Julian Bowman
Forum Replies Created
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Hey Herb.
no sorry didn’t explain properly. I have 8 x 2TB raided together (internal) and then put an SSD into my disc drive bay and use an external blue ray burner for discs.
The two externals are currently for backing up my files drive (raid) and my boot up drive (SSD).
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Mark, I have considered it too, many times, but decided to hold out and stumble along and wait and see if a new mac pro was in the offing. I just can’t justify £2500 every year and my current mac can handle things fine most of the time… and now it appears patience has paid dividends. I’m not sure what the new mac will be like for different set ups, including shops, but for me it really does look quite sweet, and not much more than I would have spent in years past, or even on a maxed out i7 imac.
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Believe me Steve, the thought of spinning it rounds has been mulled, but having the power lead out the front…. i’ll see when I get one 🙂
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I actually use a blue ray burner as my main CD/DVD drive as I use it to archive things anyway. I already have 2 external drives (one for my internal raid drives and the other my launch drive, and two monitors. For me that is it and that will pretty much be the same when i get a new mac pro, so for me the only change is the big energy reduction of the new mac and my mac stays on a lot so that is a big appeal to me.
Admittedly I will get 2 x g-tech drives so I don’t know if they consume more energy than my current one but it seems unlikely the bump in hard drive energy use will negate the saving from the machine itself.
My only real gripe with the new design is the fact there are no usb or thunderbolt ports on the front. I do a lot of swapping into my 2 front usb ports whether it be for phone charging, web cam, capturing SD cards or my Xoom or even charging my bluetooth ear piece and having to go round the back to do that will be annoying. Personally I would have liked some ports on the front, or all the thunderbolt and usb ports on the front and the other stuff on the back. But hey, I guess I can get a usb hub which will give me more than 2 frontal usb slots, so not ideal but not particularly a deal breaker.
Ultimately it is horses for courses. For me, as a one man show working in a niche market, the new mac pro offers a great deal and the price is affordable. And anything that circumnavigates the crashes and lag I get on my current machine will be embrace with loving arms (apart from imacs, I have an inexplicable pathological dislike of them. Can’t say why, just glad I don’t have to buy one).
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Cheers Martin, though I’m still going to get a new machine, but….
I did upgrade my card to a ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB. I have 32gb of ram, SSD as my launch drive and it is a 2.26 Quad Core.
To be honest I am not sure what the issue is, and things are a bit better since I added the SSD drive and the graphics card, but it still frustrates me enough to want to invest in something new and better. I have been waiting on the pricing of the mac tube and if I can, as it seems, get a good machine for my needs with the low spec and a possible GPU upgrade then i’ll sell my current baby on after i’ve got everything up and running.
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Cheers Jeremy for confirming my inklings.
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Ok, cheers both.
Craig the LTO machines are around £2k after a quick google search so that’s a no. I am fortunate in as much as I don’t need to archive rushes much at all and I forgot to mention I don’t do long form, usually films run from 2 mins to 15 mins (only one job had a 45m and 30m output). I encode for clients at 10,000 kbps 720 and everyone is happy and to be honest on this machine that part of the process is fine and dandy and I can’t see how that will change over 4 years (though of course it may). So to me keeping the mac for 4 years seems totally feasible. I work in the not for profit sector (councils, charities, NHS Trusts, Housing associations) so no top end stuff at all.
Just re-read and saw you put h.265 files. Ok, a quick read suggests it is like h.264 but keeps file sizes smaller. Again, with my business I don’t need to encode end products a great deal so at the moment that isn’t a concern on my radar, and if in 2 years it is a pain then I’ll buy another mac but I can’t see it being an issue for me at the moment.
Andrew, thanks for the feedback. I am actually pathologically opposed to iMacs and not the biggest fan of laptops (I never take the machine into the field and will only end up plugging in my keyboard, mouse and monitors anyway) and I can’t believe the small amount I would save buying one of those now over the mac pro will stand me in good stead over the coming years. In addition I am very drawn to the lower power use as the mac stays on a lot round my place.
Thanks for the GPU comments. It is what I believed from what I have read over the past which makes me also believe I won’t really need to step up to the 6 core base unit either. I will wait and see what the upgrade price is for the graphic cards in the base model.
And RAM, well I can wait and see what it is like with it but I always buy from crucial and see that as one of the smaller costs in the buying process.
External drives I pretty much run with 8TB at the moment (4x2TB drives 0 raided in my mac) and that space is good for me, thus my going down that route. And yes, when I may need 12TB it will be much further down the line and prices will have dropped.
So it seems from you guys feedback that I am leaning towards the low spec mac pro with a possible upgrade in graphics cards and my 2 x g-tech drives. In 2 years I can look again. If new codecs impact on my to the degree that everything feels like I am working in treacle then I can consider a new mac again but if not then I will be good for another year or 2. in the meantime I have saved money at this point which is my sticking point (big tax bill coming up, just moved house, getting married… triple whammy though 2 of the 3 are quite joyful events).
If any others want to pipe up that would be great though as I take a lot from reading what people say about topics and this one is totally specific to my needs.
Many thanks for your time.
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Bill, I’m confused. you said I can create an event and simply put my plugins in it and use that as my very needed and not particularly antiquated favourites folder.
Well I just tried. It appears I cannot in fact drag my plugins into a new event and then open that event (favourites folder) and see them, let alone scrub through them to see how they may look as i can in the plugins section.
So how exactly is your workaround, which was offered up with your typically dismissive attitude of anyone wanting anything in X that you don’t want or need, a bona fide current replacement for a favourites folder?
I’m guessing what you mean is I can use some laborious workaround to collate examples of the plugins, probably on other clips, that will not allow me to visually see how they look or in fact visually present them as neatly as the plugins folder. if so, not quite sure how that is the future. Surely the future would be to have a great plugins area of the NLE (which we do) decluttered by enabling user management (which we don’t and was asked for in this post)
The other workaround listed below is also just a poor man’s workaround. I use it, but it is
a) fiddly
b) will break when you do an upgrade
c) won’t enable me to put everything I want in there
d) won’t enable me to close all the plugins I DON’T want cluttering up my plugins area (especially the totally hobbyist nonsense packaged with X). Even if I put my FX Factory plugins I want in there and delete the rest, FX Factory still reinstalls them when I boot back up, so decluttering is not possible. As for Apples plugins, that’s even more of a PITA arse to hide them, you have to hack the core folders.Truly, the ability to manage your plugins as you see fit, including turning off in X those you don’t need or moving those you use to a series of ordered folders, is an enhancement of the ability to edit with expediency. It is not antiquated. It is not clinging to the past. It is not wanting using X as you want to use legacy, it is wanting to use X as a professional with organisational needs for the plethora of plugins Apple themselves have encouraged.
To argue otherwise, to suggest someone is somehow howling at the moon because they want a feature added that was valid, valuable and aided productivity in other NLE’s, is bordering on the deluded and makes that contributors opinions seem, er, nuts.
bill, one final question. Are you still editing on 10.0? I mean you were such a huge advocate of how perfect it was and how awesome it was and how everyone else was simply nowhere near the puck, therefore I am guessing you haven’t installed any of the upgrades because really you don’t need them because all they did was supply the features and changes that people were asking for that you said they didn’t need because, you know, they were harping on about the past and Apple had just delivered the future.
So how is it on 10.0?
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Shhh, Steve, don’t tell Bill that, his entire existence is based on the opposite of that very sane fact. The metaphysical meltdown won’t be pretty.
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sadly not. there are a couple of nice touches in 7 but the icons look poor and the new calendar layout wastes space as isn’t as visually clear or functional. face time audio is nice. favourites on safari blank page is nice but creative cow website no longer fits on a safari page so I can’t read it without constant left right swiping. overall it seems the design shift was more for in house self gratification that great great design. still it is a phone and that still works 🙂