity are.

If you are not comfortable experimenting with configurations, or need this to work first try, I suggest finding a local consultant to help you. Or, as I mentioned above, hire your friend with the ingest system to do the edit.

If you need to color correct the footage, you will need an MXO, MXO 2, or a product from AJA or Black Magic Design. You will also need a separate monitor to view the footage. Search the Cow for color correction and monitor solutions that would be appropriate.

If you need to mix the sound, you will need decent audio monitors.

If you are confident that the sound and visuals will not need any tweaking, you can forgo this, but in my experience the sound and visuals always need tweaking.

If you try to color correct using the Canvas in FCP you will be disappointed. It does not tell the truth about color. It is a confidence monitor and a content monitor only.

If you try to sound mix with cheap speakers you will be OK as long as there is almost no complexity to the mix. If you have music, natural sound, and voice over happening at the same time, your mix will be less than optimal without flat studio monitors with a wide dynamic range.

Best of luck with the project.

Tom Meegan
Woven Pixels, LLC

[Elijah Lynn]

Great advice by Tom!

I have been learning FCS for the past 6 months or so and I want to add that just buying a computer and software is only part of the investment.

The rest is massive time investment and good training materials/classes.

I would budget a good $1,000+ for training if you want to expedite your learning curve.

Cheers,

Elijah