[Jeff Mueller]

The answer is simple: if you have the money buy the Mac Pro, you will never regret it. If you don’t have the money, the i7 should be a superb machine. This from a guy who is happy to have just upgraded from an old iMac to an old Mac Pro (1st gen quad core). Could have bought a new iMac core duo for the same money, and speed wise it’s about a toss up, but after living with the iMac for several years I recognize it as good value but not really intended for film professionals. It is largely un-expandable, unrepairable, prone to overheating because everything is crammed into close quarters that weren’t intended for 12 hour rendering sessions. Did I mention that it works? I have been editing Pro Res 4:2:2 in FCP 7, building effects in AE, mixing audio in Soundtrack Pro, Grading (the pros might not call it that) in Color, Compressin’ in Compressor and delivering in various formats with a 4 year old 2.16 gHz, 3 GB ram (maxed out) 2 FW400 connectors iMac. So it can be done and if you can’t afford the Mac Pro don’t give up on film making. But I am so glad to move to an expandable machine that was built to run 24/7. The i7 iMacs are 10x the machine I have been working on (I kid you not) and especially if you figure out how to add a second internal drive to the connectors Apple stuck in there for the second SSD option (or better yet add an eSata connection for an external Raid, which I think OWC is doing) there is no better value than the new iMacs. But if you can afford the Mac Pro, buy it.

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

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks Michael.

Would I miss the Raid 0 at all if I went internal? At present i don’t collaborate much (I DO play well with others, it’s just a geo thing!) and I assume I could offload a project file and media to an external if necessary, so it’s more about how do I get the best (fastest and most stable) performance out of this system (which is light years ahead of what I had but amateurish to the experts here).

On the iMac I have felt that the FW connection was a bottleneck, but there have been so many bottlenecks that I am not sure of its relevance. FWIW I typically shoot HDV either 60i or 24p, and on the iMac have been editing in HDV but rendering to ProRes 4:2:2 standard. I’ve tried editing in ProRes (both by using the built in conversion with FCP and by converting later) but between the space requirements and throughput over the FW connection it seems to me to present more problems than editing HDV native and rendering to ProRes. Most of my final product is either 720p H.264 or DVD MPEG2. Biggest PITA with going straight from HDV to ProRes is 1440×1080 1.33 pixels seem to confuse everything downstream. Do others agree?

Thanks so much.

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

[Jeff Mueller]

Along these lines:

I just bought my first Mac Pro (admittedly a 1st Gen Quad Core) to replace my iMac. (Yeah, I know). I’ve been using a G-Raid over FW as my scratch disc and the internal as my system drive. The Tower is coming with two 500GB drives (presumably the original 7200 rpm 8 MB cache type), money is limited of course (otherwise it would be a 12 core), but should I put a super fast system drive in the Pro and stick with the G-Raid over FW for scratch? Or add a single big HD internally for scratch? Or put in a PCIe eSata card and connect the G-Raid through that? (G-Tech’s card is $200 but I see them for $50 or less).

Thanks.

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

[Jeff Mueller]

Todd certainly knows this, but because I was a neophyte until very recently I’m going to repeat it here: the best trick with pro-sumer cameras (the Vixia, as nice as its images are, unfortunately isn’t quite there) is shoot at 1080 60i for Slow Mo and 1080 24p (or F) for everything else (assuming you want slow mo, otherwise ignore), this essentially equates to over-cranking by 250%. Thus your final product can be at 40% speed. You will need to slow the 1080 60i stuff down through AE, Motion or something similar and then drop it into a 24p timeline, but the results are beautiful (and arguably special as most pro-sumer stuff that is slow mo is done in the NLE and rather stuttery). I think the new JVC cameras ( maybe Panasonic?) can properly over-crank, but my Canon XLH1 can not.

Hope this helps.

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

[Jeff Mueller]

Hi Jeremy:

OS is 10.6, I did a fresh install of everything (including the OS) when I installed FCS3 sometime late last fall. Have not done a reinstall since then. Crashes are random and different, sometimes just FCP crashes, other times the whole machine freezes, sometimes FCP opens up where I left off, other times I have to restore from an archive, sometimes I’m doing something I’d consider to be heavy processing and HD access, other times I’m just sitting there mulling a cut and when I go to play the timeline it crashes, frequency varies, could be 3 times in a day or go for 4-5 days fine.

I have a couple days off from my big project so I’ll try working on a smaller project from a different drive and see how that goes.

Thanks,

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

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll let you know how things work out. Still open to more input, too.

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

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks Michael, good points. Don’t know yet who the post house will be. I opened my mouth about how great ProRes is so I may go ahead and give them a ProRes version through Compressor, but I will definitely also give them the HDV project in case they want to work the way you describe.

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

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks Jerry. I understand that I can’t get back what was lost in transferring it to DV and that there will be some more loss encoding for DVD. Given that we’re probably not doing much by way of graphics or color correction is there no loss in the editing phase using DV? If there were, that would be the reason in my mind to use ProRes to stem the loss.

[Jeff Mueller]

Prints aren’t necessary. Any decent telecine facility can transfer your color negative to a positive video. That is how ALL television (shot on film) is done.

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

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks, this is good information. The iMac and my G-Raid seem to handle ProRes 422 material fine, I just have to watch total storage capacity. I know I can’t do uncompressed stuff because the Firewire speed to the scratch disk won’t support it. I tried (by accident) and the image freezes.

It sounds like if I could get the material transferred to ProRes 422 from some master source that would be best. If I have to go with the miniDV though there might be some benefit in moving to ProRes? Bear in mind that it’s straight cuts (mostly), is there a generational loss when you make those, or is it just when it get’s run through compressor at the end?

Thanks again.

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