[Ben Pirouet]

I believe it is the nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra with 256mb VRAM. Last AGP model.

While i’m here, i’d just like to mention that even today we still maintain a couple of the Power Mac G5s we forced FCP7 on, and never once had a problem with them. In fact they performed better than some of our first generation Intel models in a lot of areas 🙂

[Ben Pirouet]

Hi

That’s very kind of you, but i emailed the address given above, and they’ve been very helpful and managed to get me one. Thanks anyway!

Ben

[Ben Pirouet]

Will do. Thanks for your help 🙂

Ben

[Ben Pirouet]

Oh and just to add, i have played around with the rendering quality options in FCP User Preferences, and in Motion. All to no avail 🙂

[Ben Pirouet]

I hope you don’t mind me bumping up this thread, but i just thought i’d update you on our progress of this solution.

It is now installed, and working much better than expected, more on that later.

We changed the specification slightly after begging education for some more money, this is the solution we ended up with.

XServe 2.26ghz 8-Core with 6GB RAM, 3x 1TB Apple Drive Modules running RAID0 with external Time machine backup running on a couple of FW800 backup drives, as of course running a RAID0 is very fast but fatal is one drive fails. We have a spare ADM on standby should one ever die. We used an SSD drive as the OS drive of course so no extra stress was put on the RAID other than the video. I know using a Time Machine FW800 drive as a backup is not very ‘professional’ but we’ve used Time Machine as our backup on our main server with some USB2 drives, and it’s absolutely faultless, we’ve saved many a students data because of it. I doubt any paid solution could improve upon it frankly.

The rest of the spec remains the same as my original post. Like was suggested in this thread, we made sure when the Entrasys switches were installed, that we got in a network engineer who knew exactly what he was doing. He enabled the Jumbo Frame support on the Entrasys switches as well as setting up LACP for the Link Aggregation. We got the 4 port SmallTree card as well of course, our supplier couldn’t get hold of the 6 port.

After installation, on the first week of the new term we asked our students to do some stress testing for us and i was quite frankly shocked by the results. We had 28 students on 28 clients, half of which capturing footage from DVCam tapes on VTR’s and half were using existing files placed on the new server and were told to edit away, put multiple clips on top of each other in FCE without rendering, and of course adding effects and rendering. Really pushing the server. DV25 footage only.

After checking the logs afterwards, the maximum percentage the CPU was being used for over the course of the hour long test session was 2% and the maximum throughput the network card was putting out was about 50 megabytes per second or 400mbps. We have an aggregated 4gbps network card and only 400mbps was being used.

After being so worried that the server could not handle the massive influx of data that one group full of students would put on it, having 2 full groups (28 people) barely touched it. I didn’t really believe the results, so i checked the Scratch Disk settings on all the clients, checked all the students had actually done what i had asked them to do and they had.

So i’m very happy that this solution has worked, and even gives us room for expansion to compressed HD sources in the future.

Just like to add my thanks for the helpful suggestions given on this forum, i’d have been lost without them.

[Ben Pirouet]

I haven’t got a Bluray burner, but i have burnt some HD content on a DVD using AVCHD, which the Blu-ray tool lets you do as well. So it is effectively a Bluray disk, it has bluray menus, plays in a bluray player etc etc.

Anyway, it’s simple yet effective. It doesn’t let you do much with it, the options are very basic. There’s no real tools for customisation, i also couldn’t find a way of getting a 5.1 track out of it either. It seemed to be either stereo or nothing, though maybe someone else has had more success with that.

I think we can all safely say it’s not a tool for making full on Bluray finals of a project that you intend to distribute, not unless you just want a stereo movie without a menu. But just for seeing what your project looks like in HD, or sending it to a client for previewing, it’s very useful.

[Ben Pirouet]

Motion is a bit lackluster compared to AE, but you can’t really compare Motion and AE. Yes they do the same job to an extent, but like has been said, i think Motion is more a tool for editors rather than full-on motion graphic designers. I myself am an editor, and i’ve used Motion to create some great graphics. However i am not even slightly interested in becoming a Motion graphic designer. Motion does just enough for me to get by, and i think that’s what Apple want it to be, a tool for editors that can create graphics and do basic compositing for a relatively cheap price without the need for learning too much or having to outsource graphics creation.

There is a lot of talk going around, especially with the latest FCS release, that Apple are abandoning their pro market. I can’t agree. While FCS3 isn’t massively different, it does have some fantastic new features, for me the new ProRes codecs are worth the price of admission alone.

I think what peoples problem is, is that we’ve been very lucky in the last few years because Apple has made some massive breakthroughs and released some fantastic products. I think the reason people are underwhelmed with new releases at the moment is because while new releases and hardware are good releases they don’t match those big breakthroughs of the last few years. It’s not just in the pro market, look at the iMac. The design difference between the beige Macs and the G3 iMac were staggering, the difference between the G3 and the G4 iMac was staggering. The difference between the G4 iMac and G5 iMac was staggering, but the difference between the white iMac and the alu iMac, while nice was not so staggering. The original iPhone release was staggering, the updates not so much. It’s the same with their software too. There hasn’t been a massive new release from Apple in a while, and people are getting underwhelmed. That’s the problem when you’re a company like Apple. People want the next big thing every time you call a press conference. I imagine the rumored ‘netbook’ may be what Apple fanboys will be waiting for.

[Ben Pirouet]

There are two reasons why i’ve had Motion exports in FCP go green on me

1) The ‘Scratch Disk’ isn’t set up correctly or is low on space. Bizarrely occasionally when i’d had clips go green on me, just changing the Scratch Disk settings in ‘System Settings’ fixes that for me.

2) The more common reason it’s happened to me is because in the project properties in ‘Motion’, the Bit Depth was set to 16 or 32 bit (float). Switching back to 8 bit usually cures that for me. When i first started using ‘Motion’ i assumed that the highest bit depth was obviously the best and would work the best. Not true 🙂

Hope one of these helps 🙂

[Ben Pirouet]

Well, I know that they didn’t test the software on PowerPCs. And they made no effort to make the features work on PPCs…most of the stuff might just be leftover from the crossgrade code. They designed the software and the new features with Intel machines in mind, because they are looking ahead at Snow Leopard.

Oh ok i’ll take your word for that then.

Like i said, i would never recommend that anyone specifically purchases FCS3 just for a PowerPC machine, but if you’ve got the software already, you may as well test run it on a PowerPC machine to see it works, which for me it clearly does and does everything i want it to.

This is a big deal for me, it saves us a lot of money in the medium term. So i’m keeping FCS3 on our PowerPC machines until such time as i start encountering show-stopping problems with it.

An update to FCS will probably break it eventually. Like you said, Apple won’t support it, so for major production houses, this is not a good idea to persue. But we’re in Education, we can afford to test these things and hope that they work. We can’t afford machine replacements though, ha 🙂

[Ben Pirouet]

As long as FCS3 works on both Leopard and Snow Leopard, it doesn’t matter if our Intel machines are upgraded to SL, and our PowerPC machines are kept on Leopard, we just want to be able to transfer FCP7 projects between PowerPC and Intel machines

If for whatever reason we need SL on all machines, then the PowerPCs will have to go, but if FCS3 works well on PowerPC machines like it appears to, there’s no point in getting rid of what are still potentially very useful machines to us.