Ben Holmes
Forum Replies Created
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Jeremy
Works a treat. In fact, more reliably than many SCSI arrays I have used. Always carry one in my bag as a fallback. Sure, scrubbing can be a little less smooth on occasions, but capture via cards or IO is faultless.
You need a good brand FW800 array however, and the G-Raid and Lacie options both (to my knowledge) use a pair of raided drives.
Hope this helps you in the future.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
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[Ben Holmes] “In fact, how do you know that Apple has not revised ALL the Mac Pro hardware at the same time as releasing the 8-core iteration?”
Actually, that’s the suggestion you’re making isn’t it? But that would make this a Rev-b Mac Pro though, wouldn’t it, and more than likely a better platform since they will have ironed out all those early-adopter wrinkles you rightly fear? In actuality, Apple makes countless hardware revisions during the life of all it’s products, in many small components and manufacturing techniques.
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
-
[JeremyG] “Yes it is in 10bit”
Nope. You can work in uncompressed 10-bit using a fw800 array like the G-Raid, and have been able to use something like this (coupled with the AJA IO) on a Mac laptop for a number of years. With FW800 on Mac towers, such as our old 2.7Ghz machines, we frequently use a Lacie FW800 drive as a backup for 10-bit uncompressed capture and archive needs.
So, whilst I share your hopes for ProRes I’m really hoping for performance gains in SD. As far as HD goes, you can use excellent DVCProHD via the above method, for great quality and performance. So again, I’m hoping ProRes leads to other advantages…
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
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OK. Panicking a little less now, thanks Wayne.
I can see that a) having adequate RAM for OS and FCP (say 3-4Gb) is a necessity, and then that having additional RAM will allow other apps to run at the same time properly. I suppose with the increased interoperability in FCS that’s going to be a lot more important, since at the moment I rarely have anything other than FCP open all the time.
Thanks again – your reply really clarified things for me.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
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OK. I’ll play.
No, I don’t work for Apple. Can you tell me why I should have concerns about a system using pretty well tried and tested systems and a chip with a 6 month operational record that works off an identical motherboard within the same Xeon product-line? How long do you think I should wait before upgrading to be safe? Based on what? How is this specific situation the same as a new Apple hardware platform being announced/released? Should I have the same concerns when Apple puts a faster processor in the MBP, as it’s then an untested system?
If you can find someone else on this forum with the same concerns, or one article from independent testers like Barefeats that raises concerns about the systems they have tested, I’ll hold off my order. Deal? Nothing about the 8-core upgrade is risky in the sense you imply, because nothing has changed except the architecture of the chip, something I suspect Intel does not revise every couple of weeks. The additional cores may not be adequately utilised by OS X or all software, but that’s a completely different discussion, and leads to a decision based on cost/performance gains. I imagine that’s the kind of reasoning the orignal questioner, lost as he certainly now is, probably wanted to hear, not some vague and misleading comments about new systems – which this is not. In fact, how do you know that Apple has not revised ALL the Mac Pro hardware at the same time as releasing the 8-core iteration? Crikey – better not buy ANY for a while.
Sheesh.
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
-
[Wayne Carey] “From what I understand from several of the Prost Productions conference speakers, you really need 2 gig of memory per core to get optimal performance”
You mean I need 16Gb of memory in my 8-cores for optimal performance? Really? Oops. Got to get some more memory ordered. Seriously, do you see a real performance advantage (particularly for rendering) between 4 and 8Gb of RAM? I’ve never seen good figures to compare this – can anyone shed some light on this, say after upgrading their own system?
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
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As logical as your process may seem, it’s not the ‘correct’ FCP way to go about this. If you first select the master clip in the browser and make it offline, then replace the file and reconnect it, you may have avoided the problem. Comments anyone?
From what I read, FCP6 may avoid some of these problems, as it maintains a closer connection between the clip in the browser and the file linked to it. In FCP5, it’s not as simple a connection as you assume it must be.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
-
I think that Apple concentrates on HD as they consider the ability to manipulate HD video more easily to be the killer app – it’s not really hard to deal with SD at the moment with a MBP and a FW800 drive.
However, ProRes has some interesting advantages that may prove a boon for SD – such as a briefly touched-upon ability to be efficiently processed by multiple cores. We shall see…
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
-
Copy one clip, then right-click or ctrl-click on another clip (or selection of clips) and select ‘paste attributes’. I believe the pop-up window will give you all the options you mention, and many more besides. Most often used for me are filters and basic motion (which covers size, motion etc.)
Most useful.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.
-
Matt,
There are a couple of ProRes discussions below, with a couple of links you may find useful (including an Apple white paper on their website). In brief, however, yes it is compressed and has numerous presets available such as PAL and NTSC framerates and sizes. It is, however, a single codec. Apple claim it to be a high quality compressed codec ideally suited to the needs of post-production and edit hardware, similar to Avid’s own compressed offering.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.
New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.