Michael Bloodgood
Forum Replies Created
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They only dramatically cut the 1300MHz FSB Harpertowns but the 1600 MHz frontside bus models only received a minimal cut.
As Shane says, forget about upgrading. You can’t even buy some of the chips that Apple puts into the Mac Pros cause Intel will only sell the chips to Apple or Boxx or other high-end workstation makers (chips like the 3.2 GHz Harpertown, est. retail price $1200).
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Ah yes, Mpeg compression. Another question how slow is slow to you? How long does it take for you compress say an hour of material.
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What kind of system do have? And what kind of stuff are you dealing with?
As far as the render farm goes you have two options: Setting up a grid or setting up an HPC. A grid is user friendly and is GUI based but it works out about as good as Anna Kournikova: Looks good but doesn’t play very well. Anyone who has used qmaster knows what I am talking about. Setting up an HPC requires a MS in computer science and a full time person to run it, needless to say not worth it for only two systems.
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Fastest Mac Pro with 16GB RAM (It’s cheap now, why not?)
Quadro 5600 Graphics card (I do a lot of MAYA)
Four internal 15K SAS drives hardware RAID as the main system drive (many will argue that this is unreliable but the one hard drive failure that I’ve had was swapped out and the RAID rebuilt it without interrupting my work and besides, AE with all my plugins loads in two seconds and hard drive buffering actually works)
Kona 3
ATTO quad 4Gb FC card
24TB custom built RAID (Fedora server with the RAID partitioned under EXT-2, a file format that OSX can read and write to) I can build this for under $12k with transfer rates lingering around 1800-2000 MBps.
Probably the TV logic monitor
Yamaha DM1000 mixer with the AES/EBU option card (I love that console)
7 JBL LSR4300s
I like building my own desks but that Anthro looks sweet
That about sums up the perfect system. I left out a bunch of the little things as they are pretty much mandatory. (Actually the mixer and speakers are for my audio guy)
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The way that I have heard it (from some Apple developers) is that the Cocoa rewrite began before the gold 64-bit Cocoa API came out (about a few months before Tiger came out in March 05 otherwise-known-as immediately after FCP 5 came out). It might be ready for version 7 which my gut is telling me won’t be out in April 09 because of stupid ongoing ipod/itunes/iphone development. I really see this being more of a Summer 09 (WWDC) or an April 2010 release.
It really shouldn’t take this long cause writing in Xcode is far more efficient that writing for Carbon development which use OS 9 APIs. But Apple’s focus on the consumer stuff is shifting programmers away from the OS development team (reason why Leopard is such a crapshoot) and the Pro Apps development team.
Then again, Apple will probably release the next big cat by then or be on to OS XI which could delay a practical 64 bit release of FCP and save the 64 bit version for FCP 8 with version 7 being a feature update.
Ah, the politics of a consumer based company that also makes kick ass Pro Apps
Michael Bloodgood
Senior Editor
Horizon Entertainment GroupAh yes, the laser fields
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Just look at the specs. The 9800 has twice as many pipelines as the 9600. Just cause the 9600 has 256MB doesn’t mean that it could even utilize 128MB as well as the 9800.
Michael Bloodgood
Senior Editor
Horizon Entertainment GroupAh yes, the laser fields
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To simplify: QT CONVERSION IS A BAD THING
Before compressor was around it was the only way to change your format during render. The workflow of using QT conversion to extract stills is poor for quality. It doesn’t matter if only now it seems to worsen your quality but FCP 6 has changed the structure for rendering. This is not a bug. It’s just one of those “proper sequence of procedure” type deals.
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Dual channel RAM is better optimized for ECC RAM than for conventional unbuffered RAM that most homebuilt users use. The performance benefits are greater, I’d say about 35% better. Xbench is kinda good for telling the difference but it really isn’t a good benchmark. I’ve used 3dmark64 on a similarly configured homebuilt Xeon XP64 workstation and there was a huge difference when enabling dual channel.
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I would say the real issue here isn’t Leopard’s ability to work with FCS 2 but Leopard’s ability to work with third party software and hardware. FCS 2 works fine with Leopard. My digidesign stuff does not which is why that system will be on Tiger for a few more months.
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After doing computer sales for the last four years, I would say Apple refurbs are the only way to go. No point in buying new. But the real rapin’ deals aren’t directly through Apple, they are through CompUSA. I just bought the last generation 12″ Powerbook for $150 and a last gen top-of-the-line Macbook Pro for $700. If the computer is more than a year old, you can’t get Applecare through this way but you can still get the CompUSA warranty which is just as good for hardware support (they end up either sending it directly to Apple or if they have an Apple tech, order parts from the factory) just without tech support.
Just make sure that it cosmetically looks good as everything will be fine on the inside. And actually, most refurbs are just what it sounds like, defective units returned to the factory. Thing is, they get all brand new insides since practically everything inside a laptop is soldered to one another (they even replace the hard drive).