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BOB ZELIN WROTE – don’t hold your breath on the compositing with After Effects. Some people are lucky, some are not (my clients are usually not). For LONG renders, your single port ethenet connection will choke. For regular ProRes editing, this will work perfectly.

Could I not install an extra ethernet card in the clients, and connect each via 2 ethernet cables to the 6-port Small Tree card, and get higher throughput?

BOB ZELIN WROTE – I bet you a beer that you do not have a licensed $29 copy of Snow Leopard, and that you are using a restore disk from another MAC Pro that had Snow Leopard on it. The Apple Store sells OS-X Snow Leopard for $29. Buy it, and you will have no issues.

I have actually tried to install Snow Leopard from a Mac Box set (family pack), which has worked fine on the 2008 workstations, and my Macbook Pro. So there must be something else wrong.

Anyway the arguments for keeping the new powerful Mac as a capable server have convinced me to do that, and I will start saving up to exchange the G5 with the next generation MacPro for compositing ; )

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Server w. X-Raid

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Thanks for the advice from both sides. Maybe I should elaborate a little on how I plan to use the Server:

Server will be equipped with 2 x 2TB drives in Raid1 partition for project files, and a X-Raid connected through Fibre channel for video files. 3 clients will be directly connected to a 6-port Small Tree 1Gb ethernet card. Apart from file-sharing the server will be used to drive a Farmers Wife project database.

The clients will edit with ProRes files in Final Cut Pro, and do compositing with After Effects. Right now the clients are 1 PowerMac G5, and 2 MacPro 2008, and the brand new server is a 8-core MacPro Server 2010.

I have tried to install regular Snoe Leopard on a clean harddisk on the Server machine, but it seems the installer will not work – just stops on a gray screen with an Apple logo. My supplier told me that Apple did in fact change the specs of the MacPro Server, so it is not just a regular MacPro…?

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Server w. X-Raid

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If Apple didn’t have to focus on trying to keep 4-5 applications in the suite updated, and instead focused on creating one single app that does not try to do everything, but offers state of the art editing, with basic motion graphics and titling (better and more integrated that today), enhanced sound track editing, and more tools for color correction and grading – and then offered the right tools for integration with other developers apps right in the box – I think it would become a better product.

More important I truly believe that the other approach – buying up 3rd party apps, and trying to integarte them in non-effective round-tripping routines, will cause Apple to loose ground on the market, and ultimately become the death of FCS.

Just MHO

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Server w. X-Raid

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Walter Biscardi wrote: Have you actually learned Color? Quite a simple interface to use and quite honestly, some of that interface would be good to bring into FCP.

Yes I have used Color occasionally and it does offer great tools, but without any realtime. So the problem is you have to render before you see if a grading works or not. Sure the interface does have its benefits – but try to launch it on a MBP, and you will not be able to use it. Also there is too much mouse clicking involved if you want to create a custom mask. And it renders so sloooowwwwwwww….

Walter Biscardi wrote: Final Cut Pro doesn’t integrate into Professional Industry Standards? Since when? That’s quite the statement for a product that has delivered hundreds of network broadcast HD programs from our shop alone and we’re just a small production company. I would say Final Cut Pro is quite the Professional Standard these days.

What i meant was that if you look at the complete FCS package, these apps do not integrate perfectly with industry standards: Bad Photoshop file support, no image-sequence import, bad AAF and OMF integration, missing export of MPEG2 formats, YUV vs. RGB round-tripping problems, proprietary plug-in format – just to mention some…

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Server w. X-Raid

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Solved it by taking audio from the AES tracks, where we have 8 outputs. From STP 1 & 2 corresoond to L & R , while 5 & 6 correspond to Ls & Rs.

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Server w. X-Raid

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I have tried to setup the ioHD to playout 2 front and 2 rear analog channels with SoundtrackPro, but it defaults to the analog channels being setup as: L, R, C, Ls.

Anybody know if it is possible to trick STPrp to playout L, R, Ls, Rs ???

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Server w. X-Raid

[Morten]

Hopefully this fixes an issue with the signal being squeezed during playback when certain filters are applied?

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Server w. X-Raid

[Morten]

Dear Bob

thank you very much for all your input. You are absolutely right in advising me not to do the installation by myself. Since I am based in Denmark, I would prefer to use my regular supplier who has experience with video storage solutions for TV stations and smaller production companies, and for example also are dealers of SmallTrees products.

But 10GbE is something new so it is always great to get cutting edge advice.

My idea would be to connect the two editing stations directly to the server via 10GbE, use a third port for the compression station, and possibly a fourth port for linking to a 1GigE switch. Can this be done?

I know that the diak array will be a limiting factor, but I will not be doing AfterEffects composting at the same time as editing. So worst case I have 2 AfterEffects jobs working simultaneously, and in that case I would not expect any real time performance.

Regarding to a 4 port 10GbE card – I cannot seem to find any 4 port server cards on SmallTrees website? What card were you going to suggest?

– No Parking Production –

Finalcut Studio3, MacPro, ioHD, X-Raid

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Thanks for the replies.A few new questions did arise:

1) Is there no benefit in buying an XServe instead of a MacPro as server apart from 2 x16PCIe slots?
2) Will using MetaLan on an ethernet setup NOT give me any speed benefits in regards to AFP?
3) Do you honestly believe that the XRaid would be a fast enough storage?

Just to clarify a little: apart from editing on the 2 MacPros with compressed HD, I also do a lot of large AfterEffects projects, and often at up to 4K resolutions. Also need to connect a third workstation for AE rendering and compression. The 2 suites are located within 15 meters from server room.

I have had a look over at the SmallTree forum, in regards to using a 10GbE solution. Is there a 4 port 10Gb ethernet card available, so I could connect clients with 10GbE card directly through cat6e? Or is it possible to put two of the 2 port cards in one server?

– No Parking Production –

Finalcut Studio3, MacPro, ioHD, X-Raid

[Morten]

try lowering the gain to -3dB and setting pedestrial lower also. This worked for our HPX301

– No Parking Production –

Finalcut Studio3, Dual G5 w. Kona 2, iMac i7 w. ioHD, X-Raid