Frank Gothmann
Forum Replies Created
-
[Jeremy Garchow] “As someone who says that a closed system is business insanity, have a real good look at that HP Red thing.
If you aren’t shooting Red, it is way more overpriced than the more flexible MacPro you were “forced” to buy and only really helps to spend that much dough if you’re shooting and posting red only.
A quadro 6000 GPU would serve most editors much better than a proprietary red rocket and red card readers.”
The RED z820 comes with either a Quadro 4000, Q5000 OR you can also upgrade to a 6000 when you buy (not afterwards and toss the old card out). If you don’t shoot RED there is obviously no reason to buy the RED edition, you’d simply but the regular z820 with all possible GPU etc. options you could possible want. How on earth is a MacPro more flexible with regards to IO, speed and upgradability?
If it’s the price, get a z800 with Westmare Chips and you still have more expandability, upgradability, io and GPU options.——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Francisco Bech Gómez] “I been editing a 2 minutes long trailer shoot with a red one. I did this in FC, and use compressor, the quality I can get is far from the original. What would the best encoder or the best way to create a DVD, it´s only 2 minutes long
“Cinemacraft is without a doubt the best encoder out there. The PC version also does a good downscale job which is crucial when going from HD to SD. Otherwise you may look into downscaling via other tools (eg. Avisynth) to get a good SD base to work from.
——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
Motherboard can handle 512GB of ram, the 32 GB is probably what they ship it with.
Sweet machine. We are looking to buy a “non-Red” z820 in July.——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Bret Williams] “I thought your 8 core is still a faster machine in all tests I’ve seen available. However, for FCP 7 the iMac would be faster since FCP only utilizes one processor.”
You’ve said that before in another post and it just isn’t true. FCP7 doesn’t use only one processor. It’s actually among the very best of Apple’s own apps with regards to multi-threadding.
——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I am talking about buying ,say, an HP z820. I want to “upgrade the motherboard”, do I call HP and have them send a new one or does it not work like that?
More broadly, I am trying to take a litmus test as to how much user upgradability is truly useful today in machines that you buy from a vendor, not a bunch of parts you assemble yourself.
We typically get 3 maybe 4 years out of machines.
On a side note, what are you sing to mange your SAN, metaSAN or something?
“You could call HP or your VAR.
But, that’s why I have said I wouldn’t really upgrade the MB on such a machine, you’d also need the different CPUs, Ram etc. so at the end of the day it might cost you as much as a new machine. Bascially because that most expensive pieces in such a machine are the Xeon CPUs.
But what’s perfectly feasible and even available via the HP online store is going from a single socket machine to an upgraded dual CPU machine.
Or to faster CPUs.
Plus of course the usual stuff you can swap and replace: power supply, hot swap drive bays, USB3 and eSata for machines that don’t have it yet, GPUs, additional network cards etc.We looked into metaSAN but eventually decided to go the NAS route via Samba, AFP and NFS. I might have to build a second shared storage machine this year and that one might go the Fibre/metaSan route. I haven’t really looked into it as the whole transitioning away from FCP has kept my busy and my nerves thin.
——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Robert Bracken] “I wonder if everyone here is so worried about the Mac Pro why don’t you ask the companies that really depend on them.
Such as Pixar, Adobe and AVID.
First, Pixar. Do you think that a company built off of Apple would begin using Windows? This was a company bought by Steve Jobs himself. I highly doubt that. If someone has information that is the opposite then I would like to see it.
Pixar uses a combination of Linux, OSX and windows.
And guess what Apple themselves use in their datacenters?
HP Proliant servers and icloud runs of Microsoft Azure.——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I am trying to look at all of this practically.
It seems that while the PC side seems to praise the “tinker” aspect of it, I am trying to get a sense of just how much tinkering really happens and how often, and does that really equate to cost savings, or perhaps more importantly performance gains in relation to those costs.”
Sometimes tinkering doesn’t make sense, sometimes it does – bigtime. First thing is that replacing this parts isn’t difficult. It’s dead easy, for anybody. As is building a PC from scratch. Once people loss the fear and just dive in it’s simple. I’ve swapped tons of stuff around and I never managed to break anything and, probably more important, I never had a case where things didn’t work together. Compatibility of components really isn’t an issue (just the usual one on one, right socket for the right cpu etc. but that’s just normal planning before you buy)
Here is an example where tinkering saved me a lot:
We connect to our San via 10GB Ethernet. Machine is all selft built, running Linux. When we built it it was serving out to four clients via 10GB and others via regular 1GB. We put in two 10GB nics which have 2 ports each (that’t the max as we don’t use optical but regular cat6a), ie. four ports with direct connection to the clients.
Earlier this year we needed fast access for two additional clients. Now… there was no more space for another 10GB nic because all slots were occupied. A 10GB Ethernet router still costs around 10.000 dollars.
So, we simply swapped the mainboard with more PCI slots. Added a faster CPU (we went with a really basic AMD consumer grade cpu at the beginning), power supply. Total cost of the upgrade: 600 dollars, with one more slot still empty in case we need to add yet another two clients.——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Thanks, guys.
When it was time to upgrade your Windows hardware, what did you do?”
Depends on the machine and what it is used for. Bought the z800s with stock 12 GB of ram and upgraded to 48 plus other stuff later via 3rd party.
On our linux san we replaced mainboard, ram, cpu and power supply earlier this year for more slots and more beef.
I usually don’t replace mainboards on a bought workstation for upgrades, I would if it’s broken. But I have and always will one the machines that are custom built. There is one that has gone through three revisions already. The only thing that is still left from the first built is the case and the power supply.
——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Craig Seeman] “Bingo and homerun on this point.
If I can use that without breaking the COW analogy law. 😉As per replace vs repair. . .
Think of this . . . replace your damaged unit and then they repair and sell the refurb and they don’t even have the any time pressure on repair turnaround. Refurb allows a lower price point as well.
I don’t doubt that replace rather than repair and the refurb sales market may actually make Apple more money.”And how does all this actually benefit you? When you need more ram you “replace” the entire machine? Why don’t you just send money donations directly to Cupertino for the good cause of it all.
——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Bill Davis] “[Frank Gothmann] “With 256 GB storage in the base model I am damn sure you’ll do a hell of a lot of editing and projects with Prores or Uncompressed from internal storage. ”
I personally haven’t stored a FCP-X project on my laptop’s internal drive in six months. I consider it dumb when the software works with inexpensive external storage so fluidly.”
Precisely, which is why the point of the poster I’ve replied to (9 streams of prores from the internal drive) is irrelevant. Especially since this topic is not related to anyone complaining about lack of performance.
——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement