[Jason Myres]

If you’d like to develop for OS X, a good place to start is developer.apple.com. Apple is pretty good about documenting their technologies. I believe the page you’ll want to take a look at is here:

https://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/FXPlug_overview/Overview/Overview.html

Good Luck! Let us all know if you release something 🙂

JM

[Jason Myres]

When it comes to creative applications, more CPUs is generally more helpful than faster CPUs, so by getting a dual CPU machine you are already 90% of the way there.

Beyond a certain point, you start to pay a very heavy premium for clock speed, which is only justifiable if you are rendering so much content (think Pixar) that the benefit in time saved is directly related to money saved (i.e. release movie faster). It doesn’t sound like you are under that sort of pressure, so I would get the 2.66 if you can, but spend any extra money on ram and fast storage.

If you can get the Dual 2.66, 24GB of ram, and the 4870 I think you will be in the pocket. Beyond that, adding (3) 1TB or 2TB Hitachi Ultrastars in drive bays 2,3 & 4 and then striping them as a RAID0 in Disk Utility will give you several (quiet) terabytes of internal storage that will do 250+ MB/second for very little cost. If you want a larger, protected, RAID5 array, especially if you are doing a lot of video editing, Maxx Digital (Evo) or G-Tech (G-Speed) are good places to look.

JM

[Jason Myres]

Buy a Dual CPU Nehalem if you can. The single cpu model is a much less capable machine. After Effects will drop the hammer on whatever you can throw at it, and a dual cpu machine will have much more value when the day comes that you want to sell it.

Nehalem Mac Pros work optimally with ram in sets of three (3GB or 6GB for single cpu, 6GB or 12GB for dual cpu). You will see a 15% CPU performance hit if you occupy ram slots 4 & 8. More on that here:

https://www.barefeats.com/nehal02.html

If you want to go big on ram, it might be cheaper to order with 6GB, then remove that ram, and buy a set of six, matched dimms (12, 24, or 48GB) from a reseller like OWC. Brands that have worked well for us include Kingston, Hynix, and Samsung. They are often what Apple sends you in your Mac Pro as well.

Buy the Radeon 4870 if you can can. Its rock solid and worth the extra $200. It will be a huge help if you are using FCP, Motion, and Color.

JM

[Jason Myres]

Hi Richard,

I’ve been hearing about this as well. I haven’t had the opportunity yet to read about the issues people are having in depth, but here are some thoughts based on what we are doing for our customers…

“Early 2008” and later Mac Pros have fixed PCI-E lane allocations: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2838

Slot 4: 4x
Slot 3: 4x
Slot 2: 16x
Slot 1: 16x

The RedRocket functions at full bandwidth in a 8x PCI-E slot. So, in later Mac Pros that would mean it needs to occupy Slot 2, with Slot 1 usually reserved for a graphics card.

Most of the storage controllers (Apple Fibre, SAS RAID, etc) we work with require a 4x slot, so they generally occupy slot 4.

The issue I believe people are running into is with the Kona card. Per AJA’s recommendation, the Kona LHi and LHe need to be installed in Slot 2. I know there are people who might like to debate this, but it has been successful for us.

For the Kona 3, however, AJA recommends that it be installed in Slot 3, which is why I suggested it for George if he decided to install a RedRocket as well. My guess is, the issues people are experiencing are related to PCI-E lane speed conflicts when attempting to use an LHi or LHe together with a RedRocket.

The configuration below, that I suggested to George, has worked very well for us:

Slot 4: Fibre or RAID Controller
Slot 3: Kona 3
Slot 2: RedRocket
Slot 1: Graphics Card

The only other thing to consider would be the Dual SDI breakout plate for the RedRocket. If a client decides they need that functionality, the breakout plate can be installed in Slot 1(b), with a single slot graphics card in Slot 1(a), but that will come at the expense of being able to take advantage of a higher-performing card like the Radeon 4870.

JM

[Jason Myres]

Hi George,

1) Is it better to buy one ATI Radeon HD 4870 or 2 geforce? I’m planning to edit with 2 Dell hd monitors.

You’ll encounter issues with FCP if you try to use more than one video card.

https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1828

This may change at some point, but for now get the 4870 or buy your Mac Pro with a GT120, and then replace it (do not leave it in) with a Quadro FX4800. The 4800 is $1500 but will help a lot with real-time FX in FCP, Motion, and After Effects.

2) When I called the Apple Store, instead of the Mac pro Raid card they suggested me to buy the Promise SmartStor DS4600 that comes with 4 x 1 Tb hard disk. What do you think about that?

Call Maxx Digital (Evo2) or G-Technology (G-Speed). There may be others, but I can personally vouch for both of them. They configure storage for RED editors all day long.

3) Do I need a matrox MXO2 le for real time editing?

I have heard that Matrox is a good company, but I would take a look at a Kona 3 (2K-Capable) or Kona LHi (80% of a Kona 3 @ 1/2 the cost).

Also, if you are serious about RED now and in the future, I would look into buying or at least renting a RedRocket card. I do know there are people who believe in the proxy workflow, but nearly every RED client we work with is transcoding to ProRes with a RedRocket, then on-lining to 4K later if they need to.

If you do buy a RedRocket…

A) The RedRocket needs a serious RAID array to make the most of it. Tell the company you are buying your storage from. In return you will save weeks of time, and have honest control of your RED media. It’s also the only real way to look at your RED footage at full resolution, but you’ll need a smokin’ ref monitor or projector as well.

B) You will need to buy the Kona 3 if you want to put both the RedRocket and Kona card in one machine. The 4 PCI-E slots in your MacPro will look like this:

Slot 4: RAID Controller
Slot 3: Kona 3
Slot 2: RedRocket
Slot 1: 4870 or FX4800

4) is it enough a 8 gb RAM?

