[Alexander Archer-todde]

“This is the path that I would recommend, but if you went with the 1TB SSD on Thunderbolt that I originally described, that Samsung 840 EVO drive is quite fast enough to handle both your cache/renders and your original media.”

This is a great suggestion from Tim, my point is that your cache will fill up very quickly and yes, I would always put speed priority onto accessing the source media if you’re intending to work with 4K native files, which will probably have an extraordinary bandwidth. For greater speed, you could do lower resolution proxies for an offline to enhance creative workflow. Those specifics are down to you!

Technically, if your workflow is fast enough then you shouldn’t really have to render (save for After Effects). The major speed difference will come from having your applications, scratch and footage on separate disks as only one process will be writing to one disk at each time.

The main red flag to all of this for me is working with 4K footage as one hour uncompressed will be very large, though obviously it depends on what codec you use and what compression rates that codec has.

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Post Production Co-Ordinator

Opinions here are my own

[Alexander Archer-todde]

Hi John,

Just to say that changing the processor in your Mac Pro will void its warranty as Apple only deems Hard Drives and RAM as being good to upgrade as a user.

By cache I take it you mean preview files/media cache? In this case, I would keep this on a USB3 drive or a separate, internal drive if appropriate. If you’re going for one SSD, this should go primarily towards footage in my opinion, you don’t want any latency if you’re working with 4K files.

To clarify what I was saying before:

– One drive for OS and applications (system drive)
– One drive for footage (the faster the better), these can be extended or added to later
– One drive for cache, this will fill up rather quickly so you don’t want it impacting your footage storage or speed.

Also, keep in mind that you will want to backup your files too and where you’re keeping your Projects to make sure they’re safe, I’m unaware if you have a system in place for this and it would be best practice to archive your footage also.

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Post Production Co-Ordinator

Opinions here are my own

[Alexander Archer-todde]

I agree with Tim that the Fusion drive is great for OS caching but doesn’t give you much more improvement in editing.

I’m currently looking at a variety of setups with SSD drives and what I’ve commonly come across is that three drives is the key, minimally. If you have a low capacity SSD, your scratch will fill it very quickly and this could lead to you having to delete peak files etc, which could impede your edit workflow.

An internal SSD would make the applications run lightening fast. I’d suggest getting a USB 3 drive for your scratch as these are fairly cost effective.

Another option for your rushes would be to get a BlackMagic MultiDock. This allows for Thunderbolt connectivity with the option of docking four SSDs if you want to build them up over time that you can use for your source media. Also, it’s worth thinking about the SSDs that you buy. Samsung offer a five year warranty with their disks.

You’re only going to be as fast as your slowest item so take the graphics card into consideration too as Premiere and After Effects are very graphics card heavy. Look at graphics cards with CUDA cores to enhance your processing speeds and obviously a fast processor will also help, as well as a good serving of RAM.

Even if you’re only outputting for the web, you’re still going to have to handle the demands of 4K files in reading your source media, you could be outputting a 200×113 file size but your machine will still have to transcode those 4K files.

If you have the budget to get five iMacs, I’d consider whether you truly need five machines that all need a bit more work or whether you should get four and make them a better specification.

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Post Production Co-Ordinator

Opinions here are my own