[Francois Stark]

Walter, I suppose that’s true – they expect the pro’s to do more by themselves.

The real question is: where do they make more bottom line profit? The G5’s have a much higher profit margin: how many iPods must they sell to make as much profit as on one G5?

I don’t expect any more updates on the G5 line: Apple’s engineers must be working full speed on the Intel lineup.

Sad…

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

I’m sure the Chief Mad Scientist: Rob-ART Morgan at http://www.barefeats.com will compare the midrange G5 models with their older brothers.

F

[Francois Stark]

Hi Bart

It looks like I will have to replace 6 Apple fibre cards with Astera cards. Can you tell me about the LU mapping on the Asera cards for Tiger? The replies I got from ADTX said I should enable all LU’s on all ports for Tiger (when using the Apple HBA’s), and that will not work with our current setup.

Thanks
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Frankly I’m not impressed by the midrage G5 models. The top-end G5 quad looks like a render workhorse, but the other two single CPU dual core machines will be slower than the ones they replace!

The single dualcore 2GHz will be slower than the dual 2GHz G5, and the single dualcore 2.3GHz will be slower than the current dual 2.3GHz – because they share one bus to the CPU. Their only advantage will be PCIe – which also does not help all of us with PCI-X hardware.

I am currently using a dual Xeon and three dualcore AMD64 X2 machines for graphics – the AMD’s render faster but their interactivity dies while rendering. The dual Xeon renders a bit slower, but you still get full interactive user interface while it is rendering, presumably because of the seperate interfaces to memory.

Answer this: Why would Apple not lead their website with the new dual core G5 machines? Are they not proud of their newest high-end offering? They are leading with the new iMacs, the new G5’s are nowhere on the front page…

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Great – I’ll get a quote from our ADTX supplier.

Thanks
F

[Francois Stark]

Hi Bart

Am I mistaken? I seem to remember that they stopped making the asera cards. Are they still available? What about support – are they still updating the drivers?

Thanks
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Just to give you a reference – we are doing a 7 track multicam edit on FCP 5:

Clips are about 15 minutes, DV PAL. Running FCP 5 on a G4 1.25 DP with 1.5GB RAM, os X.3.9, Quicktime 7, Fibre channel SAN using SanMP, the array we are accessing is a stripe of two six-drive raid 5 sets in a ADTX array, equal to a 12 drive raid 50 set.

Performance: we get about a 1 second playback startup delay and then it runs well, with cutting on the fly.

So: For multicam editing, the drive speed is much more important than the CPU power.

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

…on one of our suites.

We are actually stuck on os X.3.8 and FCP 4.5, but have received some projects on FCP 5. So we have a os X.4.2 installation on a tiger drive, with FCP 5 installed on it.

Last week, I tried booting on os X.3.9 (quicktime 7 works well with FCP 4 in panther), plugging in the drive with the os X.4.2 partition, and running FCP 5 off that partition, and it worked, even while accessing our SAN. The editor was impressed and said it was quite stable.

So – boot on os X.3.8 and run the app straight off the firewire drive, without using the dock.

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

I’ve bought final touch SD, and an ATI X800 video card on our new G5 2.7DP to run it with.

It’s impractical. All our programs have multiple video layers, and motion effects: speedups, slomotions etc. Getting all that from the FCP timeline to final touch and back is a nightmare.

Then we deliver Beta SP tapes, to be broadcast on a satellite channel using 1.5 mbit/s mpeg 2 compression and ends up looking like the dog’s breakfast.

So here we are, grading inside FCP, on a DV timeline with subtitles added, all being re-compressed back to 5:1 and 4:2:0 colorsampling and no-one will tell the difference – believe it.

Regards
francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi Floh

[Floh] “it should be possible to split LUNs of a storage array between different software approaches, but I would never try to run 2 different FC clients on the same Computer.”

Makes sense.

[Floh] “So you probably would not gain anything from using SanMP for your ProTools and XSan for your FCP suites.
“

I have not thought about that… Running XSan on the FCP suites and SanMP on the pro tools suites would mean the FCP suites can work together, and the Pro Tools suites can work together, but sending stuff (Omfi files and reference movies) to Pro Tools from FCP would mean transferring it through the network – not very efficient.

Compressor can render through a network connection, but there you said it yourself – the network will be a bottleneck, whic is why I thought about using the SAN.

Regarding MetaSAN, I’ll start a new, simple thread to try to get a response from Metasan users.

Regards
Francois