Nehalems use a tri-channel data bus called QuickPath that works optimally when using RAM in sets of six. Your options at the Apple store for this will be 6GB and 12GB. If you occupy ram slots 4 and 8 on your Mac Pro you will loose approximately 15% cpu performance to support that extra ram. See more on that here:

https://www.barefeats.com/nehal02.html

There is a lot of gear mentioned here, and it’s not cheap, but these are all things RED editors are using to get work done. If you need to do this on the “cheap”, and still get the job done..

-Mac Pro 2.93×8/ 12GB RAM/1TB for OS and Apps
-Your (2) Dell Monitors

Then…

For storage, buy (3) 2TB Hitachi Ultrastars online. RAID0 them together using Disk utility. You’ll get about 5TB of internal edit space that will do 250+ MB/s until about half full, then it will start to drop. It will also ~not~ be protected (RAID1 or 5) so you will need to keep good back-ups on external drive (G-tech GRaids are popular). But, Hitachi is the best drive going right now so that’s your best shot.

For transcoding, you can use Red Rushes, which is free, but slow. It will process about 3-4 frames a second on your Mac Pro (versus 20-36 FPS on a RedRocket) so you will be doing A LOT of waiting if you have a decent amount of footage (i.e., days or even weeks…).

For monitoring, you can try to just get away with your dual monitor set-up, but if you want a real ref monitor, you’ll need real video I/O, which means SDI, which means Kona 3. You can try to go cheap and get a Black Magic HD Link or possibly a Matrox, but I can’t say anything other than you get what you pay for. And if you don’t pay in $$$ you inevitably pay in time/ quality.

JM

[Jason Myres]

It’s a little unclear what your needs are bandwidth-wise…

The size of your projects is also important to consider. If you are creating motion graphics for the web and your projects are basically short 30-60s spots, you could keep your media on a file server and copy your projects locally as you need them. Provided each station has full gigabit ethernet bandwidth available (see below) you could perform transcoding of compressed formats across your network, forgoing the need to copy first.

Each Station would need:
-Local internal or external RAID5 for uncompressed playback.
-A gigabit connection to the server for fast copies to the local RAID or for transcoding. To keep things fast you’ll need a direct connection to the server, or the server will need a 10 gigabit link to your ethernet switch.

Some possibilities:

File Server:
https://www.dell.com/us/en/business/servers/poweredge-r510/pd.aspx?refid=poweredge-r510
or
https://tiny.cc/uQURc

Local RAID:
https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=144
or
https://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-es.cfm

If you are doing a good bit of actual uncompressed video editing, then your best bet is to dedicate one or two stations to all of your uncompressed work, and outfit them with larger RAIDs that can provide you with the bandwidth and storage you need for the duration of your projects. You can use the other stations for low-bandwidth content creation, and send those files to the uncompressed workstations for finishing and final output. You could archive to Blu-Ray if you need a cheap solution for getting data off of your RAIDs once a project is complete.

Large Local RAID:
https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=132_104

Hope this helps.

JM

[Jason Myres]

We have been experimenting with 10Gb Ethernet as well. We rent a lot of remote edit stations and we’ve been looking for ways to connect them to an archive station for storing and transcoding RED files.

If we attach a large array (usually a Maxx Expando or Active XRaid) to the archive station, we’ve been able to successfully share out the array via SMB to the edit station for cutting dailies. We are still refining it, but in some preliminary testing we are getting 300-400 MB/s between the two machines. Set-up is dead simple. Just give each machine a fixed IP on the same subnet, and away you go.

JM

[Jason Myres]

“Ideally 10bit. Probably just 4:2:2.”

yeah, just 4:2:2…lol

JM

[Jason Myres]

You need to do a little diagnosis first. Do you have iStat installed? (https://www.islayer.com/apps/istatmenus/) If not, add them, and turn on the options for CPU, Memory, and Sensors. Restart, then do a ram preview again, see if anything gets pegged. Make sure if you are using stills or video, that they are formatted to the size of your project. If Motion is needing to heavily scale your content, that’s a lot of extra work.

Finally, you have a good, but 3 year old video card. If you work in Motion all day long, I’d get a Radeon 4870. You should see about 30% improvement (15 min renders become 10 mins) over your x1900. If you decide to sell it you could probably get about $125-$150 for it on eBay.

JM

[Jason Myres]

Noah’s right, SLI isn’t supported in OS X, so strapping two video cards together won’t be possible until Apple makes those changes at the operating system level.

As far as using two video cards with FCP, that’s difficult as Final Cut often addresses the GPU directly and this causes problems when you have more than one video card installed. Apple’s Kbase article on it is here:

https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1828

To avoid problems, the current wisdom is to get the best single video card you can afford. If you want an Nvidia that would be the GTX285, or if you have the cash, a Quadro 4800. There have been some problems with Nvidia drivers in the recent past though, and people have reported Nvidia cards under-perform in Macs when compared to PCs. Nvidia is working on this, though.

Since you are using FCS, a really good option with awesome performance, and minimal issues is the Radeon 4870. If I was spec’ing out anything mission-critical, this is the card I would go with as ATI offers great OS X driver support, it will work in any Mac Pro, and it absolutely smokes if you’re a heavy user of Color or Motion. A good recent comparison is available here:

https://www.barefeats.com/nehal14.html

Also, do not confuse video game performance with performance in FCS; they are not the same. If you take a look at the article above, while the 4870 is quite a bit slower in Call of Duty, it is absolutely toe-to-toe with both the GTX285 and the Quadro (an $1800 card) in the Motion benchmarks.

One last tip: if you can, use a single larger display, rather than two smaller displays, as two displays will effectively cut the available video ram to each display in half, which isn’t good as FCS leverages vram heavily.

JM