[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks for the response Michael. Yes I am on 1.5.2 and the latest Snow Leopard. I would love it if I can use the 1440 material. I have a huge (for me) project that I brought in as 1440/24P Pro Res that I’m almost ready to take to Color and dreading the problem, but as I said I just did a little 3 minute piece where until I converted everything to full raster I had both sync problems and specific shots that refused to show up in Color even if I put them in their own Sequence and sent them that way. Is there something else I could be doing wrong? I’m on an early Mac Pro Quad 2.66. Nvidia graphics card (trying to upgrade it), and as I say I just updated all of my Apple stuff (FCS and OSX).

Thanks.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

I too shoot in HDV and capture via Firewire (either as HDV with renders to Pro Res or as Pro Res 4:2:2 1440×1080 via Apple’s method). I don’t do offline edits, but the above seems to work fine for everything EXCEPT Color. I think it is because Color is full raster, but the results are odd. Sometimes it works fine, but usually about half the shots don’t show up in Color and the other half show up fine and render out to Pro Res fine but are way out of sync. Not by a specific amount, could be frames, could be seconds. Am I doing something wrong? The last project (which I captured as Pro Res 1440×1080 24P) I ended up having to take all the shots and run them through Compressor to convert to 1920×1080, then they worked fine. But this method requires adding handles and basically reediting. I tried Media Manager re-render but that didn’t work. Any advice?

Thanks.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

It’s a long time since I used FCP 5, but I find that Canon Firewire and all versions of FCP have issues and idiosyncrasies, but if memory serves FCP 5 and HDV were a nightmare. FCP 7 is much better.

I’ve never used an HV20 but with the Canon XLH1 and XHA1 a few tricks to bear in mind when connecting to FCP via Firewire: Make sure that the camera/vtr is in straight HDV playback mode (turn OFF automatic mode and turn OFF down-conversion). Do this before connecting. Do not mix different frame rates or interlaced and progressive footage on the same tape, this is a disaster. By following these rules I rarely have issues in FCP 7, but my memory of FCP 5 was that there were a few more requirements: don’t plug the camera in through a daisy chain, for best results connect and power on the camera before booting the computer and certainly before starting FCP. Of course make sure your Easy Setup matches the camera and things seem to be smoother when the camera is on an AC power source. Not sure why a bunch of this matters but it seemed to with 5 and to a lessor degree 6.

Hope this helps.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

I stand corrected. Sometimes I get too passionate about the gear and forget about the people, Shane.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

I’ll chime in here as a low budget person who’s been studying this issue intensively. My intel iMac is overloaded and so I just chose to buy a 1st gen Mac Pro (and upgrade it substantially) rather than buy a new iMac, but it wasn’t an easy choice. If you can afford a brand new Mac Pro without indenturing yourself, by all means buy it. For all the reasons Shawn stated it is a wonderful machine. But the latest Quad Core iMac is pretty impressive for the money. It benchmarks as twice as fast as my 2.66 Xeon quad core and certainly the processor speed and buss is faster and FCP doesn’t really use the 4 cores (as I understand it, feel free to jump on me). It’s got a great graphics card (basically as good as they get by today’s standards) and a wonderful 27″ IPS, led backlit screen, all for less $$$ than a base Mac Pro. Plus, it appears that OWC can install an eSata connector for a couple hundred bucks which would enable you to add a very fast external Raid array.

But Shawn is right, other than maybe the eSata upgrade it is completely un-expandable, un-upgradeable. A video I/O is a big problem (but if you are mostly off-lining that’s not necessarily a big deal), drives are MUCH cheaper if you just slam raw ones into a Mac Pro (although you can buy the cheapest G-Raid and slam big drives into it). And I’ve been having a lot of fun upgrading my old Xeon: ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card 1 GB (PC version) $130, upping the RAM, picked up a slightly used 1 TB 7200 RPM drive for $34.00 (Mac came with two fast 500 GB drives), Asus 300MBPS N wifi, haven’t picked the final Monitor yet but it will be IPS (plan on using an older Sony for bins and such).

For me the decision to go Mac Pro was in part based on frustration with the previous iMac, as it got long in the tooth its issues couldn’t be addressed. No updates, and failure means going outside the box (Firewire optical drive that’s never quite happy for instance) or giving up (thought my GPU was going out, but it turns out the darn thing won’t cool properly with the stock factory settings, so downloaded smcFan Control. turned the fan up, cooled the GPU to under 100 degrees F and that part is fine, but i just don’t think the iMacs were built to work 24/7 doing heavy processing, Not that I work 24/7, but sometimes it is 24/3 and then the iMac still has to render for 12 hours at which point it gets really cranky.

So my take is the iMacs are worth a look, but if you can swing a Pro it will last you longer and frustrate you less.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

Well, they’re probably right, but I hope they’re wrong. Whatever miserly income I make I make from film and video work, and I’m thrilled to have just upgraded from an iMac to a Gen 1 Mac Pro 1,1. I don”t intend to edit uncompressed HD on it, Pro Res 4:2:2 is everything I need at present and I hope my bigger dreams will support an on-line session.

Right now (my “new” Mac Pro 1,1 hasn’t arrived yet) I am comfortably able to edit HDV 1080 60i (or 24p) with renders to Pro Res 4:2:2. My problems come when I work with too many layers or venture off into Ram (or vRam) intensive programs like AE or Color. With the capacity for 32 GB ram and an ATI 4870 1 Gig video card I am optimistic that my “new” Mac Pro will blow those problems out of the water (but it is a matter of perspective).

So back to the system you propose: Airport card is nice, but worth $20-$40 in real world terms. 6 GB Ram is adequate for FCP7 which (if i understand correctly) can use up to 4 GB leaving 2 GB for other system processes. For After Effects I currently think 10-12 GB is good. (1-2 GB per core plus 2 GB for other processes seams to be the min spec). When you say Leopard 6.3 I assume you really mean Snow Leopard 10.6.3? No reason not to use Snow Leopard if you have FCS 2009.

Scratch drives will be important and you may want more ram and a better video card (a complicated issue with early Mac Pros). But IMHO (and I’m a relative Newbie) the system you propose has good bones for indie film making or local commercial video production. J. Walter Thompson won’t hire you, but do you care?

My biggest concern with your proposal is 2.0gHz processor. I’m an artist not an expert, but as I understand it a lot of my key apps (like FCP7) can’t make full use of multi-cores (I think Compressor and AE can), so for those apps a 2.0gHz processor is taking you back to 2005 (maybe there was a cute girl-or guy, I don;t care- in your life in 2005 so you want to go there, but otherwise: a 2.0 machine is a bit limiting, 2.66 quad or 2,26 octo would seem better, but $1100 for that computer seems fair (not a steel, mind you).

Hope this helps.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

I too have been looking for a budget monitor. The U2410s are readily available on US eBay for $400 (256 GBP), so you might want to look around before you dismiss it. Unfortunately I’m trying to stay at $300. Dell has a new 23″ IPS monitor the U2311H which is sub $300. Anyone have experience with these? Or an opinion on an older 24″ such as U2405, 2407 or 2408? This would be bought used, and while I have read older threads on these I’m wondering how they are holding up and how they compare to the newer stuff as well as each other.

Thanks.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

I think everybody’s agreeing that any of the new Mac Pros would be a better long term investment than any of the new iMacs. Buy as fast a processor as you can afford. Everything else can be upgraded. But by my standards the lowliest new quad core will fly.

My iMac (typing on it now) is an older model and so the comparison is not apples to -umh, apples, but if you google around you’ll see that earlier iMacs were prone to overheating. Supposedly this has been addressed in newer machines, but only time will tell and let’s face it the iMac looks sleek but how do you get a lot of air in there? And all the new chips are just going to run faster and faster. The real point is there’s a reason they use the word “Pro” for the Pros and not the iMacs (beyond marketing hype). When I thought my GPU was going out (due to overheating) that was a deep problem, because you can’t replace it. In a 4 year old Mac Pro that would be more like an opportunity to upgrade it to the latest flavor. FWIW smcFanControl made a huge difference in keeping the iMac stable.

I still think that the quad core iMacs are superb value for money and if you’re a video or photography hobbiest there’s probably no real need for the Pro, but there that word just came up again.

Hope this helps, just my 2 cents.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

Well, the Mac Pro with 8GB of ram (to be comprable to the iMac) and a 24″ ACD (add another $200 for the upcoming 27″ screen) will run you $3700 while the iMac is $2400 so not exactly an apples to apples comparison (no pun intended). Boss’s money I’d go Mac Pro. My money, a lot tougher call, for what you say you want to do the iMac should be fine, but if things change (when don’t they?) you will be locked in with the iMac whereas greener pasteurs always await you with the Mac Pro. Just my 2 cents.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Jeff Mueller]

Raphael beat me to the punch by leaving a lot of words out. I think they call that editing 🙂

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA