Jason Myres
Forum Replies Created
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The current 15-inch MacBook Pro doesn’t have an ExpressCard slot. And you’re right, an ESATA ExpressCard connected to a good external drive would be a great solution for you. But, you will need to buy a 17-Inch MacBook Pro or possibly an older MacBook Pro 15 that does have an ExpressCard slot.
In a sense though, your situation is a bit out of date. While the XL1 is a nice camera, many modern cameras use some form of media card (P2, SxS, SD Card, etc) rather than tape, so capturing in real-time over FireWire, is becoming more and more rare. Many people now use some form of USB card reader to ingest their data to an external Firewire drive so they can edit their video media.
In your case, the XL1 will need to be connected via Firewire which leaves you with only USB for external storage on the 15-Inch MacBook Pro. You can give a good quality USB drive a try (like a G-Technology G-Drive), but there is a chance you will see dropped frames or other errors while you are capturing or editing.
You have a few options:
A) Buy a MacBook Pro 15. If you do this you’ll need a modern card-based video camera, and an external FireWire 800 Drive for editing. You’ll use a USB card reader or USB directly from the camera to capture your video. If you buy an SD card-based camera, you will not need a seperate card reader as this model has one built-in.
B) Buy a MacBook Pro 17. If you do this you can keep your XL1. You’ll need to buy an ESATA ExpressCard and connect it to an external ESATA hard drive for editing.
C) Buy an older Mac Book Pro 15 with an ExpressCard Slot. If you can find an “Early 2009 Unibody” MacBook Pro new or used somewhere, you’ll be able to have your cake and eat it too, by keeping your XL1 and using an ESATA ExpressCard and Hard Drive with it, like you would with the current 17-Inch MacBook Pro.
Here is a good place to look for deals on older models that may still be available:
https://dealmac.com/Computer/Apple-Computers/Mac-Book-Pro-Deals-466.html
JM
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A unified interface doesn’t mean you can’t customize your window arrangements. Usually you can break out any tabs you want, but initially the basis of your organization is one large panel.
Either way, it seems to be a pattern at Apple…
JM
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There was a lot of talk about Final Cut earlier this year. Based on a few key hirings recently (Randy Ubillos, more UI designers, etc.) it might be the middle of next year until we see something. They might have enough time to announce something by NAB, though.
Final Cut Studio is based on a huge amount of dated, Carbon code, and there is the hope that a full re-write to Cocoa in Xcode will make it a more efficient, modern software package, with features like 64-Bit addressing, multi-processor support through Grand Central, real media management, and 4K frame sizes.
Where they take the user interface is anyone’s guess though. My thought is they will move to a unified, single-window interface that will look very similar to Logic Studio and Soundtrack Pro.
There’s also the whole Quicktime transition to deal with, and that is going to take some time as well.
https://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/6
JM
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“I find AE slow on an 8 core Xeon with 16 GB of RAM.”
If that’s slow, what’s fast?
JM
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QNAP is nice, but I do not know of an out-of-the-box NAS solution that will give you the data rates you’re looking for.
While they do have GigE interfaces, most NAS solutions don’t have the RAID or CPU power to stream full GigE bandwidth to several clients.
What you will probably need is more along the lines of a real file server (Apple Xserve or MacPro) sharing out a good SAS RAID array to a few clients, each with their own dedicated GigE connection.
Some people have started experimenting with this as a low-cost shared storage solution, with the idea that GigE will give you about 2-3 streams of ProRes per client.
A solution like this will run you about $10-15,000 depending on what gear you use, and how much storage you need. The main issue is that it does not scale very well, and to get beyond the 100MB/sec limits of GigE you have to get into aggregating GigE cables, or move into 10Gb ethernet which is still pretty expensive (a 10Gb host adapter is about $500-800).
JM
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Totally. You may encounter issues in FCS if you try to use more than one video card. Buy the best single card you can afford. Right now that’s the Radeon 4870.
https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1828
JM
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While Mark is right, do not buy a 4 core machine. Get the low-end 8-core at a minimum if you can. An 8-core is much more capable, and while you may be working in a lot Motion now, if you ever go near After Effects, the performance situation is the exact opposite…cores are more important than the video card.
Also, with apps like Compressor, and Grand Central in 10.6 you will really benefit from the time saved by the extra cores.
The 4870 is killer with FCS if you can include it as well.
JM
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In my PC Workstation I use an Nvidia Quadro FX580. It’s not the most powerful card on the planet, but for $180 it is very solid, and compatible with just about any creative application you can think of.
If you are interested in the Mercury Engine collaboration between Adobe and Nvidia, you could take a look at the GTX285. They are available for PC for about $250, but require a large power supply (600W+) and two aux power connectors to run.
The components of a GPU that helps to accelerate the rendering of video effects are called stream processors. The Quadro FX580 has 96, the GTX285 has 240. There are other factors as well though, including VRAM, GPU clock speed, etc, but really you just need to get off of your on-board graphics and into a discreet card to fix your problem.
If you are on a budget, I would look at the FX580. It should eliminate your shader error, and get you working again.
JM
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OK, that makes total sense then.
The on-board graphics on your motherboard are fine for everyday things, but when you’re using After Effects or any other video-intensive, 3D-capable application you generally need a discreet graphics card.
Tom’s Hardware has a rolling list of the best graphics cards at different price ranges. Any of the better cards from Nvidia or ATI should eliminate your error message:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-card-geforce-radeon,2646.html#xtor=RSS-18214
JM
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Which video card are you using? Shaders are instructions used by your video card GPU to render effects. You may need to upgrade your video card to enable the effects that are giving you the error. Turing on OpenGL isn’t a solution, as you will probably not be able to use it until you have a more capable GPU.
JM