Bj Ahlen
Forum Replies Created
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It’s early days for SSD, although the fastest current units can be more than 3x as fast as a regular HD.
Just get a fast regular drive, and if you get a 17″ MBP, consider an external eSATA drive instead of FW800. Better performance and in practice more reliable imho, not to mention it leaves the FW port free
I like FirmTek’s boxes and ExpressCards. Pretty much bullet proof, quiet, reliable, great performance including in RAID if you want, slide-out trays, not expensive.
When buying an MBP, it makes sense to try to find the most recent previous version (within a major hw update), often differencing only in disk size.
And if you want to keep your sanity, get the antiglare version over the shaving mirror (just a personal opinion, I know some will disagree).
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[Steve Gustafson] “I think that removing the Lacie externals and using all-new internal drives might be the way to go. I’ve seen the Lacie power supply failure a bunch of times, but couldn’t find a problem drive when I looked at the system a couple weeks ago.
“The error messages indicate a problem with the FW external drives. The setup is begging for trouble.
LaCie has been committing suicide the last few years, they used to be good but seem to have lost their way.
No matter what video format you’re editing, just put an eSATA card in the Mac Pro and get a proper drive box such as what’s advertised in the margins here.
My personal favorite is FirmTek with drives I buy myself. For the moment I favor WD drives from Newegg (after Seagate lost control of their Chinese factory QA last fall), but Hitachi are also good.
See for example https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-5pm/ for a 5-bay enclosure that is rock solid.
It’s about $540 naked (with no drives and no eSATA card). Add a hardware RAID card and five 2TB drives in RAID 5 to get about 7.5 TB net net usable disk space with reasonable (but not absolute!) protection against one drive failure, and good performance.
Your existing media drives are probably fine, it’s just the clunky FW connection that is making trouble.
I don’t think you’ll gain anything by switching to a 12 GB RAM kit, other than if you use After Effects in which case that is just short of a must-do. Go to OWC to get top Apple-spec RAM for a fraction of the “FOB Cupertino” price.
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Matrox MXO2 can be used to do color critical 10-bit output via HDMI or SDI
The MXO2 Mini is ~$450.00 and can connect through the 17″ MacBook Pro’s ExpressCard slot.
Of course that means you can’t connect an external eSATA RAID, so that’s a tradeoff to keep in mind.
The MXO2s also support Avid MC5, helpful if you get Avid gigs also.
See https://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mac/mxo2_family/mxo2_mini/ for more info.
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From https://macsoda.com/2010/04/13/steve-jobs-next-final-cut-studio-will-be-awesome/:
Folks who left were in support, not engineering. Next release will be awesome.
/Steve
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Firewire 400 devices can be plugged into the FW800 jack on the newer MacBook Pro notebooks, you just need a small adapter that costs a few dollars.
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Amen to that.
For big stuff (workstations, monitors, AJA boxes, etc.), I tape a small envelope containing a photocopy of the warranty papers to the back, side, or bottom of the box.
The best way to keep my sanity :O).
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Definitely make the project an HD project for the reasons offered by Shane.
No matter what people say today, they’ll be back for the HD version.
Then it’s nice to be able to say:
OMG, you want HD now? That will be several weeks of work!
However, I can give you Express Processing for only four times my normal HD conversion rate, and have it ready for you tomorrow!
Just one thing: see if you can keep the VHS clips in SD resolution and show them in a smaller frame next to something meaningful like a title describing what’s showing, or a motion background.
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I’m wondering if I need new eye glasses or a new screen, because I can’t see anything wrong with that image.
Can you be more specific about what you are seeing on your screen?
Do you perhaps have a 6-bit LCD? Those are very common, and then you may see stuff that others don’t see.