[Mark Hollander]

There are several problems with imacs. 1) When the monitor dies (when not if, we have had 2 die in 2 years) the computer is next to useless. It has to be sent off to be repaired at a quite significant cost. When the last one broke-down I was quoted $1000 to fix it! If a monitor on a MacPro dies it’s no drama at all. Grab a spare and keep on truckin. 2) the gloss screen, deal breaker. 3) I render in Lightwave (which uses 100% of every core) and leave the machines running all weekend. I would not even try this on an imac, it will be fried by Monday morning. 4) Limited RAM upgrade. 16GB is barely enough to run After Effects. 5) No input from tape (although my DVCPro50 tape deck is starting to gather dust the past 3 years) 6) No USB 3, which I can add to the MacPro for a ~$120. 7) When using multiple monitors I like having 3 identical monitors that are the same height, resolution and colour. So my eye-line is the same across the monitors and everything looks consistent. 8) Multiple internal HDDs. I don’t want to back to 1996 when my desk was filled with external devices. For my business the imacs are only good enough for admin work. They just don’t work for me in our edit suites. Having said all that the “new” MacPro would seem like a waste of money for anyone who already owns a MacPro as the current model has not had a price change since it was released in 2010. That needs to be addressed! CHEERS. Mark

“It beats working for a living”

[Mark Hollander]

“My favorite is to simply store client A’s work on it’s own $140 firewire 800 drive.”
This may work if someone only has a few clients. I have over 230 clients on my system (we make TVC’s) that is a lot of firewire drives, and I work on 8-12 jobs at various points in the week, usually on the same day.
Our client management system works like this: Capture HDD-Client Name-Job Number-files. The next project for the client (might be 6 months later) will be assigned the next job number from a daily spreadsheet. In FCP7 or Premiere we can set up these folders in the finder, put the files where they are needed and start editing. In FCPX there is no way (that I have found) of putting multiple jobs for a client, over several years, in any sort of order. It likes to assume you only have 1 job per client, so alphabetical order works nice in the events list.
The catch is our admin computers and the server have the same file hierahy as the edit suites. So anyone can go to any machine and see the same filing system on an admin computer, server or edit suite.
We have 7 Macs and all have identical filing systems. FCPX stuffs the whole thing up!
Between our 3 edit suites we have over 1000 sequences from the past 5 years. If someone can show me how to organise 230 clients with anywhere from 1 to 40 projects each, and 1 to 12 sequences per client, I’ll jump ship tomorrow.
IT CAN’T BE DONE!
and partitions, external drives is not an answer either.

It’s not personal it’s just how it is. FCPX can’t do what we need.

“It beats working for a living”