[Christian Calon]

Thanks.
I also found (many) other answers in the help document. This one had escaped me.

MacBook Pro 2,5GHz, 4GBram, eSata G-Raid nTB, dual 23″ monitors, FCS3, Modul8… Nuendo 4/ Live/Reaktor 5/Euphonix/JLCooper/Motu i/o/2 G4 PowerBooks/multichannel surround audio setup.

[Christian Calon]

“… imagine how it might open up if you could upgrade the video card of any Mac by using an external PCI box connected via ThunderBolt?”

You can’t.
If you do the simple calculation, internal bus of PCIe is about 12x faster than TBolt. That’s what graphic cards need to achieve the speed they do on the 16x PCIe bus.
So long for modular (for now). But the MacPro IS actually like any other tower a large case full of modules which you can change or add : cards and disks and RAM and connectors. A thing you can’t do with closed boxes like MacbookPros or iMacs.
A thing Apple could do is to make the box smaller and extend the connection to Sata, PCIe, etc. You then provide the same raw computing power pro users need, you reduce the production cost and you provide the same openness and give users the choice of their peripherals.
I’m sure Magma, Sonnet and others are looking into this, but for now, the type of video cards we can add through TBolt are only acquisition cards. The major problem to the smaller box remains (I may be mistaken) the graphic cards. Even audio DSP cards run fine of FW800…

I am in need to upgrade my video production system so you may guess I consider this question quite seriously. And in my perspective, for pros, things don’t look too promising coming from Apple these days. The company in the last decade moved from “computing” into “life style” and this is now built into Lion. That’s fine. No one want to do any computing. We just want to produce works. But the only tools really adequate for the complexities of most jobs are still the big machines, the raw power of multiprocessors, video cards and GigaRams. And that is MacPro. Save us from the dark ages of Infinite rendering!
Cheers

MacBook Pro 2,5GHz, 4GBram, eSata G-Raid nTB, dual 23″ monitors, FCS3, Modul8… Nuendo 4/ Live/Reaktor 5/Euphonix/JLCooper/Motu i/o/2 G4 PowerBooks/multichannel surround audio setup.

[Christian Calon]

yes, probably your drives need permissions repaired.
I just started using the Sonnet eSata Pro card with my MacBook Pro 2,5 GHz. Compared to FW800 it is over 5 times as fast. And not one glitch.

MacBook Pro 2,5GHz, 4GBram, eSata G-Raid nTB, dual 23″ monitors, FCS3, Modul8… Nuendo 4/ Live/Reaktor 5/Euphonix/JLCooper/Motu i/o/2 G4 PowerBooks/multichannel surround audio setup.

[Christian Calon]

I do wish Apple would release a kick-ass update to Final Cut. They really are like molasses at the moment in pro apps.

To be faire, not completely. They did a great job with the last Logic Pro version. And with Motion, Color, Soundtracks… but it is true, we want real REAL TIME for FXs!

MacBook Pro 2,5GHz, 4GBram, eSata G-Raid nTB, dual 23″ monitors, FCS3, Modul8… Nuendo 4/ Live/Reaktor 5/Euphonix/JLCooper/Motu i/o/2 G4 PowerBooks/multichannel surround audio setup.

[Christian Calon]

Yes, system is minimal…
The drive is about 60% empty. It is a G-Tech G-Raid dual drive Raid 0.
In the previous tests I did, fcp can read from this drive 10 layers of ProRes Proxy with various opacity settings, 8 of them with a 3-way Calibration plugin (fcp) and 8 audio tracks. Playback is not too smooth, but definitely useable. The timeline shows a green bar. So in this case I look elsewhere than at the drive. I am also going to connect the drive through eSata, and see.
I am starting to suspect that FCP puts a lot of data in ram and since the macbook pro only can take 4GB that may be the source of slowdown?
But do you think FCP puts data in ram when you open a sequence or when you open a project?
thanks for your time and concern!