[Jean-jacques Gaudel]

Hi Tom,
I too have a mid 2010 MacPro 8 core that I thought was pretty maxed out with 32GB of Ram and four 1TB hard drives, 2 of them in a RAID array using the Apple RAID card.
It worked fine for HD 3d Animation in AE. But I am getting into 4K work in 3D in After Effects CC with a bunch of layers and Ray Tracing, and my “fast” machine slowed down to a crawl.
My solution: four 480GB OWC SSD’s in a RAID 0 array in the 4 drive bays, one 480GB SSD in the second optical bay, and a NVIDIA K5000 for MAC video card to get CUDA acceleration. I also added an eSATA controler Card and put my four original 1TB hard drives in an eSata enclosure to get faster storage.
I have Mountain Lion 10.8.5 installed on both the 4 SSD RAID and on the SSD in the drive bay.
I am now getting a respectable Write Speed of 380MB/s and Read Speeds or 520MB/s on the RAID 0 using the BlackMagic Speed Test, but that is less than I was expecting. The single SSD gives me 220MB/s for both Write and Read, so I was hoping to quadruple that to about 900MB’s with the 4SSD RAID 0. I am not sure what the bottleneck is.
I tried to choose the SSD in the optical bay as my Cache in AEcc Preferences to speed things up, but it is not offered as an option. In Disk Utility, it appears on top next to the Optical Drive, and separated from the other drives by a horizontal line.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
JJ

[Jean-jacques Gaudel]

HI guys,
I am new to this forum, and would like to put my 2 cents worth. Nobody ever seems to mention the JVC-HD7 as one of the very best camcorders around. It got a bum rap in the reviews, but I looked beyond those when I bought mine a year or so ago, and I could not be more pleased. I did test the Canon and the Sony out before I bought it, and chose the JVC not only because I wanted easily accessible full manual controls, and was by far the best looking, but also because I preferred the vivid snappy images. I found both the Canon and Sony images very dull in comparison.
I have not regretted my choice. The hard disk is huge, the exposure controls and the manual focus ring are a pleasure to use , it shoots full 1920×1080. To shoot in the studio, I connect it directly to my MAC PRO thru a Black Magic HDMI card, and record live the full uncompressed video.
I know it records in an odd proprietary .TOD format, and that seems to scare people off. All you have to do is use MPEG STREAMCLIP to convert the .TOD to an uncompressed de interlaced 1920x1080p AIC file, and import them into Premiere Pro CS4 as Quicktime clips. You can even apply corrections to the image in the conversion process. I set the editing mode to AVCHD1080p Square Pixels. I also set the codec to AIC in the sequence settings, and it works like a charm. That’s why I had not become a member earlier!
Any body out there agrees with me?
JJ