[Dave Haynie]

I agree… Macs are overpriced. Now, if you need FCP or other Mac software, or think the MacOS is worth paying 2x-3x as much for the same hardware, you won’t think this. If you’re just adding up the relative features of the hardware, you will.

With that said, I’d definitely go for the Mac Pro if you want the Mac. Yeah, it’s pretty expensive, but any 8 core system with 16GB is not going to come cheap. You could “build” one based on the lower-end Xeons used in the Mac Pro for a bit less based on the HP600 platform… or spend much more and get a 12-core system at 3GHz. But regardless, you pay a premium for any system at this level, so there’s not as significant an “Apple Tax” on the Mac Pro.

The iMac is a triple whammy. iMacs use laptop-class motherboards, thus, no expansion to speak of — you get the graphic it comes with, and your extra HDDs add on outside. Plus, Apple’s nailing you for a premium monitor, the built-in, which lives or dies by that iMac. I bought dual 24″ MVA LCD monitors 4-5 years ago. I have upgraded the main board/CPU in my PC twice since then, but the monitors I still love. You need dual monitors for a serious NLE anyway, and mine are matched — you’ll not have that option, either, with the iMac.

And yeah, what John said about the GPU. I have used ATis and nVidias, never had a problem with either. In raw power, nVidia just edged out ATi, but ATi has been price/performance winner for awhile. But in GPGPU support, nVidia is way ahead… and that’s the only real reason you want a higher end GPU for a video machine anyway. You want the GPU to be your choice. I don’t think the GPGPU capabilities of Vegas 10a are significant, but you never know ahout 10e or 11, 12, etc… all coming within the lifetime of your new system, if things keep going. When I can spend $200 to get a 50% speedup on ANYTHING, I’m goin’ there soon. The iMac locks you in, and you may wind up hating it for that.

Don’t get me wrong… one of my sisters has two iMacs and loves them. They’re fine for an iPhone fanatic who needs to write post-doctoral papers on Educational Psychology, or for web surfing and videotainment. But a workstation they do not make.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

DNxHD, under the latest Quicktime 7, sure seems to support your choice of the usual frame rates, resolutions, and progressive/interlaced settings you normally expect. I have used it for 1080/24p and 720/60p, made up my own presets for that, and it’s fine… slow, but fine.

Just tried 720/30p, and it worked just dandy.

Do make sure you have the latest DNxHD and Quicktime installed.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Use the “pro” version of AC-3. For whatever reasons, the “studio” version is non-compliant. Also, stick to 192kb/s for stereo, 448kb/s for 5.1 surround, for maximum DVDA happiness.

Also, carefully preview the result. I’ve been seeing some weirdness with AC-3 with Vegas 10 rendering for BD and DVD… weird modulations generated with the rendering.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The Socket 1156 is the mainstream processor — everything that’s not i7, which is considered high-end. I didn’t realize the rollout was that far apart — the new Socket LGA-1155 replaces the mainstream+low-end LGA-1156, while the high end LGA-1366 is being replaced by LGA-2011; that’s the one that’s coming much later in the year, and the one that will support 6-core chips.

They’re keeping the basic names — i3, i5, and i7, but the Sandy Bridge chips will be iN-2xxx in name. And yet, the initial release will have i7 models, at least for laptops. But it looks to be true that Sandy Bridge chips, i7s or otherwise, will max out at two DRAM channels and four cores — you’ll need the new socket to go beyond that. Which isn’t going to come soon.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be price pressure — if Sandy Bridge is as big an improvement as Intel implies, a 4-core S.B. processor will outperform i5s on pretty much anything, but even 4-core i7s, depending on the job.

The simple fact that it’s still confusing is reason enough to wait a couple of weeks, IF you can wait. You can’t always, as I couldn’t when my main board failed.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Ever seen the “clap-board” they use on a film set, for the start of a take? While the black-board part is used to index takes, the “clap” itself is for audio synchronization — it’s easy to match a sharp audio event.

And easier, still, when you’re in an NLE and can actually eye-ball the audio. Audio sampling is, of course, far finer grained than video, too, so it’s the place to look. You can usually find a good audio sync point, but if you can’t, next time, create one — a loud clap or something before you start. But for any kind of performance, there’s generally some quiet-leading-to-loud portion, mic feedback, a cough in the audience, a cymbal clash, something to use for syncing up cameras.

For any major event, like a wedding shoot, I’m likely to be starting and stopping cameras all the time. I keep one digital audio recorder (Tascam DR-1) going throughout the entire event, though — much easier to sync multiple video clips to a foundation, than to each other.

For pros doing this on a regular basis (and using Vegas Pro), there’s the Plural Eyes plug-in from Singular Software, which does pretty decent audio synchronization automatically. Not cheap ($150), but you could save hours per project if you have complicated shoots.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Here’s the other thing.. how soon do you need this?

I just replaced my motherboard… cost me $450, and it’s a good upgrade. But unexpected (MB failure) and so, I didn’t pick the right time to buy. So my upgrade was financially fairly modest.

