[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “There’s two extra sata ports, they are just hard to get to, and not super easy to implement. Single drive only, not port multipliers.”

There used to be two extra sata ports on pre-Nehalem MacPros, where optical drives were pata only, located in the middle of the mb for which there were breakout brackets available from 3rd party.
They are not there anymore. What’s left are the two ports at the very front which connect to the optical drives but you’d loose those plus they are virtually impossible to route to the back. The design is retarded. Looks nice from the outside unless you want to modify anything.

[Frank Gothmann]

I am not familiar with the Lenovo boxes so I cannot comment on them. As far as HP, specifically the z800 is concerned, I am extremely happy with it.
If you need eSata that’s easy. All the sata headers on the HP motherboard are switchable via bios to work as esata ports. You can get an esata breakout bracket from HP (10 dollars or so) and then you can have as many esata ports as you want (or have sata ports on your mb left).

The really nice thing about it is the flexibility and expandability. 9 USB ports plus 3 additional headers on the mb, Firewire. Raid5 capable controllers for Sata and SAS drives built in. You can have hot swap drive bays, in theory you could have up to 9 internal drives plus you have 6 PCIe and one legacy PCI slot.
The power supply can be pulled out without any tools required and can be upgraded to a beefier one if you need more power for several high-end gpus.
As far as gpus go, you are only limited by your budget really. A Quadro 4000 will probably be a good start for Premiere.

Not terribly important but there is an nice HP tweaking app included that will scan your applications and, if you wish, adjusts how the system talks to ram, cpu settings etc. for best performance (it recognizes Avid and Adobe apps and has specific settings for them).
As far as stability is concerned. It’s been running pretty much 24/7 for encoding jobs, so that means full whack, it hasn’t been rebooted in weeks.

Gotchas: dunno, it doesn’t have wifi or bluetooth built in so you’d have to add that via usb if it’s needed.
Hope that helps. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask.

[Frank Gothmann]

It doesn’t look like iMovie at all. Why? Because there’s a timeline with thumbnails. Are you serious? It looks pretty much like all Adobe apps have looked in the past years, totally consistent with their CS UI.
Frankly, given the current climate they’d have to be suicidal to make their apps look like iMovie or FCPX.

[Frank Gothmann]

I am afraid I don’t really understand the point of your posting. If you have used Photoshop before I assume you have a licence so why switch to Gimp now?
Gimp’s allright, but if Photoshop is sitting on the same drive waiting to be fired up Gimp wouldn’t be my first choice. Won’t save you a penny either. Same for After Effects, Dreamweaver etc. If you have used them in the past you may as well use them now and in the future since you have already paid for them.
Some of your sw choices have severe limitations (dvd, blu-ray) but if it suits your needs that’s just great.
If your decision to switch to something else is not budget driven… fine, but that’s not the point you were trying to make.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “No sh*t. But if you give a person the option, two MyBooks, and a promise raid and they want cheap, which are they going to buy? The answer is different from what they should buy.
“

They’d probably buy the MyBooks in such scenario, but that’s not what was shown in the demo. It was 4 MyBooks, not 2, in Raid0, and the comments related to the sense or nonsense of such a setup. I haven’t seen a price for those drives yet but I assume four of them plus over 200 bucks for the cables… probably not too far away from the Promise Raid.
And, just in general, nobody trying to put a damper on TB as per your suggestion. Glad you’re excited. People including me just questioned the assumption that it makes a tower redundant. That’s a totally different story.
One of those MyBooks connected via TB, at a reasonable price – great. Four Mybooks in Raid1, 0, or 10… not so great in “my book”.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Chris Harlan] “No its 1080i, 29.97. I have got some 23.98 lying around on different drives but I just don’t have the time to play around much. Right now, I’m just doing select reels on MC 6 to get my fingers keyboarded up, but I’m still cutting the pieces on FCP 7. If I can get the AMA to function properly, I’ll transcode my sellects and do more exhaustive cuts before sending them back to FCP.

My goal is to slowly work back into MC over the course of this project without impeding the project, and learning the subtitles as I go. It also lets me not worry too much about current bugs.”

That’s a sensible approach. I was asking because there is a bug with QT and TC in 23.98 files. I run into it every time with subtitling apps and some xml stuff, also confirmed by some developers I reported this to. Thought it might be related but if it’s with 29.97 then it’s something different.

[Frank Gothmann]

Just out of curiosity: are these files 23.98? Can you reproduce the same issue with source files at a different frame rate?

[Frank Gothmann]

[tony west] “1. They have a good product that people want and 2. they can give their software away because they make their money on COMPUTERS and Iphones and Ipads and Iwhatever the he– else they want to kick butt with.”

1. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Problem is that a lot of people’s perception is that everything Apple is automatically brillant just because it bears the logo. Regardless of wether X is good, bad, getting there or whatever: if it had been a new app from an unknown company hitting the app store while, at the same time, Apple had released FCP 8… would anybody really have bothered? Would people have abandoned FCP8 for the new paradigm or even tried it out? After all, most other NLEs were either right under people’s noses, either already installed or available as a trial (and I am not excluding myself here, I had PP for a long time and never bothered to take a closer look).

2. Very true. Which is the root of the problem. Because they can now afford to piss off niche markets without thinking twice about it.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Thomas Frank] “Oh you mean editing the footage, isnt that possible in FCPX?
I thought you mean converting standard to stereo….”

Out of the box in X? No.
And even with Dashwood plug-in that is currently only runs in legacy not as in-depth (no pun intended) as in MC6.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Thomas Frank] “True that but again allot of your suggestion are techno talk, wouldnt you rather use a app that is made for stereoscopic…”

I don’t understand what you mean by that. MC is made for stereoscopic editing, out of the box, that’s one of the big things that sets it appart from almost everything else on the market (if you need that feature of course).