[John Davidson]

There’s this…

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

[John Davidson]

All I can tell you Rich is that our iMacs perform much faster and better than our 2 2013 Mac Pros. 7 Systems (not including servers) and every day the Mac Pro guys complain to me about AE having horrible render times, FCPX exporting slowly, etc. It seems that even El Capitan isn’t working great with Mac Pros.

I understand the idea of getting rid of formerly valuable hardware is difficult. I’ve been donating lots of our stuff to the local non-profit station here and before Jan 1 I’m giving them a basically brand new HDCam D1800 deck. Its hard letting go of the past. The benefit is less crap to deal with and manage, and that – especially on multiple systems – is a wonderful thing.

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

[John Davidson]

Blackmagic Mini monitors. I typed that in both previous posts. Go check it out.

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

[John Davidson]

Black magic mini monitors give you SDI out as well as HDMI via Thunderbolt. That’s actually what I use, but I believe that Airplay does turn the display into a second monitor with FCPX or as an extended desktop from your computer. Those older 2012 mac pros are basically 5 year old technology. Old 3G drive speeds, USB 2, no Thunderbolt. We use ours as the server now. It works great for that.

Up to you though. The iMacs did just get a pretty solid update, so they’re very fresh.

PS – if you lose a drive in that internal RAID 1 it’s all gone. We lost a drive in the server Mac Pro 3 weeks ago. Luckily it was empty when it croaked!

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

[John Davidson]

Rich, while I love the trash cans, I find the iMac 5k to be superior in just about every way. I wouldn’t recommend buying new Mac Pros till they are upgraded.

Instead of USB cables and old monitor cables, run ethernet with 10GBe for server connections – I bet you already have those run anyways. Apple TV’s to your plasmas, or Blackmagic thunderbolt mini monitors. You’ll want a Netgear 10Gbe switch, Promise TB2 lighting adapters. and card to connect the switch to the server over PCI.

For wireless solutions I recommend a new Airport Extreme with wireless ac to maximize the speed of streaming to Apple TVs. Any mac could screen share to any apple tv enabled Plasma.

This solution gives us server connections of about 800Mb’s read/write over SMB. The old towers are still great for running as a server.

Bob Zelin can help you with all of this.

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

[John Davidson]

[Robin S. Kurz] “I have yet to hear of anyone buying a Mac for the sole purpose of using FCP X, “

You have now. Our Mac Pros and my 5K iMac were purchased specifically with FCPX in mind, all the way to contacting Apple about which options provided the best FCPX performance.

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

[John Davidson]

Hey Ed, what are your exact compressor settings?

Where are your Phantom 3 files stored – locally or staying on the card? Screen grab your compressor preset settings and paste them here please.

Thanks!

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

[John Davidson]

We use AE, PS, IL, FCPX, Motion and Compressor heavily. Lately our Art Director has just been building heavy graphics in AE, then publishing them to Motion as Generators with editable text so editors can change titles on the fly.

The new Trapcode Suite 13 will probably drag me back into AE for some playtime soon. I like all the toys. There’s always room for improvement.

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

[John Davidson]

I can’t seem to find their tutorial online now. Wonder if something changed.

Here’s a question for you Helge, I’m trying to do the same thing with ~Library/Application Support/ProApps/Effects Presets, which almost works. I can SEND files to the server location, but my mac won’t pull files from it. When I open FCPX, it doesn’t read the presets from the server. If I create one, it will save it there just fine.

I changed permissions on the local ProApps/Effects Presets folder to match what the Motion Templates one does, but still no joy.

Any ideas?

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

[John Davidson]

It’s not the end of the world – things still work, but expect weirdness like sometimes you have to restart the whole mac for Share Exports to work. Sometimes my share just sits at ‘0’ for no reason.

And hey, Pinned Tabs are cool and the new notes is a nice upgrade.

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