If I had the cash for a leading edge PC, at this point in human history, I’d wait. The reason for this is simple: Intel will be announcing their next generation “Sandy Bridge” CPU architecture next month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

The fact they chose CES is a pretty good indicator that they’re already in production, and will probably have units shipping in 1Q2011. See here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3922/intels-sandy-bridge-architecture-exposed.

Don’t know yet.. but this could do two things. For one, it may drastically de-value the i5 and maybe even i7 you buy today (they have not discussed a 6-core version). Second thing, it may drive down the price of the existing line of Intel chips.

The main board that failed had an Intel Q9550 on it. That chip was at Intel’s top-end $1,000 price point when it first shipped. I bought mine shortly after the i7s came out, something like six months later, and I paid around $200.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Which specs would be better??
1066, 1333, 1600MHz = ?
That’s the effective clock speed. Like your CPU, a faster clock means faster memory, all else being equal.

The first consideration: what does your motherboard support? DRAM speed is a potential, like the speed on your SDHC cards, or the voltage on a flashlight bulb. A faster SDHC card only helps if the device can use the faster speeds; a 6V flashlight doesn’t get brighter with a 12V bulb. A faster DRAM DIMM only helps your memory speed if the motherboard can use that speed.

With that said, the clock speed (1066, 1333, 1600… all in MHz, based on the effective clock speed of the DIMM) is the most fundamental indicator of memory performance.

CL (7,8,9)= ?
CL = “CAS Latency”; CAS = “Column Address Strobe”. Simply put, a DRAM is accessed by your computer like a spreadsheet — first you lock in the row, then the column. However, that’s kind of slow, and modern processors generally talk to RAM in bursts. Rather than supply both row and column for each access, they lock in the row, and allow multiple columns accesses… much faster. CL is the number of clocks it takes for this page-mode access. For the same speed RAM, a smaller CL is better. But a larger CL number on a faster DIMM is likely faster overall.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Drive speed is essentially never an issue … for a single stream of video, anyway. I managed to make my 6-core system hard drive bound by compositing two DNxHD files at the same time, from the same drive; I think these were at 145Mb/s.

The big advantage of higher RPMs these days isn’t speed. Yeah, it’s a little faster, but the big win is on seek time. A 10K drive or SSD is a great choice for your system drive, largely because Windows deals in thousands of tiny files, and because everything you do gets a boost from a faster drive.

I typically keep my main project files on a single 7200RPM SATA drive (one per large project, and a second one for smaller projects). Simpler stuff I just render back to the project drive, but if there are enough assets in the same project, I direct the output elsewhere (usually to the “desktop”, which is on the boot drive) and, if necessary, move some of the assets to a second input drive.

Again, it’s the seeking that’s the issue. If you have a couple of inputs, your render should happen at full speed… CPU is at 100%. If you have too many large inputs, your drive will slow down enough from seeking that, as I pointed out, you may need a second drive.

A RAID can help, but only so much. You can go RAID0 (stripeset), which parallels two drives. The advantage is that you have the same capacity as two drives, so straight-line performance is doubled. On the downside, the RAID is subject to the worst-case behavior from either drive… so your seeks are always the slower of the two, and the whole partition fails when either drive fails. With enough buffering, the additional performance will add more speed than the slightly slower seeking will take away (within a single file, you seek half as often thanks to the paralleled drive, but that only matters if you’re eating data in large chunks).

RAID1 gives you the same read speedup, same minor seek issues, and added security — your partition only fails when both drives fail. But you spend twice as much for the partition (two drives, one unit of storage).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

VBR works by analyzing the video and varying the bitrate based on content. Of course, that’s implied in the name, “Variable Bit Rate”. Unless your encoder is broken, VBR always looks better than CBR at the same effective bitrate.

However, if space is no issue, you might as well encode in CBR. Far as I know, VBR can’t exceed the 9.8Mb/s peak defined by the DVD specs even momentarily… so clearly, it can’t be any better than “the best possible”. So for practical discs, save 192kb/s or 448kb/s for audio (unless you’re encoding PCM audio for higher quality), and you have about 9.3Mb/s-9.5Mb/s to work with. So you get roughly an hour’s worth of the best possible CBR on a DVD5.

There’s a risk it may not play in older players. No idea how much of a problem that is… I’ve sold 100’s of videos on DVD-R, but never anything that didn’t need VBR encoding in order to fit.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I actually meant the WMV CODEC… not the stand-alone “Windows Media Encoder”. You get this when you “Render As…” to Windows Media Video V11 from Vegas. You want to use the “Custom…” option, and change the format to “Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile”. That gets you SMPTE standard VC-1, or so they tell me.

I still think of this as “Windows Media Encoder”… before Blu-Ray, I used to make WMV/HD DVDs from my HD video. This was a weird “standard” Microsoft made up, based on HTML, Javascript, and WMV9 media; I happened to have a red-laser DVD player that supported this format in HD, as long as you didn’t get to crazy with the bitrate. At the time, you could get better results using Media Encoder than rendering directly from the timeline.

I’m guessing that the new Expression Encoder 4 is the go-to replacement tool; Media Encoder was a little long-in-the-tooth when I used it, mid-2000s (last update was 2002 or 2003, though it uses the MS CODECs from the system; it’s really just a front-end to the encoders, same as Vegas).

-Dave