[John Davidson]

Ah, usually that means agreeing to all the OS X terms and conditions. if you’re already past that, then it’s possible your VNC connection needs to be rebuilt due to changes in yosemite. I don’t use VNC, but perhaps it’s a setting that needs to be enabled in System Prefs / Sharing. Is Screen Sharing and remote login checked?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

You have to log in directly on the mac and agree to everything before you can screen share into it. It’s annoying and when we had a mac without a video card gave us a real headache. You should check out Splashtop for Business btw. Super easy way to manage lots of computers.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Why not post a 1080p file to Vimeo or YouTube and give them that? I realized a while back that if I convert all these old digital files I have to h264 I would free up a ton of space and everybody is happy. H264 1080p encoding all the way. If you provide sources, run compressor on them and give them the compressed sources.

My 2 cents.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I gave up on that a long time ago and we use SMB only now. NFS has the fun feature (or at least it did) of locking up after effects renders that go to the server.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Ah, what you really want is to sync motion templates across all systems with a localized folder. That’s what we do.

Email me at info @ magicfeatherinc.com and i’ll share an in-house tutorial we made to get you going.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Carbon copy cloner, super duper, etc. What exactly do you want to sync? Do you want to just copy a library to the server? If your media is kept outside of the library I have an automator service you might find useful.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

-Clips getting lost in timeline vertical space.
-Generators determining speed on their own requiring me to go into motion to try to fix it with build in build out markers (I still don’t understand it).
-Adobe releasing another disaster update that breaks real time AE Ram Previews forcing me to once again throw in the towel on AE 2015.
-Adobe After Effects auto save. It’s like being crotch kicked for 30 seconds when you’re in the zone. Every. Five. Minutes.
-Not being able to minimize primary when i’m in creative edit mode.
-Clips arbitrarily getting assigned roles incorrectly with no ability to fix it on finder level before they are imported.
-Transitions on a secondary storyline affecting audio when I want the audio to stay full and not fade with the video.
-Digging around in finder for a designers renders, media clips, etc.
-working with keyframes in FCPXand transforming clips
-setting an in/out in the browser, hitting q, and either the in/out ranged clip goes into the timeline where I didn’t want it, only 2 frames goes into the clip where I did want it, or the ENTIRE clip forgets my in/out and goes into the timeline. This is probably me hitting the wrong key, but it happens so so often.

I’ll add more later.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

You can totally get your own ram from OWC and save yourself a few coins. Nothing wrong with that. I think you’ll be pleased with the 5K iMac performance and won’t need a new Mac Pro. Very unlikely you’ll ever have any real world use for anything more than TB2 speeds. TB2 is very useful for things like getting 4K HDMI output of an iMac via a Belkin dock. If your RAID 1 TB’s still work, don’t worry about any additional enclosures.

I wouldn’t recommend buying the Highpoint box. I’ve had annoyances w/ that company.

Bob Zelin recommends Hitachi Deskstars. They even go up to 6TB if you want them. I assume your RAID TB1 enclosure is a Promise Pegasus or similar. They’ll have specs on what drives their systems can handle (mine still kicks butt to this day on my home iMac).

Don’t go Fusion – get an SSD 1TB. Get the most expensive GPU Apple offers. If you want a dual monitor setup, use an extra Thunderbolt Display and tether it to the iMac. It’ll look something like this:

This system is using:

iMac 5k, 1TB SSD, everything maxed out
Areca TB2 Array w/ 4TB Hitachi Deskstars (32 TB)
Bose Companion USB Speaker system
Apple Cinema Display (left)
Belkin TB2 Dock w/ HDMI out connected to a 50″ LG 4k tv.
Black magic mini-monitor w HDMI and SDI out
Promise TB2 10GbE connection to 128 TB network server (speeds approx 800MBps r/w)
Casio 88 weight key piano connected via USB
iPad Pro (awesome to make a list of client notes with checkboxes via ‘notes’ app.)
And for fun, the back light is a Satechi LED bluetooth control RGB light strip.

I have zero need for a Mac Pro and I wouldn’t hold my breath on USB-C on a Mac Pro update. Everything you want is covered with USB3 and TB2.

That help?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

You need to change the duration of your motion generator project to 2 seconds from within motion. While youre at it, make a 2 second one, a 1 second one, etc. We also have a ‘fade from color’ and ‘fade to color’ one that is 1 second. I think 1 second is the minimum length you can have for a generator.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I agree with all this – but get the 1TB SSD. We constantly have to clean our 1TB SSDs because they fill up quickly. 512 would be a disaster for me. Check out the Areca tb2 enclosure with Hitachi 4TB deskstars. Had some kinks with it at first but I love mine now.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.