[Chad Horn]

We talked about that too, but its hard because of shadow and modeling on the subjects, black in clothes, etc. then all get removed as well. Hrm…

[Chad Horn]

Ah, yeah – I wonder if that would work well with Premier, Audition, etc.
Unfortunately the Adobe folks aren’t that much help in this department.

[Chad Horn]

So I went yesterday to our local Mac Business site and talked with everyone, and left feeling uneasy but a little more comfortable than I was before. Looks like my $12,000 budget is going to get blown out of the water a little bit, but here’s what I’m looking at getting:

Mac Pro 2.7GHz 12-Core Intel Xeon E5
1TB PCIe-based Flash Storage
Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM
Cost: $8241

Crucial 16GB DDR3 SDRAM Memory (Replacing the stock ram) $210.00 x4 = $840.00

PROMISE Pegasus2 Series 8-bay with 8x3TB SATA HDD (Thunderbolt connection) = $3419.05

Blackmagic Design UltraStudio 4k Thunderbolt capture = $945.00

Basically $14500 total with Apple Care, DVI to Thunderbolt connectors (so I can use my old monitors), misc accessories. Under $1000 to get deck control and playback out of the machine through Thunderbolt w/ the Black Magic device is pretty great deal, vs getting an external box and using my old Kona. I lose the CUDA card but I imagine the new processor is so beefy I’ll see an increase in render time anyway, and eventually (hopefully) Adobe will really support OpenCL rendering. Problem is, I don’t really know much about the hardware to know if this makes sense, but I feel a little better about it after pricing out some PC machines that come in at the same power only more expensive.